Gold drilling in Buckingham – Fjord Public Comment

Lakshmi Fjord, District 5:
I ask the Board of Supervisors not only to deny a “zoning text amendment to the list of special use permits in an A1 Agricultural District to allow core sampling for a commercial use.” But, that you also issue hefty fines to Blue Ridge Property’s owners for each of 28+ exploratory core drilling sites, which defied our local ordinances and likely caused nearby wells that share this aquifer to go dry.

There is no economic justification imaginable to instead reward that illegality by overturning our farmland protections’ ordinance to endanger our 100% single source of water, which is illegal under the U.S. Clean Water Act, for the sole benefit of a Canadian gold mining operation.

Because of the mining operations’ location and immense environmental and environmental justice impacts, the Board of Supervisors must instead stop this gold drilling permit process to involve federal and state agencies in required “pre-screening” reviews for the “site suitability” of this project. Your special use permit for the Union Hill compressor station was considered not relevant by the U.S. Appeals Court for the 4th District when vacating the ACP air permit. Why?

Because Dominion had supplied you, FERC, and DEQ with the same poor, incomplete, and deliberately omitted data that led to our lawsuit and its favorable outcome. The judges required DEQ’s and Dominion’s lawyers to place in the record that Union Hill is an environmental justice community, to accept the door-to-door household findings of 84% majority minority from the community household study I designed and led. The other one-half of the basis for the judges’ unanimous decision was the proposed fine particulate matter emissions from gas-fired turbines, which this mining operation will also cause. The Dept. of Transportation-DOT requires environmental justice reviews and reviews of particulate matter in new infrastructure that will use public roads as part of their operations.

Thus, the Board must not for gold mining, as for fracked gas prior, only consult with and accept as “factual,” corporate-provided gold mining environmental science data. Which, like the Coal industry hides their mining operations’ health and mortality hazards, or Tobacco and the Opiod industries’ hiding addiction and health impacts by manipulating data. The billions in fines now for doing so do not bring back the dead.

Instead, the Board must consult open pit mining environmental scientists who are independent of industry ties. Whose methods and findings stand up as replicable by other independent scientists. A National Environmental Policy Act-NEPA guidelines-based environmental justice review will find the same EJ findings and air emissions issues with this site for open pit mining activities. And, the site must be reviewed under the Historic Preservation Act, Section 106 that brings the federal Advisory Council of Historic Preservation-ACHP in to consult, because both Yogaville and Union Hill Rural Historic District are under VA Dept. of Historic Resources review processes.

A new “Gold Rush in Buckingham” will this time leave permanent scars and contaminations with its toxic cocktail of chemicals — degradations that heighten sickness and mortality. We will bring these issues before the courts, too, because preventing health conditions and deaths from gold mining and all forms of toxic polluting air, water, and soil hazards to Buckingham is our mission.

Respectfully submitted,
Lakshmi Fjord, Ph.D.

108 Yogaville Way
Buckingham, VA 23921
Lakshmi.fjord@gmail.com
Cell: 510-684-1403

Submitted by email were technical sources: Fjord Community Study Research Report, the 4th Court’s Final Opinion, Transcript of the Hearing, and the Hydrology Report for this site location.