The coal industry has always been a big provider in Western Maryland. Right across the street from my apartment complex is a winding road up the mountain to several active blast sites. There are still old mine tunnels under the campus.
Acid mine drainage is a huge problem up here. Many of the streams are nearly decimated, so clogged with iron and sulfur that only the most hardy of algae can survive.
Last year, my ecology class surveyed about eight miles of George's Creek, from the Hoffman drainage tunnel (also called a blow, where water flows through excavated mine areas due to changes in pressure) to a sewage treatment plant.
The tunnel flows down an incline, coloring the stream bed bright orange from elevated levels of dissolved sulfates and iron compounds.
You can immediately see the vast differences in coloration between the two streams. Hoffman has almost 900% of the normal iron levels (3.2 mg/L v. 0.4 mg/L) for a healthy stream, and over 350% of the sulfates (400 mg/L v. 125 mg/L).
As a result of the pollution, Hoffman is more acidic and contains less dissolved oxygen, both important factors in supporting aquatic life.
In fact, the only organisms found in Hoffman were hardy algae (and probably bacteria); in Vale, we found indicators of a healthy stream under every rock (caddisfly, stonefly and mayfly larvae, black-nosed dace, etc.).
The Hoffman tunnel spills into the watershed, elevating levels of pollution not only at one point, but throughout the system.
The pollution at Hoffman was far worse in the 1930's, with the pH hovering around that of strong sulfuric acid. In the early 1900's, a company called Consolidated Coal built a shaft to drain the deep mines, pumping the excess into Georges Creek. In Maryland, unfortunately, AMD remediation wasn't directly funded by the government until 1992.
Coal is a strange subject up here. Every Appalachian resident's life has been touched by it in some way, especially here, so close to the Queen City, now mostly dead, no longer the gateway to the west. I know folks that have had fathers that mine coal, or sons that operate machinery. The older women a work tell stories about the Smoking Mountains around Lonaconing, coal seams that caught fire for one reason or another. The children would pretend that they lived underneath a live volcano or that a dragon smoldered deep in the heart of the mountain. There is a wistfulness in their voice when they talk about coal, and a general melancholy in the area about the subject, like something lost along the way. Something beautiful that will never return.
I hate coal. Most of the town is heated by it, including our apartment complex. In our first two years up here, the filter on the furnace was bad, and coal particles would lightly dust our furniture and stain the tops of my books. Frostburg stinks of sulfur throughout the winter.
So it's interesting to see the tangible effects of the substance and the decisions people made in using it set against a background of how much of a boon it was to people growing up in the early to mid 1900's.
Later this week maybe I'll get around to talking a bit about some of the more interesting AMD remediation techniques.
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