News Archive 2007

232 State to get almost $28 million for mine reclamation in 2008 2007-12-20 17:11:25

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania will get almost $28 million in 2008 — $6.5 million more than this year — to reclaim dangerous abandoned mine sites and put out mine fires, from an amended federal abandoned mine reclamation funding program.

The payout announced by the U.S. Office of Surface Mining yesterday is the first installment of money guaranteed the state to reclaim the historic mining scars left on 184,000 acres of abandoned mine lands — more than in any other state.

The amendments to the abandoned minelands funding program will bring Pennsylvania approximately $1.36 billion guaranteed over the next 15 to 18 years from the OSM, which collects a royalty on each ton of mined coal to fund reclamation efforts. The federal fund contains about $2.3 billion.

Abandoned mine land problems or polluted mine water runoffs affect 44 of the state’s 67 counties. The bulk of the funding will be used at 5,100 of the state’s most dangerous abandoned mine sites to reclaim cliff-like highwalls at old strip mines, douse the worst of the 30 underground mine fires burning across the state, plug deep mine entrances and remove coal waste piles that pollute streams with their runoff.

In Allegheny County, there are 263 identified abandoned mine sites affecting 4,514 acres.

First published on December 18, 2007 at 1:47 pm

231 Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy Through Art and Science 2007-11-28 13:31:12

by Erik Reece

Published in the November/December 2007 issue of Orion magazine

THROUGHOUT PENNSYLVANIA, THE VFW HALLS look much the same,a bar stretches across the front and a bingo parlor sits behind it. In 1995, T. Allan Comp, a historic preservationist who specializes in industrial sites, walked into the VFW bar in the small borough of Vintondale. Comp was looking for some local people who had agreed to talk with him about a reclamation project that he called Acid Mine Drainage and Art (AMD&ART). Comp’s idea was to reclaim toxic former coal mines using not only science but elements of design, sculpture, and history, which he hoped would spur community involvement and create vital public spaces. And although a small group had gathered in the bingo hall to meet with Comp, the men sitting at the bar had their doubts.

“One of the guys said, “˜Are you here for that art thing?'” Comp told me when I met him in 2005. He explained to the men that what he really wanted to do was transform the wasted area that ran alongside the community into a new kind of park. A ripple of laughter ran down the bar. “They were like, “˜Har, har, har. That’s got to be the dumbest idea in the world,'” said Comp.

Five years later, after a lot of public meetings and public planning, Comp took a picture of a group of men building benches in front of the firehouse, benches that would eventually sit in the park. “What’s great about that photo is that three of the men in it had been at the bar that first night,” Comp told me on the day that the AMD&ART Vintondale Park was officially dedicated.

Read more of this article and add comments on the Orion Website. The article is titled Putting art to work

230 Creativity flows through the use of iron oxide found in local riverbeds 2007-11-28 13:16:36

A River Runs Through It

Gallery showing will be on display at the AFA gallery on December 7th at 6 p.m.

Artists for Art Gallery in partnership with the Eastern Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation have made creative use of the iron oxide pigment collected from local riverbeds. Supported by a grant through the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts-Scranton Area Foundation, seven area high school students worked with book artist Ivana Pavelka for five sessions at Keystone College and AFA Gallery and created accordion books using the pigment in their artwork. Robert Hughes AML Program Manager of EPCAMR introduced the students to the reclamation and transformation process of the abandoned mine drainage and showed them how it becomes a pigment that is environmentally friendly and useful to artists. For the following art-making sessions, Ivana and the students explored the artistic uses of the pigment as well as the cultural and historical implications of the material itself. Mixed media artist Elizabeth Parry-Faist worked with the students on including photographic images in their books, and poet Jennifer Hill-Kaucher helped them add meaningful text. The finished accordion books show the use of the pigment in mixed media, paint and ink and will be on display at the AFA gallery on December 7th at 6 p.m. as part of Scranton’s First Friday Art Walk.

This project was generously supported by the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts Scranton Area Foundation.

229 Man has a plan that would use underground water to heat and cool structures 2007-11-28 13:08:47

Mine tunnels seen as assets

By RORY SWEENEY

rsweeny@timesleader.com

SCRANTON – For years, it seemed that the underground mining industry that forged this region had also given it its biggest black eye. Due to the efforts of a few amateur explorers, it’s possible that black eye also created the region’s golden egg. Down in the mine tunnels that scarred the land and spoiled the water, the explorers hatched an idea unique to this region that could supply cheap, renewable heating and cooling for consumers from Forest City to Shickshinny.

Jim Sovaiko, a Lackawanna County antique electric-meter restorer with an insatiable interest in mines, has long believed the acidic water that infiltrated the tunnels held untapped energy potential. The idea has politicians and professionals from various fields buzzing about the prospects. A banner made for Tuesday’s demonstration said Northeastern Pennsylvania has reemerged as “The Clean Energy Capital of the World.”

Lackawanna County Commissioner Robert Cordaro discussed the implications of the idea and invited people to tour a small shed heated and cooled exclusively using the earth’s own heat. Two holes, spaced about 70 feet apart, are bored about 150 feet down to the water-filled mineshafts. A pump in one hole pulls water from the shaft, and the water is filtered before it enters a heat exchanger.

Depending on the season, the exchanger unit removes or adds heat to the water to regulate the building’s temperature. The water is then pumped back into the mineshaft, along with the filtered-out materials, through the second bore hole.

Cordaro said he had “asked all the bad questions” to ensure it wouldn’t “replace one environmental problem with another.” The announcement created “happy timing” coming just a week before the election but wasn’t politically motivated, he said. He intends for private industry to undertake process, and said the county’s recently created Authority for Innovative Renewable Energy “as a conduit for funds, for research” and for collection of certain fees. Those fees would reduce property taxes, he said.

Deep Interest

For years, Sovaiko held onto his idea but couldn’t be sure the mine water would be useful unless he actually saw it. In 2004, he met Chris Murley, an amateur mine explorer who got him access to the source. “From there, it’s just connecting dots” between those with the idea and those who can make it happen, Sovaiko said. The idea is relatively simple, but it’s unique and wouldn’t exist without the mining operations. Because the ground is so undermined, the water creates “an enormous storehouse of heat and cool,” said J.B. Singh the president of J and P Engineers. The ground insulates the water, keeping it a consistent 55 degrees, and there is “vastly too much water all surrounded by highly heat conductive rock” to affect the temperature; no matter how many people draw on the resource, he said. In fact, the high concentration of people in the valley creates a “fortuitous juxtaposition” because they can all tap in with little impact, making the idea more effective.

Costs can be recouped

The engineers have outlined an area in which the holes wouldn’t go below 150 feet, making construction of a system cost effective. Singh said customers could recoup their costs within about four years. The only electricity being used is to run several pumps. Residential system design could run between $3,000 and $15,000, said Arthur Hunt, of J and P Engineers. Construction was estimated at about $2,500 to $3,000 per 12,000 BTUs.

That compares favorably to construction costs for a gas heat and electric air-conditioning system, he said.

The general idea isn’t novel, but its application in this area is. Geothermal heating and cooling systems have been installed for years, but the difference is that water is pumped up and down many bore holes, potentially hundreds, rather than circulated through a vast water body via two holes. To combat potential deterioration from the water’s pollutants, the pipes in the holes are plastic and the heat exchanger is stainless steel. The contaminants would be filtered out by then, so the rest of the system need not be so resistant. The filter would need cleaning about twice a year, Singh said. Because there is more undermined land in the Wilkes-Barre area, Sovaiko said, it would work even better there. The idea even poses advantages for property values, he said, because the worth of the energy underneath it will now be included.

For Sovaiko, the work has been fun, but not profitable. In fact, he said he has no financial interest in the process. “It’s been like a public service,” he said. He has a different process in mind for exploiting the underground heat without moving the acidic water, but that will wait until the idea evolves, gains acceptance and is used. “It’s like the Wild West. I don’t know where it’s going to go,” he said. “The higher the price of energy goes, the better we look.” But no matter where conversation with Sovaiko goes, it always returns to miners. “They were down there carving out the coal, and they had no idea they were carving out an energy resource for their children,” he said.

228 Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy Through Art and Science 2007-10-30 17:31:47

Putting art to work

by Erik Reece

Published in the November/December 2007 issue of Orion magazine

We were actually sitting at one of those benches inside a large pavilion. It was a beautiful summer day. Speeches had been made and supporters had been thanked. To our right, a series of passive treatment ponds was transforming an orange, acidic syrup into clear, clean water that flowed into a seven-acre wetland before emptying into Blacklick Creek. To our left, children were playing on the new soccer field while their mothers watched and talked in the pavilion’s shade. Visitors took guided tours of the ponds, gardens, and sculptural installations dedicated to the memory of the men who dug coal in this small community until the 1950s.

