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Lowcountry Open Land Trust Announces Largest Conservation Gift in South Carolina History: Norfolk Southern donates 12,488 acres for conservation easement
CHARLESTON, S.C. – Some of the most ecologically significant land in the U.S. will be protected permanently from development through a conservation easement donated by Norfolk Southern to the Lowcountry Open Land Trust. The easement is thought to be one of the largest in the Southeast and the largest ever by a corporation in South Carolina.
Norfolk Southern, through two subsidiaries, has granted an easement on 12,488 acres of its Brosnan Forest timber and wildlife preserve near Dorchester, S.C., 35 miles northwest of Charleston. The property is near the 15,000-acre Francis Beidler Forest, which is owned and operated by the National Audubon Society. Beidler Forest and the surrounding rural lands make up a 450,000-acre watershed for Four Holes Swamp within the larger Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto (ACE) Basin, one of the largest intact coastal ecosystems on the East Coast.
“The rural character, natural resources, habitat, beauty, and unique ecological character of the land will be preserved in perpetuity,” said Norfolk Southern Chief Executive Officer Wick Moorman. “With our partners at the Lowcountry Open Land Trust, all of us at NS are proud to do our part in protecting the environment.”
“Given the sheer size of this easement, this is a big win for South Carolina and our efforts to preserve and protect the quality of life here in our state,” said Gov. Mark Sanford. “This tract is incredibly significant from an ecological standpoint, both for the way it encompasses the headwaters of the ACE Basin and its proximity to Francis Beidler Forest. To that end, I would like to thank Norfolk Southern for this donation and give real credit to the Lowcountry Open Land Trust for working together over the past few years to make this happen.”
The undeveloped land is the largest corporately held and privately protected property in South Carolina. Brosnan Forest is especially significant because it provides a protected habitat for 79 groups of the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker and serves as home to the largest known and most researched population under single ownership on private land. Norfolk Southern has participated in a Safe Harbor program through the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources to provide a protected nesting area for the woodpecker since 1999. Additionally, the property is designated an Important Bird Area by the American Bird Conservancy and National Audubon Society.
Brosnan Forest also includes more than 6,000 acres of longleaf pine trees. Longleaf pines can grow to 120 feet tall and live up to 500 years. The longleaf pine ecosystem, once one of the most extensive in North America, is now among the most threatened. It currently occupies about 2 percent of its original coverage. This ecosystem is valued not only for its aesthetic appeal, but also for its outstanding biodiversity. It has a natural resistance to fire and insects and supports more than 30 threatened or endangered plant and animal species.
Norfolk Southern and its predecessors have held much of the Brosnan Forest lands for more than 160 years. The property straddles the historic route of the Charleston-Hamburg Railroad line, the first steam-powered railway in the United States and, at 136 miles, the longest in the world at that time. The conservation easement will preserve Brosnan Forest’s natural and historic value by prohibiting subdivision and development of the property.
Norfolk Southern will continue to own and manage the land under easement as well as an additional 1,900 acres that are dedicated to corporate meetings, agricultural and recreational purposes, and wildlife management and research.
Will Haynie, executive director of the Lowcountry Open Land Trust, said, “This is one of the finest acts of corporate citizenship in the history of our state. Not only has Norfolk Southern been a good steward of these thousands of acres for more than 160 years, but they also are good neighbors by forever preserving the rural character of this community. The gift will benefit the residents of South Carolina for generations to come.”
“It is impossible to overstate the significance of this remarkable conservation gift toward the protection of the Four Holes Swamp ecosystem and the Edisto River watershed,” said Norman Brunswig, executive director of Audubon South Carolina and manager of Francis Beidler Forest. “I have driven past Brosnan Forest for more than 30 years hoping that it could be preserved forever, and now it has been.”
The Norfolk Southern donation brings the total easement acreage held by Lowcountry Open Land Trust to 72,429 acres during the past 23 years. The Lowcountry Open Land Trust is a land conservation organization based in Charleston, S.C., that focuses on preserving rural land in the coastal plain of South Carolina.
Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) is one of the nation’s premier transportation companies. Its Norfolk Southern Railway subsidiary operates approximately 21,000 route miles in 22 states and the District of Columbia, serving every major container port in the eastern United States and providing superior connections to western rail carriers. Norfolk Southern operates the most extensive intermodal network in the East and is North America’s largest rail carrier of metals and automotive products.
