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III IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII 999 Mary Lou and Charles E. Stein 1918 2075 Drive Cedaredge, Colorado 81413 August 18, 1983 RECEIVED U. S. Environmental Protection Agency 1860 Lincoln Street Suite 103 AU G 2 2 1983 Denver, Colorado 80225 MINED LAND RECLAMATION DIVISION Gent 1 emen : Calo. Dept. of Natural Resources Enclosed you will find pertinent correspondence during a period of time which a complaint was lodged regarding excessive noise coming from an air vent fan lo- cated at the Grand Mesa Coal Mine, which is immediately adjacent to our small ranch. What you will not find are the verbal ayreements made at a meeting with the coal company officials, residents of the area surrounding the mine and a Delta County Commissioner. Delta County has eliminated the dirt and dust from the roads and have taken care of the traffic hazard. The coal mine however is quite another story. At this meeting the employees of the mine gave a rendition of why the fan was necessary, the fact that they have them all over Kentucky, Indiana and other coal states and what they intended to do to try to quiet the fan down. One solution was to build a sound barrier, the barrier that they ended up constructing is of little or no value at all as far as the noise is concerned. Another was to put in a larger fan with a different and lower noise decimal, well this didn't work either. Now we are right back where we started two years ago. We cannot sleep at night during the summer with any windows open in the back of our house. With the windows closed we can't sleep either. So we are in the position (still) of noise or suffocation, to be real honest we are not sure which is the worse of the two. We have come to the conculsion that we are definitely stuck with the noise, we do however, want to eliminate any more of these noise makers that may be installed at any time in the future. We are just not sure what agency would have the control of the installation of the fans, but will appreciate your advising us as soon as poss- ible the name of the agency to contact. We did contact an employee of the coal mine on Saturday night the 6th of August, at 11:00 p.m. He apparently had retired for the night (which we also had tried to do from 10:15 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.) and he was very angry. His statement to my husband was "come in to the mine during regular business like normal people and maybe I might do something about it." Chuck asked what the regular hours were and the employee stated from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. My husband works 4, 10 hour days a week and 9 to 11 hours on Friday, leaving the house considerably earlier than the mine opens and gets home well after the mine is closed. 41e cannot afford for him to loose time off work to talk about a~problem that someone "might" do something a- bout, we have already given them 2 years to do something about the problem to start with. The employee also told my husband to take the problem to the Department of Mined Land Reclamation, this we had also done 2 years ago as you care see by the enclosed correspondence. We can appreciate that the coal company provides economic resources in that [hey pro- vide jobs. Right now (for about the last 18 months), we believe that there is just a 3 or 4 man skeleton crew at the mine. To our knowledge they have not mined coal for about that same period of time. Our question is "why do they need the air vent running 24 hours around the clock when there is no mining being done in the tunnels? The fan noise is bad enough during the day when you have to listen to it, but it is