>>KATHY COSCO: Acid mine drainage is a serious source of
water pollution in many parts of West Virginia.
It’s especially hard to address when it’s coming from coal mines
abandoned before regulations were put in place in the 1970s.
Treating it is a complicated process, but one that is being tackled by the DEP and local
watershed groups and as the DEP’s Erin Creelman found out,
they’re making steady progress.
>>NARRATION: Water being pumped out of this underground
mine in Preston County is being treated before it enters Kane’s
Creek – part of the Decker’s Creek watershed.
As part of its permit, the mining company is responsible for remediation of the water
it produces.
The water is chemically treated with lime – calcium hydroxide – to neutralize the
acid and remove the iron and aluminum in the water
before it’s discharged safely downstream.
But it’s a different story in other parts of the watershed…
>>Timothy Denicola Of all of the sub watersheds in the Decker’s
Creek watershed, Kane’s Creek was the most heavily contaminated
and Decker’s Creek water quality above Kane’s Creek
was good enough to support fish and macro invertebrate life,
where below Kane’s Creek there was no biological life, at least not until much farther downstream.
Since treatment measures have taken place on Kane’s Creek,
benthic macro invertebrate and fish populations have actually rebounded in Decker’s Creek.
>>NARRATION: Tim Denicola is project manager for the Friends
of Decker’s Creek.
The group was started in 1995 and works with the DEP and other agencies on cleanup projects
throughout the watershed.
>>TIM DENICOLA: Funds are limited and watershed groups such
as Friend of Decker’s Creek – we do what we can with what we have and a
lot of times it’s treating smaller discharges, smaller amounts of contamination – now it
all adds up.
Every small project that’s completed reduces that much more acidity,
reduces that much more metals contamination but to actually implement a full scale treatment
operation like this takes the kind of money that you
typically find associated with the industry itself –
not with the water remediation side of it.
NARRATION: Those smaller discharges typically are treated
passively, like this project at Sandy Run.
Water from an abandoned mine flows through a series of ponds –
it’s filtered through a layer of compost which takes the oxygen out and through a layer
of limestone to neutralize the acid.
With the oxygen gone, the iron turns into a form that doesn’t coat the limestone,
reducing its effectiveness, as much.
Properly maintained, there’s enough limestone in the system to neutralize the water for
decades…
>>Martin Christ: We know that flushing these ponds helps them
work for a longer time.
To save some of the travel out to flush the ponds, two of them actually have automatic
flushing gizmos that flush them every week.
The third one doesn’t and we come and flush that one manually about once a month.
When we measure the water coming out of the end, it is neutral -
there’s no acidity in it whatsoever and we’re half a year after this project when
we measured the water coming out of the dam, it also was neutral and of course that means
we not only neutralize this one, we neutralized enough in the whole watershed
upstream of the dam to counteract whatever acidity
was still coming in from the untreated tributary over there.
>>NARRATION: But this system on ponds takes up a lot of
ground, and in some places that’s just not a practical solution.
Those situations call for a more active form of treatment…
The Friends of Decker’s Creek maintain this active dosing site – South Site Number One.
It’s powered by water and mixes a measured amount of lime into the stream.
It’s one of two active dosers operated by the group.
Limitations imposed by the terrain were one factor in choosing an active solution for
this site – chemistry was the other…
>>TIM DENICOLA: It’s a small volume mine that’s only partially
flooded which allows highly oxic conditions, in fact the coal bed itself is maybe 20 feet
below the land surface and when mining engineers look at mine subsidence
and mine fracturing they often say that the subsidence and the fracturing patterns extend
300 feet over a mine seam, so when it’s only 20 feet to the land surface,
there’s a high rate of recharge of groundwater and introduction of atmospheric oxygen into
the mining environment which causes greater dissolution of iron sulfide
minerals and greater acidity and greater dissolution of clays
and greater introduction of aluminum into the mine water, so ultimately you end up with
highly oxygenated water with high concentrations of iron and aluminum
because it’s so shallow, because it’s so oxygenated
and that may be why this mine discharge, specifically, was so severe was because of its geometry,
its location to the land surface.
>>NARRATION: In Preston County, I’m Erin Creelman for
Environment Matters.
>>KATHY COSCO: To find out more about the Friends of Decker’s
Creek and their work to clean up the watershed, you can check out their website –
deckerscreek.org.
Coming up: Joining forces in Jefferson County, plus…
Celebrating Earth Day.
We’re back in a moment…