vironmental hazard by crushing the rock at Skytop, loading the material into about 165 trucks a day, and hauling it to a fly ash pile near Heilwood. "Given the outcry here tonight, we have to step back and consider what we're doin here," Hoffman said. "Maybe there's a Plan C out there." Hoffman was less than 20 minutes into his opening presentation on the conditions at Skytop, where acidic leachate threatens groundwater and streams, when one person in the crowd spoke up. Soon, an outpouring of anger interrupted Hoffman and drowned him out. "Put it in your water, damn it," Heilwood resident Paul Palmer said. The crowd, as if repeating a cheer at a football game, began chanting: "We don't want it, we don't want it." "If we break into this uproar after every comment -- and I know that you're rooting for your team -- we're not going to get anything done," Hoffman said. Three state police officers and the Indiana County sheriff stood in the midst of the crowd. State police Lt. Brad Shields, the officer in charge of the Indiana barracks, at one point strode to the front of the room, stood in front of Hoffman and Yowell, and cautioned that shouting was not constructive. "You're not going to get anything accomplished," Shields told the crowd. But he stepped off to the side and the volume rose again, with residents telling PennDOT that its plan threatened the nearby residential roads, the well water and the overall quality of life. Dilltown resident Ken Umholtz told Hoffman and a half-dozen other PennDOT officials from three of Pennsylvania's 11 transportation districts that, unlike U.S. Route 422, on which 24-ton trucks are familiar traffic, state Route 403 "is no truck route." He held up a poster-mounted photo of a home and Route 403, a residential road, and said the distance between the house and the pavement was 81/2 feet. "These houses are too close to the road to widen it. These houses -- these foundations -- will be destroyed. They won't have no damn windows left in their houses. You people are going to destroy these people's lives." Indiana County Board of Commissioners Chairman Rod Ruddock called for PennDOT to revisit the project. Commissioner Bernard Smith brought the crowd to one of a dozen rounds of sustained applause when he told Hoffman: "You thought it was going to be all right at Skytop. I don't believe you, I don't believe you." He added that PennDOT should keep the acid rock in Centre County. "Dig a hole up there," Smith shouted. "We'll give you the fly ash, and you can do it right there." Dilltown resident Brian Price raised the specter of injuries to children from the truck traffic -- more than 42,000 truckloads of material from Skytop alone over the course of almost a year -- and said that, if anyone gets killed, "we'll be coming after you." Hoffman's attempts to answer questions posed by the audience were more often than not silenced by a houseful of jeers. "If we and the DEP thought there was any damage ... ," Hoffman said at one point, only to be quieted by a roar of laughter. Cambria County resident Robert Hagens, who lives along Route 422, asked Hoffman how it came to be that so much acidic rock was unearthed at Skytop. "If you knew it was there, why didn't you stop?" Hagens said. "If you had one pile, why did you build four? Why didn't you stop?" Hoffman replied that "it was excavated in one fell swoop." According to a PennDOT timeline, the department realized early in the excavation, in February 2003, that it had encountered more pyritic rock than it had anticipated. It decided during a meeting that month to continue excavating but to add lime to the spoil piles. By September of that year, a million cubic yards of pyritic rock had been excavated and a highly acidic runoff was flowing into Buffalo Run. Where the Skytop cleanup plan goes from here remains to be seen. Hoffman told the crowd that he and other PennDOT officials spent two hours before the meeting examining four alternative routes to the old mine along Route 585 between Heilwood and Strongstown. Asked after the meeting whether PennDOT might resort to its Plan B -- placing the pyritic rock in a Worth Township landfill that PennDOT would dig -- Hoffman shook his head and suggested instead that there might be a Plan C. The DEP has scheduled a public hearing March 7 in the same firehouse to discuss Robindale Energy Services' application to truck the pyritic rock from Skytop and mix it with fly ash at the old Barnes & Tucker mine. But the crowd in opposition could be even bigger then. At the conclusion of Monday's meeting, a woman took the PennDOT officials' place at the front of the hall, shouted to get the departing crowd's attention, and asked everyone to come back on March 7 and "bring 10 friends with you."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910. email thisprint thisreprint or license this
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