DEP has more abandoned mines to reclaim than funds to do

it Small watershed groups aid the effort.

July 9, 2006 12:00 AM

Lake Fong, Post-

Gazette photos
One of the three holding ponds at an abandoned mine is located on Prospect
Street just outside the town of Cadogan in Armstrong County.

By Mike Bucsko
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
CONEMAUGH TOWNSHIP -- Twenty years ago, a group of coal miners in southern
Indiana County developed a trout nursery that became one of the first such
cooperative ventures in the state.

Necessity had given birth to the nursery. The miners were tired of having to drive all
over southwestern Pennsylvania to fish. Their local waterways, Blacklegs Creek and
its tributaries, were too polluted by acid draining from abandoned mines to sustain
aquatic life.

At the urging of state officials, the miners formed the Blackleggs Creek Watershed
Association -- they misspelled the name of the creek when forming the group and
decided just to leave it that way -- as a conduit for state money to help the nursery
and to address the mine-runoff problem. During the past six years, the organization
has obtained more than $1 million from the state and federal governments and local
contributors to clean up the pollution.

While the site along Big Run in Conemaugh, a tributary of Blacklegs Creek, is an
example of a successful remediation, there are thousands of other sites yet to be
addressed. The state has many more sites than the dollars it needs to deal with more
than 5,000 high-priority abandoned mines. The Department of Environmental
Protection sees the hazards to public health from abandoned mines as its top
environmental problem.

Pennsylvania has nearly 185,000 acres of abandoned surface coal mines and at least
50,000 underground mines, though an exact count of underground mines is
impossible. About 3 million Pennsylvanians live above underground mines and 1
million live within a mile of abandoned surface mines, said Tom Rathbun, of the
DEP's Office of Mineral Resources Management.

People in the southwestern bituminous and northeastern anthracite mining areas live
with the environmental hazards of two centuries of coal digging. The hazards include
mines draining into waterways, subsidence and underground fires.

A few miles outside of Ford City, Armstrong County, rust-colored water from the
closed Allegheny River Mining Co. mine in Cadogan runs into Brunner Run, which
travels for a mile before it disappears underground. Nearby, two ponds hold water the
color of caramel.

Behind a coal pile, drainage pipes flow from the mine into three more holding ponds,
where mine water is filtered before it is discharged into the Allegheny River.

The difference between the landscape of the Cadogan site and the reclamation project
in Indiana County is dramatic.

The Armstrong County site looks like what it is -- an abandoned mine with rusted and
broken-down structures and old coal piles. Its ponds contain multicolored liquid, and
foam collects in trenches that carry the water from the mine to the ponds.

In Conemaugh, there are two ponds, surrounded by woods and fields. The mine
drainage is clearer because it is filtered twice, once through tons of calcium carbonate
limestone gravel and then through a system in a second pond.

It is part of a process that reduces the acidity of the water before it flows into Big Run,
which, in turn, flows into Blacklegs Creek. Across Sportsman Road and up the hill, a
270-by-70-foot ditch has been dug for a third pond that will treat drainage from
another mine opening. A fourth pond is planned nearby.

The group hopes to clean up the Blacklegs Creek watershed to the point where the
creek dumps into the Kiskiminetas River five miles away in Saltsburg, said Art
Grguric, one of the founders of the watershed organization and now the group's
wetlands coordinator. Mr. Grguric and the others left mining in the mid-1990s after
their mine closed.

The differences in the remediation of environmental issues at the two old mine sites
reflect a difference in the intent of the two forces behind the efforts: the Blackleggs
Creek Watershed Association and Nic Di Cio, owner of the Armstrong County site,
Mr. Rathbun said.

"What [the Blackleggs Watershed Association] is trying to do is restore the stream to

pristine condition," Mr. Rathbun said. "What they're doing in Armstrong County is
trying to restore Cadogan to the limits of the law."

Mr. Di Cio, who bought the 400-acre Cadogan mine site three years ago, said the
situation wasn't as dire as it looks.

He's treating mine drainage on the Cadogan property, which the DEP inspects
quarterly. Meanwhile, he's pursuing three options to improve and, eventually, to
reclaim the property.

The key is to remove 10 million tons of coal refuse, which causes 95 percent of the
acid-mine drainage on the property, he said.

Options include building a co-generation plant to be fueled with the coal refuse. He
also could sell the coal refuse to an existing coal-burning power plant.

Building a plant to use the Fischer-Trope process of gasifying coal and converting it
into diesel fuel represents a third option, he said.

Mr. Di Cio, of Cadogan, owner of Reyna Foods in the Strip District, operates a tortilla
chip plant next to the mine site.

He said he bought the mine property partly as a community service, but also because
he saw its economic potential, even if it takes years to realize that potential.

For now, he said, he feels responsible to clean it up and leave a positive legacy.

"I bought it to rectify the problem," he said. "It's going to happen."

Thousands of sites
There are thousands of other abandoned mine sites waiting for reclamation.
Armstrong County, with 313 sites that take up 17,772 acres, is second behind
Clearfield County for the most abandoned mine sites in the state.

Every day, contaminated water from the mines and sediment from coal waste piles
seep into waterways, Mr. Rathbun said. The state has to use the money it has to
address the sites that federal officials have designated as priorities, characterized as
such because of their danger to the public from problems that include subsidence and
acid mine drainage.

If the federal allocation for reclamation remains at $20 million to $25 million a year,
it will take decades to fix problems at the 4,617 sites that remain untouched. U.S. Sen.
Rick Santorum, R-Pa., has proposed legislation that would raise that amount to $60
million a year, enough to clean up those sites that have top priority under federal
guidelines. Even so, thousands of other abandoned mine locations will not be
addressed.

That's why the state embraces the efforts of local organizations such as the Blackleggs
Creek Watershed Association, Mr. Rathbun said. Those organizations can coordinate
remediation work and obtain grants, including Growing Greener state funds, and
address mine reclamation immediately, he said.

"We can't sit around waiting for the federal government to give us money," Mr.
Rathbun said. "We have to move. Helping these small watershed groups and these
small sportsmen groups is the best possible way to accomplish our goals."

But with all they've accomplished over the years, even the sportsmen at the Indiana
County organization have their work cut out for them.

There are 50 discharge sites from mines in Conemaugh, and only a few have been
addressed. Still, the former miners have accomplished much, said Nick Pinnizotto,
senior director of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy's watershed programs in
Blairsville.

"When it's all said and done, this little group will end up using between $3 million
and $5 million to clean up this area," Mr. Pinnizotto said. "That's quite an
accomplishment."
 Art Grguric, left, and Althea Kirsch, of the
Blackleggs Creek Watershed Association, stand on top of calcium
carbonate limestones that were used to treat the mine water.Click photo for
larger image.