The Biden administration has committed to investing in the nation’s infrastructure, and that includes natural infrastructure like rivers and waterways.
The Biden administration has committed to investing in the nation’s infrastructure, and that includes natural infrastructure like rivers and waterways.
The Department of the Interior announced Thursday that 40 fish passage projects will receive a total of nearly $38 million this year including projects in the mountain state.
The bipartisan infrastructure law will invest $200 million in the National Fish Passage Program over the next five years to address outdated, unsafe or obsolete dams and other barriers fragmenting our nation’s rivers and streams.
As part of the announcement, federal officials visited the Albright Power Station Dam in Preston County to discuss the dam’s removal and the positive impact it will have on neighboring communities.
Removing the obsolete dam, built in 1952 on the Cheat River, will help increase public access and recreational opportunities and improve public safety.
Engineering is underway, and removal is planned for 2023.
The state will also benefit from a Potomac Headwaters Restoration project that will remove 17 fish passage barriers across West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia.
Thursday’s announcement comes on the heels of Monday’s launch of a separate $1 billion America the Beautiful Challenge that will accelerate locally led land, water and wildlife conservation efforts across the country.
In the predawn hours of November 4, 1985, a large band of rain began forming from North Carolina to West Virginia. The storm was stronger than most because it was picking up moisture from Tropical Storm Juan, which had hit the Southeast just days before.
During the morning of the fourth, the front moved northward and pulled in additional moisture from the Atlantic. As the downpour intensified, West Virginia’s rivers began to rise. The rain finally began to let up after midnight on the fifth. But, the damage was done. Four to eight inches of rain had inundated the northern and eastern parts of the state, producing deadly flooding.
The Cheat, Greenbrier, Tygart Valley, Little Kanawha, and West Fork rivers along with the North and South Branches of the Potomac River all crested well above flood stage. The flooding devastated the towns of Parsons, Rowlesburg, Philippi, Marlinton, Glenville, Petersburg, and Moorefield. Despite heroic rescue efforts by first responders, 47 West Virginians died in the 1985 flood, with Pendleton and Grant counties suffering the most deaths. Many of the towns had to rebuild nearly from scratch, and some have never fully recovered.
On a recent sunny Wednesday, Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of West Virginia University’s Water Research Institute, was standing on a bridge looking out at Big Sandy Creek. It was a balmy afternoon, perfect for kayaking, and the creek running the Cheat River was clear. But 25 years ago, this water was a shocking orange color — from acid mine drainage.
“Look at this,” Ziemkiewicz said, gesturing to the raging water below. “This is a fishery now, but it was completely dead back then.”
This year the last heavily-polluted stretch of of the watershed is set to be cleaned up.
“In my lifetime a river that was dead has now come back,” said Amanda Pitzer, executive director of Friends of the Cheat, a local conservation group that was formed by a motley crew of river guides and enthusiasts in 1994 to deal with acid mine pollution. The group also hosts the annual Cheat River Festival to celebrate the river and raise money to restore it.
Credit Jesse Wright / WVPB
/
WVPB
Children play with bubbles during the 2018 Cheat River Festival.
The Cheat was known to be polluted for decades, but the pollution grabbed national attention after two blowouts at the active T&T coal mine in 1994 and 1995 poured millions of gallons of acidic water into the main stem of the Cheat. Fish were killed 16 miles downstream in Cheat Lake.
More than two decades later, Friends of the Cheat, local residents and businesses and state and federal regulators have a reason to celebrate: Once fully operational, an active water treatment plant run by West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection near the T&T mine will clean polluted water currently running through Muddy Creek.
Once the 3.4-mile stretch of Muddy Creek is clean, fish will be able to travel the entire length of the Cheat River — one of the longest free-flowing rivers in the eastern United States — unimpeded by pollution.
“It was such an accomplishment to bring the Cheat back, but to bring Muddy Creek back — I mean we’re kicking ass and taking names,” Pitzer said.
A New Approach
This success is largely the result of a decision among regulators, scientists and a local conservation group to treat the pollution problem as an entire watershed.
Across the Cheat River’s 1,422-mile watershed, more than 340 abandoned coal mines feed pollution into the Cheat and its tributaries, like the Big Sandy. Acid mine drainage, or AMD, is one of the largest contributors of pollution to thousands of miles of rivers and streams from Alabama to Pennsylvania.
The bright orange, and sometimes milky white, pollution contains iron, aluminum and manganese. It forms when pyrite, a mineral buried deep underground with coal, is exposed to air and water.