When the underground mines shut down and the coal companies skipped town, they left behind a poisonous discharge of sulfuric acid and iron known as acid mine drainage. So many Pennsylvania streams run orange with acid that, according to Comp, “People from the region don’t even see it. They grew up with it.” Comp himself grew up in Southern California and came to Pennsylvania in 1993 to work for the National Park Service’s National Heritage Areas Program, where he oversaw economic development, education, and historical preservation in a ten-county region. He had earned his PhD in the history of technology and American economic history from the University of Delaware. But two years of teaching at Boston University convinced Comp that his future lay beyond the ivory tower. “I wanted to be out in the field, working with all of this history,” he said. So he moved to the National Park Service to become senior historian of the Historic American Engineering Record, documenting historical industrial sites for the Library of Congress.

Comp’s work with the National Park Service did indeed allow him to experience firsthand the region’s built industrial landscape, or what he calls “the vernacular of technology.” “That is the American character as far as I’m concerned,” Comp explained. “All of the amazing things we’ve built give you a window into us as a culture.” But it also gives you a lot of toxic waste, and that waste has destroyed rivers throughout Appalachia, a region Comp calls the country’s “largest forgotten ecosystem.”

In the late 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency designated acid mine drainage as the biggest environmental problem in the eastern mountains. But well before then, Comp had been kicking around the idea of a reclamation project that would actually call attention to the problem and its solution. “If we’re going to get our act together enough to address a big environmental problem,” Comp said, “we ought to celebrate the fact that we’ve gotten our act together enough to address a big environmental problem.” Ten years after that first meeting in the bingo hall, Comp and Vintondale had indeed brought off something remarkable: together, and assisted by a dedicated crew of AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteers, they transformed the town dump into what the AMD&ART mission statement calls “a public place in which to explore, learn, reflect, and recreate.” And they have learned a lot about themselves and each other.

THE AIM OF AMD&ART, “to re-create a sense of place by honoring the past and instilling hope in the future,” is certainly laudable. But Comp’s first encounter at the VFW hall is suggestive of the forces that work against such initiatives in the coal fields of Appalachia. In the 1910s, the railroad found its way into the remote hollows of these mountains. Company towns, or coal camps, were thrown up quickly, and all manner of men,immigrants and mountaineers,went to work underground. Families from twenty-two countries came to Vintondale, looking to earn a living. The work was brutal and the pay poor. A man might spend all day loosening coal in a twenty-inch-high mine shaft and earn one dollar. A miner’s wife-turned-songwriter, Sarah Ogan Gunning, remembered, “It literally happened,people starved to death. Not only my baby, but the neighbors’ babies. You see them starve to death too. And all you could do was go over and help wash and dress ’em and lay ’em out and sit with the mothers until they could put ’em away.” Eventually, the miners tried to organize. Throughout Appalachia, the bloody union wars of the 1930s dramatized exactly what kind of civic engagement the coal companies would not tolerate.

“If you were civically engaged in a coal camp, ” noted Comp, “you were likely to get fired, blacklisted, and be homeless.” So the tendency to keep one’s mouth shut, to grudgingly accept terms set by others, became part of the Appalachian character. According to Comp, it has led to the “nothing good happens in Vintondale” attitude that he met up with that first night at the VFW hall.

Looking at old photos of the AMD&ART site, one can understand why. When the coal operators pulled out of Vintondale, they left behind thousands of tons of “bony,” coal waste that has very little energy value. Mounds of this black rubble were strewn around crumbling coke ovens and rusting coal tipples. The coal operators also left behind a dwindling community where the per capita income was half of the state average. As Comp writes in his AMD&ART founder’s statement, “These are citizens who rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to participate and learn from any kind of cultural or arts-related activities within their own town. There is little sense of being special in Vintondale, no particular distinction to boast of, only constant decline for half a century,typical for much of Coal Country, too typical.” In 1998, as a survey of townspeople showed, the idea that this thirty-five-acre blight could be a place that attracted tourists and brought pride to the town sounded, if not like “the dumbest idea in the world,” certainly like a remote possibility.

Undeterred, Comp put together a core team of designers that included hydrologist Bob Deason, sculptor Stacy Levy, and landscape designer Julie Bargmann. And crucial members of his elaborate cast were the townspeople themselves. “If I have an art form, it’s probably choreography,” Comp explained, “and I don’t even get to pick the dancers. I’ve got elephants and gazelles and they all have to work together.” At one of the first town meetings, Comp handed out topographical maps of the site, along with markers, and he asked the people of Vintondale, including some high school kids he had rounded up on a street corner, to draw in what they wanted. As it turned out, what the community wanted and what the AMD&ART team envisioned were not exactly the same thing. The design team talked about a water-treatment system, wetlands, and public art; the community talked about picnic tables and a baseball field to replace the one lost in a 1977 flood. Comp takes obvious pride in the fact that everyone,designers and townspeople,got most of what they wanted. “No one is allowed to compromise, but all have to accommodate” is a kind of mantra for Comp when it comes to designing with and for communities. He is emphatic in his belief that good design must include public engagement. “Designers who work in the isolation of their offices when doing community projects are designing in a vacuum,” he maintains.

Sue Thering, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has spent a great deal of time studying the Vintondale project. Thering is an extension agent in the Department of Landscape Architecture, and her work focuses on encouraging citizen participation in public works. She believes that the design team’s receptiveness was the key to earning the community’s trust and changing much of its defeatist attitude. The same survey that was conducted in 1998 was replicated in 2001. In those three years, the number of residents who thought positive change,attracting tourists or bringing fish back to the creek, for example,was possible jumped from 20 percent to 70 percent. Thering attributes the shift to what adult education theorists call transformative learning. “The people in Vintondale were being listened to and they were learning to bump up against their own preconceptions about themselves and about the community,” she told me at the park’s dedication, over a couple of kielbasa. “Something changed that made them think it was possible to build a park that people would visit.” That something was a dialogue between what Thering terms “outside experts” from the design team and “inside experts,” the people in Vintondale who knew their town’s history best.

Something else that might not be as easily measured statistically is Comp’s charisma. Many who eventually donated money or resources to AMD&ART describe their first meeting with him as something akin to watching a fast-talking dervish armed with maps and pamphlets. Comp, who is sixty-four and has been married to Selma Thomas for thirty-five years, has unruly white hair and an easy manner. He takes as a given that his ideas seem unorthodox and untried, and he starts from there. Consequently, he seems to inspire a lot of frontier thinking in people: let’s do something no one else has done before. Liz Elliott, one of AMD&ART’s many volunteers, said, “I think Allan knows before the people themselves know that they will become committed.”

BACK IN THE 1990’S, WHEN COMP WAS STILL trying to sell the Vintondale community on his idea for the AMD&ART Park, the state of Pennsylvania started building power plants that were intended to burn coal waste exclusively. It was an effort to get rid of all the bony piles that littered the state, but what it meant for Comp was, “We got seventy thousand tons of material removed from the Vintondale site for nothing. That at least got us down to more or less bare ground.”

And in 1995, the EPA’s Sustainable Development Program awarded AMD&ART a $250,000 grant. That was enough to begin work on a passive treatment system that would naturally convert acid mine drainage back to swimmable water. Though Deason engineered this system, Comp emphasizes that all four members of the design team collaborated on every component of the park. They designed six keystone-shaped ponds at the eastern edge of the property. A half mile away, acid mine drainage was pouring out of a mine portal into Blacklick Creek at a rate of two hundred gallons per minute. Today, that drainage is pumped into the first treatment pond where, instead of taking the typical approach of using sodium hydroxide to neutralize the acid, Deason lined the pond bottom with limestone that naturally draws iron out of the water. The discharge then flows downhill into the other ponds, growing cleaner with each filter process, until it is ready to return to the creek.

On one weekend in 2001, AMD&ART organized the planting of a thousand trees beside the ponds. The idea was to create a “litmus garden” where the fall color of the trees would reflect the color of the acidic water as it turned from a reddish-orange, to yellow, to silver green. One hundred and fifty people showed up that day to help, including many Vintondale natives who had moved away. Alongside the first pond, they planted six-foot-tall black cherry and sweetgum trees whose leaves would turn red in the fall. Downstream they planted orange-leafed sugar maple, yellow-leafed poplar and hackberry, and finally the light-green black willow to indicate clear, uncontaminated water.

AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteers were interspersed among the planting team. By that time, AMD&ART had raised enough money to provide room and board for a few volunteer workers each year. They had set up their headquarters in the basement of the Hungarian Reformed Church, whose members agreed to lease the space to AMD&ART for one dollar a year. The volunteers ran their operation from the basement,writing grants, coordinating field projects, and hectoring the state to build an access road for the park. Comp credits them more than anyone, himself included, for finally winning the town over. “You have to earn credibility and trust,” he said. “The way I do it is with AmeriCorps and VISTA. These volunteers give you the face time with the community that is absolutely critical if you’re really going to do community-based design. Coal country is nothing if not tight. You get inside that culture a little and you get lots of support and lots of interest.”

ONE OF THE STRANGER THINGS ABOUT ALLAN COMP is whom he works for now: the U.S. Department of the Interior,in particular, the Office of Surface Mining (OSM). Within the environmental and conservation community, OSM is usually not considered a forward-thinking regulatory agency, particularly under the current administration. When George W. Bush first took office in 2001, he loaded most federal natural resources agencies with undersecretaries who had previously worked as lobbyists for the very industries they were being entrusted to regulate.

None of this is news to Comp. He knows he’s the odd man out at OSM. But in 1999, when Gene Kruger, OSM’s division chief for reclamation assistance, saw what was happening at Vintondale, he asked Comp to organize something similar for OSM. “OSM wanted me to come in and do this in a lot of other places,” Comp said. He now oversees the Watershed Assistance Team, which places VISTA workers in communities across Appalachia. In 2004, Comp won the Department of Interior’s Environmental Achievement Award for creating innovative partnerships between OSM and various organizations working to protect watersheds. In the current political climate, one learns to savor small victories. In reality, Comp works “so far down inside the belly of the beast” that he poses little threat to industry,at least that’s what he said as he and I sat in his favorite diner in Cambria City. About fifteen miles from Vintondale and right across from the steel mills, this was the community where immigrants had settled in the 1930s. Reasoning that he was also an immigrant to Pennsylvania, Comp bought a small house here back in the 1990s so he could be close to Vintondale. The diner is a neighborhood fixture where the waitresses are extremely nice and breakfast is ridiculously cheap.

After we ate, Comp took me for a tour of the newly completed AMD&ART Park. We walked along the Ghost Town Rail Trail, which today attracts seventy-five thousand bicyclists a year, and was one of the main things that attracted Comp to the abandoned mine site. A few cyclists had stopped at a low concrete platform to watch artist Jessica Liddell add the last porcelain tiles to a mosaic that illustrates what these thirty-five acres looked like at the height of the coal boom. The nine-by-fifteen-foot mosaic is modeled on a 1928 Sanborn Insurance map. It depicts with a line of brown and black tiles the coke ovens whose foundations are still visible in the wetland area beyond the mosaic.

Liddell had recently completed a mosaic for the cafe in New York’s famous Random House Building. “To a lot of people, that may just be wall decor,” she told us, “but here in Vintondale, I’ve spent time with the very people who this mosaic is for. It became very real when folks that lived in the town and worked in the mine walked up and pointed out the homes that their families had lived in for generations.”

Across the Ghost Town trail from Liddell’s piece stands Mine Portal No. 6, where in the 1930s and 1940s most of the men of Vintondale disappeared underground each morning. From the trail, you can see that a large slab of polished black granite now blocks the portal, framed with heavy timbers. Much like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC, it does not look that impressive from a distance. Only when stepping closer do you realize that an image of nine miners leaving the portal has been diamond-etched into the granite. The miners all carry lunch pails and wear head lanterns and heavy work coats. The artist, Anita Lucero, etched them life-sized and in exquisite detail. But unlike the Vietnam Memorial, where only the names of the soldiers appear, the Miner’s Memorial depicts images that were taken from the quarter-inch, 8-millimeter film of a 1938 home movie. Comp enlarged the image to eight-by-ten inches and chose Lucero to re-create this tableau. Over a hundred people attended the dedication of the Miner’s Memorial in 2005. Comp recalled, “We had guys showing this to their grandkids, saying, “˜That’s the kind of lunch bucket I had. My lunch was in the top, my water was in the bottom.’ As a historian, that’s important to me.” And unlike the Vietnam Memorial, where the names are cut deep into the granite to accentuate that they will not be forgotten, the image of these miners appears gauzy and almost ghostlike. That was Comp’s intention, and Lucero’s rendering is as evocative as it is accurate.

And yet, through the ritual of art, these ghost miners have made the history of Vintondale real again. The social theorist Michael Mayerfeld Bell has written thoughtfully about what he calls “the ghosts of place,” defining ghosts as “felt presences” or “the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there.” In Vintondale, that dormant sense of being of a place,so characteristic of Appalachia,has been revived through a work of public art that retrieved the past in order to celebrate it. And by laying claim to the past, a community has laid claim to a revived sense of place. Perhaps the clearest example of this in Vintondale is that its residents have recently decided to restart, after thirty years of inactivity, the Town Planning Commission.

Comp and I circled the treatment ponds and the Litmus Garden until we came to one of my favorite aspects of the AMD&ART Park design. It is a slate installation, set on the bank of Blacklick Creek, directly across the park from the Miner’s Memorial. Called Clean Slate, it was designed by University of Pennsylvania landscape architecture students Claire Fullman and Emily Nye. It is a minimalist work made up of two long pieces of rough black slate, placed in the form of a stair step. The lower slab is set right beneath the mouth of a culvert where water from the treatment ponds, having passed through a wetland area, finally empties into the creek. Visitors are encouraged to stand on that platform and let the purified water wash over their bare feet. Anyone who is inspired to do so can leave chalk messages on the higher, dry piece of slate. There are plans to plant ferns and other plants around this stark work, vegetation that dates back to the Carboniferous Age,the age of coal.

STILL, FOR ALL OF THE PARK’S OBVIOUS VIRTUES, the cynic’s question hangs in the air: Is it art? Not in any traditional representational sense. Rather, the origins of a landscape such as the AMD&ART Park are in the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s,a movement that took art off the canvas, and often out of the museum, so that it became an experience in place and time, rather than simply a painting on a wall. Whatever conceptual art was, it wasn’t decor. Its practitioners believed that such projects could, as Rose Lee Goldberg writes, “effectively transform people’s everyday lives.” Joseph Beuys, one of the conceptual movement’s luminaries, submitted 7000 Oaks to the Documenta 7 exhibit of 1982. It was a plan to reforest Kassel, Germany, symbolized by one spade that leaned against a white wall. Each patron paid to sponsor a tree, and in return received from the artist a signed certificate proclaiming, “Small oak trees grow and life continues.” To understand the world as a canvas is to think very differently about its composition and one’s place within that composition. And to think “of the entire world as art,” as greenmuseum.org director Sam Bower suggests, means to begin thinking seriously about ecological problems and their solutions.

Sam Bower’s online environmental showcase has featured AMD&ART prominently, and he gave a short talk at the park’s dedication ceremony. “As the twenty-first century unfolds,” he said, “we urgently need a more constructive relationship between our species and the natural world. We can no longer afford the vacationer’s emphasis on art for art’s sake. The new catchphrase may actually be, Art has a job to do.” To that end, Bower describes tractors and backhoes as the sculptural tools that brought this thirty-five-acre canvas into being.

For years, Allan Comp has been describing the Vintondale project as “art that works.” The AMD&ART Park “works” in the sense that it filters acid mine drainage from millions of gallons of water. But it works in a much more subtle way as well,in the way the people of Vintondale experience and respond to it as art. Sue Thering describes Vintondale as a blue-collar town where “people work hard to put food on the table for their families and they don’t have time for art, thank you very much.” However, she believes it was the artistic components of the park that brought locals,especially the men,around. As she sees it, most people don’t get too excited about the science of water purification. But the older men of Vintondale were inspired to show their grandchildren what they looked like, back in the 1940s, walking out of Mine Portal No. 6.

“Art isn’t just about someone with too much time on their hands trying to draw a picture,” Thering said, paraphrasing the classic workingman’s distrust of the artist. But for the local people, “realizing that art would be meaningful to them was an important part of AMD&ART’s success.”

ALLAN COMP HAS DESCRIBED the term “AMD&ART” as a shorthand for “science and the arts.” Following the ecological principle of interdependence, he possesses an almost mystical belief that disciplinary boundaries need to be broken down and worked across. Turf wars, especially at universities where budgets are strained, have too often kept the sciences and the humanities on opposite sides of campus, increasingly specialized, and so estranged that they, quite literally, cannot understand the language the other is speaking. Early in the twentieth century, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead stressed that while different disciplines obviously represent different values, those values, in the end, remain complementary. “When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth,” wrote Whitehead in Science and the Modern World, “you may still miss the radiance of the sunset.”

Soon after my visit, the AMD&ART Park won the prestigious Phoenix Award. Touted as the “brownfields equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars,” the Phoenix is given annually to recognize exceptional reclamation projects on toxic industrial sites across the country. Comp feels vindicated by the award. “It affirms that the arts and sciences belong together in reclamation, ” he said as a red-backed salamander crawled through the leaf litter at our feet. “That’s why they gave us the award. It wasn’t for the best science project.”

