DEP Highlights Two Mine Drainage Projects in Somerset County

The Department of Environmental Protection this week highlighted a $361,000 Growing Greener grant to the Somerset County Conservation District to design and construct two mine drainage treatment facilities to abate historic mine discharges on Lamberts Run in Stoneycreek Township.

 

Acidity and iron from the discharges have severely damaged aquatic life in Lambert’s Run and has degraded water quality in the upper Stoneycreek River gorge.

 

“Construction of these passive mine drainage treatment systems will improve the water quality in Lamberts Run to the point where it will once again support aquatic life and will address the iron staining and adverse impacts on the Stoneycreek River where Lamberts Run enters the river,” said Acting DEP Secretary John Hanger. “In addition, the project will provide buffering capacity to the Stoneycreek River which will help avoid a catastrophic fish kill should an existing treatment system elsewhere on the river fail or should there be an unexpected abandoned mine blowout.”

 

Lamberts Run, which is adjacent to the Flight 93 Memorial, has long been polluted by acid mine drainage from underground mines that were abandoned prior to World War II. Water chemistry samples from Lamberts Run range as low as 3.3 pH, with concentrations of dissolved iron as high as 30 milligrams per liter. The ability of fish species to survive and breed is severely impacted in water at a pH below 4.5.

 

The addition of high levels of dissolved iron and aluminum in mine drainage further reduces the chances for aquatic life to survive. The new mine drainage treatment systems will reduce the acidity of the water and remove iron concentrations to below 1.5 mg/liter which will allow for the recovery of aquatic life in the stream.

 

“The conservation district will work with the Somerset County Conservancy to construct passive mine drainage treatment systems at the Heinemeyer deep mine discharge and at a nearby wetland containing artesian flows of mine drainage,” Acting Secretary Hanger said. “Six miles of the Stonycreek River will be protected for full use as a recreational fishery which will enhance the downstream river gorge that has a reproducing trout fishery. Further, this project will benefit the town of Hooversville which utilizes a downstream public water supply intake.”

 

Pennsylvania is home to the largest abandoned mine problem in the nation with 180,000 acres of unreclaimed minelands left over from when mining was largely unregulated prior to 1977. More than two billion tons of waste coal and thousands of acidic seeps and discharges pollute or degrade 4,600

miles of rivers and streams in the state.