For more information or to become a sponsor, please see this brochure.

Tickets are on sale at the EPCAMR store.

Please join us and show your support for abandoned mine reclamation and mine drainage treatment in the Anthracite and Northern Tier Bituminous Coal Regions.

EPCAMR would like to thank these sponsors and contributors:

Gold:

Lehigh Natural Resources, an Anthracite Coal Mining Company  located in the Southern Coal Fields of the Panther Valley, PA was EPCAMR’s 1st GOLD LEVEL SPONSOR for our Inaugural Dinner/Fundraiser.  The company will be undertaking operations of approximately 8,000 acres at the former Lehigh Coal & Navigation Stripping Operations.  Special Thanks to Douglas Topkis, CEO of Lehigh Natural Resources.

RETTEW has generously provided EPCAMR with additional financial support as a Gold Level sponsor for our event.  EPCAMR has had a long standing relationship with RETTEW, as has other community organizations throughout the Coal Fields in working on AMD remediation projects, stream restoration efforts, watershed assessments, and innovative design and construction projects, particularly in Schuylkill County’s Southern Anthracite Coal Fields. Please check out their website for more details.

Hy-Tech Mushroom Compost, Inc. has donated 55 cubic yards of Pasteurized Mushroom Compost delivered to within an 80 mile radius of Ashley, PA to the highest bidder during the Silent Auction. Hy-Tech has been working with EPCAMR over the last several years to assist them with finding locations suitable for the spent mushroom compost on abandoned mine lands and in AMD treatment system construction. Delivery must be made by September 30, 2011.

Silver:

The Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor has graciously donated (on loan) the use of dozens of Anthracite Mining Artifacts such as lunch buckets, pails, Davey Lamps, lanterns, carbide lamps, and drinking vessels to be arranged as a part of the Centerpieces for the Dinner.

Our very own local bank,First National Bank, has become a Silver Sponsor for our 15th Anniversary Event and  Fundraiser. Charlie Jones, Regional Branch Manager, has been working with EPCAMR to promote our  organization on a corporate level with FNB, and will soon be working in partnership with us to provide us with a Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) donation to support our outdoor environmental education experiences with elementary school students throughout our service area.  FNB will provide a golf pack to include umbrella, towel, tees, and balls and also an FNB gift pack to include a soft cooler and various items.  FNB will also have information available about their product offerings.

At Insightly we like to support non-profits where we can, so we have increased the limits on EPCAMR’s free account up to 5,000 contacts and 6 users so you can continue to use Insightly without cost going forward. Good luck with your noble efforts in the future, and with your upcoming Anniversary Dinner!

Insightly is the most popular Google Apps CRM and Project Management package. Track leads, proposals, opportunities, projects and manage files, all through an easy to use interface.

Aluminum:

Breaker Brewing Company, a local Anthracite Region brewery, located in Plains, PA, has offered to provide several sixtles of their seasonal brews come time for the EPCAMR Inaugural Dinner on the 4th of August, and again on Friday Evening, the 5th of August, for the Dinner presentation of the annual MayFly Award sponsored by the PA AMR Conference Planning Committee.

Stream Restoration Inc. & Clean Creek Products, will be providing our Dinner guests with a small parting gift for their continued support of our efforts in PA. 150 3.5″ Trout magnets made with recycled iron oxide, have been donated to represent our ultimate goal of restoring AMD impacted streams to their former native use as fishery habitats.  Thank you, Margaret Dunn, and her staff (Cliff Denholm, Shaun Busler, and Laurie Popeck)

Corcoran Printing  was able to provide us with over $300 in donated services by printing our dinner invitations, brochures, and providing envelopes.

The Columbia County Conservation District is one of EPCAMR’s very first Conservation Districts that elected representatives to the Board of Trustees.  Thank You Mary, Cheryl and the rest of the Conservation District board and Staff for the donation and for their continued support.

 The Lackawanna River Corridor Association has been around twice as long as EPCAMR in the  Anthracite Region of Northeastern PA under the leadership and direction of Bernie McGurl, Executive Director and our current EPCAMR Board President. EPCAMR Staff absorb as much knowledge and advice from the LRCA perspective, particularly with our work in the Northern Anthracite Coal Fields, where his name and LRCA is synonymous with AMD watershed restoration and river corridor protection.