Moreover, one of the most important elements of Vintondale may not be its water-treatment system or its sculptural installations, but rather its function as a potential model for many other such projects across the country. “AMD&ART is now both the name of a park in Vintondale and the name of an idea, a commitment to interdisciplinary work in the service of community aspirations to fix the environment,” Comp said. Since the completion of the park, Comp has established the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team, a group of fifty-five OSM and VISTA volunteers who are working with the AMD&ART model to engage coal field communities in projects that will remediate damaged waterways and rekindle the power of place.

Twelve years after he hatched the idea to resurrect the town dump of Vintondale, Comp feels more certain than ever that the “arts and the humanities are absolutely necessary to environmental recovery.” Science can change the water chemistry, but for Comp, it is art and history, combined with the science, that will ultimately change people’s minds,will change the way we think about an industrial economy that is destroying the very ecosystems that sustain us, and all life. “It’s not the water that’s the problem, it’s us,” Comp said. “And if we fix us, we’ll start fixing the water.”

227 PEC recognizes area residents’ efforts to improve environment 2007-10-24 10:12:10

By Ron Bartizek rbartizek@timesleader.com

Business & Consumer Editor

Robert Hughes receives an award Thursday night from the Northeastern Pennsylvania Environmental Partnership for his commitment and advocacy. Marleen Troy of Wilkes University presented the award.

Aimee Dilger/The Times Leader

PLAINS TWP. , On a balmy mid-October night when global warming was on the agenda, the Woodlands Inn & Resort parking lot likely held the highest concentration of hybrid cars in Wyoming Valley Thursday.

That may have been because inside, the Northeast Pennsylvania Environmental Partnership was handing out its 17th annual awards.

Robert Hughes, Plymouth Township, was honored for his tireless efforts to improve the environment of his hometown through environmental education, community projects and grant seeking. That was on his own time; Hughes also cares for the environment as an employee of the Luzerne Conservation District and the Eastern Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

“When I come home I have to practice what I preach,” Hughes said in his acceptance remarks.

He described coming full circle with the event that he first attended in its inaugural year as a high school student looking for an opportunity to get involved in the organization that brings together environmentally minded individuals, government agencies, educational institutions and private industry.

“That became my passion,” he said about his environmental advocacy, and he worked for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council for two years after college. He ended his speech with a promise: “I’m going to continue to do it for years to come.”

The top honor, the Thomas P. Shelburne Environmental Leadership Award, went to Keystone College professor Howard Jennings for his 37-year commitment to environmental education, research and outreach.

Other awards went to the Earth Conservancy, for its leaf and yard waste composting program; Alan Gregory, an avid birder and conservationist from Conyngham; the Bradford Sullivan Forest Landowners Association, the oldest group of its kind in Pennsylvania; Dan Kunkle and the Lehigh Gap Nature Center; and Gordon Whitworth and Tom Zeterberg, Pike County, for their involvement in smart growth planning.

Earlier, keynote speaker Nancy S. Cole, Director of Climate Outreach for the Union of Concerned Scientists, outlined changes global warming will bring to Pennsylvania. She explained that warming trends now under way cannot be changed because carbon dioxide emissions last in the atmosphere for decades.

“So our emissions are setting our children’s climate future,” she said, and if they are lowered, the effects could be cut in half.

Ron Bartizek, Times Leader business editor, may be reached at 970-7157.

226 Coal shaped much of Schuylkill Countys history and continues to shape its future 2007-10-11 11:43:03

However, it might be shaping the present in one undesirable way.

Two environmental advocacy groups released a study last week alleging that 10 sites of unlined pits in Pennsylvania, including three in Schuylkill County, show groundwater contamination.

They allege that such contamination is linked to the dumping of coal combustion ash from coal-fired power plants in unlined pits.

Mahanoy Creek Watershed Association members want the federal Environmental Protection Association to investigate two such sites beneath the Ellengowan and BD Mines in Mahanoy Township for possible cleanups under the Superfund law.

Such an investigation would be a good idea, regardless of whether the problem actually exists. As long as such a probe is conducted in an unbiased manner, it should either relieve fears of such contamination or spur action to clean it up – each of which is better than living in doubt.

Certainly, Schuylkill County’s coal mines have left an environmental legacy that has not always helped the region.

Acid mine drainage has tainted many waterways in the area. Stripping pits and culm banks have scarred the landscape, rendering some areas barren.

However, steps are being taken to rectify those ills, and there has been some success in each area.

Groundwater contamination is potentially more serious than either of those since everyone would be affected if the county’s drinking water were tainted. No one can avoid drinking water, so no one could escape the potential effects of its contamination.

While the two sites in Mahanoy Township, plus the third at the Silverbrook Mine in Kline Township and Packer Township, Carbon County, would not pollute this county’s entire water supply, even some contamination is bad from any standpoint.

No one wants to drink contaminated water, and no one should have to do so.

Of course, such contamination cannot be assumed. Advocacy groups tend to exaggerate the evidence favorable to their viewpoints, and minimize or ignore contrary evidence, so last week’s study cannot, and should not, be taken as gospel.

A study by EPA, however, would not assume the truth of any such proposition, or the truth of the contrary position – that there is no evidence of any harm. EPA is as unbiased a source of such an investigation as it is possible to have, so it should move forward as soon as possible with the study.

It should examine last week’s study as evidence, not as the conclusive truth. It should do precisely the same with evidence offered by the industry, which maintains there is no evidence of contamination and that it complies with the law in dumping coal ash into the pits.

It is worth noting that the state Department of Environmental Protection agrees with the industry, saying that coal ash has been dumped for many years in Pennsylvania without demonstrable ill effects.

In other words, EPA should start with questions rather than answers, as any good investigator does. EPA must work forward to find what the evidence means instead of working backward from a predetermined answer, which would lead to changing facts to suit theories instead of changing theories to conform with the facts.

The investigation should be thorough enough to explore all possibilities and allow everyone interested to present and comment upon the evidence.

When it is completed, it should be evaluated carefully and its conclusions implemented.

The people of the county deserve nothing less.

©The REPUBLICAN & Herald 2007

225 White tries to unearth ideas for mine cleanup 2007-10-11 11:36:03

By Patrick Shuster

LEADER TIMES

Friday, September 14, 2007

SOUTH BUFFALO — The question seemed easy enough – how do you spend about $1.5 billion over 15 years to clean up problems that occurred from past coal-mining operations and practices?

The answer, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, is anything but easy, which is why they held a series of meetings across the state to help look for answers.

The final meeting, held Thursday night at the Northpointe campus of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, brought only a handful of people from the region to offer suggestions.

State Sen. Don White, R-Indiana, who hosted the meeting, said that he will do whatever he can to make sure a portion of that money will be used for projects in his 41st District, including Armstrong County, and was disappointed that more people didn’t come out to talk about the problems and offer solutions.

“Everyone here and everyone in my district has been impacted in some way from the problems left by the coal mining of the past,” he said. “This is going to take a lot of teamwork and effort to come up with solutions to deal with all the problems we’ve been left with.”

The concern of White, along with other attendees, was not so much how the money would be spent, but who makes the determination as to what projects get funded and when.

“I’m afraid that it’s going to become political and that funding will be divided unequally to areas that have more priority sites than those with less,” White said. “I want to know so that I can be prepared to fight for equal consideration for my district.”

Armstrong County has about 40 projects that are considered a priority 2 and only a few priority 1, with the biggest concern being a 50-foot high by 1,000-foot long high wall in Boggs Township in the area of Mountain Trails Road and Ridge Road, according to DEP. The total estimate for all the projects to be reclaimed is $2.6 million.

The priority 1 and 2 projects are ones that have health and safety issues, such as open mine shafts or portals, or other concerns in which a person on the property could be injured, according to DEP officials.

Officials discussed how much funding should be spent to handle acid mine drainage problems. The state can allocate as much as 30 percent of its annual funding for such projects.

Many attendees agreed that the full percentage should be used because that portion of the money could be placed into interest-bearing accounts and allowed to accrue interest.

“Our waterways are so precious to us. We deserve to have clean water,” White said. “It seems as though clean water is being made out to be less important that other problems, but having clean water is a major health and safety issue.”

Armstrong County Commissioner Rich Fink suggested projects that could tie into other economic development projects should be a higher concern and should be considered for completion.

“There are areas that could be used for a variety of development, including parks, business development, and other recreational uses, such as ATV trails,” he said. “By combining the projects with the reclamation projects, it allows for other sources of funding and gives us more leverage to better the communities they affect.”

