Coal-Country Trout

Five years ago TU launched an initiative to restore the lower section of Kettle Creek-a major West Branch tributary which, in its upper reaches, is one of the most productive trout streams in the East and, along with its tributaries, offers about 70 miles of Class A wild-trout water. The last 6.5 miles of the mainstem, however, is severely acidified, and two miles before it merges with the Susquehanna's West Branch, and after it picks up Twomile Run, it's lifeless.

TU wrote a science-based restoration plan for the lower watershed. And, with the Kettle Creek Watershed Association, it helped the state DEP plan a large passive treatment facility, now complete, on a tributary of Twomile Run. On that same tributary TU is in the process of reclaiming a 57-acre strip mine, regrading, planting vegetation (of the sort favored by the local elk population), and thereby preventing a good deal of precipitation from reaching acid-forming pyrite. On another Twomile-Run tributary it will have started work on four passive-treatment sites by the time you read this. Total cost for restoring the lower section of Kettle Creek: $10 million.

In the long run, eliminating instead of treating acid mine drainage is probably cheaper and definitely more effective. You do it by reclaiming (as defined by biologists not industry) strip mines and mountaintop-removal sites. And you do it by filling up or sealing off deep mines so that water and air can't mix with pyrite. This takes a major financial commitment of the sort America hasn't yet been willing to make. Currently there's a political battle between Western and Eastern coal producers over the Abandoned Mine Land (AML) Trust Fund, into which coal companies must pay 35 cents per ton for surface-mined coal and 15 cents per ton for deep-mined coal. Some of the money is supposed to go to the states for restoration of water and land damaged by mines before the August 3, 1977 enactment of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act; but $1.5 billion sits unused, except to help offset the federal deficit. AML funds are crucial to rivers like the Cheat, which gets 80 percent of its acid from mines that went in before 1977.

It used to be that Appalachia was the biggest coal producer; now it's just the biggest acid producer. These days the largest coal producer by far is Wyoming; but Western coal deposits contain little pyrite and there's not much water to form sulfuric acid anyway. Western companies argue that they shouldn't have to help fix messes in Appalachia. Eastern companies, on the other hand, argue-and logically-that their dirty coal helped the country win World War II, got it industrialized in the 1950's and 1960's, and that Western coal producers are getting fat off that public service and therefore owe them big time.

Meanwhile, the politicians are posturing like tom turkeys on the strutting ground. Without renewal by Congress the AML fund will expire on September 30, 2004 and the $1.5 billion will get gobbled up for general expenses. For a while, the renewal was tacked onto Bush's energy bill, which was so dreadful that no legislator with an environmental conscience could vote for it, even to save the AML fund. Different bills are being hatched to save the fund, but it's not clear how much, if any, of a renewed fund would go to acid remediation.

Controlling what politicians do with AML money is infinitely easier than controlling how they aid and abet the coal industry in ducking cleanup responsibilities. The problem is that where coal is king most legislators are courtiers. Consider the current effort to do away with West Virginia's "Tier 2.5" designation for water quality. Tier 2.5 means streams in which brook trout are self-sustaining; and, while it offers modest protections, it exempts non-point pollution sources such as agriculture and logging. But, whipped up by the coal industry and the politicians who front for it, property-rights advocates and Farm-Bureau and chamber-of-commerce pooh-bahs imagine that it contravenes the Fifth Amendment. Recently the legislature passed a law that lets a property owner petition the DEP to delist a Tier 2.5 stream. So now wild-trout habitat can be defined by public opinion.

Last year state senator Sarah Minear (R-Tucker County) got an amendment accepted by the legislature's joint Interim Rulemaking Committee to remove the current trout stream list from the water-quality rule. Had it been enacted, West Virginia would now-at least officially-contain no trout habitat. Such is the opposition faced by those who love things wild and beautiful, and not just in West Virginia.

"What kind of person owns land with a brook-trout stream running through it and doesn't want it protected?" said Pitzer.

"A coal mogul or property-rights zealot?" I asked.

But, as Pitzer and Thorne had reminded me, there are other voices; and, even in coal country, they're starting to be heard. With the public's new ability to petition for delisting, Tier 2.5 water comes the ability to nominate it. Available for saving are all the trout streams never surveyed and all the trout streams that keep surging back to life.