Photos and maps available at:
Lowcountry Open Land Trust: www.lolt.org
Norfolk Southern Gallery: www.nscorp.com
From infrastructure development and land conservation practices to training employees – and even to looking out for an endangered woodpecker – NS seeks to engage in best practices to uphold our responsibility as environmental stewards.
- NS protects its natural assets by engaging in environmentally safe methods to limit erosion and control vegetation. NS engages in efforts to reclaim land for new uses, and it participates in brownfield and rail-to-trail projects.
- The company develops use of eco-friendly alternative materials. Examples are steel reinforced plastic bridge ties, composite crossties, and biodegradable rail lubricating greases. NS restricts use of chemical products on its property that pose unacceptable potential environmental health and safety risks.
Norfolk Southern recycles and reuses a wide variety of resources to maximize their life cycles with minimal environmental impact. Recycled items include crossties, batteries, oil, scrap metal, paints and solvents, and office wastepaper. The company also has a reclamation program for used hydraulic oil. NS extensively uses rechargeable batteries. A single rechargeable battery replaces 100 to 300 disposable carbon-stick batteries, minimizing waste.
- Wherever locomotives are likely to park throughout the system, track mats are put in place to absorb potential leaks.
- NS employees receive annual training in Clean Water Act requirements and in spill prevention control and counter measures. The company also works with customers to help ensure that possible contamination from cargo is minimized prior to leaving of cars from customer facilities.
- Energy conservation projects include use of longer-lasting signal lamps, locomotive headlights, and LEDs for grade crossing signals. NS is undertaking a major project to install more energy-efficient lighting in all office buildings and shops.
NS strives to find new and improved ways to conserve our natural resources and to minimize waste generation. These efforts go beyond initiatives to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions:
- We enhanced crosstie treating processes to prolong useful life of crossties and reduce creosote consumption.
- We developed and implemented coal bonding and crusting programs to minimize coal dust emissions.
- We constructed wetlands to treat water discharges from our properties.
- We work with municipalities that have land acquisition needs to determine if surplus property exists that can be donated or redeveloped as a brownfield, a rails-to-trails project, or for recycling and energy conservation initiatives.
Our internal controls, policies and procedures are designed to exceed regulatory requirements. NS staffs our emergency response phone number 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We publish an Environmental Hotline number where local citizens can report nonemergency environmental concerns.
We report all spills of hazardous materials and petroleum to state and federal agencies regardless of whether we exceed the reportable quantity. We have a network of managers known as “sentinels” across our system who receive intensive hazardous material awareness and response training. They can provide enhanced service to local emergency response agencies in the event of a hazardous materials incident. In addition to these internal resources, we conduct intensive training of local emergency management personnel to ensure familiarity with the railroad and its operating equipment.
More than 90 percent of railroad crossties are made from wood, and 20 million railroad ties are produced in the United States each year to replace aging wooden crossties. Finding ways to increase the life of crossties – and reusing old ones – is a priority at Norfolk Southern, which purchases more than 2.6 million crossties annually.
Average crosstie life is nearly 26 years, but geographic conditions affect that average. Tie life ranges from 10 years in the Deep South to 35 years in the North. The most prevalent reasons to replace crossties are mechanical failure in the North and decay and insect damage in the South.
For more than 100 years, pressure treatment with coal tar creosote has been the standard tie preservative method. Norfolk Southern developed an alternative – pretreating crossties with a borate solution prior to creosote treatment. The borate controls insects and fungi that attack wood, and it provides safe, affordable, long-lasting protection against wood-destroying pests. The process has worked to increase crosstie life, primarily along Southern coastal areas, and to reduce consumption of creosote.
Pretreating crossties with borate reduces creosote use by nearly 200,000 gallons annually. Additional benefits include a lower future demand for new ties and subsequently fewer ties generated for disposal.
Alternative end uses for old crossties serve to minimize landfill volumes. About half of Norfolk Southern’s old crossties are disposed of as a fuel source for small cogeneration power plants. The other 50 percent are recycled for use in landscaping. For crossties that aren’t ready for disposal, NS practices a cascading policy, reusing them throughout the system for various purposes.
Norfolk Southern is employing the latest technological advances in lighting systems to save energy costs, reduce its carbon footprint, and benefit local communities – all while improving overall lighting. When it comes to lighting, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch.
