Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Bham News Article on CRS Annual Meeting

Developers honored for preservation
Projects include ways to capture, filter runoff

Thursday, January 25, 2007
DAWN KENT
News staff writer

Environmentalists and developers will come together tonight as the Cahaba River Society introduces an award for projects that have features designed to protect the river and its watershed.

At its annual meeting, the society will present the Blue-Green Design Innovation Award to businesses involved in two projects: The Shoppes at River Run in Mountain Brook and St. Vincent's One Nineteen Health and Wellness in Hoover.

"We want to show that these are practical and feasible measures," said Beth Stewart, the society's executive director. "We hope that more and more projects will begin to be built this way."

At St. Vincent's One Nineteen Health and Wellness, a technique called bioswales reduces stormwater pollution and flooding effects of parking lots. The bioswales use landscaped islands in parking lots to allow runoff to seep into the ground, filtering pollutants. The facility is near Lake Purdy.

St. Vincent's Health System and St. Vincent's One Nineteen Health and Wellness will receive the award, along with general contractors Brasfield and Gorrie and landscape architect Ross Land Design.

Bioswales also are in use at The Shoppes at River Run, on the banks of the Cahaba River. In addition, the development uses a Baysaver, a trademarked water filtration system, in the parking lot to catch and filter runoff.

Moss Properties, Stewart Perry Company Inc. and Ross Land Design will receive the award for the project.

Other awards presented at the meeting will recognize volunteer and public service efforts to protect the river and its watershed.

The meeting, which will be at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, is open to the public. Beginning at 5:30 p.m., there will be interactive displays of existing or upcoming developments with watershed-protective design. The 6:30 p.m. program will feature the awards and comments from Vestavia Hills Mayor Scotty McCallum and Trussville Mayor Gene Melton.

E-mail: dkent@bhamnews.com

Friday, January 19, 2007

Volunteer Corps~ Opportunities to serve in Bibb County

The Volunteer Corps is an idea born of the Bibb County Tourism Meetings held in Centreville at the Rock Building. Of the many different organizations that exist in Bibb County, communication and participation will be the key to making progress and cleaning up Bibb County. contact: Elizabeth Salter 205-566-2479

2007 Schedule (as it currently stands):

JANUARY- DONE This Saturday- 9:30 Italian Catholic Cemetery on Primitive Ridge Road Lunch provided

FEBRUARY- DONE Acid Mine Drainage (AMD)- Workshop on AMD, West Blocton, City Hall; field trip to ID Sites; Bibb County Canoe Trip

MARCH- DONE Coke Ovens Volunteer work- Help us ready the park for Lily Day and River Ramble!

APRIL- Earth Day! 8:00, April 21st Clean up at the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge with The Friends of the Refuge, the Cahaba River Society, Fox 6, and Alabama Power

MAY- Lily Day! (26th) and the ~Cahaba River Ramble~ more details to come...

JUNE- The Smithsonian comes to Bibb County! A Traveling Smithsonian Exhibit, Between Fences will be set up in West Blocton for the months of June and July~ Opening day: June 22nd in conjunction with Wild West Blocton Days the 29th and the 30th

JULY-

AUGUST-

SEPTEMBER- Public Lands Day~ Clean up with the US Forest Rangers from Centreville

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Alabama State Council on the Arts funds Blocton Coke Ovens Restoration


------------------------------------Walter Sansing gives us a tour of the Ovens

For Immediate Release:

The Town of West Blocton Receives Grant for Blocton Coke Ovens Park

The Town of West Blocton is pleased to announce that it has received a grant of $4,500 from the Alabama State Council on the Arts (ASCA), the state arts agency. This grant will provide part of the money needed to design a conceptual plan for the Blocton Coke Ovens Park. The rest of the monies will be donated. This conceptual plan is necessary to show future grant sources (federal, state legislators, and similar agencies to ASCA) what is needed to make the park a showcase of our coal mining heritage, a cultural center for the town, as well as a key component of the regional Cahaba tourism plan with some of the most well preserved Coke Ovens in the region.

ASCA grants are awarded through a multi-faceted competitive review process. This grant signifies that The Town of West Blocton, the University of Alabama Center for Economic Development, and the Americorps OSM/VISTA Program through the Cahaba River Society, Cahaba River Authority, and the Bibb County Citizens for Wildflowers are providing programs to serve the needs of the community.

