Federal Creek in Athens County is one of Ohio’s cleanest watersheds, but its water quality is threatened by a proposed strip mine.
The 23 mile-long creek has come a long way since mining in its watershed stopped in the early 1960s. This stream, which meanders through eastern Athens County, was once heavily polluted. Its water quality was compromised by the many coal mines that operated along its banks from the 1870s on.
But today, Federal Creek is one of the cleanest in Ohio. Its water quality is listed as extremely high, and, in fact, it is a “reference” stream for the Western Allegheny Plateau with Special High Quality Waters rating.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency compares the purity of other streams by using Federal Creek as a standard or mark of excellence.
There are heron rookeries along its banks; beavers; and many different types of fish in the stream including redear sunfish, panfish and steelhead trout.
But this success story is now threatened by a 347-acre strip mine in the headwaters of Federal Creek. This strip mine, in Joy Hollow on Sharp’s Fork of Federal Creek, would once again reintroduce strip mining to Athens County and could damage the watershed that has fully recovered from its history.
The Sharp’s Fork sub watershed represents almost a third of the Federal Creek watershed, and Federal Creek is one of the four largest watersheds of the Hocking River.
Landowners who have leased their properties for strip mining say that no harm will come to the creek, but there are a number of potential threats in the permitted area.
The re-mining will auger into old strip mines to get the coal that is left. It will also go down into the earth to reach deeper coal veins.
The coal here, Pittsburgh No. 8, is high in sulfur. When the coal and the rock surrounding it are exposed to water, they create a toxic soup know as acid mine drainage — highly acidic water rich in heavy metals that can be harmful to humans, animals and plants.
Oxford Resource Partners, LP mining application includes plans for dealing with this discharge, but flash floods and accidents could easily overwhelm the temporary water treatment facilities the company has planned. In some cases, all that is between the permit area and the creek is a barricade of plastic and straw bales.
Oxford Resource Partners, LP mining application also calls for relocating and reconstructing more than 686 feet of streams that feed Sharp’s Fork.
Oxford, in its permit application, says its reason for doing this is that Oxford Resource Partners, LP has to “maximize coal recovery, and that’s not possible without affecting the (creek) buffer zone.”
The company states that it has to disturb the buffer zones or else “the vast majority of the coal would be orphaned,” and for its shareholders, “not being able to get a return on their investment would be devastating.”
Devastating is what the mining could be to this “reference” stream for the Western Allegheny Plateau — one that has taken more than 50 years to come back to life.
Sandra Sleight-Brennan is a member of Save Our Rural Environment, an informal group of concerned citizens in the Federal Valley watershed.
