Pennsylvania Streams and Why You Should Care

Everyone knows about farm runoff and other pollutants that can get into the water supply. But do people really know just how far away things can effect one of the most important resources in the world, fresh water streams?

Here is every single mapped stream in the state of Pennsylvania! Did you know second only to Alaska, PA has the most streams of any state?

Acid mine drainage is the result of chemical reactions with sulfides in rocks and the runaway reaction with sulfuric acid

Above is the reaction that is the main problem when it comes to AMD (acid mine drainage and I will refer to it as such from now on.) that being pyrite. Pyrite can be found in almost every mine in the world and is virtually unavoidable, which becomes a problem with how we go about mining and throwing out the garbage we do not use. When we go mining for ores we grind up the rock to get farther into the mine or to get the targeted ore out, when we do this we are severely crushing up the rock, sometimes into a fine dust. The stuff that goes unused while then be dumped outside into big piles called tailings. This is the source where AMD starts. With these tailing piles you create a breeding ground for chemical reactions, this is due to the extreme amount of surface area we have introduced through crushing up the rock. So, when it rains, the water will react with the crushed up pyrite and go through the reactions shown above. This will eventually make its way into streams and lower the pH to such acidic levels that even arsenic and lead can dissolve into lethal levels.

The process is essentially this, "The basic concept of an AMD treatment system is to raise the pH level of impacted waters and remove metals. The pH scale measures how acidic or basic a substance is on a 0-14 scale. The average pH level of fresh water is around 7 (which is neutral, neither acidic nor basic) while streams affected by acid mine drainage can have a pH as acidic as 2. To put this into perspective, this means that acid mine drainage water is 100,000 times more acidic than neutral water." (ACID MINE DRAINAGE TREATMENT FACILITIES – REVERSING HUNDREDS OF YEARS OF POLLUTION TO BRING PENNSYLVANIA’S STREAMS AND RIVERS BACK TO LIFE).

Doing this reverse acidity process can be difficult and expensive, but the biggest problem is that it takes a long time to clean the water, so the total flux of AMD water is hard to measure but it is also on a long term timescale. It will take many facilities to even potentially combat the current situation of AMD in our streams.

If you want to learn more specifics about AMD take a look below at the Wikipedia page on it, this is also where I got the equations posted previously in the story.