Groveton May Take Lowell (VT) Mine's Asbestos

This is long term environmental remediation project that will be daily trucking asbestos tailings between 2 points. Why not a rail shuttle of covered hoppers?

GROVETON — A proposal that has been in the works for several years is now coming to light - an asbestos processing plant in Groveton, which the developer said has the natural gas pipeline to make it work.

The plan - still preliminary, far from any approval, and facing challenges - stems from the federally mandated cleanup of the now-inactive 1,540-acre Eden-Lowell asbestos mine at Belvidere Mountain in Vermont that, until the health dangers of asbestos became widely known, had been run by the Vermont Asbestos Group before it was shut down more than 20 years ago.

In 2013, Vermont Asbestos Group, co-owned by Howard Manosh, of Morrisville, Vt., reached a settlement with the Vermont attorney general and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in regard to the group’s liability.

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toolmaker wrote:This is long term environmental remediation project that will be daily trucking asbestos tailings between 2 points. Why not a rail shuttle of covered hoppers?

There is no rail access to the mine site anymore, and the shortest route into the mill at Gilman is a total mess that would require significant work to get a train over it. But the lack of rail at the mine is the big deal. The LVRC served the site, and is now a recreation trail in various states of construction from one end of the line to the other. So trucking is the only way to get material out of the mine. Adding trans-loading onto rail into the mix, especially of a highly regulated HazMat, would really make the economics tough to overcome. There are ways to make it work but it would be dependent on the various involved parties willing to get outside of their comfort zones.