Bringing Blacklick Creek back to life

BY DAVID HURST

DHURST@TRIBDEM.COM

VINTONDALE – Geologist Rich Beam on Thursday pointed out red-orange rubble in the bed of Blacklick Creek to a group of Blacklick Valley High School students.

The discoloration and the creek’s acidic water is the result of underground pollution caused by mining decades before the students were born, they heard as they stood on a bridge over the creek in Vintondale.

Portions of the waterway are lifeless as a result – but a year from now, that will have changed, said Beam, of the federal Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, part of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The Blacklick Valley students on Thursday toured the site of a $26 million acid mine drainage (AMD) active treatment plant that is now under construction just west of Vintondale.

Beam, state Department of Environmental Protection officials and HRI Inc. executives explained how the facility is designed to restore 25 miles of Blacklick Creek to a pH level that will allow plants and aquatic life to thrive again.

“After this project works its magic, there’s going to be a clean stream here again,” said Tom Decker, a regional DEP

Please see MINE, A2 “After this project works its magic, there’s going to be a clean stream here again.”

TOM DECKER, STATE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

Jon Fredley (left), senior project manager for HRI Inc., explains to Blacklick Valley High School students how a new acid mine drainage treatment plant will work to clean up Blacklick Creek during a tour on Thursday, at top. Above, geologist Rich Beam, of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, demonstrates some of the chemistry behind the $26 million project. Above left, two tanks are under construction at the plant site just west of Vintondale. At left, polluted mine water spews into Blacklick Creek from boreholes drilled in the creek’s bed in Vintondale; that is one of three sources of pollution that will be treated at the new plant.

PHOTOS BY TODD BERKEY/ THE TRIBUNE-DEMOCRAT

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communications manager. “There’s going to be trout stocking here ... and more opportunities to recreate along the Ghost Town Trail.”

As planned, AMD that has polluted the creek from three abandoned mine sites – the former Vinton No. 6, Wehrum and Commercial No. 16 mines – is being directed into what will soon become the Blacklick Creek Treatment Plant.

Those mines stopped operating years before laws were put into place to protect Pennsylvania waterways from pollution. One of the mines has been idle since World War II ended, Beam said. But polluted water now flows out of them and into the creek.

State engineers designed the plant to handle all three sources of pollution at one central location, noting that it was easier to move the polluted water to one location for treatment than to build and operate three separate sites.

The process will include mixing in liquified lime to the drainage-polluted water before it continues through clarifiers and sludge retention ponds designed to separate metal-laden pollutants from the water.

The remaining metals, once collected, will be injected back into a section of the deep mine identified as safe for storage, DEP officials said.

HRI’s team, including environmental manager Mary Jo Miller, and the environmental officials showed students a spot along the creek where pumps are used to carry mine water toward the plant site, as well as the site itself.

Blacklick Valley freshman and angler Camden Good, 14, was already starting to notice pollution’s effects, he said. He has fished on Blacklick Creek and noticed periods when fish that swam into Vintondale didn’t survive.

“I didn’t really notice it until I started trying to fish there,” Good said.

Just because a problem is obvious doesn’t always mean it’s noticed, said Blacklick Valley environmental science teacher Becky Bennett. That’s one reason why she viewed Thursday’s tour as a once-in-alifetime opportunity. She said the experience folds into this year’s lessons on aquatics and forestry and how water pollution impacts it all.

“When something has been there their whole lives,” Bennett said of the creek’s pollution, “it’s easy to overlook. ...

“But hopefully, it’ll encourage them to become stewards of the environment. And this is proof that there are jobs in this industry – not just in mining, but cleaning up those mines.”

David Hurst is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @TDDavidHurst.