VISION 2021 Acid mine drainage treatment systems making progress; Vintondale-area facility could break ground this year, DEP says

Feb. 27—EBENSBURG — Construction of an acid mine drainage treatment plant designed to clean up 25 miles of long-polluted Blacklick Creek could begin before the end of the year, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said.

The plant is to be built in Buffington Township, Indiana County, just outside Vintondale — where it will collect and treat acid mine drainage (AMD) from three major sources in the Blacklick Creek watershed before discharging the water back into the creek. The hope is that the project can turn a 22-mile stretch of Blacklick Creek into a viable fishing stream.

Lauren Fraley, community relations coordinator for DEP's Southwest Regional Office, said permitting and final design for the project are ongoing. DEP anticipates advertising to receive construction bids at some point this year. Construction could begin as early as this fall, although Fraley noted that the timeline could change.

One of the pollution sources to be treated at the Blacklick Creek plant, the Vinton No. 6 borehole group, is drilled through the bed of the North Branch. The boreholes are visible as three small fountains of water located just upstream of the bridge that carries Main Street over the creek in Vintondale. They put an average of 1,000 gallons of acid mine drainage per minute into the creek, according to DEP documents.

The other two sources to be addressed by the Blacklick Creek plant have an average flow of 700 gallons per minute each.

Several other active treatment plants have been online for years in the region, including the Lancashire No. 15 plant in Barr Township, which has helped make the West Branch of the Susquehanna River between Northern Cambria and Cherry Tree a viable trout fishery and a popular destination for anglers.

Active treatment plants

Len Lichvar, manager of the Somerset Conservation District, has high hopes for a planned active treatment plant that is to be built near Portage, in the Little Conemaugh River watershed.

Fraley said that DEP is preparing to start the design phase of that project "soon." The design process is likely to take up to two years, she added, so construction of the plant could start in 2023.

The plant would collect and treat drainage from three major sources of AMD in the Portage area, including the notorious Hughes Borehole near the intersection of Route 53 and Sportsman Road. Drilled in the 1920s to remove water from the area's network of coal mines, the borehole puts about 1,000 gallons of polluted water into the nearby Little Conemaugh River each minute. The looks of the land around it, stained orange and full of dead trees, have been compared to those of the Yellowstone National Park mud pots.

DEP anticipates that the completion of that plant would allow the restoration of a 20-mile section of the Little Conemaugh River, roughly from Portage to Johnstown.

"That active treatment system would be the salvation, primarily, of the Little Conemaugh River system, something that we've been trying to identify and target for 30 years," Lichvar said. "The opportunity for a resuscitation of the Little Conemaugh River, just like we've done over the past 20 years, gradually, with passive treatment in the Stonycreek, could come to fruition. That would be the other half of the equation."

Another potential treatment plant touted by Lichvar is a longer-term project; no potential construction dates have been announced. That plant would, if built, treat water from four major AMD discharges polluting the Shade Creek watershed in Somerset County — "the big four," in Lichvar's words — which, according to DEP documents, have a combined average output of 2,300 gallons per minute.

"Right now," Lichvar said, "we have decent water quality in the Stonycreek down to the mouth of Shade Creek. From there, it becomes impaired again. ... When Shade Creek enters the Stonycreek near Foustwell, it ravages the Stonycreek. It creates a dead zone on the Stonycreek downstream from there for quite a ways.

"This active treatment system is the only thing that will move the needle in the Shade Creek watershed and the Stonycreek River watershed to the next level of water quality improvement."

Passive treatment fixes

In contrast to the above-mentioned active treatment systems — large plants that collect, treat and release huge amounts of water from AMD sources with high-flow volumes — passive treatment systems are appropriate for treating smaller volumes of water.

They work like this: Acidic water is directed into and enters a basin where some suspended metals can settle out. The water then flows through a series of ponds and basins filled with limestone, which neutralizes some of the acidity, before reentering the main river channel.

When the limestone becomes so coated with metals that it can no longer neutralize any acid, the system starts to fail. Rehabilitating the system involves agitating the limestone to remove the metal coating and adding new limestone to replace what has dissolved.

One key Somerset County passive treatment system, consisting of five separate sites built in the 1990s along Oven Run in the Stonycreek River watershed, played a major role in the improvement of that river's water quality, which helped earn it honors from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources as Pennsylvania's 2012 River of the Year. The Oven Run sites had recently begun to fail.