Iron:

The Anthracite Section SME AIME is a great bunch of environmental professionals in the mining, abandoned mine reclamation, engineering, consultant, service providers, equipment, and watershed restoration services field that meet to network, provide scholarships, receive training, and provide groups like ours the opportunity to be heard and to build stronger coalitions that are not adversarial, but collaborative and rewarding to support our projects in the region.

Earth Conservancy has been a long-time partner of EPCAMR’s since our inception in the mid-90s and we have a shared mission to reclaim abandoned mine lands and restore streams and waterways impacted by AMD, while trying to great economic redevelopment and job opportunities at the same time.

Mark Kaufman and his co-worker Keith Perks at Futuristic Innovative Graphics, Inc., located in Wilkes-Barre,   PA,  do a great job on all of our t-shirts and embroidery orders at a great price and with an expedited turnaround time! They have been working with EPCAMR for many  years.

Skelly & Loy has had a long rich tradition of working on many EPCAMR related abandoned mine    reclamation, AMD Treatment Systems, and stream channel restoration projects in the EPCAMR Region since our inception and continues to provide quality expertise and a high level of professionalism and technical assistance to community groups in the region.

Kovalchik, Kollar & Co., LLP - Certified Public Accountants

Solution Mining, Inc.

Information about the Anthrascapes AMD Art Silent Auction

For our 15th Anniversary, EPCAMR put out a Call for Artists to several regional Art Leagues, Art related Studios, and partnering Artists who participated in our first ever EPCAMR Anthrascapes AMD Art  Show that was held in August 2006 at the Arts YOUniverse Studios that had been located in the Old Stegmaier Mansion, in downtown Wilkes-Barre through a unique collaboration with the Office of Surface Mining and ourselves.  Over 50 artists participated generating over 100 pieces of artwork from paintings, jewelry, wood stains, sculpture, paper mache, watercolor, pastels, venetian oils, chalk drawings, recycled plastics, fabric dies, ink making, ceramics, photography, and pottery with one thing in common…they ALL used recovered, harvested, and dried, iron oxide provided to them by EPCAMR.  The 2 week show had been a huge success.  EPCAMR provided invited artists with a regional watershed tour of Schuylkill, Lackawanna, and Wyoming Valley to talk about the historical mining impacts of our region, our work to clean up the mine scarred lands and water, and showed them dozens of large Anthracite discharges, ALL of which have the potential to develop market uses for the iron oxide that settles to the bottoms of the streambeds in the impacted watersheds.

Some of those same artists are back, along with some new artists, to assist us with our Silent Auction spin-off of the Anthrascapes AMD Art Show to help financially support EPCAMR’s work and theirs. A Silent Auction Sheet will be placed at each art piece during the event with an information sheets about the individual art pieces and who the artists are, along with a minimum bid.  Sign your name, bid your price, and check back often before the Evening Event is nearly over for your final bid, if you like what you see.  The Silent Auction will be a blend of art and the environment, using art to express and highlight the environmental impacts in our area created by past mining practices while at the same time allowing the artists to showcase their talents in various mediums.  Please bring your checkbooks and or credit cards to the Dinner/Fundraiser and take home a wonderful piece or pieces of art created and inspired by our work in the region with our colleagues from iron oxide that EPCAMR is harvesting, collecting, drying, processing, and marketing to these artists and other partners across 8 states nationally already to generate some unrestricted funds for our environmental education and outreach programs.

For a preview of some of the previous art pieces, please visit our Photo Gallery. Click through Pages 1 and 2 of the Gallery.

“When you visit an AMD impacted site, it’s a very stimulating experience of the mind, because not only do you get to take a hike off a few beaten paths of lush greenery and old abandoned railroad grades into these abandoned mine lands, you get to take in the spectrum of colorful wetland vegetation, hydrogen sulfide gas (rotten egg smell) venting from the mines, the damp smell of the coal silt and black culm located in these areas after a morning dew, the sounds of the mine water splashing about from the boreholes or air shafts like fountains, and of course, last but not least, the almost neon-colored hues of oranges, reds, and yellows, of the iron oxide deposits that make many of our waterways, polluted.” Hughes explained.

