Community Corner

Cleaning Up Chartiers Creek

A guided tour shows the workings of the passive abandoned mine remediation system at the Upper St. Clair conservation area.

Take a look at Chartiers Creek, and you’ll notice the water isn’t exactly crystal blue.

If it appears to be kind of muddy, the brownish color actually is the result of drainage from the many mines that once operated nearby.

Efforts to clean the water include a system of ponds and wetlands set up in the northern portion of the Wingfield Pines conservation area in Upper St. Clair.

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On Sunday, a tour of the passive abandoned mine remediation system was conducted by the man whose expertise helped guide its construction. Dr. Robert Hedin, president of Hedin Environmental in Mt. Lebanon, said his consulting firm works primarily with issues regarding coal mines.

“I’m an ecologist, and so we do things passively,” he explained. “We try to treat water without chemicals, without energy. We try to do things using natural processes.”

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As for the natural processes at Wingfield Pines, “It’s all gravity and air.”

Here’s how it works:

  • Iron-rich water from the mine flows to a discharge fountain pipe, which has 150 jets spouting water to create a splashing effect, which in turn exposes as much water surface to the air as possible as it empties into a large pond.
  • When the dissolved iron comes in contact with the air, it oxidizes and becomes ferric (iron) oxide, a solid that is heavier than water and settles to the bottom of the pond.
  • The water moves slowly through five ponds, during which time the iron oxide sinks and collects at the bottom. Troughs between the ponds help to keep the water flowing slowly and consistently.
  • A wetlands area serves as the final filter before the water enters the creek, with the remaining iron oxide clinging to rushes, sedges and other plant.

“It’s really very simple,” Hedin said. “You just want to aerate the water and retain it long enough so that the water will stay in the ponds. We’ve actually found that if the iron is very clean, we can recover it, and if we dry it enough and process it enough we can sell it. The main thing we’ve been selling it as is a pigment.”

The primary buyer, he said, is Virginia-based Hoover Color Corp., which produces blended iron oxide pigments for paints and other coloring applications.

Eight years ago, Hedin conducted a study for the Chartiers Creek Watershed Association of all the mine drainage affecting the waterway.

“There are actually eight big flows of mine water that come into Chartiers Creek and make it look muddy all the time,” he said, noting that the drainage at Wingfield Pines represented the fourth-largest source of iron.

In 2001, Allegheny Land Trust purchased the 80-acre Wingfield Pines property, which previously served as the site of a golf course and swimming pool. A few years later, Hedin started working with the organization on developing a plan to address the mine discharge.

“We came up with a treatment system and put a price to it, and Allegheny Land Trust went out and got state funding to install it,” he said. “We built the treatment system in July 2009. Since we built the system, we’ve had clean water going into the creek.”

It’s still not quite crystal. But it’s getting there.


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