Murrysville will use $2 million to clean mine drainage in Lyons Run watershed
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Throughout southwestern Pennsylvania, old mines channel water tainted with heavy metals such as iron and aluminum into creeks and streams, killing aquatic life and disrupting the food chain.
Murrysville officials have secured $2 million in grants to address 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.
Tim Denicola, an engineer with Civil & Environmental Consultants, said the project will use a series of treatment ponds to filter heavy metals left behind from a shallow mine.
“Those are common throughout the Pittsburgh Coal Basin, and they generate highly acidic water,” Denicola said. “The mine is discharging about 150 gallons per minute of acidic high-iron and high-aluminum contaminated mining water into a tributary of Lyons Run.”
That ultimately impacts between 2 and 4 miles of Lyons Run as it conveys water toward Turtle Creek. Iron imparts an orange tint to the water, and aluminum runoff can turn it an unnaturally bright blue.
“We’re going to collect and convey them to a series of treatments, which consist of flushing limestone beds, which impart alkalinity to the water,” Denicola said. Alkaline elements are the chemical opposite of acidic elements.
“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,” Denicola said.
That will happen twice in sequence, then it will send cleaned and treated water through nature’s filter — a series of constructed wetlands.
“The final effluent is neutral with no metals,” Denicola said. “It’s also got a little residual alkalinity, which can help neutralize sources of acid downstream.”
All of this is great news to Lyons Run Watershed Association President Ben Sampson.
“We want to make it common knowledge how important our streams are,” Sampson said.
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.
“We want to make efforts to protect high-quality water through things like (natural) buffers and other projects,” said Murrysville Community Development Director Jim Morrison. “We recently purchased some stream monitoring equipment to put in Turtle Creek and Lyons Run so we can get constant data on the water, and we’re working with the Westmoreland Conservation District to do some some sampling in Lyons Run, as well as with the Franklin Township Municipal Sanitary Authority for some hand-sampling along Haymaker Run, Turtle Creek and Lyons Run.”
Haymaker Run and the nearby Steele’s Run are both designated by the state as high-quality watersheds.
In addition to a $500,000 matching grant from the state’s Department of Community & Economic Development, the bulk of the funding, $1.5 million, comes from grant money released through the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act’s Abandoned Mine Drainage Remediation Program.
Denicola said the goal is to bid the project out late this summer, with construction sometime between this September and June 2024. He said it typically takes a year to start seeing visible results.
“You have to have a couple storms to wash decades of acid mine precipitation out,” he said. “It’s being slowly washed out, but right now there’s just more replacing it.”
The major benefits are ecological — cleaning the stream reestablishes the bottom of the local food chain.
“Those macro-invertebrate animals are laid as eggs and start their lives in the bottom of these streams,” Denicola said. “By restoring that habitat, you restore the macro-invertebrates. They’re food for small fish, which are food for larger fish, which are food for birds and other animals that will be able to rely on the stream for food.”
Sampson is hoping that can help get more residents on board.
“Once you get the public to understand it, it’s easier to talk with people about things like a conservation easement,” he said.