This endeavor has been supported locally with great enthusiasm by the local art community as a way to recycle what is commonly considered a pollutant to aquatic and insect life in our streams. Due to the hard work and creative thinking of the EPCAMR staff And the local art community, this same pigment is now more commonly being accepted as a valuable resource to the art world as an alternative pigment with value.  The Earth Conservancy has also allowed EPCAMR to tour their lands to evaluate their mine drainage sites and are willing and active partners who allow us to remove the years of iron deposits from their AMD treatment wetlands along Dundee Road in the Nanticoke Creek watershed.

List of Participating Artists:

• David Hage, Web:http://www.davidhage.com, resident of NE PA – sumi ink with iron oxide, recycled plastic with iron oxide

• Diane Grant Czajkowski, Web: http://www.dianeshorses.com/, Ashley, PA – skilled artist working in watercolors, oils, pastel, graphite, pencil, drawings, various paintings of mixed mediums, sketches and other finished works of art, “Iron Horse prints; has a love for horses and  loves historic subjects such as local coal breakers, landscapes, and periods of history such as Civil War scenes

• Heather Freeman Radel and her students, Web: http://heatherfreemanradel.blogspot.com/, Back Mountain, PA – artist and architect, as well as a teacher; several students may exhibit and not have their artwork for sale; Heather, however, is creating a piece for the Silent Auction

• Skip Sensbach, Lehman Twp., PA – pottery and sculpture artist; iron oxide glazed bowls

Come Listen to EPCAMR’s Greatest Story Teller from the Endless Mountains Coal Region-Bruno Najaka

Bruno Najaka is a founding EPCAMR Board Member who stands out in the Coal Region for his commitment to environmental quality, and who, over the long term, has proven to be an aspiring environmental leader and a champion of partnering, much like the motto of EPCAMR states.  There is no doubt in our mind that Bruno Najaka fits this description to the tee.

Bruno has represented the Sullivan County Conservation District and the Endless Mountains Resource Conservation & Development Council on the EPCAMR Board of Trustees since 1996.  To promote the spirit of cooperation among all parties who have an interest in resolving the problems of Abandoned Mine Drainage & Abandoned Mine Reclamation in northeastern, northcentral PA, and Sullivan County Bruno has assisted EPCAMR in too many ways to list and he has done it with the greatest sense of humor and passion for the environment. Bruno has coordinated Sullivan County Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation projects since the inception of the Rural Abandoned Mine Program (RAMP).

• Passerella AML Stripping RAMP Project
• Rte 487 AML Reclamation Project
• Loyalsock Creek Abandoned Mine Drainage Passive Treatment Design Project with BAMR

Bruno has spent over 41 years of his life dedicated to the conservation and reclamation and remediation of not only Sullivan County’s natural resources, but to the northeast region of PA on a whole through his active participation on the EPCAMR Board of Trustees.  Rain, snow, or shine, Bruno committed himself to making it to as many EPCAMR BOT Meetings as possible and always came with a story to tell. EPCAMR is very appreciative of the time and effort Bruno not only puts into our organization, but into the local watershed associations, land associations, and citizens of Sullivan County. We enjoyed hearing his stories and we think you will too. You don’t want to miss him.

Speaking for myself, as Executive Director, as a young environmental professional, just getting my big break with my job as Regional Coordinator for EPCAMR, early on, Bruno was very instrumental in providing the much needed advice and inspiring leadership that I was looking for in my new role.  Bruno was always on-call, if I needed some input from a third party or another pair of eyes on a project.  Bruno is just a knowledge of information when it comes to the people, organizations, and conservation groups that facilitated Sullivan County’s ability to bring in grant monies for AML reclamation and abandoned mine drainage remediation projects for many years.

At a meeting of the EPCAMR Board back in 1999, Bruno once chuckled while giving an update during the Watershed Association Committee Report section of the Agenda, “If you don’t mind, I’ll just go on to another watershed since about six of them flow downstream out of the County, and I am here to represent all of them!”  Loyalsock Creek, Muncy Creek, Fishing Creek, Schrader Creek, Mehoopany Creek, and Birch Creek.  You can be sure that Bruno knows where all of the hot spots are in each one of these watersheds and knows who the right people are to talk to when you are looking for information about a particular project, if you just ask him.

There is no doubt in my mind that this distinguished gentleman has stories to tell. EPCAMR invites you to come listen for a chuckle or two towards the end of our evening Dinner/Fundraiser event with Bruno.