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Mining could affect water quality at lake, geologist says
WAYNE — A proposal to expand mining operations onto public land next to East Lynn Lake could increase the rate at which potentially harmful minerals are dissolved in the lake and some of its tributaries, a Marshall University geology professor told Wayne County commissioners Monday.
“East Lynn Lake and a few of its tributaries are already listed as impaired bodies of water by the (West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection),” geology professor Ron Martino said. “Over time, the likelihood of mine drainage seeping into these bodies of water will increase, making water quality even worse.”
Martino’s comments came during a public meeting between county commissioners and Randall Maggard, environmental compliance manager for Argus Energy. The commission set up the meeting with Maggard to allow him to address concerns that commissioners have about the proposal.
Argus Energy and Rockspring Development want to lease 13,089 acres of government-owned land within the boundaries of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' East Lynn Lake project. The Corps of Engineers owns the land and mineral rights to approximately 24,000 acres around the lake.
The Corps of Engineers spent $37 million on acquiring property and building East Lynn Lake in the 1960s and another $55.5 million between 1977 and 1991 to acquire mineral rights around the lake to protect it from problems that come with coal mining.
But when the Water Resources Development Act was passed in 1999, Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., successfully inserted an amendment that removed the Corps of Engineers' consent authority over the mineral rights at East Lynn Lake. The amendment instead placed that authority with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Today, East Lynn Lake remains the only publicly-owned property in the nation where the Bureau of Land Management can bypass approval of the surface management agency (in this case, the Corps of Engineers) to lease mineral rights, according to bureau officials.
Argus and Rockspring would mine approximately 26 million tons of coal on the East Lynn Lake property over a 10- to 15-year period, according to the most recent draft environmental impact statement on the proposal. They would use underground "room-and-pillar" mining methods to extract the coal. No surface mining would be performed, according to the 359-page draft report. The coal companies paid a global environmental consulting firm approximately $1 million to prepare the draft report.
Maggard said the proposed coal lease is crucial to the 600 jobs that Argus Energy and Rockspring Development provide in Wayne County. The companies have enough coal reserves on private land to mine for another 10 or 15 years. Obtaining the coal lease on the East Lynn Lake property would secure those jobs for an additional 15 years, he said.
The proposed mining area would come as close as 200 feet to the lake and 1,580 feet from the earthen dam, according to the draft report. However, the buffer zone between mining activity and the lake would be much greater than 200 feet, Maggard told commissioners during the meeting.
The buffer zone would be 200 feet beginning at the emergency spillway elevation of the lake, which is about 40 feet higher than the maximum summer pool elevation, Maggard said. That means mining activity would occur several hundred feet away from the lake, not the 200-foot buffer that is mentioned in the draft report, he said.
That does not alleviate concerns about the impact that mining near the lake could have on water quality, Martino said.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection placed East Lynn Lake on its list of impaired bodies of water in 2006, saying that its water sample results failed to meet the water quality criteria that protect wildlife. The DEP did not detail what was found in the samples in its report, nor did it establish what caused it.
Martino said the DEP added Camp Creek, Rich Creek and Kiah Creek to its list earlier this year. All three streams are tributaries of East Lynn Lake and border tracts of public land that Argus Energy and Rockspring Development want to mine.
Camp Creek had high traces of aluminum and iron and low pH levels, Martino said. Kiah Creek had high levels of manganese, while Rich Creek had high iron contents.
Read more about this story in Tuesday’s Herald-Dispatch.
