Back to Press Archive

June 6, 2004
Tribune-Review

Watershed event
Tour shows group source of pollution

John Piwowar, the chairman of the Greater Redstone Watershed Clearwater Initiative, wanted to show the association's members and guests firsthand what they were up against in a tour last week.
"The idea of tonight's exercise is to show you the magnitude of the problem," he said.

The watershed originates in the mountains in South Union Township and empties into the Monongahela River at Brownsville. Its most prominent waterway is Redstone Creek, which flows through the center of Uniontown.

The grassroots Clearwater Initiative was founded in 2000 to clean up the watershed of Redstone Creek, Little Redstone Creek and Downers Run, which have been degraded by decades of abandoned mine drainage and other pollution.

Piwowar, a North Union Township farmer whose land lies in the watershed, loaded about 20 people onto a hay wagon, including regional DEP officials, and headed down Route 51 toward a major source of mine drainage into Redstone Creek.

To reach the Phillips discharge, the group had to walk single file through thick foliage, tramping on and tripping over the remnants of newly felled trees.

Piwowar warned that there was an abundance of poison ivy along the way.

After a difficult hike, the group reached the Phillips discharge, actually the combined discharge of scores of abandoned mines in the area.

There was no mistaking it. It wasn't a trickle, or even a current flowing into the creek. It was more a fount spewing forth.

Piwowar said the flow was 4,500 to 6,000 gallons a minute. He asked the group to imagine the difficulty of building acres of settling ponds to treat the discharge in the terrain they had just covered.

There are other mine discharges as well, including into Rankin Run. The Clearwater Initiative is studying the stream in an effort to find the best way to treat the drainage there.

The group's scheduled journey to Rankin Run last week was cut short by a cloudburst. Piwowar continued his session under the roof of an ice cream parlor along Route 51.

With the heavy rain of recent months, portions of another stream, Bute Run, have also started to turn orange with mine water discharge, he reported.

"A year ago if you looked at Bute Run there wasn't any orange in it, now it's as orange as Rankin Run," Piwowar said.

Piwowar reminded the group that mine drainage was not the only source of pollution. Raw sewage still flows into waterways at points. There is also animal waste from livestock grazing on farms along the watershed.

The attitude of some area residents about the pollution is another problem, according to members of the Clearwater Initiative.

"A lot of people have taken for granted that that's the way it is and that's the way it's going to be", said Jim Tobal, a retired social studies teacher from Laurel Highlands High School and Clearwater Initiative board member.

There have been some recent advances. The Clearwater Initiative received a $66,000 grant from the state's Growing Greener program to conduct a three-year study of the watershed and the initial draft has been completed by Skelly and Loy Engineering and Environmental Consultants.

Terry W. Schmidt, the project consultant for Skelly and Loy, said the study was built on previous research, including the Clearwater Initiatives own water sampling project. He said it looked at causes of pollution from discharges to illegal dump sites.

Schmidt said the watershed would have to be cleaned up one section at a time and it will be expensive.

Remediation programs for streams such as Rankin Run would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. Cleaning up the Phillips discharge would likely cost more than $1 million.

Piwowar said he is encouraged by one ongoing project, the $17 million expansion of the Uniontown Area Sewage plant, located adjacent to Redstone Creek in North Union Township. The expansion will double the capacity of the plant and hopefully eliminate sewage overflow during storms.

He also said that the Fayette County Conservation District is working closely with area farmers to decrease pollution from livestock.