DEP should be receiving its first installment of the money in October and plans to form committees to further discuss issues from the public meetings.

For more information on abandoned mine reclamation, visit the DEP Web site at www.depweb.state.pa.us/abandonedminerec.

Patrick Shuster can be reached at pshuster@tribweb.com or 724-543-1303, ext. 237.

224 WVIA presents: Hope for Polluted Waters 10/18/07 2007-10-10 21:39:05

Broadcast premiers Thursday October 18th @ 8PM

A one-hour documentary about mining and abandoned mine drainage in Pennsylvania

Hope for Polluted Waters tells the personal stories of the individuals and groups working throughout the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania to clean up the abandoned mine drainage (AMD) that pollutes over 4,000 miles of waterways in the state.

The focus of the story is the people themselves; their passions, frustrations, challenges and ultimately their triumphs over pollution. Dedication drives these individuals, whose goal is a better future. These emotions are evident in every one of the volunteers who is trying to correct the wrongs of the past. . (more)

223 Area acres await reclamation: Schuylkill County 2007-08-01 16:55:43

BY SHAWN A. HESSINGER

TAMAQUA BUREAU CHIEF

shessinger@republicanherald.com

05/25/2007

MARYD , Reclamation of more than 1,000 acres of mine land is planned in Schuylkill County with more than 300 acres already funded and actively being reclaimed.

But the maintenance of more than 25 passive treatment systems in the county addressing acid mine drainage is also eligible for at least part of a new federal funding package to be available beginning in October.

“This is what the conservation groups are keying on,” said Daniel J. Koury, watershed manager for the Pottsville District Office of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

On a walking tour Thursday morning of the Bell Colliery Project in Schuylkill Township, near the headwaters of the Schuylkill River, Koury pointed to orange-tinged water running from an abandoned mine entrance.

Beneath the ground in deep mine workings, oxygen and water react with pyrite or iron sulfide creating the rust that gives the mine discharge its characteristic orange tint and sulfuric acid polluting the water and destroying aquatic life.

The Bell Colliery discharge is special, said Koury.

“This is the headwaters of the Schuylkill River. This is the first major source of pollution to hit the Schuylkill River,” he said.

But thanks to a two-phase project costing a combined $312,000, the water is being treated with limestone, lowering its acidity and allowing harmful metals to settle out into two large ponds before it ever reaches the important waterway.

A pipe running beneath the river is used to periodically force contaminants that have collected in the system into a third pond, cleaning the system.

“The problem we have in the anthracite region is we have too much discharge,” said Rick Walck, inspector/forester for the Pottsville DEP office.

Officials and conservation groups say the treatment systems are only a “Band-Aid” on the problem.

But keeping the current systems maintained will be costly and to date, no grant funding has been available to do so.

An estimated $1.4 billion from a reauthorized federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act may be part of the solution to the problem.

To date, funding has been used on high-priority sites defined as important because of the health and safety risks they pose.

For example, nearly 100 acres of abandoned mine land was reclaimed behind the Tamaqua Area High School in a two-phase project eventually costing a combined $4,155,598 transforming scarred mine land into sculpted, revegetated hillside.

The Tamaqua project was seen as a high priority because of the mine land’s proximity to the school and the potential for danger to students, said DEP Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation civil engineer manager Ron Ryczak at a meeting in Pottsville on Wednesday.

But the new funding from the reauthorized federal act could also allow the state to set aside up to 30 percent of that money for water treatment, said Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation director Roderick A. Fletcher at the meeting Wednesday set to gain public input about uses of the funding.

Money from the act is not tax dollars but is derived from a fee collected from active mining operations. The federal Office of Surface Mining must create a system by which the funds will be dispersed, a process expected to begin in October and continue over the next 14 years.

©The REPUBLICAN & Herald 2007

222 Water quality questions plague airport project 2007-07-24 12:15:11

Monday, 23 July 2007

By L.A. TARONE Staff writer

The Hazleton City Authority considered using Green Mountain as a water source several times, most seriously in the late 1980s and early ’90s, and again in the mid to late ’90s. Both times, the authority decided using that water was not cost effective.

But now, state Rep. Todd Eachus, D-116, says the proposed cargo airport can use that source for both drinking and utility water. Authority officials still have issues with the water.

HCA had two quality reports done on Green Mountain’s watershed. Both showed water in the mountain’s watershed is too acidic and contains too many contaminants to use without significant filtration. “We looked at the feasibility of using Green Mountain water,” HCA Manager Randy Cahalan said. “Yes, it’s feasible to a degree, but there is a huge cost and a huge question mark associated with it. “We looked at blending (Green Mountain) water with our other sources, like Humboldt or Mount Pleasant (reservoirs),” Cahalan explained. “When you do that, you can dilute its impact and not harm the existing sources because you don’t know what you’re getting with tunnel water.”

Eachus agreed the water in the watershed is very polluted. But he said he thinks it is feasible to clean it up so it’s useable. “I hear what they’re saying, but I’m not buying it completely,” Eachus said. The main report, a 160-page, eight-chapter preparation, was compiled in July 1998 by Schumacher Engineering, the authority’s contracted engineering firm. It is largely a summary of a collection of other water analyses done over a number of years , all of which are included in the report. The second is a 70-page addendum prepared in October 1999, again by Schumacher. Both show results from a variety of tests, done as recently as 1999 and as far back as 1978. They include several done by or for the state Department of Environmental Protection; its predecessor, the Department of Environmental Resources; an earlier Schumacher analysis; one done by Hawk Mountain Labs, West Hazleton, in 1995; another done by EcoScience Labs in 1992; and one done by BCM Engineers and Planners.

“The study concludes that use of Green Mountain tunnel water as a source to the (HCA) may be feasible, primarily if blended with other HCA,” states a two-page summary of the reports prepared by Cahalan. “The water is low pH, highly acidity (sic) and highly corrosive. The water contains high levels of iron, manganese, aluminum, zinc and sulfate. Also, analyses have indicated trace amounts of arsenic and mercury and, at times, very high levels of coliform bacteria.

“Pretreatment of the Green Mountain tunnel water would be necessary to improve the water quality to allow its use as a source to the HCA filtration plant,” the summary adds. It estimated the cost of operating a treatment plant capable of handling 2.5 million gallons per day of Green Mountain water at $139,677 annually, on top of an initial $1,650,489 construction cost. Those estimates were made in 1998. The same summary adds the cost of building a plant to treat water from Catawissa Creek, which is formed from Green Mountain flow, was estimated at $6.3 million in 1982. The annual operational costs of that plant were pegged at $534,000. The summary also notes flow of Green Mountain water is “very inconsistent and varies with seasonal rainfall conditions.” Elsewhere, the report stated using Green Mountain water is feasible, but adds treatment makes it expensive. Based on fiscal year 1997, it pegged the cost of using Green Mountain water at $1.50 per 1,000 gallons versus the 85 cents per 1,000 gallons systemwide.

“It’s not a problem that can’t be overcome,” Eachus said. “It is what it is. But when you’re talking about a project this large in scope, large problems become small problems.” Eachus said the funding stream he’s trying to put together , both private and public , will cover all aspects of airport operation, including both industrial and potable water. Water treatment is among the aspects accounted for in proposed funding streams. “There are a whole set of other issues we have to deal with , there are wetlands permits, drinking water, industrial water, highway interchanges,” Eachus said. “But once you get the authorization of being on a state projects list, you can start dealing with them.

“Now, you might have to tap other funding resources for different aspects of the project,” Eachus said. “You might have to request funding for a highway interchange from the Federal Highway Administration; or funding for water clean-up from (the Environmental Protection Agency). You’ll have to leverage what you have. But once you have everything in place, it all gets easy.”

Mercury, arsenic, cyanide

“Previous (DEP) documentation indicated that approximately 16.7 (million gallons per day) is available from streams and mine drainage tunnels tributary to the Green Mountain area,” Cahalan’s summary states, noting DEP “historically has taken a stern view of the use of mine water for consumption”¦” and indicates several other agencies may also wish to review any use of the water.

It adds, “Obtaining a Public Water Supply permit from DEP and Source Water Allocation Permit from (the Susquehanna River Basin Commission) may be very difficult in light of the inconsistency in flow and water quality”¦” It notes that what’s collectively referred to as “Green Mountain water” actually includes three mine tunnels: the Audenreid Tunnel, the Green Mountain Tunnel and one referred to as “WLT#3.” It details the construction and history of the three tunnels and “three small unnamed streams (that) form the headquarters of the Catawissa Creek which empties into the Susquehanna.”

The first water quality table lists DEP “safe levels” for a list of minerals, metals and contaminants, along with sample findings from all six separate Green Mountain sources taken in 1995 and 1996. All pH samples, tested both in the field and in a lab, were well below the 6.5-8.5 “safe range,” meaning they were more acidic than what DEP deems safe. While they varied a bit, depending on the tributary and the sample’s date, results ranged between a high of 5.33 and a low of 3.32.

