Orange creek could finally be treated in Girardville
KAYLEE LINDENMUTH / SHENANDOAH SENTINEL - The Mahanoy Creek flows past the Senator James Rhoads Nature Trail in Girardville on Nov. 14. The Mahanoy Creek Watershed Association discussed the design of a project to treat the creek's mine drainage in the area Monday night.
GIRARDVILLE – The orange hue of creeks ruined by mine drainage is an all too familiar sight in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, but a project is in the works that might finally abate that in part of our area.
A little over a dozen people came out to Girardville Borough Hall Monday to hear about a project to treat one of the worst sources of pollution in the Mahanoy Creek, the Packer 5 mine drainage outfall.
The Mahanoy Creek Watershed Association is spearheading the effort and the design phase was funded by a $165,000 Growing Greener grant from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
Skelly and Loy, of Harrisburg, is designing the project and Joe Mills, senior scientist, and Brent Sapen, director of civil engineering, provided the presentation.
Mills said the Packer 5 outfall flows into the Mahanoy Creek on property owned by the Mahanoy Creek Watershed between Girardville proper and Rappahannock, where the Senator James Rhoades Nature Trail is.
He said that the main issue at the outfall is iron. Unlike most mine drainage issues, the water tends to be between 6.5 and 7.5 in pH, which is close to balanced.
“The real bad actor, what makes the stream that orange color, is the iron,” Mills said, which was at 19.2mg/L in a sample taken.
The project design, he said, will include the installation of a system to oxygenate the water, which would allow the iron to “drop out” of the water. It would be collected in geotubes — what he called essentially a filter bag — where the water would drain out and the sediments would be collected.
“We will be disturbing the walking trail, and we’ll have to discuss how that will be handled,” Mills said.
He said that the system would remove at least 90% of the iron content from the water, if not nearly all of it.
“My goal is 90%,” Mills said. “My expectation is we’ll be closer to 95 to 99%. We probably won’t get it all out, but if this thing works the way I hope it will and I expect it will, we should be almost iron-free when the water discharges.”
The project is not yet fully-funded, but Mills said there are grants available for projects like this.
“This will be a very large, very costly project,” Mills said.
Rob Krick, a member of the watershed board, said that when the mines closed in the 1950s, a newspaper article cited a state official saying that the Packer 5 area was a key location to treat mine drainage.
“It’s kind of ironic that going back that far, they recognized that this was the spot to treat the whole Mahanoy Valley,” Krick said.
Mills said that the water itself is simple to treat, but the area and volume of water poses a challenge, with up to 6,500 gallons a day flowing from the outflow.
A 2004 DEP report indicated that the Packer 5 outflow was the ultimate discharge point for the majority of the mines in the Shenandoah area, including the minepools of Shen Penn, Shenandoah City, Kehley Run, and Maple Hill.
Another, much older, DEP report from the 1970s said that, at that time, Packer 5 was responsible for 31.7% of the total mine drainage entering the Mahanoy Creek and several thousand pounds of iron were discharged there.
The watershed association plans to pursue grants to construct the project, which could break ground in the next year or two.
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