This grant, awarded by the Alabama State Council on the Arts is made possible through funding from an annual appropriation from the Alabama State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts. This public Support enables our project at the Blocton Coke Ovens Park to reach new audiences, foster community development, and demonstrate the importance of arts as a component for quality of life in Alabama.

Monday, January 8, 2007

New- Helena's Coke Oven Park!

The Birmingham News

History is foundation of new Helena park

Friday, December 29, 2006
MARIENNE THOMAS-OGLE
News staff writer
Though time has destroyed the roof, the massive stone retaining walls still stretch their original 175 feet in length and 20 feet in width, their 12 oven openings intact.

The Billy Gould coke ovens, used in the 1800s to transform coal into coke to fuel iron production, lie in the Helena woods at the fork of Buck Creek and the Cahaba River. They seem to be in the middle of nowhere, but Helena officials plan to make them the centerpiece of a public park linked to area neighborhoods by a greenway system.

The Gould site would be the latest in a series of properties from the Birmingham area's iron and steel history to be reclaimed for use as public attractions.

Developer Kendall Zettler is deeding the city about 60 acres near his Riverwoods subdivision off Shelby County 52. A six-acre section contains the ovens and an adjacent coal mine, with the balance of the land on the opposite side of Buck Creek.

"This is a beautiful, peaceful spot that many history buffs and Civil War re-enactors are very interested in," Mayor Charles "Sonny" Penhale said. "We want to clean up the area and add some picnic locations, but keep the area as natural-looking as possible."

The ovens, whose massive fieldstones were quarried near the site, lie parallel to the bed of an abandoned railway once used to transport coal and coke, Helena historian Kenny Penhale said.

"The abutments that held the railroad trestles over Buck Creek and the Cahaba still stand and will eventually be used for pedestrian bridges as part of the greenway being planned through Helena," he said.

The date of the ovens' origin is unclear, said Jack Bergstresser, an industrial archaeologist and historian who has long advocated the preservation of the Gould site.

According to Bergstresser, Billy Gould came to Alabama from England as a prospector, miner and engineer. An owner of the Helena mine, he is acknowledged to be the first person to make coke from Alabama coal, and old documents tell of him building early coke ovens.

"When the era of coke blast furnaces got started in the 1870s, ironmakers used the beehive or dome-shaped design, while this style (in Helena) was used prior to that, possibly the 1860s," Bergstresser said. "Either way you cut it, whether built during the Civil War or the 1870s, these are some of the earliest in the U.S. and, as far as I know, some of the rarest in design."

Kenny Penhale said that while the city plans to clean up and fence the coke oven site soon, the area won't be open to the public for at least two years.

"We're getting ready to apply for placement on the state and national historic registers and seek preservation grants from both the state and federal governments to help with the project," he said.

Zettler said the city's enhancement of the site means a great deal to him and his family.

"My father, Phil Zettler, owned the Vulcan Engineering Co. in Helena from 1969 to 1999, and we've been in the iron and steel industry for years," he said. "Our interest in this is doing what's best for the stewardship of the land and the history of Helena."

Bergstresser said he is "delighted that the city is taking over the ovens."

"This is an important historical and archaeological site," he said, "and it's exciting to think that Gould comes to Alabama when the old technology is still in use and builds one isolated pocket of history in Helena."

E-mail: mogle@bhamnews.com

Thursday, January 4, 2007

CRS Annual Meeting - Thurs., Jan. 25, 2007- Birmingham and Upcoming Meetings

CRS Annual Meeting - Thurs., Jan. 25, 2007
BLUE GREEN GROWTH with Mayors Gene Melton & Scotty McCallum
5:30 PM interactive displays, 6:30 program
Alabama School of Fine Arts, Birmingam
FREE - Come & bring a friend!

**3rd Bibb County Tourism Meeting- January 18th
**Cahaba River Authority meeting- January 18th
**Bibb County Citizens for Wildflowers meeting on the Presbyterie Camp- Next Tuesday, January 9th Brent Centreville Library
**Italian Catholic Cemetery Cleanup- West Blocton, January 20th

Contact me for details: lizalt@gmail.com

Really cool Web Newsletter... Creek Clips!