Arsenic, too, was well above safe levels. DEP considers .05 milligrams per liter (mg/L) safe. Test samples showed 5 and 6 mg/L in all tributaries and tunnels.

The report showed a similar situation with mercury. DEP’s safe level is .002 mg/L; results ranged between .6 mg/L to 1.2 mg/L ,with most readings around .20 mg/L

Selenium levels were higher: DEP’s safe level is .05 mg/L. Results in all samples (except in one test period in which no sample was taken) showed results of 5 mg/L.

Cyanide readings were well above the .2 mg/L safe levels, with all samples showing greater than 10 mg/L. DEP considers the safe level for iron to be .3 mg/L, but sample results from .24 to 3.4 mg/L.

Manganese levels were generally much higher than the .05 safe levels, with samples ranging from .07 to 1.73 mg/L . Only two samples, a “tributary MP #2″ in 1996 (.03) and tributary mp #5 in 1996 (.01), showing under the safe level.

However, levels of barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, silver, zinc, nitrate, chloride, sulfate, copper, zinc were within safe limits.

The table is followed by a notation stating HCA had two options with Green Mountain water: use it to replenish Roan Reservoir (the one at the treatment plant and HCA’s offices on the Arthur Gardner Parkway; AKA the Heights Beltway), or use it to replenish other depleted reservoirs, such as Mt. Pleasant and/or Humboldt. But in either case, there would be related transport and construction costs, not including pre-treatment. Depending on the option picked, those costs were estimated at between $3.3 million and $4.9 million.

That report also stated, “utilizing Green Mountain as an additional source of supply to address the Authority’s safe yield deficiency would require a new pump station at Humboldt or Mount and a new raw water pipeline to the filtration plant.”

Plus, the report includes results from a series of tests done by Hawk Mountain in Summer 1995 used to compile Schumacher’s report. Also included is a report done for the then-DER in April 1982 by GEO-Technical Services, Harrisburg. The report was to consider ways to reduce acidity, raise pH levels and eliminate excessive alkalinity in the Catawissa Creek and tributaries the Tomhicken and Sugarloaf creeks. It listed a number of proposed options, along with costs breakdowns; the aforementioned $6.3 million and $534,000, in 1982 dollars.

The BCM report, done in 1988, became largely the blueprint of HCA actions yet to come. For instance, it recommended the discontinuance of the Ebervale, Park Place, Drifton and Mount Pleasant reservoirs as daily water sources, and retaining Mount Pleasant as a replenishing source for others. All that was done, as was tapping onto the Lehigh River in the early 1990s, voiding other alternative sources under consideration. One of those alternative sources was Green Mountain. BCM thought little of it. The report stated 16.7 million gallons per day could be taken from the watershed, but added the “safe yield of these sources available for city use may be considerably less”¦”

The report stated the water could be usable through an impoundment (reservoir). But it adds, “impoundments take a long time to plan, design and construct, not withstanding the environmental, and regulatory hurdles.”

“Therefore, this option is not worth pursuing,” it concludes.

Other water sources are not readily available.

“For surface water, you’re looking at either the Susquehanna River or the Lehigh River,” Cahalan said. “The Susquehanna’s quality is very poor. Lehigh’s quality is good, but it’s a battle with Allentown, Bethlehem, and the whole Lehigh Valley.”

The Lehigh Valley relies on the Lehigh River as its primary water source and vigorously objected to HCA’s tapping into it in the early ’90s.

Groundwater is another potential source. But Cahalan said it is apparently not as plentiful as once believed. He noted that as more wells are drilled, the groundwater table lowers. There have been reports of residents having to dig wells deeper to get water, meaning the water table is dropping.

“There’s a limit to how much groundwater you can take,” Cahalan said.

“That’s why we’ve looked at Green Mountain, as a sort of last resort,” Cahalan added. “But it’s very poor quality and very expensive to get. There is a huge cost to pre-treat it, just to get it to stream quality. Then, it would have to be treated again to get it from stream quality to drinking water quality.”

But Eachus said the value of the airport makes significant water treatment, even if it’s more expensive that what it costs systemwide, feasible.

“Right now there’s nothing there,” Eachus said. “But when you put a high-value project on the land, you put a higher value on the land. You can make higher cost investments.”

In fact, Eachus said, it’s conceivable Green Mountain water could supply the nearby Humboldt Industrial Park North. A Coca-Cola plant is slated to move there, but CAN DO, which operates its own water supplier, is not able to supply its needs.

Eachus said that while the final decision would be up to airport developer Gladstone Properties LP, he could envision a treatment plant supplying the firm’s water needs.

221 Catawissa Creek Watershed Questionnaire for the Rivers Conservation Plan 2007-06-26 17:02:26

Do you live in or near the Catawissa Creek Watershed? If so, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC) is requesting your input for the Catawissa Watershed Rivers Conservation Plan project. PEC is conducting this survey in order to obtain information on the major issues facing you and your community that are related to the rivers conservation plan. Such issues may include, but are not limited to, stream bank erosion, mining issues, flooding, recreation (trail and park development), and historic preservation. The information gathered from these surveys will be used to develop the final Plan. As part of this project, we need to determine the community’s issues, such as stream bank erosion, flooding, park development, tourism, etc. This questionnaire is one method we are using to gather this information.

A questionnaire and a map of the study area can be viewed and downloaded from PEC web site (www.pecpa.org) or the separate documents can be downloaded here –> Questionnaire, Fact Sheet and Watershed Map. Just download the questionnaire, fill it out, save it and e-mail it to jsweeney@pecpa.org or print it and fax it to the Pennsylvania Environmental Council at 570-718-6508.

If you would like to become further involved with this project, please indicate so on the bottom of the questionnaire and we will add you to the Steering Committee list. You will then be invited to attend monthly meetings that will be held though out the rest of the year.

If you have any questions please contact Janet Sweeney at 570-718-6507 or e-mail to jsweeney@pecpa.org.

220 VISTA Positions being sought by Trout Unlimited and EPCAMR 2007-06-21 13:50:10

Trout Unlimited, a partnering organization of the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Coalition (WBSRC) is seeking an Americorps*VISTA volunteer through the Office of Surface Mining (OSM)/ VISTA program. See this link for a full description of the position.

The Americoprs*VISTA volunteer is a paid position, with a 1-year duration and will work in Clearfield County, PA. Applications must be received by July 16th, 2007. See the full job description for more information.

If you are interested in an OSM Americorps*VISTA Position in another location please visit The Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team Website. Look under the “Projects” section for possible locations.

218 Register for the 2007 AMD Conference! 2007-06-07 22:43:16

The 2007 PA Statewide Conference on Abandoned Mine Reclamation will be held July 20 & 21, 2007 at the Ramada Inn and Conference Center, State College, PA. Please visit www.TreatMineWater.com for more details.

This year’s conference focuses on the following topics:

* Highlights of the SMCRA Reauthorization, Draft Regulations and Roundtable Discussions

* Operation, Maintenance and Replacement for AMD Treatment Systems Specifics

* Permitting Considerations for AML/AMD Projects

* Presentations from the Makers of New and Proven Treatment Technologies

The deadline to sign up is July 6th, but if you register and reserve your room before June 20th, you will be eligible for a discounted room rate!

Come and be a part of the the longest running annual statewide conference dealing with abandoned mine related issues Pennsylvania.

217 Pa. getting $1.4B for coal mine cleanup 2007-05-25 15:54:51

BY SHAWN HESSINGER

TIMES SHAMROCK WRITER

05/24/2007

POTTSVILLE , State officials held a town meeting and presentation in Pottsville Wednesday to discuss $1.4 billion in mine reclamation money, some of which may be headed for Schuylkill County.

The funding, to be made available over the next 14 years beginning Oct. 1, 2007, is part of a reauthorized Federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

“The primary focus of the program is health and safety,” said Roderick A. Fletcher, director of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation.

State and local conservation groups met in the conference room of the Schuylkill Conservation District office on the Gordon Nagle Trail (Route 901) for a four-and-a-half-hour session to discuss possible uses of the funding.

“Really, the most important part of the meeting will be getting input,” said Fletcher before the session began.

“One of the suggestions I think you’re going to hear is that some of this money could be used to maintain existing facilities,” said Tom Davidock, county natural resource specialist.

Up to 30 percent of the federal funding can be set aside for water quality issues, particularly acid mine drainage, which state officials say is top a source of water pollution in the state, contaminating more than 4,000 miles of streams.

Volunteer water conservation groups have helped establish more than 25 water treatment facilities across the county to address acid mine drainage with an estimated $4.6 million in state and federal funding.

