No longer dead in the water
Posted on Friday, 28 July 2006 (12:03:00) EDT by admin
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Source: Ad Crable - Lancaster New Era
Published: Jul 26, 2006 12:22 PM EST
LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - Maryruth Wagner, manager of the Columbia County Conservation District, was sitting in her office nine years ago when a 70-something-year-old man shuffled in.
Paul Slusser said he’d fished Catawissa Creek all his life but had never caught a single fish. He sure would like to.
Now, if you weren’t from the area and stumbled across the Catawissa anywhere along its 42-mile journey from its mountainous headwaters in Luzerne County to its mouth on the Susquehanna in Columbia County, you’d die for a fly rod.
The “Cat,” as it’s called, is up to 50 feet wide and clear as gin. It tumbles swiftly over rocks and through arching hemlocks and bowed rhododendrons. A pristine trout stream if there ever was one.
Except that since the 1930s, when the coal mines that burrowed deep under its course closed, the Catawissa has been barren of fish and all but a few of the most acid-tolerant aquatic insects.
In a few places the stream disappears briefly down mine shafts.
“The Catawissa is probably the most beautiful screwed-up stream east of the Mississippi,” says Ed Wytovich, president of the grass-roots Catawissa Creek Restoration Association.
Acid mine drainage from a handful of abandoned coal mines had given the Catawissa a pH as low as 3.2 — about the acidity of stomach acid or wine.
“It looks like a clear, beautiful mountain stream. But it’s dead — nothing,” says Lonnie Young, director of natural sciences for Rettew Associates, a Lancaster-based consulting firm.
The stream is just one of 2,500 miles of waterways in 45 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties tainted by acid mine drainage.
The state Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation handles about 800 requests a year for help with mine-polluted streams.
The Catawissa doesn’t have the iron-rich “yellowboy” discoloring of many acid mine drainage-contaminated streams, which makes it all the more pitiful to learn that the clear water is deadly.
Slusser touched something in Wagner that day in 1997. She called up the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, state Department of Environmental Protection, county commissioners, conservation districts, federal conservation agencies and Wytovich, a schoolteacher from Ashland with a bent for environmental issues.
Somehow she got them all together one night in the Ringtown Fire Hall. Some 150 local residents turned out, many of whom lived along the Catawissa.
The willingness and earnestness charged those who were there. One thing led to another and before long the Catawissa Creek Restoration Association had formed.
The group’s first effort to reverse things came in 1999 when a dump truck load of limestone was deposited on the Brandonville Bridge and everyone shoveled scoops into the water below.
“It was a Band-Aid approach but you could see it dissipated into the water,” recalls Wagner. “We monitored it and the pH came up a little bit close to that area.”
Things picked up steam, and before you knew it, it was June 17, 2006, and the dedication of the Audenreid Tunnel Acid Mine Drainage Treatment System.
The $2.2 million facility, mostly maintenance-free, is the largest passive acid mine drainage facility ever built in Pennsylvania, and possibly the world.
The project’s engineering, permitting and final design were done by Rettew at its Columbia Avenue headquarters.
Alongside the Catawissa and wedged between mountains in northern Schuylkill County, the nine-acre complex was built 6 miles below the stream’s headwaters.
In a move that typifies the cooperation the project has generated from the beginning, land and access were donated by a local rod and gun club and a private all-terrain vehicle park.
The filtering system, which handles about 13 million gallons of creek water per day, works this way:
First, acid mine drainage from three long-abandoned deep coal mines is intercepted and diverted into three partially buried concrete storage tanks of the kind used on Lancaster County dairy farms to hold manure. Each is 120 feet in diameter, 10 feet deep and holds up to 1 million gallons.
About half the space inside the open-air tanks is made up of egg-sized limestone rocks. The limestone oxidizes the aluminum in the water, and the toxic heavy metal separates, settling into the rocks.
From there, the treated and cleansed water flows over rocky spillways — more aluminum oxides are separated out — into a series of two earthen settling ponds. Any aluminum still waterborne settles out here, and the recharged water flows into the Catawissa.
It’s like giving the Catawissa a strong antacid tablet.
The water in the settling ponds is a most alluring blue. Think Caribbean. It’s caused by the sky reflected in the shiny aluminum.
“It looks like you were at the beach,” says Wagner. “We joked about putting sand and umbrellas around the blue ponds.”
The system went on line in December. Unfortunately, the facility took a hit during the severe flooding several weeks ago. The side of the mountain where the mine water is discharged was blown out and the treatment system was flooded with 10 times its capacity.
But officials are hopeful they can have the system up and running again in a matter of weeks.
The treatment system takes care of about 80 percent of the acid mine drainage emptying into the Catawissa. Another upstream mine is already being treated, and plans are to cleanse several others.
Says Wagner, “I’ve lived here my whole life, and it just makes you feel so good that finally something can be done. We take pride in our waters.”
***
Those who love the Catawissa and public officials in the region are already dreaming of what might be.
Before it was knocked out by flooding, the treatment had raised the pH of the Catawissa to a more fish-tolerable 5.5 or 6. There are 16 streams that empty into the Catawissa that hold native brook trout ready to move into new territory.
When Wytovich gives presentations, his display board on the Catawissa has this motto: “Soon to be a world-class trout stream.”
Indeed, though Paul Slusser did not live to see it, at the dedication an elderly couple told the gathering they had gone out on opening day of trout season and caught four native brook trout.
They were the first fish the pair had ever seen in the stream.
They said the fish were good eating, too.
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