Murrysville moves ahead with acid mine drainage project in Lyon Run

Murrysville officials will hire a company to clean 2 to 4 miles of Lyons Run, a tributary of nearby Turtle Creek, that is being polluted with acid mine drainage.

“It’s a pretty large and exciting project,” said Murrysville Chief Administrator Michael Nestico.

The project will clean the heavy metals present in three mine water sources within the Lyons Run watershed. Lyons Run flows south through central Murrysville and Penn Township, turning west along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The total watershed drains nearly 9 square miles of land along more than 17 miles of streams.

Murrysville officials voted this week to advertise bids for work on the $2 million grant-funded project.

The project will use a series of ponds containing limestone beds, which impart alkalinity to the water and neutralize its acidity, according to Civil & Environmental Consultants. Company representatives presented an overview of the project to council at a previous meeting.

“The limestone beds will neutralize the acid, and they also accumulate iron and aluminum precipitants, which are flushed into settling ponds that retain those metals,” CEC engineer Tim Denicola said.

The water is cleaned twice in sequence through the limestone beds, before being sent through a natural filter, a series of constructed wetlands.

The project is happening in conjunction with the Lyons Run Watershed Association, whose members helped secure $500,000 of the $2 million in overall grant funding.

The association — which also branched out two years ago to create the Murrysville Area Watershed Association and focus on areas other than just Lyons Run — secures conservation easements from local landowners in order to maintain an optimal state of nature along stream banks.

Removing the heavy metals from the stream will help reestablish the bottom of the food chain, the first in what Seton Hill University assistant biology professor Renee Rosier said should be a series of positive developments.

“The obvious benefit is that you get the food web back,” Rosier said. “A lot of people are familiar with the ‘top-down’ effects that reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park has had. This is sort of the reverse, from the bottom up.”

Rosier said reestablishing the bottom of the food chain will gradually bring back animals from its upper links.

“You’ll see more fish who eat the mosquitoes that hatch and bite people,” she said. “It can lead to a much healthier ecosystem that’s more diverse and more able to adapt to change.”

Denicola said once the project is bid, the goal is for construction to start sometime before June 2024.