State regulators have limited federal dollars to ensure water coming from these mines meets federal Clean Water Act standards. An estimated 300,000 abandoned mines dot Appalachia, complicating the problem. Water that comes from mines built before 1977, when the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act went into effect, must be treated by the state. The law mandated that mines built after 1977 must be bonded, or have insurance, in case they go out of business or the operator chooses to stop maintaining the site. If that happens, DEP takes the money from those bonds and must reclaim the land and treat the water from these so-called “bond-forfeiture” sites.
Ziemkiewicz, of WVU, said originally in the Cheat River watershed — as is the case in many places dealing with AMD across Appalachia — regulators tried to address the problem by treating each individual mine contributing pollution to the river. But it’s not always effective.
“You can throw almost infinite amounts of money trying to treat point sources like that in a watershed like this that has both abandoned mines and also bond forfeiture sites and not make any impact at all on the quality of the stream because the abandoned mines dominate the whole picture,” he said.
A key piece to making this new approach work was some innovative thinking on the part of state regulators. The state DEP created an alternative clean water permit, which allowed the agency to address streamwide water quality, rather than treat individual pollution sources.
“The watershed scale strategy that DEP is using here actually restores the creek and for a lot less money,” Ziemkiewicz said.
Scientists also needed to show federal regulators they could get results treating AMD pollution on a watershed level.
A Testbed in the Watershed
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
/
WVPB
Part of the passive treatment system at Sovern site No. 62.
Standing in a grassy clearing overlooking this forested valley, it’s just possible to see the entry to a now-abandoned coal mine here in the headwaters of Sovern Run, a tributary of Big Sandy Creek, which runs into the Cheat.
Ziemkiewicz and his team built what’s called a “passive treatment” system. At Sovern site No. 62, AMD pollution flows through a series of limestone-lined ponds and channels. The alkaline limestone turns low pH, acid water coming out of the mine into much cleaner water through naturally-occurring chemical reactions. Passive systems don’t require power or the addition of chemicals and are often lower maintenance.
“We were able to knock off something like 80 percent of the acid load, most of the iron,” Ziemkiewicz said, of the passive treatment system. “The idea was to put a lot of these all over the watershed.”
During the first Cheat Fest in 1995, Friends of the Cheat and Ziemkiewicz and his team took federal officials from the Interior Department and Office of Surface Mining the treatment system at Sovern site No. 62.
The strategy being employed in the Cheat River watershed could be valuable to other communities struggling with AMD pollution. To help widen the scope, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement created a federal plan inside its acid mine drainage program that allowed states to dole out federal Abandoned Mine Land dollars to local government agencies and watershed organizations, like Friends of the Cheat, to clean up streams impaired by acid mine drainage.
Friends of the Cheat took it and ran with it. They installed more than a dozen passive treatments. Today, they maintain those and a series of active treatments, or engineered systems. Active treatments include in-stream dosers, which deposit a steady stream of alkaline lime to help neutralize the water. Active treatments also include things such as water treatment plants.
Toddi Steelman, one of the founding members of Friends of the Cheat, studies watershed restoration She said the collaboration between Friends of the Cheat and regulators at both state and federal levels has been a 25-year experiment.
“Having the university close by and invested was a huge stroke of luck,” she said. “Having several sources of financial support in the 90s has really been essential.”
She also underscored the importance of having a local conservation group that is deeply invested in seeing the restoration of a river come to fruition.
“You need a local champion that is going to see it through because it’s really a labor of love,” she said. “It’s really about love the land, love of the river, love of community and I would say that’s really what has really characterized the group over time.”
This type of grassroots model can be a template for others, according to Scott Hardy, with the Ohio Sea Grant program at Ohio State University.
He studies collaborative watershed management and said the federal government moved toward providing resources for more grassroots, collaborative watershed restoration in the 1990s, with plenty of success stories.
Hardy said although collaboration can take longer than traditional top down restoration efforts, having local groups that are passionate about their watershed helps.
The Last Piece
It takes a lot of heart, but it also take a lot of money to clean a watershed.
Since 2000, the Environmental Protection Agency has contributed more than $5 million to the Cheat watershed. The state DEP has spent more than $13 million constructing and maintaining treatment systems across the area.
Now, one of the last treatments is almost in place. Once fully operational, a water treatment plant near the T&T mine will take care of the last major polluted stretch of the watershed.
You can see the T&T Treatment plant just off Route 26 near Albright. In some ways, it can best be described as a dishwasher for dirty mine water.
The plant will process AMD polluted water from three abandoned mine sites. Water pumped in from the polluted Fickey Run, will also be piped to the plant, said Larry Riggleman, the regional engineer for northern region of DEP’s Office of Special Reclamation.
