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Borough veers from vile to verdant Firm fights pollution with plan to make a living work of art Sunday, October 15, 2000 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
VINTONDALE, Pa. -- Coal was boss in this company town, and the boss was everywhere.
Right across the south branch of Blacklick Creek, a straight shot from the heart of town, 600 miners pulled coal from deep in the mountains. Some 1,400 feet of coke ovens veiled this narrow valley in smoke. Longwall mining grew up here. Train after train rolled down the Cambria & Indiana Railroad tracks, carrying away the black insides of these hills.
Then, a half-century ago, the boss pretty much packed up and left. Vintondale, a speck of Cambria County hugging the Indiana County line, was out of the only job it ever knew.
Nowadays, if you want to work in this borough of 582 people, your options don't range much beyond the town's compact post office, two garages and little grocery store.
Annual per capita income averages $10,957. For every dollar the typical Pennsylvanian earns, the average Vintondale resident makes 48 cents. Sixty-two percent of the families with children live in poverty.
"We were hit on the chin, hit in the gut," resident Dave Roberts said.
But 400 yards across Blacklick Creek, a stream flowing orange with acid mine drainage, one of Vintondale's few stories of renewed hope is beginning.
This once was Vinton Coal Co. land. What remains are 35 acres of creekside flatland, near death, coated black with waste coal and scrubgrass.
But in another year, it will become a patch of reborn earth -- lush with green and rich in water-cleansing wetlands, says the man who dreamed up the metamorphosis six years ago.
"This will be dramatic," said T. Allan Comp, a mix of historian and environmentalist who fathered the idea and gave birth to nonprofit Acid Mine Drainage & Art Inc., a Johnstown agency overseeing the $350,000 project. "These will be verdant, wildlife-rich wetlands, probably the most wildlife-rich area in the region."
That's the part of the black wasteland being reincarnated to treat mine-tainted water. The rest will be resurrected as a baseball field, a soccer field, a bike-racing track, horseshoe pits and picnic shelters -- once impossible recreational luxuries in hardscrabble Vintondale.
The development, though, is about more than Vintondale or Blacklick Creek.
It's no accident that planners chose the Vintondale site, along the Ghost Town Trail, a 12-mile bike and hiking path that draws an estimated 70,000 users a year. Comp and associates aren't planning just to treat tainted water; they're hoping to do it for an audience.
Ellen Micoli of Acid Mine Drainage & Art Inc. said this wasn't the worst acid mine runoff along the south branch of the Blacklick, part of the larger Kiskiminetas-Conemaugh River Basin that feeds the Allegheny River just above Freeport.
Nor is the cleanup system anything new. Similar ones have dotted the coal regions for two decades.
But Vintondale's acid mine drainage cleanup project is the showroom model, the prototype built to teach the rest of Appalachia, a region awash in mine-tainted water, what it can do for itself.
"If people bicycling past stop and say, 'What in the world's that? Why don't we do something like that?' That's enough for me," said Comp, now a program analyst with the federal Office of Surface Mining.
Acid Mine Drainage already is considering two other, larger projects.
In the watershed around Dark Shade Creek, 28 square miles of northeast Somerset County, the agency is looking at a cleanup from 21 acid mine drainage discharges.
Near Portage, Cambria County, the agency is considering plans for treating a font of pollution called the Hughes Bore Hole. This is where a hole drilled 80 years ago to drain underground mines spews four tons of dissolved metals daily.
Right now, though, the focus is on Vintondale, where the reclaimed land will be given over to the borough and to the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy.
For passers-by who take Comp up on his offer to ask, "What's that?" here's the short course.
The ponds and wetlands are a passive acid mine drainage cleanup system, a network in which mine water will be stripped of much of the aluminum, iron, manganese and acidity it picked up underground. The system is called passive because nature, not expensive machinery, does the hard work.
At Vintondale, the plan is to flaunt the process. Along the system's six settling ponds -- the largest the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool -- they are planting trees and shrubs, color coordinating them so that they sweep from red to yellow to green, symbolizing the return of the water to health.
They even hope to turn a little-used Vintondale church into a center where visitors can learn about the project.
"Potentially, this will be a beautiful sign of healing the problem of acid mine drainage," said Julie Bargmann, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia and landscape designer for the project.
The baseball fields, bike track and picnic areas were penciled into the project to draw local interest. Given the planners' view that traditional government environmental funds were too shallow to fix acid mine drainage sites across Appalachia, designers wanted to catch the eye of novel funding sources as well. They found 15.
For instance, PennDOT agreed to kick in $92,100, paying for the creation of 6.14 acres of Vintondale wetlands. That's compensation for wetlands that road builders expect to destroy when they improve nearby Route 22 across southeastern Indiana County.
The Vira Heinz Endowment contributed $50,000 for the color-coordinated trees along the settling ponds.
Meanwhile, as equipment rumbled onto the flatlands this fall and began moving ground, Vintondale snapped to attention.
"For years, nothing has been started or completed in this town. There were a lot of good ideas, but they never got farther than the drawing table," said Jane Marines, president of the borough's fledgling recreation commission. "Now that the bulldozers are over there, people are coming out, showing interest, giving us ideas about what they'd like to see."
Volunteer firefighters built picnic benches. Adults tossed in ideas for the park. Youngsters asked planners to pencil in dimensions for a bicycle course. Designers are pondering a footbridge or two that would span the 100-foot Blacklick stream bed and give Vintondale a closer link to its park.
Maybe all this cleaning up will salve Vintondale's wounded morale, helping the town to remember that armies of miners who produced coal here had a prouder legacy than pollution.
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