The Newtown Pentacle

Thursday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

That’s Chartiers Creek, in Pennsylvania’s Bridgeville.

First – allow me to say that I’m new to this urban waterway’s story, so if I get something wrong as far as your lived experience, please leave a correction and ‘get me smart about it’ in the comments section.

Second- This waterway has historically received an absolute ocean of mine runoff over the last century, emanating from several historical coal mining sites extant along its course. I’m told that it was quite common to see these waters running a bright orange, not too long ago.

It seems that iron, and pyrites, are commonly found in the layer cakes of Appalachian soil – alongside coal, shale, dolomite, sandstone, and limestone.

When a coal mining shaft exposes formerly sealed away minerals to the atmosphere, oxidation occurs, causing ‘rusty’ water to collect below. Natural processes, like springs, carry the runoff water up to the surface.

The flowing waters of mine runoff display an acidic PH level, due to all of those dissolved metals, and is fairly toxic to fish and other littoral forms of life.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The design and operation of a mine involves two critical factors – ventilation, and the management of ground water. When the mine closes, nobody is pumping out the water anymore so a vast reservoir of the liquid forms within these manmade voids. Water always wins, so it gets out of the mine and up to the surface.

The State’s environmental people have apparently been working with both the Feds and Bridgeville, for several years, on a huge remediation process here. Spending the public’s tax money on cleaning up a corporate caused, and quite historic, problem. Sounds familiar, no?

Down below, the largest mining outfit here in Bridgeville was the ‘Pittsburgh Coal Company’s Bridgeville mine’, which was in operation for around 35 years and carved some ten million tons of bituminous coal up and out of the depths. That was just one of the mines here, the largest one albeit, but there were a LOT of smaller claims being worked hereabouts.

Remember, here in Bridgeville, you could observe coal seams at ground level in Colonial and early Republic times, on surface outcrops of rock. Lots of smaller deposits were literally just worked into at ground level, with miners digging straight horizontally into the hill.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It seems that the coal seam, just like all the other rock in the Appalachian Mountains, is folded up in jagged depositional layers, a condition which is due to the range’s long tectonic history. These mountains and hills are older than the dinosaurs, and were once attached to what’s now Scotland.

PA’s Department of Environmental Protection has a cool scholarly explanation of the coal seam’s geology available.

As this land shifted about, over hundreds of millions of years, some sections of the coal got folded up in different ways, and at odd angles, in the layer cake – a ‘syncline,’ for instance, or an ‘anticline.’

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I did mention that I’ve been reading up on all this stuff, didn’t I?

A lot of what I’ve been witnessing here in Pittsburgh over the last few years offers a similar storyline. An industry appears with lots of plucky small players, then a ‘king’ emerges who dominates them and monopolizes the sector. That Dominar then abandons the industry after extracting as much money as possible and unloading it on someone else, then the ‘Captain of Industry’ would move their family and household to Fifth Avenue in NYC – leaving behind environmental, economic, and societal devastation here in Pittsburgh while they slept on a bed stuffed with dollars in Manhattan.

‘So long, and thanks for all the fish’ indeed.

I’ve described my viewpoint of Pittsburgh’s History, out loud, as ‘they practiced the darkest form of Capitalism out here.’

A hundred years later and the people who profited from the mines are long gone, whereas the modern day taxpayer has to foot the bill for cleaning up the mess that they left behind. Captains of Industry Robber Barons indeed.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Chartiers Creek, pictured in today’s post, has been receiving an awful lot of investment and attention from that modern day municipal kitty in recent years, thereby.

Just south of Bridegville, in the town of South Fayette – there’s the Gladden AMD Treatment Plant, which treats mine water with hydrogen peroxide and removes nearly 1,000 pounds of iron from the flow daily. A passive treatment system, dubbed the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area, uses settling ponds and an aeration fountain to filter some 43 tons of iron from the water annually. There’s all sorts of of smaller projects going on to ensure shoreline stability and enhance the ‘littoral’ zone.

This – of course – is how I spend my free time on a Saturday morning while my wife is taking a class, in a nearby shop.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

I’m still learning about all of this coal ‘stuff.’

It’s led to interesting conversation with a friend who’s a tunnel engineer about how ‘they’ navigated cardinal directions and stayed ‘plum’ while digging underground, prior to modern times and ‘back in the day.’ It seems that piano wire was critical to their efforts, as once it’s under tension it doesn’t sag, and spirit levels could be hung along its length to guarantee you were ‘plum.’

I’ve also learned that the ‘canary in a coal mine’ thing wasn’t due to ‘mephitic gases’ emerging from the deep, as the exposed coal seams robbed the atmosphere of oxygen chemically, via oxidation. The canary’s respiratory system includes a heartbeat that’s much faster than ours, making it a lot more sensitive to a lower oxygen environment. If the caged bird fell off its post, you had precisely eight minutes to get out, and find some fresh air.

Wonder if that’s the origin of the phrase ‘eight minutes to midnight?’

Back tomorrow with something different.

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“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.