Will ORC comply with mining, storm water and land use permit conditions?

On July 2 an incident occurred at the Bunker Hill construction site of a new processing facility for Oregon Resources Corp. Three contractors were involved, West Coast Contractors, CCC Electrical out of San Antonio and a concrete pumping firm from Bandon (sorry don’t have name) that caused serious electrical shock to a worker. OSHA is conducting an investigation and will release no further details until complete.

As of Monday, ORC has been building the ten story steel structure without the benefit of a permit or third party inspections. Leslie Berri of State Buildings and Codes in Salem responded to the matter in this email.

Thanks for your call – To-date, the project has approved permits for concrete and piling…….project managers have applied for and are awaiting their building permit. BCD and project staff are still negotiating about some of the plan details.

Last weekend, one of the project subcontractors began erecting steel without permission from the project superintendent. The superintendent immediately stopped the work and to our knowledge no unpermitted activity has occurred since. They are currently pouring concrete for which they have a permit.

Building Codes staff is in discussions with the project managers about assessing a fine related to the unpermitted steel work but no decisions have been made.

This image and several others taken yesterday morning were forwarded to BCD this morning.

Naturally, the big question for residents near the proposed mining sites is if ORC is willing to ignore Oregon laws regarding construction, will they comply with all the conditions of their various mining, storm water and land use permits? Dan Smith, Joseph Drew and Todd Lessard were all involved in another strip mining operation in Georgia in 2003 called Iluka Resources. Like ORC, Iluka was owned by an Australian company. If the best management practices and behavior of Iluka are any indication of what we can expect in Coos County, the answer is NO!

Residing on my and several other local computers are gigabytes of photos, lawsuits and press clippings all related to the environmental and economic mess Iluka left behind when it filed bankruptcy after three years eliminating the handful of local jobs it provided and tried to slink out of Brantley County, Georgia.

Over the next few weeks several of us will be wading through these documents and presenting pertinent information here and offering it to other local media.