Bert Langley Jr., manager of the Cartersville, Ga.-based Mountain District Office of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division
Walker County, Ga., has to spend $65,000 on environmental projects as a state agency’s penalty for releasing sediment into Rock Creek on March 26 from trail construction work done by a county crew.
The sediment was deposited where Rock Creek meets the Durham Trail, a nonmotorized path that’s being built along the right-of-way of an old railway line that carried coal mined from Lookout Mountain to coke ovens in Chickamauga, Ga.
The county crew was building up the old railroad bed where it had broken down in 1995 after the remnants of Hurricane Opal caused the creek to swell at old stone and timber culvert.
To build the trail over Rock Creek, the county rerouted water back through the old culvert and also installed an 8-foot-diameter, roughly 40-foot-long metal culvert next to it to handle overflow if Rock Creek floods.
But the county didn’t get a permit for its design and didn’t have adequate controls for sediment and erosion in place, said Bert Langley Jr., manager of the Cartersville, Ga.-based Mountain District Office of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.