Let’s be clear: Orange creeks require faster cleanup

Throughout Pennsylvania, miles of creeks and streams look gray, red or even orange – telltale signs that all is not well.

The colors signal an ugly truth: Much of our state’s clean water is being polluted, day and night, every day of the year. And it’s been happening for decades.

We can trace the trouble to old, underground coal mines and long-abandoned properties strewn with waste coal piles.

As water flows into these areas, it picks up metals such as iron, aluminum and manganese, then discharges the contaminants into local streams. The toxic concoction makes its way toward the Susquehanna River and eventually the Chesapeake Bay, sometimes contributing to biological dead zones – places where oxygen levels drop too low to support fish and other aquatic life.

This icky water is known as abandoned mine drainage, or AMD.

AMD represents one of the largest sources of water pollution in Pennsylvania. It taints an estimated 5,500 miles of rivers and streams across the Keystone State, including 1,647 miles of waterways that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.

Protectors of the Chesapeake Bay have for decades advocated and worked for the restoration of the nation’s largest estuary and its watershed, which includes rivers and streams in parts of Pennsylvania and five other states, as well as the District of Columbia.

Their interstate efforts to restore the bay have provided our commonwealth with critical funding, resources and research to restore local waterways.

A regional partnership known as the Chesapeake Bay Program has been at the forefront of this cleanup effort. In 2014, it adopted a Watershed Agreement with specific goals that encourage, for instance, the reduction of nutrient loads and sediment from activities such as farming. Many of its goals have a target date of 2025.

This year, the Bay Program has produced a draft revision updating the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement with new recommendations. The draft considers past progress, emergent environmental issues and the best available science and modeling.

As the executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation (EPCAMR), a nonprofit organization based near Wilkes-Barre, I am committed to improving landscapes and lives in coalfield communities. For nearly 30 years, I have worked to stem the onslaught of AMD in this region. While we have made great progress, there is much more work to do.

That is why I am a strong believer that the Watershed Agreement currently on the drawing board should include a clear, science-based, measurable and attainable goal for reducing AMD, based on improving stream miles.

By establishing this target for the first time – and incorporating AMD into its computer models – the Chesapeake Bay Program can elevate the importance of this ecological issue and potentially spur greater collaboration and speed on implementing solutions.

If we are to rid Pennsylvania’s waterways of AMD pollution, we must work in partnership with local, state and federal partners. Our success relies on cross-jurisdictional coordination to provide appropriate and timely funding and resources.

For proof, look no farther than places like Swoyersville, a Luzerne County borough where EPCAMR is managing the multi-year removal of a gigantic waste coal pile. The project would not happen without public, private and nonprofit partners all working together.

At EPCAMR, we know our local AMD-related remediation work is making a positive impact downstream and on the bay’s health – even if the full extent of the impact is not yet quantifiable. Our team co-authored a 2025 report regarding whether AMD treatment systems improve water quality by not only decreasing pollution from iron and other metals, but also by possibly reducing nitrogen and phosphorus loads.

For those and other reasons, I urge the Chesapeake Bay Program to adopt an AMD reduction target, increasing available habitat to support fish populations, including brook trout habitat, by 180 miles of AMD-impaired waters by 2035.

With the addition of that new goal, the next Watershed Agreement can be a powerful tool in forming alliances among government agencies, environmental groups, businesses and other stakeholders to more aggressively address AMD and rid our landscape of ugly, legacy, mine-polluted waterways.

It’s clearly the right move for all of us who live in the watershed today – and for all the generations to follow.

Robert “Bobby” Hughes is executive director of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation (EPCAMR), based near Wilkes-Barre. He serves as an appointee to the Chesapeake Bay Stakeholders’ Advisory Committee. Email him at [email protected]. 

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