On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with
West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine
inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and
southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an
environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol
Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West
Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are
temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of
conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in
water.
When his first reading measured 20,000 micro siemens per centimeter squared
(µS/cm), Cincotta thought his equipment was broken; he had never seen readings
above 5,000. The Consol consultant took her own reading in the same location but
farther from the riverbank. It registered 40,000 µS/cm. Still in disbelief,
Cincotta says, “we wandered upstream and found [Consol’s mining] discharge. And
in the discharge alone, straight out of the pipe our equipment registered over
50,000 µS/cm,” roughly the equivalent of seawater. Untreated acid mine
discharges typically have conductance values of between 1,000 and 1,500
µS/cm.
Earth Island Journal
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