Deckers Creek Projects Wrapping Up
Goat Mine work could be done in a month
Morgantown Dominion Post
23 May 2011
By David Beard
At the top of a wooded hill on a site just below Masontown, some acid
mine water trickles out of the hillside from the defunct Goat Mine.
Just across the gravel road, the water from that seep and several
others pours out of a black culvert and begins its mile-long journey
down a limestone riprap channel to Deckers Creek.
The National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) is in the final weeks
of a stimulus-funded acid mine drainage remediation project on Deckers
Creek. Goat Mine is the last of four project sites to be completed.
The limestone riprap doesn’t run the entire length of the channel, said
NRCS engineer Joseph Seybert. The acid water runs along “several
hundred feet” of riprap to the first of two rock sediment dams.
The dams are mounds of limestone built high enough to block the channel
and let the water pool up. Sediments and metals precipitate out of the
pooled water, which then trickles through under the dam, down the
channel to the next dam, then a short distance though a bridge culvert
and around a left-hand jog to the creek.
The pooled water is an unpleasant blue-green color, but that’s a good
thing, said Pam Yost, an NRCS agricultural economist, who works with
Seybert out of the Sabraton state office. The tint comes from the
limestone and means the water is getting treated.
The limestone, a “big bank of alkalinity,” Seybert said, raises the pH
of the acid water to bring it to a level where aquatic life can survive
in it. “These are all steps toward getting that water to where it can
support wildlife and recreation.”
These two dams, on private land owned by a hunting club, form the north
branch of the Goat Mine project. There is a separate south branch, and
a middle branch linked to the north.
Mountaineer Construction of Kingwood is working on the Goat Mine
project site — Seybert said he learned that it was called Goat Mine
because the miners used goats to pull the coal carts — and completed
the Beulah Chapel site. The contract for both jobs — paid with American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AARA) funds — was $1.23 million.
Green Mountain Co. of Charleston did the other two sites — Laurel 1 and
Laurel 2, feeding into Laurel Run above Masontown — for $576,211. The
total ARRA funding for the Deckers Creek project, according to NRCS
papers, was $4.89 million.
Seybert is pleased with the project. “We did our first
post-construction tests out of the Laurel Run site and the results are
very encouraging. The pH went way up,” he said.
All four sites employ a “passive treatment” system, Yost said. The
limestone rocks do all the work. They will get inspected once a year,
and have a projected 25-year lifespan. They may last much longer, but
the iron in the water stains the rocks orange, and in 25 years NRCS may
have to do more work, replace coated rocks, or even upgrade the
technology.
Seybert expects the Goat Mine work to wrap up in about a month.