June 4, 2005
Tribune-Review
Volunteer environmental corps works for cleaner
streams
By David Hunt
Tribune-Review
Roy Giovannelli of Perryopolis and other volunteers test water along Redstone Creek Friday near Uniontown.
Without guys like these, the orange muck of mine discharge might just keep eating its way into the food chain bug by bug and fish by fish.
"The point of the whole thing is to make people aware of water conditions," said Roy Giovannelli, of Perryopolis, a retired Westinghouse project manager who now spends part of his days volunteering to make the area's waterways cleaner.
This week, Giovannelli and fellow volunteers David Olinzock, Fred Clausner and Joe Walko spent a day monitoring Redstone Creek a few hundred yards from a recently discovered ditch where tires and other garbage stick out of a bed of iron hydroxide, a chemical aftereffect of Fayette County's coal boom that drains from mines abandoned for years.
Brian Chalfant, development coordinator with the Greater Redstone Clearwater Initiative, said the drainage, which colors the ground orange, smothers stream beds, killing off the small bugs that fish use as food. As the smaller parts of the ecosystem die off, he said, life becomes too difficult for just about any organism that lives there.
"We're just now starting to understand what sort of impact this is having on the stream," Chalfant said.
Though the orange ditch appeared to be moist, there was no water running through it, but Chalfant said runoff into Redstone Creek is likely because iron levels were detected a short distance downstream, near the Uniontown city line.
It's not the most polluted area of the 127-square-mile Redstone Creek watershed, but the ecological impact remains unwelcome.
"It suppresses life," Giovannelli said.
The watershed stretches from the mountains of South Union Township to the Monongahela River at Brownsville. Redstone Creek, which runs through the center of Uniontown, is its most prominent waterway. There are 300 miles of streams.
Giovannelli and Olinzock, a retired math teacher from Star Junction; Clausner, a retired steelworker from Perryopolis; and Walko, of Belle Vernon, a retired superintendent of a coal preparation plant, are part of the Monongahela River Senior Environmental Corps. They are helping to collect data to assist the Greater Redstone Clearwater Initiative in the overall effort to clean up the watershed.
Results of a $66,000 study the group purchased with state Growing Greener money help display the areas that need the most work. Chalfant said cleanup efforts won't happen overnight, though. More volunteers are needed, he said, not to mention money for the work that can't be done by hand.
In what's arguably the dirtiest area of the watershed, near the North Union Township village of Phillips, Chalfant said setting up a treatment system will cost between $1 million and $3 million. Other projects requiring heavy machinery will cost thousands, he said.
Over time, the watershed has been made a dumping ground for just about everything from garbage to bicycles to washing machines and refrigerators.
New pollution is being discovered, too. The area that Chalfant and the volunteers were studying this week was not identified in the $66,000 study. Chalfant said much of the data in the study is several years old, making the evaluations performed by the volunteer group that much more important.
"We care," Giovannelli said. "We want to, at least in some small way, help."
