Flowering lily pads float on a lotus pond. Pollinators buzz through patches of coneflower and marigold. Paths wind through deep green woodlands, hazy meadows and vivid gardens at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, highlighting the flora of the Allegheny Plateau ecoregion.
But the land west of Pittsburgh the garden sits on hasn't always been a green oasis. Twenty years ago the garden was a brownfield and 70 years ago it was an active coal mine. So when the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden took over the site, they had to deal with its industrial legacy.
The biggest problem? Acid mine drainage — or the water that comes from an active or abandoned mine. It often looks orange and contains toxic chemicals that can leach into the soil and flow into water sources. “It’s very acidic, something close to vinegar or something that you clean with,” said Keith Kaiser, executive director of the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. “It’s not what you grow plants in. Nothing really grows and pH water of two.”
Western Pennsylvania isn’t the only region tending a hangover from its coal-mining past. In fact, the state of Pennsylvania is home to the greatest concentration of abandoned mine lands in the country with more than 5,000 sites in need of remediation, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Acid mine drainage from abandoned mine sites flows into more than 7,000 streams across the state. Cleaning up and remediating the land would cost about $5 billion, according to the DEP.
Fixing this problem relies on federal funding, and a key source of that funding comes from the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization (AMLER) grant program. Since 2016, Congress has appropriated about $1 billion to the program, including hundreds of millions of dollars to projects in Pennsylvania, among them the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden in 2017. The grants go toward projects that reclaim abandoned mine land and transform it for community or economic use — parks, businesses or public water lines.
But a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed that while states are spending AMLER funds, they’re spending them “slowly,” according to Cardell Johnson, director at the GAO for natural resources and environment. Of the $1 billion originally set aside, only 29% — or about $290 million — has been spent so far. States face a long line to get their projects approved, delaying projects and jeopardizing future funds for communities next to old mines.
“If Congress sees that, ‘Hey, this money isn’t being spent.’ It could be an area where they pull back or reduce that [money],” Johnson said. “And that means that communities aren’t going to get that money. So it really is important for the Department of Interior to be able to move through the process quickly and approve these projects and get that money out to the states as Congress intended.”
A slow transformation
Acid mine drainage isn’t the only legacy hazard from abandoned mine sites. High walls that can collapse or cause erosion, mine subsidence under buildings and old discarded coal refuse piles dot the southwestern Pennsylvania landscape. Regrading dangerous highwalls, removing coal refuse piles, treating abandoned mine drainage and preventing and shoring up mine subsidence issues have to happen before a community can build something new.
There are innovative ways to turn over the land. Pennsylvania’s coal refuse power plants, which have been around since the 1980s, take the coal refuse piles and convert it to fuel. The process also creates an ash that can be taken back to the reclamation site to offset the acidity of the soil, helping in the cleanup. These cleanup efforts rely on programs like the AMLER program, according to Jaret Gibbons, executive director of ARIPPA, a trade group representing the coal reclamation energy industry.
“In the end, most or all of these sites don't have a responsible party to clean it up,” Gibbons said. “There is no private company or private entity. It falls on the state and federal government to do this cleanup, and partnering with private industry like the contractors, reclamation, energy industry and non-profits and environmental groups, we've been able to find ways to access these sites and do the cleanup. In the past it was never possible.”
The AMLER funds come up for renewal each year; this year, Pennsylvania got $28.6 million. In addition, Pennsylvania received an allocation of $244 million for abandoned mine land cleanup as part of the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act this June.
But getting the funds has been a challenge for states, according to Johnson. “The states want to be able to move faster, in terms of getting the money so that they can pump that into the communities.”
At the root of the problem is confusion between states and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the federal agency at the Department of Interior that approves the projects, according to the report. States felt they received unclear and conflicting guidance over things like whether a project can be built next to an abandoned mine or contracting rules. They also had proposals rejected or had to submit several revisions before they were ultimately approved. Along with issues staffing some key federal jobs, this lack of clarity resulted in delays of up to 1,000 days before the states were given the go-ahead.
“You've got a mine site,” Johnson said. “There's acid mine drainage that flows out into streams — you're not going to want to have people swimming that or other recreational activities. And so that just means a delay in those communities, being able to rebuild their economies and having people enjoy those lands.”
The report recommends that the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement provide clearer guidelines for states seeking the funds and start tracking the time it takes to approve each project to find approval bottlenecks.
The ultimate goal in making those funds easier to access is to facilitate more abandoned mine land success stories like the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. To clean up that site, the Botanic Garden created three passive water filter systems to treat the acid mine drainage, sending 25-million gallons of newly clean water into the region’s watershed each year. And it was done through the use of AMLER funds. But the work isn’t done yet — the garden still deals with some mine subsidence and acid runoff issues on parts of the 460-acre property, and maintaining those passive water filtration systems is continuous work.
Still, the majority of visitors who take in the garden’s 65 acres of woodlands and gardens, including 82,000 visitors last year, “probably aren’t aware of our story of land use” according to Beth Exton, external relations director at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden. But Exton said she thinks it's a valued use. “It wasn't something that we just ignored and never took care of. Some coal mines just end up being brownfields. But we've turned this into something that is not just green, but it's just a variety of other colors as well.”
