State hopes to erase I-99 mistake

HEILWOOD -- When the state raised the curtain on its $40 million Skytop Mountain cleanup plan last week, it thrust a remnant of Pennsylvania's old king-coal economy into a supporting role for a new high-tech marketplace.

If Interstate 99 through Centre County is an $800 million investment in the transportation network feeding the Penn State area, then this lonely windswept piece of Pennsylvania highlands in Indiana County is destined to become a $27 million storage space for something that got in the way.

What'll be parked there -- after 40,000 truck trips -- is a million tons of rock laced with sulfur and metals that is capable of turning streams into fish cemeteries and well water into something that tastes awful and smells like rotten eggs.

It's a massive undertaking, a monumental attempt to erase a monumental mistake, and the idea of it has left those living near the old mine with mixed emotions, all of them bad: memories of yesterday's coal heyday hardships and feelings of just being used.

"I think it's a big waste of money, and I don't like to see it come because you don't know what'll be next," said 55-year-old Jim Makin, who's lived near the site his whole life. "Once they start dumping, who knows what they'll bring?"

Folks like Makin know the old mine not as the Robindale site, as state Transportation and Environmental Protection departments refer to it, but as the Barnes & Tucker mine, once a deep-shaft mine that was part of a coal industry that rose and fell with the railroads, then yielded the energy economy to oil.

Dumping ground

Barnes & Tucker closed the mine 20 years ago. The ties and rails that once carried coal cars in and out have vanished. An imprint that traces the rail route around what was the coal yard is all that remains.

One thing that remains is a huge "bony pile," a mixture of coal, rocks and clay that mine operators used to leave behind because, at the time, it wasn't worth burning to make electricity.

After Robindale Energy Services of Johnstown bought the property, it inherited the bony pile and began using a big area next to it to dump a coal-burning waste product, fly ash. Fly ash is alkaline and is able to counteract the acid-bearing rocks from Skytop.

The fly ash pile has grown more than 140 feet high alongside the bony pile, and they appear as twin hills reaching above the Allegheny Plateau's horizon.

PennDOT's $27 million Robindale contract to truck in and dump pyritic rocks atop the fly ash bed will also enable the company to load the emptied trucks with a million tons of the boney pile material to haul to a waste-coal generating plant, possibly in nearby Ebensburg.

As the boney pile dwindles, the fly ash pile will grow.

"They're going to build us a new mountain," said Vince Dumm, whose view looks across a spacious front lawn to the old mine field.

Robindale officials could not be reached for comment.

Fly ash treatment

The site has already been permitted by the DEP for fly ash disposal. At the base of the fly ash pile, plastic pipes stick out and convey drainage that eventually flows to a stream called Dutch Run. Before it gets there, it undergoes treatment in a series of ponds that make the mine field look like a swamp.

Some of the raw drainage from the fly ash pile looks sickly. On Thursday, at the base of the fly ash pile, darkly colored liquid, red and orange, was oozing out of the pile in places and inching toward the ponds.

Gary Hoffman, PennDOT deputy secretary for highway administration, said the fly ash will create an impermeable bed under the pyritic rock from Skytop. The rocks will be mixed with lime to neutralize the pyrite. The big rock pile will be covered with an impervious liner. A leachate collection system will monitor and treat what runoff still gets out.

The treatment ponds already in place seem to work. A Centre Daily Times sample from Dutch Run downstream of the fly ash pile found the water clear and its pH normal. Pine Township Supervisor Jim Shirley said he has no complaints about Robindale's work to maintain the treatment system.

Impacting residents, roads

What does worry Shirley and each of 10 Pine Township residents interviewed is the impact of heavy trucks, loaded coming in and loaded going out, on three roads, about five miles in all, and on the people who live alongside the roads.

These roads resemble some of the roads that branch off old Route 220 through Taylor, Worth and Huston townships in Centre County. Small family-owned commercial undertakings mix with purely residential homes. Signs here and there offer fresh brown eggs for sale, deer processing and excavation.

A million tons of rocks to be hauled by 50 trucks making three round trips a day for 200 haul days works out to a truck going by every two minutes during a 10-hour day. One of the roads is a two-lane with painted center line and a lot of potholes. The other two are narrower, unpainted and potholed as well.

"What they'll probably do is tear up the road," said Charles Lydic, who plans to replace an old mobile home he rents out with a new doublewide. "That's a lot of trucks going through here -- there's children up there, too."

Two Penns Manor Area School District buses pick students up in the morning and drop them off in the afternoon. Anita Stem, a 22-year resident, has a son in high school who takes the bus. She remembers the fly ash hauling a decade ago, when "the trucks went really fast."

"I think at the moment that the road is not going to be able to handle the traffic," she said last week. "The road isn't wide enough. The road is in disrepair. They'll need to work on the road. They'll need to police the trucks. My basic concern is for the safety of the people."

State Sen. Jake Corman, R-Benner Township, asked about such concerns Thursday, said PennDOT should be made to repair Indiana County's local roads without taking money from the county's road improvements budget, just as PennDOT has pledged to clean up Skytop without using Centre County's allocation.

"PennDOT made the mistake," Corman said.

Acid rock spotlight shifts

PennDOT's mistake in Centre County has lit up the phone 75 miles to the west, in the Pine Township municipal building in Heilwood, an old red brick structure which is itself a remnant of mining operations.

It's usually not very busy at all there, secretary Jennifer Lindahl said, but last week the phone lit up with inquiries from residents and reporters. "All of a sudden, this acid rock's made me a movie star," she said.

On Friday, state Sen. Don White and state Rep. Dave Reed, the Indiana County commissioners and the Pine Township supervisors met there with a Robindale official. The elected officials told Robindale they were worried about the number of trucks and the drivers' sense of urgency pushing up truck speed.

Nearby resident Kathy Dumm, a nurse who commutes to Indiana borough, said she will have to lengthen her route to work to avoid the truck traffic. She usually goes by the old mine.

"That's my road," she said.

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.