Creek Clips
Issues, Support, Celebration

(Click on the words above to sign up for Creek Clips at the Eastern Coal Regional Roundtable Website)
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Creek Clips

Issues, Support, Celebration


In this edition: Watershed-based Brownfields resource; Interview with Friends of Rural Alabama; 50th anniversary of the Mountain Eagle

Coal Creek provides model for watershed-based Brownfields projects

The Roundtable's online resource collection now includes a Watershed Brownfields presentation prepared by ARCADIS. This presentation introduces the challenges, objectives, and approaches of a Mine-Scarred Lands Brownfields Assessment project in Anderson County, TN. ARCADIS explains the project's geodatabase construction process, sub-watershed prioritization, site identification process, etc. Access the power point presentation here.

ForAla expands GIS program to other Roundtable states

Friends of Rural Alabama worked with the EPA and Jacksonville State University to create the American Environmental GIS (or AEGIS). This website makes certain GIS information available over the internet. Currently, Friends of Rural Alabama is expanding this mapping project thanks to funding from the EPA. Soon, 14 more southeastern states will have similar systems. Creek Clips recently spoke with Dr. Bryan Burgess, Director of Friends of Rural Alabama to find out more about this project.

First, please tell me a little about the history behind AEGIS. What needs did you see?

First, we saw the need to be able to identify potential pollution sites along streams where public access points for water monitoring may be several miles apart and to get more active with scientific data in analyzing non-point pollution sources and prioritizing restoration of Alabama impaired steams. We saw the need for scientific data to show citizens and leaders the major causes of water pollution.

How did you go about solving them?

Friends of Rural Alabama, Inc. (ForAla) formed a consortium of several Alabama conservation groups, applied for and received an EPA grant that began with developing aerial photography techniques that would be cost effective for conservation groups. The focus of the photography was to capture visual documentation of potential pollution sites on Alabama impaired waterways, and we took some 4000 photos for a couple of years over 2700 miles of polluted streams. Then, we built a GIS to map the sites we photographed, and imported 10 years of Alabama Water Watch (AWW) monitoring data as a layer in the GIS so we could combine water quality data with photos of neighboring sites to begin to understand the sources of non-point pollution. more...

How can this project be useful to groups working with mining-impacted waters?

...more. Cumulative impacts of mining, and other pollution sources, can be easily illustrated by showing their footprints of pollution and how footprints overlap to create levels beyond acceptability. We can work with the coal states to map the mining sites and dialogue how best to use the data.

What makes the AEGIS model worth repeating in other states?

Two of the more significant products resulting from the grant included a desktop GIS and the website GIS.We also developed a technique to map animal feeding operations, data heretofore not available for Alabama watershed planning. The creation of a website hosted at Jacksonville State University contains many of the GIS layers where anyone with internet access could view and download the data and use it for assisting with solving some of their own conservation issues. more...

What have you done so far? What is left to do?

Our new EPA grant provides the funds to develop these layers and provide them on a desktop GIS to conservation groups in 14 states. It also funds the hosting of the state website data for the duration of the two-year project. Thus far, we have delivered the Ohio system and trained them. That group has been active and asks lots of questions that help us identify areas of improvement. We are about finished with Illinois and plan on delivering to and training them in December. We have imported the satellite images into GIS format for seven states and created many of the data layers for the states GIS.

Who are some of the groups working with this project?

Rivers Unlimited and Sierra Sentinels in Ohio, Sierra Sentinels and World Wildlife Fund in Tennessee, Sierra Sentinels in Kentucky and llinois. We have lots of interest from other groups, and now with the project underway, we are actively talking with and seeking others to join this project.

How have people reacted to this project?

The Alabama Environmental Management Commission, for the first time, saw a big picture of the quality of Alabama waters... more...

How can people learn more about this project?

more...

Publishers of Appalachian weekly look back

WHITESBURG, Ky. (AP)...Their small staff of mostly volunteers filed scores of stories that attracted national attention to Appalachia, serving as an impetus for the proclaimed War on Poverty and the 1977 Surface Mining and Reclamation Act. They covered the lack of health care in the hills, the dilapidated schools, jobs lost to the mechanization of the coal industry and dangerous mining conditions. more...



Get Netty...

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Study Up

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Phone: 304.329.8049 Fax: 304.329.3622 Email: info@easterncoal.org