Section B.3  Assessment of Previous Reclamation Programs and Studies

B.3.1   Historical Impacts and Regulation

The detrimental effects of large scale anthracite coal mining and related industrial activities on the environment of Pennsylvania became increasingly evident after the Civil War.  The increasing toll on the human community was brought to the public’s attention with the catastrophe of the Avondale Mine Disaster in 1869.

At Avondale, across the Susquehanna River from Wilkes-Barre, a coal breaker located directly above the mine shaft caught fire.  Fire, smoke and noxious gas were drawn down the mine shaft and into the mine workings.  Over 120 miners, men and boys, fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, brothers and cousins were suffocated to death by the poisoned air.

For the families it was a tragedy of unmitigated proportions.  All males in several families were lost.  The shock waves to the northeast Pennsylvania community rippled across the state and nation.  The Avondale disaster catalyzed the Pennsylvania legislature into adopting the nation’s first regulations on mining, The Mining Safety and Inspection Act of 1871.

This act began a slow process of regulation, inspection, data collection, analysis, and enforcement.  In the interests of mine safety, the act regulated the standards and practices of mining, breakers were no longer allowed to be located directly over a mine entry, procedures for ventilation and emergency egress were instituted, air quality related to mine gas safety requirements were established, roof and surface support practices were instituted, inspections and reports of all incidents and accidents were required.

The state appointed and employed professional mine safety inspector engineers to inspect, record data and information on all mining activities and practices, and to publish annual reports.  The annual reports of the Pennsylvania mine inspectors are an eminently valuable record of the anthracite mining industry.

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, with the advance in science and technology, and the advance in labor management relationships and the onset of the Progressive Era, the time of the coal barons and the rapacious exploitation of human and environmental resources was gradually ending.

The political power of the coal industry to evade environmental regulation continued well into mid-century.  While the socio-environmental damage caused by more intensely mechanized mining activities increased.  It is obvious from the reports of the Pennsylvania mining inspectors and from studies like the 1904 W. F. Dodge report on water pollution in the Northern Anthracite Field that there was some awareness and understanding of the problems anthracite coal mining was causing.

The unwillingness of the mining companies to broadly modify some of their more odious practices and their ability to thwart public, court-based or legislative controls meant that negative mining impacts continued.  The Pennsylvania Clean Streams Act of 1937 was the beginning of more effective control of pollution from both industrial and municipal sources, including for the first time coal mining activities.

B.3.2   Modern Regulations and Early Reclamation

After a reprieve from regulation during the Second World War, the examination of mine related problems as well as publicly funded and regulatory required reclamation increased.

Mining regulations in Pennsylvania gradually required more surface regrading and drainage control for strip mines.  The costs associated with underground mining gradually reduced the number of underground operations.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health, Sanitary Water Board began requiring AMD prevention and control through a mine drainage permit system based on the 1937 clean stream legislation.  A publication on the Best Management Practices to Control Acid Drainage from coal mines was published by the Board in September 1952.

The U. S. Bureau of Mines published a definitive assessment of mine drainage and surface infiltration in the Lackawanna Basin in 1952.  This document, Bureau of Mines Bulletin 518 examines the physical aspects of infiltration of surface water into the then operating mines in the Lackawanna Basin.  It describes and assesses various control and prevention measures.   Bulletin 518 also assess the issue of pumping related to coal production and offers a number of physical and policy suggestions relating to mine pumping.

The issues assessment reported in Bulletin 518 became part of the policy basis for the federal government to fund a mine water control program in the anthracite region between 1955 and 1961.  The history of this program is reported in Bureau of Mines Information Circular 8115 published in 1962.  This program and an interrelated Pennsylvania funded program were designed to pro-actively engage the then still active mining companies in partnerships to control and reduce mine drainage.

The program was essentially a grant program whereby the Bureau would entertain proposals for control, reduction and pumping projects.  The philosophical view of the legislation enacting the program was focused on protecting and sustaining access to anthracite reserves as a public health and national security value rather than a concern over environmental degradation.  The positive environmental impacts generated by the program were ancillary to the national security aspect which was the ostensible impetus for the legislation.

The program implemented a variety of surface mine reclamation projects to back fill and regrade abandoned strip pits, to direct surface drainage away from infiltration sites and back into streams. Stream channels were also addressed with the installation of various types of flumes and earthen and concreted channels and culvert systems.  New deep water pumps were installed to assist the economically beleaguered mining companies in their dewatering efforts.  The mining companies were required to operate and maintain the pumps.

This program is interesting for a number of reasons; it involved interrelated federal and state legislation and a 50/50 federal/state appropriation.  It required mining companies to participate by developing proposals including the design of projects.  It further required some commitment to ongoing operations and maintenance of completed projects by the mining companies.

The program only accomplished a few of its objectives, several thousands of feet of stream corridor were flumed, excavated, diked or culvertized to limit stream flow loss; several hundred acres of strip pits were regraded to direct surface storm run off to rechanneled or flumed streams; several dozen high capacity electric turbine pumps were installed at various deep mines.

