Landowner Norris confronts the threat of Rosa mine

Dwight Norris stands on a longestablished beaver dam creating the pond he says is one of his favorite nature spots on his farm, a spot possibly threatened by proposed mining along the Rosa Mine highwall. Few people are threatened more directly than Dwight Norris by the prospect of MCoal Corporation’s proposal to reactivate the Rosa coal mine.

His 144-acre farm is bounded on three sides by a highwall that looms above the roughly triangular Cold Branch hollow, where Norris’s property lies. The pond where he stands lies directly in the drainage path of two catchment basins upstream. Their purpose is to capture and contain sediment-charged runoff from mining operations at higher elevations above the valley.

In times of normal rainfall, those structures may well serve the purpose for which they’re intended. Norris’s concern is that a major rain event of several inches in 24 hours – or several less heavy ones on several successive days – would flood those shallow basins and wash tons of mining spoil down the branch, damaging or destroying the pond and the habitat it supports.

The process of runoff and sedimentation threatening Cold Branch applies to other streams in the mining area as well: Dry Creek, Andy Branch, Calvert Prong, and ultimately, the Locust Fork River itself.

Other possible threats to Norris’s property include concussion effects from blasting that could damage his home and outbuildings, possible contamination of ground water, and possible deterioration of roads in the area if they are traversed by mining equipment or vehicles.

An hour after viewing the pond, Norris leaned against a three-foot diameter yellow poplar tree rising in a sheer, 100-foot column before the first limb appears. It sits in a small woods on the bank of Cold Branch near its junction with the Locust Fork.

The woods and its denizens are one of the reasons Norris moved here from Hoo-ver several years ago, purchasing three parcels of land and accumulating 144 acres. The tree and woods along the branch could be imperiled by acid- or sediment-laden runoff from the mine spoil at the head of the watershed.

“When I closed the loan on the land, the loan officer asked me what I was going to do with all this land – run cattle, plant row crops, whatever. ‘Nothing,’ I told him. ‘I’m just going to enjoy it.’” That enjoyment is a right or privilege now at risk.

Norris works as a senior computer operator at Protective Life Insurance Company in Birmingham. He bought property in the Five Points area and moved to Blount County in 1993. A few years later, he began buying property on Cold Branch Road, where he now lives.