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
/
WVPB
The T&T treatment facility located near Albright, WV.
Riggleman helped design the plant. It can treat between 800 to 4,200 gallons of polluted water each minute. A lime slurry is added to the two 80-foot tanks, or clarifiers, as they’re called. When the lime is added the iron and aluminum to drop to the bottom. The metal sludge is pushed to the middle, drains out, and is pumped back into the T&T mine nearby.
“And then from here it’s a straight discharge to the river,” Riggleman said.
If another mine blowout were to happen similar to the events in 1994 and 1995, the plant can handle up to 7,600 gallons per minute, which will flow through the two tanks and come out the other side clean.
The site cost about $8.5 million to construct and $30,000 a month to run, funded in part by the bond forfeited by the T&T mine. DEP also received support from oil and gas company, Southwestern Energy. The company has a policy to offset its water use by contributing in other water restoration efforts.
“Within West Virginia we were looking for meaningful projects that were out there that we could be a contributor towards and the Cheat River is a beautiful river and one that stood out to us as a place that we could make a positive impact,” said Rowlan Greaves, manager of strategic solutions for Southwestern Energy.
Riggleman has been working in this watershed for years and he said once the plant is fully operational, Muddy Creek, which has been the single largest contributor of acid mine drainage for years, will be clean. He said it’s hard to quantify what that will mean.
“I mean, to be able to bring a stream back to life — which I can’t tell you when the last time it was it had a life — but from an environmental standpoint on the Cheat it’s huge,” he said. “I think from a recreational standpoint with people wanting to fish, kayak, things of that nature, I think that’s huge. I think it’s very important that this gets done and I think it’ll be very successful.”
Paul Hart, president of local rafting company, Cheat River Outfitters, agrees that the work done over the last two decades has made a difference in the water quality of the river. Today, he said, guides will often catch fish in the clear, clean water.
“A lot of people have seen it and decided ‘you know we can do better,'” he said. “And they’ve put their heads together and made it happen, which is a dream turned into a reality. The Cheat is just too much of a gem to be lost to something like acid mine drainage, it really is.”
But Hart added the river was already losing appeal as a rafting destination before the big mine blowouts in the 90s, and it has yet to recover. Pitzer, with Friends of the Cheat, said they recognize overcoming a polluted reputation takes time.
Credit Jesse Wright / WVPB
/
WVPB
The Western Avenue String Band plays during the 2018 Cheat River Festival.
“Just like anything it takes time to change people’s perception of what a river is,” she said. “If you came here in the 80’s and you paddled the river and you remember it being orange and awful and then someone tells you ‘oh my gosh, I went and I caught walleye down in Jenkinsburg,’ they might be like ‘oh, get out of here’ you know. So, I think it just takes time.”
The groups plans to continue working to restore the river in the hopes that one day the Cheat has a different reputation: One of a clean, beautiful river.
The Cheat River flows pale green and slate gray, glistening in the sunshine as it gathers speed, turns to whitewater and drops between rocks on the way toward the Monongahela River. From there it makes its way to the Ohio River and the drinking water of millions of people.
As West Virginia pushes toward an uncertain economic future, a river that once flowed bright orange charts a course out of mining’s toxic legacies.
The state recently joined conservationists to protect the Cheat’s eight-mile whitewater canyon, collectively buying 3,800 acres from timber investors for $7 million. A new $8 million water treatment plant next year should help alleviate ongoing acid drainage from an abandoned underground coal mine that blew out in 1994, spewing acid and metals.
“In the East, it’s a rare opportunity where you get to protect eight river miles along an area that not only has tremendous biodiversity but also has a lot of recreational opportunities available,” said the Nature Conservancy’s Keith Fisher, a biologist.
Even with President-elect Donald Trump promising a coal industry comeback, most West Virginians have adapted to a world in which other economic engines are needed to revive one of the nation’s poorest states. The two-decade effort to reclaim the Cheat River and its tributaries fits into a broader push to grow tourism in West Virginia, where visitors already spend about $4.5 billion annually.
“Our tourism possibilities in this state are limitless,” Governor-elect Jim Justice said during the campaign. An outdoorsman and mine owner, he told The Associated Press after winning that he wants to protect the state’s air, water and natural beauty, saying it can co-exist with coal.
The Cheat also has a more tangible connection to West Virginia’s coal legacy. Like many waterways in coal-producing states, it remains threatened by mine drainage that turns water acidic.
