The Effects of Coal- Years After It is Mined-Acid Mine Drainage

After seeing the pictures Denny posted on his Stop Mountaintop Removal blog about acid mine drainage, I decided to take some similar pictures from my area. The effects from mining coal last for decades and possibly 100 or more years. These pictures are of runoff from the Sagamore Mines in Armstrong County, PA. These basins are on slightly different elevations, with the water flowing through 1 then dropping down into the next. I guess this gives the compounds that are suspended in the water time to settle and end up in the soil. They recently dredged these to remove the contaminated soil, but I wonder how red it was before dredging and how often they clean it out.

Below is a pile of soil contaminated by the sulfuric runoff from the abandoned mines.

Below is an image from Microsoft Virtual Earth. I have marked the area in red where the above images were taken. You can clearly see the polluted water still entering the lake in this image. Make sure you click on the image to make it bigger.

I guess this is an effort to keep our waterways safe, but the disturbing reality of this area is that it is located at the head of a very beautiful lake less than a mile away from where I live. The lake itself was built to keep a supply of water for steam and the cooling towers at The Keystone Power Plant a few miles away, which is one of the “dirtiest” power plants in the nation, releasing more mercury than any other power plant.

Pennsylvania has quite a few problems related to coal mining. According to ActionPA.org Pennsylvania’s Dirty Energy Legacy…:

Abandoned Mines and Subsidence
• Pennsylvania has one-third of all the abandoned mine-related problems in the country, more than any other state in the nation. Pennsylvania is home to over 250,000 acres of abandoned surface mines. Abandoned mines, coal refuse banks, old mine shafts and other relics of past mining exist in 45 of our 67 counties.
• Approximately 200,000 acres of land throughout Pennsylvania are prone to subsidence, a type of shifting in the ground caused when mines collapse, that can crack homes’ foundations, redirect streams, damage roads and more.
  Pennsylvania is home to 90% of the country’s mine-related hazardous and explosive gas problems and half of its hazardous water bodies.

Acid Mine Drainage

• The single biggest water pollution problem facing Pennsylvania is polluted water draining from abandoned coal mining operations. Over half of the streams that don’t meet water quality standards — more than 2,400 miles of the state’s 54,000 miles of streams — don’t meet standards because of mine drainage.
• Pennsylvania is the worst state in the U.S. for acid mine drainage.

While here in Pennsylvania, we don’t have to worry about Big Coal ripping the tops of our mountains off and pushing them into valley’s(although strip mining sometimes comes very close), we do have some of the most serious environmental issues in the nation related to coal.

You can read more about acid mine drainage on Wikipedia’s acid mine drainage page.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.