Half century of pollution quite enough
Mining's environmental toll on Northeast Pennsylvania was so vast that it has taken many decades merely to mitigate. Great progress has been made in capping abandoned mines, diminishing culm piles, reclaiming some horribly scarred land, and on and on.
But as mine operators fled with their wealth, they left behind problems so severe that even solutions led to other environmental problems.
Perhaps the greatest of those is the borehole under the Lackawanna River in Old Forge, near its confluence with the Susquehanna River. As mines closed and companies turned off the pumps, much of the Lackawanna Valley became susceptible to flooding, as reported by David Falchek in The Times-Tribune.
The "solution" was to drill a wide hole, a release valve, into the lowest-lying of the interconnected abandoned mines, allowing the pressure of the underground water to force mine water into the river, leaving dry the densely populated valley above.
It served that purpose at an enormous cost. Millions of gallons of water that flow from the hole each day carry with it large amounts of metals that fall to the river bottom and render it incapable of sustaining aquatic life and spreading pollution as far south as the Chesapeake Bay.
For 50 years since the hole was drilled in 1962, untold tons of metals, some toxic, have been carried into the river. That should be enough.
River advocates long have dreamed of a water treatment plant at the borehole to remove the metals from the water. Clean water would be discharged into the river; metals would be sold for industrial use or properly disposed.
The region's state and federal lawmakers should make that project a priority as efforts continue at both levels to restore the Chesapeake Bay. The borehole is the largest single source of pollution for the bay and, as such, should be a principal target for correction.
Several major local sewer systems are under federal orders to correct design flaws, also from the 1960s, that have deposited millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Lackawanna-Susquehanna-Chesapeake system. There is no reason to allow the borehole to continue its destructive daily work as other problems are corrected.