State awards $38 Million for abandoned mine reclamation, $0 awarded in Schuylkill
HARRISBURG – The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) announced Thursday $38.76 Million in funding for six abandoned mine land projects, without a cent coming to Schuylkill County.
The grants are part of the first of three rounds in the 2023 Abandoned Mine Land and Acid Mine Drainage (AML/AMD) Grant Program and the projects funded “focus on reclaiming abandoned mine land, decreasing abandoned mine drainage, and treating AMD through the construction, operation, and/or maintenance of an AMD treatment facility.”
DEP says the program “prioritizes serious human health and safety problems that are a result of abandoned coal mines, as well as treating AMD to continue restoration efforts under the AMD Set-Aside Program.”
“By focusing on operation and maintenance needs or upgrades of AMD treatment systems, the program helps to prevent the loss of restored streams and creates significant water quality improvements that go toward watershed restoration,” the state said in a media release.
Despite that, no projects were funded in Schuylkill County. Abandoned mine lands have been the site of several deaths in northern Schuylkill County alone, many of which were drownings. In 2015, a Shenandoah Valley High School student, Tolik Stutts, drowned at an abandoned mine site near Lost Creek.
Since the 1990s, several people have died at abandoned mine sites in the Shenandoah and Girardville areas. The Shen Penn pit east of Shenandoah was the subject of protest in the early 1990’s after three back-to-back-to-back deaths at the abandoned site.
South of Girardville, multiple people have died at two abandoned pits, including in 2021.
None of the local abandoned mine land sites where fatalities have occurred have been reclaimed, despite PADEP prioritizing health and safety in reclamation efforts.
The nearest project funded is in Northumberland County, where the Anthracite Outdoor Adventure Area will construct a waterline “to provide adequate water quantity and quality” to the recreational area.
Two other projects were funded east of the main branch of the Susquehanna.
In Lackawanna County, a grant was awarded “to remove mine spoil piles, backfill abandoned coal mine pits, and excavate dangerous highwalls” and to excavate and backfill an underground mine complex to support a logistics center.
In Luzerne County, a grant was awarded to reclaim 15,000 linear feet of creek channel in the Nanticoke Creek.
The remaining projects were out west, two in Cambria County and one in Somerset County.
The AML/AMD Grant Program began in the fall of 2022 as a single round with three application rounds planned for 2023 and at least $96 million in funding available through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
In the first round in 2022, 16 projects received $7.8 Million in funding, and all but one was in western Pennsylvania.
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