The economics of costs versus market share and the calamitous Knox Mine Disaster of 1959 under cut the effectiveness of the program.  When it terminated in 1961, it had expended only 40% of the 17-million in available funds.

The program’s salient benefit seems to be that it broadly demonstrated techniques effective in controlling surface infiltration into mines and showed positive cost-benefit ratio for several environmental factors:  

B.3.3   Post Closure Activities and SCAR LIFT

With the cessation of most underground mining in the anthracite region by the 1960's, greater attention was focused on addressing and solving the problems of acid mine drainage AMD.  In the mid 1960's, the Sanitary Water Board commissioned a study to address AMD at the confluence of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna rivers.  This plan proposed a series of bore holes and diversion conduits to convey AMD from the Old Forge Bore Hole, the Duryea Outfall and the Butler Mine Tunnel to a proposed AMD treatment plan to be constructed at the rivers’ confluence.  Due to installation, operation and maintenance costs and a change in political leadership in Harrisburg, the proposal was never implemented.

The Federal/State Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) funded a study of AMD in Appalachia by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Mines in 1969.  The study included a sub-area report on the anthracite region including the Lackawanna Basin.  This study recorded AMD flows at the confluence to be 58-million gallons per day with 66-tons per day of net acidity and iron loading of 31-tons per day.

The report suggests that effects of the smaller AMD in the Upper Lackawanna are balanced by the river’s net alkalinity but the Old Forge and Duryea AMD’s surpass the river’s alkaline capacity and result in a 23.5-ton per day discharge into the Susquehanna.

While no specific AMD or reclamation program developed from this study, it serves as a useful benchmark to look at successive study data.  The 1969 ARC study did work to inform later state and federal reclamation policy.

The most comprehensive AMD assessment program in the Lackawanna Basin was the two-phase operation SCAR LIFT Study funded through the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection between 1970-78.

The SCAR LIFT assessments were extremely thorough and well developed.  The study assessed all of the river’s reaches and tributary streams to measure flow loss and determine the extent of loosing reaches.  The study also looked at upland areas in each subwatershed , assessed and recommended strip pit backfilling and surface reclamation projects.

SCAR LIFT AMD studies continue as a basis to measure ongoing and proposed projects in the Lackawanna Basin.  The SCAR LIFT AMD recommendations for stream reach flow loss have helped to prioritize several recently completed and proposed stream channel restoration projects.  SCAR LIFT also continues to guide many of the surface reclamation projects being conducted by the PA DEP/BAMR.

Other federal and state mine reclamation initiatives during the 1950's through the 1970's were focused on public health and safety problems.  Surface stability and mine-cave problems affected many built up areas where commercial, industrial and residential properties were threatened with structural failure from subsidences into collapsing abandoned mine voids.  This situation was occasionally wide spread in some communities or neighborhoods where illegal mining had removed coal pillars needed to maintain surface support.  To help stabilize some of these areas, particularly areas under important commercial, institutional or residential areas, the federal and state governments funded extensive abandoned mine flushing programs.

Mine flushing programs usually employed contractors and staff who had experience in mining operations. These projects used a hydraulic process to flush pulverized coal waste, culm mixed in a slurry down boreholes drilled throughout a selected neighborhood to fill mine voids.  Larger man-sized bore holes, still accessible slope or shaft entries were utilized to send crews into the perimeter of the area selected for flushing.  The crews would erect brattices, or underground bulwarks to serve as coffer dams to direct and confine the slurry mixes.  The containments would allow the discharge of drainage while concentrating the crushed culm aggregates to fill upwards of 75% of the volume of the selected voids.  This would serve to buffer the scale and extent of future subsidence damages.

These techniques, augmented with the addition of cementious or polymeric grouting materials are utilized today by the U.S. Department of Interior - Office of Surface Mines (OSM) to address emergency subsidence response needs in the anthracite region.

The other major public health and safety need during this period was the control and elimination of underground mine fires and culm bank fires.  Left unaddressed, bank fires can burn for upward of 75 to 100 years.  Underground coal mine fires have the potential to burn for thousands of years or until a geologic or hydrologic limit is reached.

Major multi-year programs were required to extinguish underground and culm bank fires in the Lackawanna Basin with the SCAR LIFT program during the 1970's .  The larger culm bank fires at the Baker Colliery in Scranton and Taylor, the Marvine Colliery in North Scranton and at the Eddy Creek Colliery in Olyphant and Throop each took several years and several million dollars to extinguish.

Underground mine fires in Scranton and Carbondale required the condemnation and removal of several-hundred homes and businesses and the excavation of millions of cubic yards of earth and rock to extinguish.

The Carbondale fire took over ten years to be extinguished and have the final surface reclamation work completed.  Two underground mine fires continue to burn in Carbondale today.  The older fire along Greenfield Road is monitored and is burning out toward the outcrop boundary.  A newer fire near Russell Park referenced in Section I of this document continues to burn.  A containment trench and monitoring network of boreholes has been installed by OSM. 

