>>ANNOUNCER: Promoting a healthy environment...
It's the air we breathe.
Clean, safe water.
Responsible management of our natural resources.
We protect and restore - for a sustainable future...
Environment Matters...
>>MAN'S VOICE: As the river flows past Charleston toward
the Ohio, it is easy to see and smell the evidence.
It is polluted, heavily polluted.
>>NARRATION: THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW -- A STORY OF A RIVER IN RECOVERY...
PLUS: >>WOMAN: It's a beautiful day to pick up some
trash.
>>NARRATION: LENDING A HAND TO HELP MAKE IT SHINE IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD....
>>KATHY COSCO: Hello everyone and welcome to Environment Matters.
I'm Kathy Cosco with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
A friend is someone who knows you, who understands where you've been and perhaps most importantly,
is someone who is there for you when times are tough.
For nearly two decades, a group of concerned volunteers -- the Friends of the Cheat -- has
been that troubled river's best friend.
As the DEP's Mike Huff found out, while the river has made a dramatic comeback, there's
still a lot of work to be done.
>>NARRATION: It wasn't that many years ago that West Virginia's Cheat River was rated
one of the ten most endangered rivers in the country because of the effects of acid mine
drainage.
By the mid-1990s, water quality was so poor, fish were dying and the area's whitewater
rafting industry was nearly crippled and that's when a group of concerned volunteers stepped
in.
Since 1995, Friends of the Cheat and its partners have set up 15 different acid mine drainage
treatment systems throughout the watershed --
>>AMANDA PITZER: Oh I'm absolutely optimistic!
I mean it's been going on twenty years that Friends of the Cheat have been working on
the AMD problem but we learn more every year and we take smaller steps towards progress
every year.
There are fish in the Cheat Canyon.
There are eagles.
There are top predators in the Cheat Canyon and just the community, the sentiment about
the river has changed in that twenty years.
It's really easy to have the attitude that "Oh it's been polluted, it'll always be polluted.
It'll never get better" but we have shown that it can get better.
>>NARRATION: And those efforts begin high up in the headwaters -- like at this project
along an old surface mine site in Preston County.
The Tichnell Road AMD Treatment site was originally constructed in 2005 by a grant to WVU's National
Mining Reclamation Center -- the project picks up a source of seep water from old surface
mine spoil.
Water flows through a limestone channel to a limestone pool and then over a steel slag
dam and into a wetland before moving into a small creek called Sovern Run.
>>KEVIN RYAN: When the seep is flowing, it's flowing about ten or fifteen gallons per minute
so you can see where the ground is basically ditched out where the water flows.
It does affect the treatment performance when it's dry and that's one of problems we have
with this site.
We have no water control structures such as gates or valves to hold water back so that
we can treat it before it runs out and so we're actually brainstorming currently -- Friends
of the Cheat is --about how to improve this site.
>>NARRATION: Most of the treatment sites in the watershed are passive like the Tichnell
Road project but as the science of acid mine drainage remediation improves, the technologies
change...
>>AMANDA PITZER: We're at Site 62.
We call it Sovereign 62.
The site has a long history of different treatment approaches and in 2010, Friends of the Cheat
in cooperation with the National Mine Land Center at WVU installed this treatment project
using 319 funds.
The project involves a freshwater collection pond up at the top which feeds a steel slag
bed and then on the other side of that same collection area are two portals -- two old
mine portals that feed in.
The water then mixes behind me in the first leech bed cell and there are two limestone
leech beds in sequence and then at the very bottom we have a wetland which adds some natural
metal removal properties...
>>NARRATION: And the numbers back that up.
Metals and acidity concentrations collected at the mouth of Sovern Run are down -- starting
in 1997 with an initial project and improving significantly between 2007 and 2010 when multiple
sites were constructed in the watershed.
In many of those cases, that meant getting the cooperation of private landowners...
>>AMANDA PITZER: We try to work cooperatively with landowners who voluntarily let us come
in and, I mean this site is several acres of property that the landowners have given
to us so not only are we using taxpayer money but we are also working with landowners who
want to see improvement.
It's crucial.
Friends of the Cheat does own some property that we've picked up in tax sales in case
there are sites we can't get voluntary buy in but without the landowners, we really don't
have anywhere to work.
>>NARRATION: Mark Dixon is one of those landowners.
A pile of limestone fines alongside the stream as it runs through his property helps raise
the pH of the water as it flows through.
>>MARK DIXON: We just wanted to improve the -- keep improving the stream because when
we first moved here it was still red but now as you can see -- it's really improving.
I'm a trout fisherman and it's nice to keep the streams in good condition.
>>AMANDA PITZER: We're taking small steps but we are seeing success and the work in
Sovereign Run is a very small piece of the puzzle but we have landowners that are starting
to buy in.
They see progress.
But as far as the lower Cheat, the entire lower Cheat watershed, there are nine tributaries
that are severely impacted and I joke with my niece that she's going to have to take
over my work when I get too old because this is something that we'll be cleaning up for
decades and decades so, you take those small victories and you hold on to those and you
just keep on keeping on.
Patience and persistence...
