ROANOKE, Va. (AP) - By early next week, equipment will be in place to enable Consol Energy to pump water with a high chloride content from an underground mine into a southwest Virginia river that is home to an endangered fish species.
State regulators have signed off on the plan, which the company says is necessary to keep one of the region's largest mines open. But opponents fear further harm to a river that has just begun to recover from mining's earlier damage.
Buchanan County officials and others are challenging the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy's decision in court.
Consol crews were in Grundy this week to install a diffuser, a device that will speed up dispersal of the high-chloride water in the 50-foot-wide stream. Consol spokesman Joe Cerenzia said Thursday that the discharge could begin by the end of next week.
Consol says it has run out of storage space in abandoned shafts where it had been putting the water.
The project is a first for Pittsburgh-based Consol and for Virginia.
The company and the state will conduct a battery of tests on the mine water for various metals, PCBs and even petroleum before the discharge can begin, according to DMME spokesman Mike Abbott.
Still, local officials are nervous.
'This is going to have such a major effect on the community down here,' said Mickey McGlothlin, county attorney for Buchanan. 'We feel the company can afford to treat this water.'
Cerenzia said the water will be treated for a high iron content, but not chloride.
'There's not an easy way to remove the chloride,' he said.
Instead, the mine water will flow into the river at a rate of 1,000-1,500 gallons a minute, Cerenzia said, and be dispersed in the river's 135,000-gallon-a-minute flow over a three-quarter mile 'mixing zone.'
'A mixing zone is a place where animals will die,' said Don Orth, a Virginia Tech professor of fisheries and wildlife science who was asked by county officials to review Consol's proposal.
The Levisa is already contaminated with PCBs.
'It's a river that was once a beautiful river teeming with fish that had its fish and wildlife destroyed by mining activity,' McGlothlin said last month before the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. 'But today it's on the rebound.'
The Levisa is a popular place for catch-and-release smallmouth bass fishing, according to residents. It also is home to the variegate darter, which is on Virginia's endangered list.
Examinations of the mine water's likely impact have assumed that chloride is the only problem, Orth said. The effect of a mixture of high chloride with metals such as iron haven't been calculated.
The discharged water must meet Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards, according to Abbott of the DMME.
High concentrations of metals and minerals in water often result from mining because it accelerates the natural process of rock breakdown, according to Hermann Pfefferkorn, a geologist and professor with the University of Pennsylvania.
The chloride alone will be a problem for the Levisa fish, Orth said, because they aren't equipped to handle salt in their water.
The water discharged into the Levisa will not be nearly as salty as ocean water, according to Orth. The highest concentration in the company's tests of the mine water was a little over 18,000 milligrams per liter, vs. about 33,000 in the ocean.
The Levisa flows into a lake about 14 miles from the discharge pipe that supplies drinking water to Pike County, Ky. Officials in that state threatened legal action last year to protect the water supply, but have since dropped their objections.
No date has been set yet to hear opponents' appeal in Buchanan County Circuit Court.
Chuck Crabtree, head of Grundy's Industrial Development Authority, said he didn't see any reason why Consol shouldn't proceed.
'They've done everything that the state and the federal government requires,' he said. 'Until they break the law, what do you do?'
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