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• `7M III IIIIIIIIIIIII III The Corley Company Pnone692~5050 P.O BOa 1BP1 May 30, 2000 COLORADO SPRINGS, COLORADO 80901 Mt. James Fulton Chief, Denver Field Office Office of Surface Mining 1999 Broadway, Suite 3320 Denver CO 80202-5733 Dear Mr. Fulton: We would like to add clarification to our citizen's complaint concerning the GEC reclamation site. In the eazly 1980s, the Colorado Mined Land Division now know as the Division of Minerals and Geology (DMG) directed Harrison Western as permittee of the Newlin Creek Mine to remove burning gob from their property to another location. Harrison Western made an agreement with GEC to place the burning gob in GEC's unreclaimed strip pits, and DMG approved this agreement. No attempt was made to cover the exposed coal at the toe of the highwall. The burning gob was transported offsite to our property without our consent, and according to the District Court of Fremont County, Colorado in its judgment in GEC vs. Harrison Western, found that the burning gob started the undergrotmd coal fire that continues today. This part ofour complaint has two factors. GEC was awarded damages and paid over $300,000 shortly after their reclamation bond was forfeited in 1987. We notified DMG about the judgment, but somehow the $300,000 was never attached or recovered from GEC. The other complaint is that DMG approved the transportation of burning gob from Newlin Creek to our property and the offsite impact has been tremendous. Were either of these two DMG actions correct? We have walked the drainages from the GEC east pit and Magpie Creek, and we have found considerable deposition of material further downstream than where your inspection of Feb., 2000, went. We have taken several pictures and have identified their location with GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. There is some debris from the GEC site shown in the pictures, especially the fabric underlayment used in the reclamation efforts. There are many dead trees in the deposit areas, and these deposit areas are readily identified by a lazge amount of coal intermingling with the shale and sand deposits. There are no exposed coal outcrops to yield this coal, and the coal is not oxidized and decomposed; this coal is from a recent mine event such as GEC. We stopped walking just before the Magpie and Newlin Creek confluens, but the tree deaths and sediment deposition continue to that point. We are posting the pictures on our web page of the interne[ at: http://www. geocit ies.com/gecmine