Lichvar said his group has rehabilitated two of the Oven Run sites in the past two years. Test results indicate that the repairs were "extremely successful and effective," he said, with the sites removing more contamination and treating more water than they had in the past.

"That will begin to bump up the water quality of the Stonycreek," Lichvar said of the project, "rather than merely sustain it where it's been for the last

20 years."

To the north, Fraley said, a similar rehab project was completed in 2020 at the Puritan passive treatment system near Portage in order to improve water quality in Trout Run.

A 'fragile safeguard'

Reconstruction of three other Oven Run sites, two of which are maintained by the Somerset Conservation District and one of which is managed by DEP, could be done by the end of 2021, Lichvar said. Fraley confirmed that upgrades at Oven Run are on DEP's slate for 2021.

"That's pretty big news, if indeed that occurs," Lichvar said. "That's positive news for the future of the Stonycreek River if those systems are reconstructed to the point of functionality that will continue on into the future. That's all great news for the natural resources of the Stonycreek River, great news for ecotourism activities, great news for the ongoing Vision 2025 efforts and great news for the economy of the Cambria-Somerset region."

There are dozens of passive treatment systems in the region, including 23 in Somerset County alone, maintained by the Somerset Conservation District and a handful of volunteer watershed groups. A shortage of money and manpower makes keeping the systems functioning a constant struggle — and Lichvar emphasized that the region's improving water quality is always at a tipping point and could become degraded without enough functioning treatment systems.

"It's been a very daunting struggle for me and my staff to secure funds to rehab these systems," Lichvar said, "because we didn't have any money to match any grants or anything along those lines. Just like anything else, you need to have money to get money, and for the last 20, 25 years, no money was ever set aside. ... I put this trust fund in place so whoever follows me in the future will have an easier time of maintaining and reconstructing systems than I have had."

Mitigation of that chronic funding shortage was the reason why the Somerset Conservation District and the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies partnered to launch a trust fund in October to help pay for future upkeep of the Oven Run sites. Information on that fund, which is accepting donations from the public, can be found online at cfalleghenies.org/oven-run.

"The shortcoming (of passive treatment systems) is that they only treat the AMD — not eliminate it," the fund's description states. "The same thousands of gallons a minute of AMD that has flowed from the abandoned mine sources for over 100 years still flow today. When the systems begin to fail as they age, the only fragile safeguard that prevents the destructive forces of the AMD from once again inundating the Stonycreek is compromised."

The Somerset County commissioners voted in October to donate $25,000 to the fund. President Commissioner Gerald Walker called it "an easy decision" because the county's treatment systems "are going to have to be cared for in perpetuity."

Local, state and federal officials, including then-Deputy Secretary of the Interior Kate McGregor, gathered in October in South Fork to celebrate the removal of a coal waste pile that had loomed over the town. About 216,000 cubic yards of material was removed by Robindale Energy Services Inc. from the Stineman coal waste pile site and processed for electricity at area cogeneration power plants.

Todd Coleman, president of Altoona-based Minetech Engineers Inc., which designed the $2.1 million reclamation project, said at the ribbon-cutting that he hoped it would "help update the perception of the mining industry to one of reclamation and restoration, rather than spoiling the land and polluting streams."

A new segment of the Path of the Flood Trail has been built through the former Stineman pile site, bringing that trail closer to connecting the ruins of South Fork Dam to downtown Johnstown.

Elsewhere in the region, an 11-acre coal waste pile along the Ghost Town Trail near Vintondale is slated for removal this year. Fraley said DEP is reviewing bids for removal and reclamation of that pile and expects to award the contract for the project "in the near future."

Also, the removal of towering coal waste piles from a 70-acre tract near the Path of the Flood Trail in Ehrenfeld received top honors in 2020 from federal mine land reclamation officials, it was announced in August. The project was one of five honored in the 2020 Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Awards by the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Eric Cavazza, director of DEP's Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation, told The Tribune-Democrat at the time that the project's outcomes included "addressing environmental concerns for nearby residents, improving water quality in the Little Conemaugh watershed, repopulating endangered American chestnut trees and creating recreational opportunities that will enhance the regional economy."