But Davidock said more money will be needed to maintain those programs longterm.

With an estimated $15 billion in mine reclamation projects across the state, funding will not be sufficient to cover all projects.

“Obviously, it’s not a huge dent,” said Fletcher.

Funding for the program covers priority one and priority two sites posing significant danger or risk to local residents’ health and safety.

DEP Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation Civil Engineer Manager Ron Ryczak said such sites might include stripping pits in close proximity to schools or other centers of community.

Examples locally included reclamation near the Tamaqua Area High School in recent years, Ryczak added.

However, funding can also be used to address acid mine drainage and public water systems effected by mine reclamation issues, state officials said.

216 Mine-Scarred Lands Initiative Online Resource Guide is now Available 2007-05-16 10:26:14

NEW! Mine-Scarred Lands Initiative Online Tool Kit

Please visit the MSL Initiative Tool Kit at: http://www.epa.gov/aml/revital/msl/index.htm

This Web site shares the experiences and lessons from six demonstration projects of the Brownfields Federal Partnership Mine-Scarred Lands Initiative. It features helpful tools and links to other mine revitalization resources. The

Tool Kit provides information on:

“¢ Creating a Vision for Revitalization

“¢ Building Project Teams

“¢ Obtaining External Support

“¢ Developing a Revitalization Plan

“¢ Technical Considerations

“¢ Legal Considerations

“¢ Funding Revitalization Projects

215 SMCRA Title 4 Roundtable Meetings Announced 2007-05-16 10:19:32

The Department of Environmental Protection, in conjunction with the Citizens Advisory Council and the Mining and Reclamation Advisory Board, is scheduling a series of public town hall meetings. The topic for the meetings is the recent re-authorization of the Federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). The new law provides for a significant increase in funds available to the Commonwealth for abandoned mine reclamation. It also offers the Commonwealth the opportunity to set aside up to 30% of these funds for abatement and treatment of abandoned mine drainage.

The intent of the meetings is to enable the public to provide input to help in the decision-making process for expenditure of these funds. The decision to set aside funds for mine drainage abatement and treatment, and the appropriate level, must be weighed against the need to restore sites that impact the health and safety of the Commonwealth’s citizens. The public is strongly encouraged to attend and will have the opportunity to provide comments during the town hall meeting. Written comments will also be accepted at the following address:

Department of Environmental Protection

Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation

Attn.: AML Comments

P.O. Box 8476

Harrisburg, PA 17105-8476.

The meetings will be held on the following dates in the following locations:

May 22 – EPCAMR Office, Shavertown, PA

May 23 – Schuylkill Conservation District Office, Pottsville, PA

May 24 – Hillside Rod & Gun Club, Blossburg, PA

May 30 – Robertsdale Fire Hall, Robertsdale, PA

May 31 – Department of Environmental Protection, Cambria Office, Ebensburg, PA

June 5 – Jennings Environmental Center, Slippery Rock, PA

June 6 – California University of PA, Morgan Hall, California, PA

June 7 – Penn State University, Dubois Campus, Hiller Auditorium, Dubois, PA

All meetings will follow the agenda below.

4:00 – 5:30 PM Educational videos and overview of recent legislative changes to SMCRA

5:30 – 6:30 PM Opportunity for the public to review PA’s Abandoned Mine Land inventory and maps (poster session)

6:30 – 8:30 PM Town hall meeting

Questions concerning the meetings can be directed to:

Sue Wilson, Citizens Advisory Council at 717-787-4527 or e-mail suswilson@state.pa.us

Rich Joyce, DEP BAMR Harrisburg at 717-783-7669 or e-mail rijoyce@state.pa.us

Pam Milavec, DEP BAMR Cambria District Office at 814-472-1800 or e-mail pmilavec@state.pa.us

Mike Ferko, DEP BAMR Wilkes-Barre District Office at 570-826-2371 or e-mail mferko@state.pa.us

This notice and directions to the meeting locations can be found at: http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/minres/bamr/bamr.htm.

Individuals in need of an accommodation as provided for in the Americans With Disabilities Act and interested in any of the meetings scheduled for May 22, May 23 or May 24, should contact Mike Ferko at the telephone number and e-mail address listed above. Individuals interested in attending any of the meetings scheduled for May 30, May 31, June 5, June 6 or June 7 should contact Pam Milavec at the telephone number or e-mail address listed above. You may also use the Pennsylvania AT&T Relay Service at 1-800-654-5984 (TDD) to discuss how the Department may accommodate your needs

213 Help for Watershed Groups: Clean Streams Practicum and Benefits 2007-02-22 15:55:07

The Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team is seeking a few enthusiastic citizens’ groups or organizations from Distressed Counties in Coal Country that are concerned with cleaning up their local watershed and learning how to find the money to make improvement possible. They are offering the opportunity to participate in a training program and benefits package: the Clean Streams Practicum.

Groups will be trained in two fields: water quality monitoring and fiscal sustainability. Training sessions will occur March 26-28 and Nov. 9-11 for groups from the Southern Coalfields and April 16-18 and Oct. 26-28 for Northern Coalfields groups. Sessions will take place at Twin Falls Resort State Park in Mullens, WV. The ACCWT will cover ALL expenses for participants’ travel, lodging, food, and registration.

All attendees will also receive a gift membership to River Network as well as an intern from the Office of Surface Mining Clean Streams Initiative. 😀

If your group is interested in this opportunity for free training focused specifically on the coal-impacted counties of Appalachia, please contact Duncan at training@accwt.org, call 304.461.3132, or register online at www.accwt.org. Register by: Feb. 26th

212 Limestone Cowboy gains International Recognition 2007-02-16 13:41:59

Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation gains a spotlight in the internationally known Orion Magazine. Orion staff writer, Erik Hoffner, spoke to Robert and Mike from the group’s office in Shavertown. Read the Article… 0 666 1 1 0 0 0 0 25-26-38-20-5-22-9- 0

Edit Edit Edit Inline Edit Copy Copy Delete Delete 211 Biodiversity Conservation in a Rapidly Developing Environment Lecture 2007-02-13 14:00:33 By Dr. Michael Klemens

SAVE THE DATE: Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 @ 7:00pm

WHERE: The Schuylkill County Ag Center

Conservation and Economic growth are often considered to be competing activities, but in order to continue to improve the Quality of Life in Schuylkill County; we must work to bridge this gap. On March 28th, 2007, The Schuylkill Conservation District, Schuylkill County Sportsmen’s Advisory Board, DCNR-Bureau of Forestry and Schuylkill County Conservancy will be inviting Dr. Michael Klemens, Wildlife Conservation Society, to the county to discuss his work with this issue.

Dr. Klemens founded the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Metropolitan Conservation Alliance, a program to bridge the gap between conservation science and land use planning. Dr. Klemens will discuss how the MCA’s approach to biodiversity conservation realizes that biodiversity conservation and development are not necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. By integrating science-based information about wildlife and ecosystems into the land use planning process, it is possible for a region to maintain its ecological integrity while allowing for economic growth.

Traditionally, says Dr. Klemens, “the environmental movement has been very good at saying no to new development but not necessarily good at saying how to create new developments”. In an effort to ease the environmentally devastating effects of sprawl, Dr. Klemens’ program provides the “how” by creating and disseminating tools that land use officials can use to make better informed land use decisions. Among the various tools to be discussed will be the MCA’s “Biotic Corridor” approach as well as the program’s Technical Paper Series including the Best Development Practices manual. For More information, Please contact:

Tom Davidock

County Natural Resource Specialist

Schuylkill Conservation District

Phone: (570) 622-3742 EXT. 120

210 Window to My Environment from EPA 2007-02-13 13:31:41

Federal GIS Layers available in an Online Database

Online Link:

Window To My Environment (WME)

What is it?:

A powerful web-based tool that provides a wide range of federal, state, and local information about environmental conditions and features in an area of your choice. This application is provided by U.S. EPA in partnership with federal, state and local government and other organizations.

Type in your city, zip code or your latitude and longitude and the site returns the following:

Interactive Map – shows the location of regulated facilities, monitoring sites, water bodies, population density, perspective topographic views and so much more with hotlinks to state/federal information about these items of interest.
Your Window – provides selected geographic statistics about your area of interest, including estimated population, county/urban area designations, local watersheds/waterbodies, etc.
Your Environment – links to information from federal, state, and local partners on environmental issues like air and water quality, watershed health, Superfund sites, fish advisories, impaired waters, as well as local services working to protect the environment in your area.We would like to know what you think of the information presented here and what additional issues you would like to see addressed. To provide information or links, send an email to Enviromail_Group@epamail.epa.gov.

209 West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Symposium III – April 27 & 28 2007-02-13 09:45:03

It is that time of year again to mark your calendars for the

West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Symposium III!