>>NARRATION: Patience and persistence -- pretty good qualities to have in a friend.
In Preston County, I'm Mike Huff for Environment Matters.
>>KATHY COSCO: To find out more about Friends of the Cheat and their work to restore, preserve
and promote the Cheat River watershed, you can check out their website -- cheat.org.
Different river -- different problems -- same result.
It wasn't that many years ago that the Kanawha River was essentially dead -- unable to sustain
any aquatic life -- but the Kanawha is also a river in recovery....
The DEP's Greg Adolfson joins us now from the banks of the Kanawha with a look at just
what went in to bringing the river back to life...
>>GREG ADOLFSON: Kathy, most summer days you'll find the Kanawha River full of people boating,
fishing or just out relaxing and enjoying the water, but that's not always been the
case and it's something that's still in the minds of longtime residents of the Kanawha
Valley...
(man's voice) You know when you get down below Charleston, the Kanawha is really a mess.
It actually stinks.
(woman's voice) I don't see why they can't clean it up.
After all, they have enough brains to figure out how to make those new detergents and those
fancy plastics.
Why can't they figure out a way to clean out their water instead of dumping all that stuff
back into the Kanawha?
It's a disgrace.
>>NARRATION: In his 1962 documentary "Crisis on the Kanawha", filmmaker Stewart Finley
detailed the pollution common to the Kanawha River....
>>MOVIE NARRATION: (ominous music)
This is the ugly end of the Charleston complex.
It is a cluster of chemical manufacturing plants along the banks of the Kanawha River
in West Virginia.
Submerged pipes draw river water into the plants -- intriguing, often secret processes
take place as chemicals and synthetics are made.
And then comes the great payoff -- the used water is turned back into the river with a
little extra bonus of contamination for good measure.
>>PAT CAMPBELL: I think the biggest problem was summertime, the river from all the industrial
waste and municipal waste that were being discharged into the river -- they have an
oxygen demand and basically that waste would pull the oxygen out of the water and that
caused fish kills in the summer and every summer in the Kanawha back in the late 50's
and 60's, there were fish kills in the river and I recall a story one of the gentlemen
that has since retired, one of his first jobs he told me was to go to the river and scoop
up the dead fish -- basically -- and haul them away so they didn't stink and that was
in the Dunbar area.
Another gentleman told me that -- he was a kid, he grew up here in Charleston -- that
every summer they would go to the bridge over the Elk River and watch the catfish come up
sucking for air...
>>NARRATION: And here's why: Water samples taken throughout the summer of 1963 showed
no dissolved oxygen -- zero -- in the Kanawha River.
Today, it's a different story.
You'll still find industries along the banks of the Kanawha, but what you won't find is
untreated water being pumped back in.
That's thanks to the Clean Water Act of 1972 that set in motion a way to clean up the nation's
polluted streams and waterways.
>>PAT CAMPBELL: It gave us two tools that are very powerful.
One is gave us permitting authority so we could regulate what was coming out of people's
discharge pipes and the other, it gave us the ability to help municipalities fund their
wastewater treatment plants.
First there was grants given to municipalities to fund treatment and now it's a loan program
-- those two major initiatives combined with states given the authority to set water quality
standards...
>>NARRATION: It's taken a lot of time, money and hard work but those efforts are paying
off.
DEP Cabinet Secretary Randy Huffman: >>RANDY HUFFMAN: The Kanawha River drains
the heart of the Appalachian coalfields and it is one of the most diverse -- biologically
diverse -- bodies of water that you'll find anywhere in the country.
It's clean.
I spend hundreds of hours each year on the river.
I know what's there.
I'm intimately familiar with it from one end to the other and it's not always been that.
In my lifetime it hasn't always been that way and I think that's a testament to what
all has been done by many groups, many people over the years to make the environment clean.
Those that were like myself, born and raised in Charleston, just looking from one side
of the Kanawha Valley to the other thirty years ago versus today.
There's a difference.
>>GREG ADOLFSON: There are still problems to be addressed -- problems like combined
sewer overflows and storm water runoff -- and the lingering effects of toxic pollutants
like dioxin, PCBs and mercury but Kathy, the Kanawha today is a model of how regulators,
industries and municipalities can work together to bring about a positive change...
>>KATHY COSCO: Thanks Greg...
The film "Crisis on the Kanawha" was produced for ORSANCO -- the Ohio River Valley sanitation
Commission.
Formed in 1948 to control and abate water pollution in the Ohio River basin, ORSANCO
represents West Virginia and seven other states that form the Ohio River watershed.
Every June, ORSANCO organizes the Ohio River Sweep where volunteers work to remove trash
from nearly three thousand miles of shoreline along the Ohio and its tributaries.
The DEP is one of the many agencies partnering with ORSANCO for the annual river sweep.
We'll have that story next time on Environment Matters.
Coming up: Recognizing some of the groups and individuals that are making a difference.
We'll meet some of the winners of this year's Environmental Awards.
Plus: >>SARAH ALFORD: I'm Sarah Alford in Charleston
-- celebrating half a century of raising environmental awareness: we'll visit the 50th edition of
Youth Environmental Day.
Those stories and more when Environment Matters continues...