Coal-Country Trout

On the morning of February 16, 2004 I stood beside a misty pool, first of three that feed an icy rill collected by the Cheat River in northern West Virginia. A song sparrow trilled; corn snow crunched beneath my boots; a breeze rolled off a frozen peak; and the mist enveloped me, burning my eyes and sinuses and causing me to leap backwards. I had just inhaled anhydrous ammonia.

The chemical is being injected by the state Department of Environmental Protection into the acidified orange outflow from the old T&T mine. Color and acidity come not from coal but the pyrite associated with it. When pyrite is exposed to water and air it forms sulfuric acid and iron hydroxide. The pH of water entering this treatment facility is 2.5; leaving it's 8.5. As alkalinity increases, the iron hydroxide and other toxic metals in acid mine drainage, many of which magnify in food chains, settle out as sludge or "yellow boy." Here the yellow boy is collected from the settling ponds and pumped 2.5 miles back up the mountain where it's dropped into an old mine shaft.

The system can handle 600 gallons of acid drainage a minute; but the outfall from the mine portal can exceed 2000 gallons a minute. So it frequently runs directly into Muddy Creek, and thence into the Cheat where, as it's diluted and partially neutralized, it dumps its yellow boy, smothering benthic life. Only three miles upcurrent from the mine Muddy Creek sustains wild brook trout. In the Cheat, watershed mine drainage has impaired 100 miles of habitat on 53 streams; 73 of these miles once supported wild brook trout and, with the proper investment, could do so again. All told, acid mine drainage has destroyed or severely damaged about 12,000 miles of fish habitat in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Maryland, Indiana, Illinois, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.

The former owner of the T&T mine, Paul Thomas, had been required by the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act to post a bond that supposedly would allow the state to clean up any pollution or repair any wound he might create. But, like all coal bonds, this one had been ridiculously low, and now the state is stuck with the enormous expense of perpetual ammonia treatment. Until very recently, it was standard practice for an operator to go out of business and walk away from one mess, then start a new company and make a new mess. On the Cheat watershed alone there are 74 other forfeited sites, all belching acid. "The bonding system made a lot of bad people out of good people," said Trout Unlimited activist Bill Thorne, with me on that morning.

Not that Thomas was all that "good." In an effort to avoid treatment costs, he sealed up his mine, secretly cut a hole into an adjoining one, and began pumping in his effluent. But he'd miscalculated; the hole was too small, and pressure built up. On April 8, 1994 the wastewater blew a hole in the mountain and poured into the Cheat, staining it orange for miles, killing fish and other aquatic life, poisoning riparian habitat, burning the eyes and skin of rafters and boaters and devastating the local economy, which hasn't fully recovered to this day.

Randy Robinson, a filmmaker who happened by just after the spill had started, recorded the disaster. His footage, aired by local and national TV stations, galvanized the public and helped convict Thomas for violating the Clean Water Act. Robinson, Thorne and others then helped build a support group called Friends of the Cheat.

In addition to fish, wildlife, rivers, mountains and forests, waste products of the coal industry include people. Also accompanying me was Friends' director, Keith Pitzer. "We looked at the lowest income census block groups in Preston County," he said. "And the first thing I noticed was that a lot were heavily mined. I contacted the public service district to see where their water lines were or were planned, and there was a distinct overlap because mined areas need public water. If you drill a well, you get orange, metal-contaminated acid. These are very low-value homes, not likely to be upgraded or sold."

Three weeks earlier Dr. Ben Stout of Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia, one of the nation's leading researchers of acid mine drainage and its costs, had told me this: "I really think in 20 years eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia are going to be humanly uninhabitable. That's even without considering the ecosystem component. Humans are not going to be able to live in this region where there's no potable water. Kids come into this school thinking you can treat any kind of water and make it drinkable. 'Who taught you that?' I ask them. You can't get manganese out of water without just torturing it. You've got to take it way up in pH, treat the hell out of it, take it way back down in pH, settle it out, and by the time you've done all that you've introduced so many other things that you can't drink it."

Stout pays special attention to aquatic insects because they're indicators of ecosystem health; and in coal country he's chronicled a 50-percent reduction in both numbers and species. Many of his check stations are on headwater streams, which lawmakers assume don't count and therefore can legally be buried and/or polluted by the coal industry. But he has found that these streams are the "linkages" by which leaves and twigs are converted by insects to fats and proteins, very rare commodities in forests. These insects take to the air and float downstream, sustaining fish, salamanders, frogs, turtles, birds and mammals, jumpstarting energy flow in the whole forest ecosystem. Now the Bush administration is attempting to do away with the regulation that prevents mining activity within 100 feet of perennial streams. Stout calls the proposed rule "just outrageous . . . pulling the rug out from under the Clean Water Act."

Upstream from Muddy Creek Thorne and Pitzer showed me four lifeless streams running orange over slimy carpets of yellow boy-Lick Run, Pringle Run, Heather Run, and Morgan Run. They used to ripple with wild brook trout. Now they're known as the Four Dirty Sisters. In the last decade the big change hasn't come in their water quality but in how that water quality is perceived by the public. These days it's no longer "okay" that they're the Four Dirty Sisters. Here and in other acidified watersheds around the state groups like Friends of the Cheat, Trout Unlimited, West Virginia Rivers Coalition, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, the Citizens Coal Council, Friends of Blackwater (who look after one of the Cheat's two biggest tributaries), and at least 25 local watershed groups have a firm grasp on the lapels of elected officials and are shouting into their faces.