Mine Drainage Treatment Brings Life, Opportunity Back To Deckers Creek

Mining is a key part of West Virginia’s past. But pollution from abandoned mine drainage is one of the unfortunate legacies of the state’s energy history. Now, one waterway in Monongalia County is on a path to recovery with new opportunities on the horizon.

Running more than 20 miles across Preston County and into Monongalia County, Decker’s Creek discharges into the Monongahela River in the heart of Morgantown. Back in May, Brian Hurley walked West Virginia Public Broadcasting through a water treatment location near Kingwood. He is the director of Friends of Deckers Creek (FODC), a nonprofit aimed at improving the quality of Deckers Creek as well as promoting recreation.

“We’ve got a [mine] portal, a collapsed portal right up there. It’s pretty overgrown,” Hurley said. “Now this is another former collapsed portal, you can kind of see where all the muck is coming out.” 

Three long-abandoned mine portals at the site are almost completely obscured by vegetation, except for one, which oozes the unmistakable orange sludge of mine drainage. But just feet from the old portal, the ooze passes under a large green tower on the edge of a pond. 

Lime from the green tower is added to the water to normalize its pH before it enters King Creek, a tributary of Deckers Creek. Hurley said normal water pH is neutral, around 7, but some sites he has worked at have registered below a 3 on the scale, closer to vinegar or lemon juice and not habitable for most aquatic species. 

“On the other side there’s actually a pipe that puts water into this tipping bucket,” Hurley said. “When it loads up, the weight of the water and lime tips itself back and forth and that sort of gives you your dose of lime.”

After getting dosed with lime, the water from the abandoned mine portal is diverted again.

“So this is our holding pond, and the standard tends to be about a 24-hour hold time,” Hurley said. “That should give time for all the metals to settle out. And you can see the orange color, and you can see all the sludge in there. That’s how you know it’s actually working.” 

Hurley’s organization has led acid mine drainage mitigation on Decker’s Creek for almost 25 years. FODC maintains eight small and mid-scale treatment locations like the King’s Creek station that have slowly helped to improve the quality of the creek’s water. 

“The state of Deckers Creek back in the day, numerous people have used the term ‘cesspool,’” Hurley said. “It was just in horrible, horrible shape. It was bright orange and bright red, that was from the acid mine drainage.”

Recently, the addition of the large-scale Richard Mine acid mine drainage treatment plant about a mile upstream from Morgantown has been the final piece of the puzzle to complete the cleanup of Deckers Creek. Since its activation in April, the Richard Mine site has led to reports of indicator species returning to the waterway.

“We have multiple age classes of trout, brown trout in Deckers Creek,” Hurley said. “That is real, we get pictures of them and it’s super, super exciting.”

The Richard Mine plant is part of a more than $140 million investment to address pollution from abandoned mine lands in West Virginia from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The treatment plant works on the same principles as the FODC sites but several orders of magnitude larger, and will stop thousands of pounds of acidity and metals from entering the waterway. 

Standing on the banks of Deckers Creek across from the new treatment center, Hurley pointed out the streaks of heavy metals still visible on the stream from almost a century of previously unchecked abandoned mine drainage.

“As you look downstream on river right, the rocks on the right side, you can kind of see the remnants of the aluminum on all those rocks,” Hurley said. “You can kind of look at the distinction between river right and river left. See how orange those rocks are and how white those rocks are here? That is just a clear line, delineation of where the former Richard Mine drainage is coming in. It’s less showy now than it was, but before they built this it was just painfully bright streaking of aluminum and iron there.”

West Virginia University and other regional partners are exploring the possibility of extracting those metals, and other rare earth metals, from sites like the Richard mine for industrial use.

But for locals like Louis Giuliani, the creek’s cleanup presents another opportunity. 

“Part of the idea, when we started talking about Deckers Creek as a potential asset, the notional idea said, ‘Well, okay, we understand that the Richard mine treatment center is going to be up and running here in the next year or two. Let’s take advantage of that,’” he said.

Giuliani is the owner of music venue 123 Pleasant Street, and one of downtown Morgantown’s community leaders exploring the new possibilities of recreation in Deckers Creek. Through the organization Main Street Morgantown, Giuliani and others have commissioned a feasibility study to create interactive water features.

“We started querying about potential water dynamics, whether it be white water, whether it be a floating River, just some things that would be an attraction,” he said. 

The water feature on Deckers Creek above downtown would form part of a linear park, connecting amenities and attractions along the existing Deckers Creek Trail.

“Now you’re looking at Morgantown as being something beyond just this college town. Now it becomes a point of interest,” Guiliani said. “You’re leaning into the things that are already proven concepts, whether it be a Boulder, Colorado or a Greenville, South Carolina, or, on larger dynamics, San Antonio. These water features, when you refine them and take care of them, prove to be catalysts for transforming communities.”

That vision is still years away from being realized, but due to Deckers’ pollution it was inconceivable to invite residents and visitors to interact with its waters just a few years ago.

With thousands of miles of waterways across West Virginia still struggling with pollution from mine drainage, Deckers Creek is showing that cleanup can happen, and bring new opportunities on the other side.