What’s left of a gravel mine that was opened last year along the Nolichucky River in Mitchell County (Photo via Southern Environmental Law Center).
I’m sorry, but if you say that you love democracy, then I regret to inform you that it’s mandatory for you to embrace the chaos and whimsy of homeowners’ association meetings. There’s drama! There’s grandstanding! The board tries to brag on itself in front of its generally grumpy constituents! There are wild proposals that run headfirst into bylaws that were crafted a generation ago! People are generally unhappy about dues! Over the years, I’ve developed a love of our neighborhood’s annual meetings. I know. I’m a bit of a sicko.
My favorite genre of HOA acrimony is “Person who totally ignores procedure, does something expensive, and doesn’t stop after being confronted.” Nearly two decades ago when I lived in Charlotte, the HOA president at my condo complex told the story of a woman who was living on the ground floor, and wanted to put in a hot tub in the grassy area behind her patio. She asked the board. She was told no. A private hot tub on community property violated all sorts of bylaws.
Weeks later, the president heard the hum of construction equipment, walked over to the woman’s condo, and found a crew digging out a hole with a backhoe. He asked what they were doing. “Putting in a hot tub,” they told him. After he identified himself as the board president, he told the crew to fill in the hole and leave. A week or two later, he encountered another construction crew at the same spot, digging a hole in the same place. This time, the condo owner was outside. “What are you doing?!” he asked her. “Putting in a hot tub,” she told him. When the president said it was against the HOA rules, she calmly told him that the board president himself had said it was okay. “I’m the board president!” he said.
I’ll skip ahead to the end. The woman eventually gave up and did not get her hot tub. She was not hailed as a folk hero.
Anyhow, think of all of that when you read this:
As bad as [Hurricane Helene was] it’s almost been worse that a few months later, just as residents were beginning to believe their mountains might eventually recover, an illegal mining operation came in and — under the guise of digging stone and gravel to help the railroad rebuild — compounded the area’s problems.
The latest story in this saga, by the Raleigh News & Observer’s Martha Quillin, says a company named “Horizon 30 LLC” rolled into Mitchell County in early 2025 and, “literally in the dark of night,” began to blast a mountainside along the Nolichucky River. Over the course of the year, the company went back and forth with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which stated that while the company had asked about getting a permit before it started, it didn’t actually try to apply for one until after it had already ripped out acres upon acres of hillside. NCDEQ asked the mine operator to, you know, stop mining! Some of the nasty runoff that was coming out of the mine was flowing right into the Nolichucky River, and had the potential to kill the wildlife in it and mess with the drinking water that was being pulled out downstream. So, what was the mining company CEO’s response?
DEQ visited again about a month later, near the end of May 2025, and found mining had expanded more. The department again told operators to stop. At that point, DEQ said, [Brent] Fernandes, the CEO, told inspectors he had been talking with department officials weekly and had told them to just “fine him the $5,000 a day” for continuing to operate without a permit.
The rest of the story goes like this: The DEQ kept telling the company to stop mining. The company kept making its mine bigger. Horizon 30 filed paperwork to get a permit, but didn’t quite do it right. By October of last year, a judge told the company to stop and implement a cleanup plan. The cleanup hasn’t started. Quillin wasn’t able to get a comment from the property owners, or the folks at Horizon 30. But! In a response letter to the DEQ in May, the person listed as the company’s CFO, Sean Chipman, said that well, actually, they were just mining gravel to fix CSX’s washed-out rail line:
H30 relies upon the emergency permits, authorizations, waivers and other applicable allowances for services in support of the Emergency Railway Repairs and also the Executive Orders of the President of the United States of America, including those in support of the America First initiative and energy independence, as well as prior and concurrent emergency response directives.
Further documents show that Fernandes told regulators that he was under contract to provide granite gravel to CSX, but they’d only found sandstone at the mine site and were gonna keep looking for granite. DEQ’s continued to tell the company the same thing, over and over: STOP MINING.
The latest update is that the Southern Environmental Law Center is getting ready to sue Horizon 30 for polluting the river. The Nolichucky River is a popular spot for kayaking and rafting, is the home of rare mussels and salamanders, provides drinking water for the town of Erwin, Tennessee, and is in a really beautiful gorge. During a public meeting last year, 25 people who live in the area got up to speak out against the mine, saying the noise and dust from trucks had been disruptive. Others have stated that dust in the air seemed to be leading to the deaths of pets and wildlife. Since then, CSX has re-opened the rail line that was damaged by Helene, and told Qullin that it wouldn’t comment on whether it ever got gravel from Horizon 30.
I did my Rabbit Hole best to see if I could glean any more information about Horizon or its managers. The answer is, largely, no. The operations company had an extremely basic website that both went up and disappeared in 2025. The CEO appears to live in California, and Horizon 30’s address leads to a small office building in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The CFO’s official email address is a Gmail account. The company appears to have been around since 2018, but who knows why it was formed back then! There’s not really any other public information about it.
For what it’s worth, it’s not like gravel is unavailable. The letter from the Horizon 30 folks stated that this mine popped up where it did because it’s right along the CSX rail line. But established quarries in nearby Spruce Pine and Yancey County both produce crushed stone, according to the North Carolina Aggregates Association.
North Carolina itself is no stranger to mining. There are notable emerald mines near Hiddenite, and the aforementioned Spruce Pine quarry provides important materials for semiconductors as well as the sand for the bunkers at Augusta National. There used to be a little bit of coal mining in this state as well, although the last one closed in the 1950s (the worst single industrial disaster in state history was a coal mine explosion in Farmville in 1925). There are really big, specialized quarries here as well, and they’re not all in the mountains. A huge phosphate mine in Aurora, near the coast, drags up all sorts of megalodon teeth.
That said, other states (especially Kentucky) have been dealing with wildcat mines for a very long time. Folks up there who knew how to mine coal would just dig it out themselves. North Carolina has a long, romantic history with bootleg moonshine. Appalachian states had the same relationship with bootleg coal.
However! A lot of the Appalachian bootleg mines were run by small families on their own land. This mine, like a lot of larger mines, was run by some folks from out of state who saw a business opportunity to come in and make some quick money (they leased the property from some folks who lived in the next county over). The problem here is that once you tear up a mountainside, the water runs over the rock that’s been exposed, and it gets nasty and acidic before running into a waterway. Horizon 30 stated that there was a buffer between its mine and the river, but the Southern Environmental Law Center found evidence of chemical runoff in the Nolichucky, and it’s been going after CSX and other companies for mining and logging in the wake of Hurricane Helene. It’s possible that there’s just been a big misunderstanding between the state and the company that ran the mine on the Nolichucky. It’s also possible that paying fines for running a pop-up mine is part of the cost of doing business. Either way, there’s a big mess left behind, and somebody’s going to be on the hook for the cleanup.
All of this reminds me of another story from my old Charlotte HOA. Our condo complex was fairly old and didn’t have individual water meters or bills. Instead, the complex rolled water usage into everyone’s homeowner’s dues. Hence, whenever the board saw a spike in its water bill, it went out to investigate, often by crawling underneath the buildings and listening to the pipes to figure out where most of the water was flowing. After one particularly high bill, board members traced the spike in usage to one single unit, where a renter opened the door. The board asked if she’d been using a lot of water. Come to think of it, she said, the toilet’s been broken for months, and it’s just been running constantly.
The board members asked why she didn’t fix the problem. I don’t own this place, she said. Why would I?