Date:

Friday & Saturday, April 27 & 28, 2007

Location:

Genetti Hotel, Williamsport, PA www.genettihotel.com REGISTRATION BROCHURE

Great Lineup of Topics Including:

Could AMD affect the health of the Chesapeake Bay?
Freshwater mussels and eels: A missing link in the Susquehanna?
Barnes & Tucker Treatment in West Branch headwaters
American shad restoration in the West Branch
Update on the comprehensive West Branch AMD Remediation Strategy
AMD project highlights from over a dozen watershed groups throughout the West Branch!
The Abandoned Mine Land Fund has been reauthorized , Now what?And much more!Saturday Afternoon Specialties:
Tour the Babb Creek watershed AMD projects:
The West Branch AMD success story-or-
Sign up for a guided fishing tour (dinner included) in the beautiful Pine Creek valley

REGISTRATION BROCHURE

SCHOLARSHIPS WILL BE AVAILABLE TO HELP WITH LODGING AND/OR REGISTRATION FEES FOR STUDENTS & VOLUNTEER GROUP REPRESENTATIVES

Is this the first time you’ve heard of the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Symposium? Read on”¦The first-ever West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Symposium was held in May 2005 and the second one was in May 2006. Over 300 people attended representing watershed, sportsmen’s, and conservation organizations; local, state, and federal government; private industry; and others just simply interested in restoring the West Branch Susquehanna watershed.

The purpose of the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Symposium is to promote the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Initiative, which is aimed at the cleanup of abandoned mine drainage throughout the West Branch Susquehanna watershed. This event serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas regarding abandoned mine drainage abatement in the region and provides an excellent opportunity for networking among volunteers, technical experts, students, and others interested in restoring land and water impacted by abandoned mine drainage.

For more information on the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Initiative, read the “West Branch Susquehanna River Watershed: State of the Watershed Report” completed in 2005 by the West Branch Susquehanna Task Force. A copy of the report can be found at www.dep.state.pa.us and www.tu.org

For more information on the West Branch Susquehanna Restoration Initiative or the Symposium, contact Amy Wolfe (awolfe@tu.org) or Rebecca Dunlap (rdunlap@tu.org) of Trout Unlimited (or call them at 570.726.3118).

208 When cleaned, mine water might supply proposed airport 2007-02-06 13:02:51 Tuesday, 06 February 2007

By JIM DINO

jimdino@standardspeaker.com

If one system were repaired and upgraded and a similar system added, two large sources of acid mine water could be suitable for use at the proposed cargo airport in Humboldt, and the process would help clean the Catawissa Creek.

To create a water source for the 5,000-acre airport, Bob Powell and Mike Marsicano of Gladstone Partners LP suggested the cleanup of the Audenried and Green Mountain tunnels to provide a water source for the airport, which is proposed to alleviate congestion in New York airspace.

Ed Wytovich of the Catawissa Creek Wastershed Association said the Audenried Project, a $2 million system installed in late 2005 to treat water coming out of the Audenried Tunnel near Sheppton, is operating at a low capacity because heavy rains last summer nearly destroyed it altogether.

“It is operating at one-third capacity,” he said. “The system is designed to treat 8,000 to 10,000 gallons per minute, but during the storms, between 200,000 and 300,000 gallons per minute were coming through, and just washed it away.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency offered a grant for the repairs, which will go to bid soon, he said.

The treatment of the water does not make it drinkable, but it removes the aluminum. With the treatment system, the pH of the water increases from the 3.8 or 4.0 it is now to 5.5 or 6.0.

“There are three large tanks 10 feet deep in water filled with limestone,” Wytovich said. “The limestone reacts with the aluminum and takes it out. It is a very natural process.”

Wytovich said if [more] stone were added to the project, it could make the water drinkable.

The tanks never were filled [completely] with stone because the association could not find the funding.

“If [more lime]stone were added, it would cost about $150,000,” said Wytovich, adding the limestone might make the water drinkable.

Tom Davidock, Schuylkill County’s natural resources specialist, explained that when the pH number goes up, the acidity in the water drops to 7.0, which is neutral.

“Our goal has been to get the water to 6.0,” Wytovich said. “There are times it has been at 6.5, almost 7.0. The water in the well at my house is potable between 6.3 and 6.5″

Near the Audenried Tunnel is the Green Mountain Tunnel, which has no treatment system.

But like Audenried, if a similar system were attached, that water could be cleaned up as well, Wytovich believes.

Gladstone Partners’ Powell and Marsicano said the two tunnels pump between 15,000 and 22,000 gallons of water per minute.

Wytovich said those are high estimates.

“What each tunnel pumps out depends upon the time of the year,” Wytovich said. “Audenried pumps between 4,000 gallons per minute, at its lowest, to 20,000 gallons per minute. Green Mountain pumps between 5,000 and 15,000.”

There is a caveat to using the water, even if it is cleaned up, Wytovich said.

“The Susquehanna River Basin Commission would have to give them permission,” Wytovich said of the airport developers.

Powell and Marsicano said the airport itself would be on approximately 1,000 acres, in Hazle Township, Luzerne County, and Kline and East Union townships, surrounded by another 4,000 acres where they visualize ancillary businesses: Everything from airplane repair shops and parts stores, to manufacturing facilities might open near the airport.

sections in [ ] were added to clarify the current situation. – MAH 0 901 25 admin

207 Recent SMCRA Title IV Amendments 2007-01-10 10:27:35

by Bruce Golden, WPCAMR Regional Coordinator

New federal legislation, which will provide much-needed funding for abandoned mine reclamation (AMR), came as good news for Pennsylvania and other historic coal-producing states last month. The legislation is actually a revamp of the existing Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). The section of SMCRA that pertains to AMR is often referred to as “Title IV.” December’s amendments to Title IV were part of a much larger bill, the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006, one of the very last acts passed by the outgoing 109th Congress.

Today, we present a synopsis of the revised Title IV legislation with respect to abandoned mine reclamation.

Reclamation Fees & State Funding

Extend but decrease reclamation fees from coal mining

The authority to collect a reclamation fee on each ton of coal mined in the United States was extended another 14 years, but with a two-tiered decrease over the next six years to 80% of the current levels (35¢ to 28¢ per ton of surface-mined coal; 15¢ to 12¢ per ton of ddeep-mine coal). After 14 years (2021), collection of reclamation fees ends, and funding to states extends to 2022. The 20% reduction and 14-year limit of fees were compromises in getting the law passed.

Mandate full funding from reclamation fees to states

The full amount of money collected from reclamation fees (minus the portion allocated to OSM) will now go to the states, rather than be appropriated by Congress. In past years, Congress was stingy with their appropriations, resulting in an unspent balance of $1.8 billion in the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund. This change was almost a miraculous accomplishment!

Distribute funds according to reclamation need

The formula that determines how much funding goes to each of the various states has changed to generally direct future fees to states based on reclamation need.

Funding ramp-up period

States will receive partial amounts of the reclamation funding due to them during the next five years, allowing them time gear up to the higher grant levels. The money initially withheld will be paid in later years.

Payout to certified states

“Certified states”, those that have completed all Priority 1 & 2 projects, will receive the funds they’ve accumulated in the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund over the next ten years, but they will not receive any reclamation funds collected in the future. Wyoming is the prime example of a certified state. This was a compromise to help pass the law.

Water Quality

Allow 30% set-aside for acid mine drainage

The maximum percentage of a state’s annual grant that can be used to address acid mine drainage has increased from 10% to 30%. As before, a state choose a lesser percentage at its discretion.

Strike the “general welfare” provision from Priority 2

Funding is and has been generally reserved for Priority 1 & 2 projects (dealing with health & safety issues). Striking the “general welfare” provision from Priority 2 projects blocks the ability to fund most water-related projects using Priority 2 criteria. Acid mine drainage (AMD) is usually designated as Priority 3, which now can only be funded by the above set-aside program.

Other Provisions

Allow remining incentives

Federal incentives may be given to industry for remining abandoned mine sites that would not likely be reclaimed by industry without them.

Eliminate RAMP

The law formally eliminated the Rural Abandoned Mine Program (RAMP). Once an important reclamation program, RAMP has not received any appropriations in the past six years and was effectively defunct anyway.

Health insurance for retired coal miners

The law funds health insurance benefits for coal miners (and their families) whose companies have gone bankrupt and are no longer able to provide the benefits. Abandoned Mine Posts is a service of the

Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation

226 Donohoe Rd, Suite 110

Greensburg, PA 15601

phone/fax: (724) 832-3625

www.wpcamr.org

Comment on this article at http://amp.wpcamr.org or suggest future Abandoned Mine Posts topics at newsletter@wpcamr.org .

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