Norfolk Southern embarked on a systemwide two-year-initiative to replace and upgrade lighting in all offices, shops and yard facilities. In addition to producing savings in utility bills, lowering maintenance costs and improving lighting, the project serves to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as less energy is required to light the company’s facilities.
Localities further benefit as planners work to avoid over-lighting outdoor company facilities, lessening the impact on adjacent communities.
Converting existing lighting to newer, more energy efficient technologies will result in substantial savings in Norfolk Southern’s annual electric bill, about 40 percent of which goes for lighting its facilities in 20 states. The newer systems combine use of more efficient fluorescent technologies with pulse-start metal halide lighting. The metal halide produces a more “people friendly” white light, and the pulse-start technology gives instant startup at reduced energy consumption.
The company also is installing occupancy sensor controls throughout its facilities. Occupancy sensors automatically control lighting by turning lights off when spaces are unoccupied. The sensors give building operators additional opportunities to improve energy savings without compromising lighting to building occupants. Use of high-performance fluorescent lighting gives more light with less power, and provides a more effective distribution of the light.
The red-cockaded woodpecker, so-called because of a red streak on each side of the male’s head, once was common throughout the Southeast. The cardinal-sized bird thrived in longleaf and loblolly pine forests. The woodpecker’s natural habitat shrank over the years. By 1970, its numbers had diminished to the point that the federal government put the species on the endangered list.
Brosnan Forest, near Dorchester, S.C. |
Norfolk Southern’s Brosnan Forest in South Carolina is the ideal habitat for the woodpecker. Under a precedent-setting safe harbor agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Energy and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Norfolk Southern is participating in a program to breed red-cockaded woodpeckers for transplanting to other areas. The Fish and Wildlife Service awarded a federal grant in support of Norfolk Southern’s conservation efforts for the endangered bird.
Brosnan Forest’s more than 16,000 acres now support more than 75 colonies of red-cockaded woodpeckers, the largest known population on privately owned land. The Forest’s healthy and stable population has permitted close-up study of the red-cockaded woodpecker’s family life using artificial nest inserts - wooden boxes that fit into trees’ nest cavities. Nest inserts have been used to help red-cockaded populations grow, especially where there wasn’t enough pine. Some Forest-bred birds have been translocated to other areas that have an abundance of habitat but a meager population of woodpeckers.
Norfolk Southern has partnered with the Fish and Wildlife Service, Clemson University and others on various research projects since 1998.
Norfolk Southern is committed to use of clean, renewable energy sources, including development of wind and solar power.
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Wind power at work in Bellevue |
The company’s waste-water treatment plant at Bellevue, Ohio, incorporates a 50-kilowatt wind turbine in parallel with the local power company’s grid. Wind studies for the area indicate the turbine will provide more than enough power to run the plant. Surplus power will be added to the local power grid.
At another waste-water treatment plant at Irondale, Ala., solar power is being used to run complex operations within the plant. Norfolk Southern also is using solar power on all new rail lubricators. The company installs 200 stand-alone dispensing units per year, greatly reducing other power usage.
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“Lonely Gallon” What happens when a family of fuel cans makes a cross-country trek to meet a Norfolk Southern train? Find out in "Lonely Gallon," the TV spot that highlights the railroad’s role in reducing highway congestion. High-bandwidth 30-second version |
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“You Don’t Need Me” This contemporary tune backs “Lonely Gallon.” Ravi Krishnaswami of Sacred Noise in New York and Steve Kolander of J. Walter Thompson in Atlanta composed it especially for NS. Time: 3:45 Click here to listen [5.16 mb MP3 audio file] To download, right click here, choose “Save Target As...” and save to the desired location on your computer. |
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The Making of “Lonely Gallon” Look behind the scenes as “Lonely Gallon” is filmed in the Shenandoah Valley. Learn what it means to be a “gas can wrangler.” High-bandwidth version - 4:35 |
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Permanently sear Norfolk Southern’s marketing message onto your brain by putting the “You Don’t Need Me” ringtone on your cell phone. Click here to download the ringtone. |
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“Tree” Television Commercial“Tree” highlights the environmental benefits of Norfolk Southern’s work with its trucking partners to move freight from highway to rail. Features a gnarly tree that comes to life in order to move the freight from one mode to the other. High bandwidth 30-second version |