B.3.4   SMCRA and BAMR Reclamation Work

The surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA) created the Federal Abandoned Mine Land Trust Fund, required royalty payments into the fund from active mining operations, established reclamation and bonding requirements and established procedures to fund state operated reclamation programs to address pre-1977 abandoned mine reclamation problems.

Pennsylvania has previously enacted similar state legislation requiring bonding and reclamation, the federal law reinforced these provisions and added to the funding mechanism.

Through the AML reclamation fund, Congress appropriates funds through OSM to state reclamation agencies. With funding from this source, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation began the design and implementation of reclamation projects.  By 1993, the Bureau had completed twenty-three projects in the Lackawanna Valley reclaiming over 1100 acres, primarily addressing public health and safety hazards such as backfilling and regrading strip mine pits and highwalls, filling and capping shafts and mine entries, removing hazardous structures and equipment.

Many of these projects were designed with attention to SCAR LIFT recommendations to limit surface water infiltration into the deep mine pool. Other state-funded infrastructure projects such as local flood control and stream maintenance work, road, bridge and highway drainage projects were also designed with SCAR LIFT recommendations in mind to reduce or eliminate mine drainage infiltration.  These infrastructure projects have succeeded in their narrow purposes but they are designed with the traditional civil engineering objectives.  These objectives in the 1970's through the 1990's did not include comprehensive environmental goals such as habitat restoration and the engineering techniques did not include analogous natural system engineering.

The Lackawanna County Conservation District (LCCD) was also involved with mine reclamation during this period.  Through the Rural Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program (RAMP), LCCD partnered with the then Soil Conservation Service, (SCS, now Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS) a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency, on several successful multi objective RAMP projects during the 1980's.  This partnership had been side-tracked with the curtailment RAMP in the mid-1990's.  However, LCCD-NRCS partnership projects have continued using Section 319 program funds, and currently Growing Greener funds.

B.3.5   LRCA and Recent Work

With the creation of the Lackawanna River Corridor Association by local citizens in 1987 and the completion of the LRCA’s Citizens Master Plan for the Lackawanna River in 1990, the citizens of the Lackawanna watershed began a more proactive involvement with and advocacy for watershed conservation including AMD and AML issues.

The Bureau of Water Quality, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, the U.S. Geologic Survey, the Susquehanna River Basin Commission all conducted water quality assessments during the 1980's and 1990's which included the Lackawanna River and the effects of AMD’s and AML’s on the Lackawanna.

The LRCA was involved with the 1990 PA DER, BWQ assessment and the 1992 PA F&BC fisheries habitat studies.  This work has helped to inform LRCA’s continuing advocacy for more attention to AMD/AML problems in the Lackawanna.    

The LRCA sought to build on recommendations in the Citizens Plan of 1990 and develop a partnership with county, state, federal agencies, community and business interests.  LRCA secured federal funding between 1991 and 93 to enable the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work with LRCA and other non-federal interests to develop a Reconnaissance Study for a Lackawanna River Greenway.  This study provided a comprehensive set of proposals for several-hundred interrelated multi objective projects to promote environmental restoration, water quality improvements, habitat enhancements, recreation and infrastructure improvements.

The Greenway Study updated some assessments from previous studies such as SCAR LIFT to provide a basis for project recommendations to address various reclamation typologies.  With the completion of the greenway study in 1993, LRCA, Lackawanna County, the Corps of Engineers and Pennsylvania DER began a series of discussions on development of feasibility studies to implement some of the greenway reclamation projects.  State and federal agencies could not reach a consensus on methods to allow joint projects.  In 1994, Congress adopted an amendment to an appropriation bill sponsored by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd which required federal and state agencies to allow mine reclamation trust funds to be classified as part of non-federal matching fund requirements.  There were philosophical and financial policy differences between Corps and DER staff which mitigated against the creation of a stronger partnership in the Lackawanna watershed at that time.

Subsequently, changes in organizational structure, policy and funding on both the state and federal level have made partnerships such as the one currently developing on the Lackawanna more common.

Since there was a need to advance reclamation at that time however, Lackawanna County and the LRCA worked with then Congressman McDade to secure mine reclamation and sanitary sewer program funds.  A 30-million-dollar grant program line item for AMD and CSO work through Lackawanna County was included in the US EPA budget appropriation in Fiscal Year 1994.

In 1997 after three years of negotiation regarding scope and matching fund sources, EPA agreed to support the initiative of a watershed-based AMD and CSO implementation project by Lackawanna County.  This program known as Lackawanna River Watershed 2000 is supported through a partnership involving county, state, federal and private agencies including the LRCA.

Administrative differences between federal and local participants caused a delay in the Watershed 2000 program between 1998 and late 2000, but by the beginning of 2001, the program had been reinitiated with some modifications in scope from a watershed scale program to a project-based program.