Toxic drainage is coal’s legacy to area residents
Ten Mile Creek is running red, not with blood but with poison from the abandoned Clyde Mine in East Bethlehem Township.
That’s the contention of a local conservation group that says that for years the mine has spewed high levels of pollutants into the creek and that the company operating a water-treatment plant at the site is discharging mine acid into the stream without the required permit.
The Izaak Walton League’s Harry Engstrom chapter in Greene County plans to sue the owners and operators of the treatment plant and force the state Department of Environmental Protection to initiate the permitting process.
The Clyde Mine operated through most of the 20th century but was closed when its latest owner, LTV Steel Co., went bankrupt in 2000. It is just one of many abandoned mines in Western Pennsylvania that pose a continuous threat to our drinking water.
Rainwater fills the mines, mixes with naturally occurring salts and elements and forms what is known as mine acid, which overflows into streams, which are tributaries of the Monongahela River, from which hundreds of thousands rely for their drinking water.
Testing showed mine acid often contains high levels of bromides, which are fairly harmless until they are mixed with chlorine at water treatment plants, where a chemical reaction creates trihalomethanes, which can cause cancer. The high bromide levels are pretty good evidence that waste water from fracking gas wells was dumped into the abandoned mines.
Acid mine drainage is not a problem discovered several years ago and fixed. It is a serious environmental threat that Western Pennsylvanians will continue to face for perhaps hundreds of years. This is coal country, and this is coal’s legacy.
Consider that every mine in operation now will someday be vacated, their cavities inevitably filling with toxic water that will eventually reach the surface and spill into creeks and rivers. Preventing this is enormously expensive for the coal companies that operated the mines, and when they go out of business, for all of us taxpayers.
Western Pennsylvanians – of all people – should realize the necessity of developing and using cleaner forms of energy, ones that present a lesser threat to our precious water resources and the air that we breathe.