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CIVIL ENGINEERING NEWS
WATER RESOURCES
When the historian Allan Comp surveyed the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania in the early 1990s for a preservation project that was to focus on the region's heritage, he came across one type of landmark again and again: abandoned coal mines. Numerous sites where industry had once prospered had become town dumps and worse. In many cases, Comp found, the sole legacy of the mining industry was a poisonous discharge of water known as acid mine drainage (AMD)-thick with such minerals exposed in the mines as iron and manganese-which had to be constantly cleansed.
"The thing I saw in all these acid mine drainage treatment systems was that people were putting large amounts of public money in hidden places," Comp says. Wondering if there weren't better ways to approach the problem, Comp envisioned a group of professionals from very different disciplines-environmental engineers, landscape architects, artists, and historians-converging to transform an abandoned coal mine into a heritage park. "The idea," Comp says, "was to take an environmental liability and not just fix it, but celebrate it-turn it into a community asset that people want to be a part of."
That's exactly what he did. In the mid-1990s Comp enlisted the help of Bob Deason, the senior hydrogeologist for Earthtech, Inc., an environmental engineering firm based in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Comp and Deason chose a 35 acre (14 ha) mine site adjacent to the small borough of Vintondale that had been closed for nearly 30 years. Acidic water from the...