The state Department of Environmental Protection calls the acidification of waterways coal’s “biggest environmental problem,” affecting hundreds of miles of West Virginia rivers and streams, usually from abandoned mines where those who caused it are long gone. The agency says the Monongahela, Tug Fork, North Branch of the Potomac and several other rivers have all been affected.
The Cheat is clear to the bottom and shallow in November, unlike the spring surge that rises above boulders and draws peak-season rafters and kayakers down the canyon. Its steep walls are lined with hardwoods, oaks, hickories and maples still dropping amber leaves. The water remains high enough to carry small boats.
Part of the 330-mile Allegheny Trail runs parallel for eight miles, high on the river’s east rim. The narrow, grassy former logging tract was once designated for a rail line. Now it’s reopened to hikers, fishermen and hunters and closed to all-terrain vehicles. Commercial rafters never stopped using their rights to a navigable waterway, though they lost business after the blowout.
“Cheat River is so much better than it used to be,” said Doug Wood, a retired state biologist. “As a drinking water source it’s much better than it was before.”
Downstream drinking water systems all have to treat their intake from the rivers for bacteria and other contaminants, some more extensively.
Its acidity was toxic to virtually all aquatic life after the 1994 mine blowout released massive drainage outflows into a tributary, Muddy Creek.
“The Cheat was already a pretty severely polluted river,” said Randy Robinson, then a rafting guide who was on it shortly after the blowout and remembers the nasty, sulfurous smell. “It was like orange paint had been dumped in the river in a way.”
The orange coating on the rocks from iron hydroxide, which persisted for years, has disappeared. The acid levels have been sharply reduced through dozens of water-treatment projects, proven by both testing and the abundance of freshwater fish in Cheat Lake, a downstream river impoundment that has attracted an enclave of upscale homes and townhouses outside Morgantown.
According to Wood, acid drainage is a fairly predictable matter of coal geology, where the nearby rock also contains iron disulfide. With mining, it will produce iron hydroxide and sulfuric acid when combined with oxygen and water that eventually finds a path down and out.
“The problems with the Cheat should have educated our permitting agencies, a long time ago, to prevent them from issuing permits that are going to result in perpetual acid mine drainage,” Wood said. He said that hasn’t happened. Restoring an affected waterway afterward requires costly, active treatment, he said.
The state permitting agency said it does consider geology among many factors. Permits aren’t approved unless an operation is deemed to meet all federal and state legal requirements, spokeswoman Kelley Gillenwater said.
Amanda Pitzer, executive director of Friends of the Cheat, volunteers who monitor and work on its restoration, said the pH level, which is neutral at 7, dropped to toxic 3 and 4 after the blowout.
The Muddy Creek tributary looks milky green now, still showing effects of drainage that also includes aluminum. The creek, though improved, still has no fish.
David McCoy, a state engineer, said 3.4 miles of Muddy Creek still usually test acidic, and the Cheat itself now tests neutral. The new filtration system will use two 80-foot clarifiers, a 100-ton silo and hydrated lime to counter the acidity and capture the sludge of metals that settle out. That sludge will be piped to an injection well underground at a higher elevation.
The Nature Conservancy emphasizes a “pragmatic” approach, working with businesses to promote best practices for limiting environmental impact. The economics of the transition from West Virginia’s post-mining economy can’t be ignored, said Fisher, the state chapter’s director of conservation, and should include recreation and land and water restoration.
All of that brings him back to the big question he and others are trying to answer. Standing on the trail, high above the softly rumbling river, he said it’s about the transition from a coal-dependent economy to something else: “How do you make conservation and economic diversity work together?”
State regulators say a discharge of water from an old mine is the likely cause of orange rocks in the Cheat River.
Boaters reported seeing orange rocks at the mouth of Muddy Creek. The DEP says it believes something happened inside the old mine near Valley Point that created a temporary blockage, such as a roof collapse.
The DEP says in a news release that iron-laden water built up inside the mine and then began discharging into the creek in March. An acid mine treatment system along the creek was overwhelmed by the discharge for three days. Water flows returned to normal in five to six days.
The DEP says engineers and geologists are developing a plan to prevent future incidents.
The federal government has awarded a $24,000 grant to improve access to the Cheat River in Preston County.
Friends of the Cheat executive director Amanda Pitzer tells The Dominion Post that the funding will be used to design and build a river access at a railroad trestle in Rowlesburg.
Pitzer says the project is expected to be completed in about two years.
The river access will be part of the 40-mile Upper Cheat Water Trail. The trail runs between Rowlesburg and Hendricks in Tucker County.
The grant from the Federal Highway Administration was awarded through the state Division of Highways’ Transportation Alternatives Recreation Trail program.
