A Dead Orange Creek Got 39,000 Tons of Limestone — Now Wild Trout Are Born in It Again

In September 2009, about 50 people rode a school bus into the Pennsylvania hills to celebrate a creek that had been dead for most of a century. Mine acid had turned Babb Creek orange, and now the state said it met water quality standards. The fix leaned on limestone, about 39,000 tons of it at one treatment site alone. But the fisherman who started the fight, Bob McCullough, was not there. He had died in 2007. Years earlier, a state official told him he would not see it done in his lifetime. So, was that official right? And the creek gave that official every reason to think so. On July 30, 1990, state biologists sampled four spots on Babb Creek below the old coal mines, and they did not find a single fish. The same crew did catch fish that day, but only at a control spot upstream, above where any mine water came in. Up there, they found seven different kinds. The reason for those empty samples was sitting right on the bottom of the creek. The EPA's write-up on Babb Creek says the streambed was covered in iron and aluminium that had settled out of the water. Coal mining in these hills of Tioga County goes back to around the end of the Civil War. For decades, miners dug tunnels through the coal and then walked away from them. Water still runs through those old workings. It picks up iron and other metals on the way, and it comes back out of the hillside as acid. That is acid mine drainage. When the iron in it meets the air, it turns orange and stains the rocks and the stream bed. At one old mine complex here, the Anna S, scientists measured the outflow at a pH between 2.8 and 3.1. Neutral water is a 7, and the lower the number, the more acidic the water. Water like that is toxic to trout, and to the insects trout eat. And according to the EPA, Bab Creek was already considered biologically dead by the early 1900s. Then it got worse. In the 1970s, strip miners came back and started peeling the ground off the top of the old Anna S. tunnels to get at the coal that was left. The U.S. Geological Survey was measuring one of the mine's outlets at the time, a tunnel mouth called the Hunter Drift. From 1975 to 1979, its acidity roughly doubled, from 348 milligrams per liter to 710. By 1990, the mining had stopped, but the acid kept coming. About 14 miles of Babb Creek could not support fish, and the pollution fouled 5 miles of Pine Creek, the bigger trout stream it flows into. Pine Creek is where people noticed first. Through the 1970s and 1980s, fly fishermen on the stretch below Babb Creek watched the insect hatches they lived by start to thin out. The hatches came in smaller, the big peak hatches stopped happening, and some kinds of flies stopped showing up at all. Tom Finkbeiner, who ran a tackle shop on Pine Creek, used to drive out in the afternoons to look for brown drakes, a big mayfly that dances in the hemlock shade before it mates. One day, in the late 1980s, he walked down to a pool called the Dutchman and saw just one. He said it felt like looking at the last carrier pigeon. McCulloch fished that water too, mostly at night. His grandfather took him night fishing once and he never stopped. He had worked as an environmental planner for Lycoming County and served as a director of Trout Unlimited. And by the end of the 1980s, he was in his 60s and angry about what was happening to Pine Creek. He was also the kind of man who finished things. In Lycoming County, he spearheaded the cleanup of 231 roadside and streamside dumps. So, he sat down with the people who could fix it. At a meeting at the State Forestry Office in Wellsboro, he went around the table and asked each state agency what it could do about Bab Creek. Every answer was some version of no. The problem had been going on for over 100 years. The budgets were stretched thin. Nobody even knew if it could be fixed. And one official told him, This problem is so massive, you are not going to see it accomplished in your lifetime. Keep that sentence in mind because by the end of this story we will know exactly how right it was. McCulloch sat through that whole first round without a word or a change of expression. Then he stood up, leaned on the table and said he had made a mistake in how he set up the meeting. They were going around the table a second time and now each of them had to come up with something their own office could do. When someone started to object he cut them off. The first man offered an intern who could monitor the acid, and McCulloch took it. When somebody asked how they would ever pay for it, he told them they would get the money. That is how a friend of his described the meeting in a local magazine years later. Some of that money came out of a federal courtroom. By 1990, an environmental group McCulloch had helped start had taken Antrim Mining to court. Antrim had been strip mining on top of old abandoned tunnels since 1982, and the complaint said its digging had broken into those deep mines and made the acid in Babb Creek and Pine Creek worse. That year, Antrim agreed to stop mining and reclaim the site. Between that settlement and a separate order from the state, the company also had to build a treatment plant for the water coming out of its mine. So, the company accused of making the acid worse ended up building a plant to treat it. Money from a fee on waste dumped at a landfill tied to the case started going to the cleanup. That fee mattered more than it sounds, because it was not a one-time check. Every load that came into the landfill sent a little more money toward Babb Creek. And the EPA says the watershed group was still using that money years later to run and maintain its treatment systems. The first real fix went in on October 8, 1990, near Arnott, an old coal town. Volunteers from Trout Unlimited and soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard built two limestone diversion wells, using an idea from Scandinavia that a Penn State aquatic ecologist named Dean Arnold brought to the team. A diversion well is a concrete or metal cylinder about five or six feet across, partly filled with limestone gravel. A pipe carries water from upstream and shoots it into the bottom of the cylinder, so the water churns up through the stones. The acid reacts with the limestone and gets neutralized, and all that churning grinds the gravel into a fine powder that washes into the creek and keeps working on the acid downstream. Those first two wells raised the stream's pH from 4.5 to 6. For Babb Creek, that was the first proof the rock could push the acid back. The catch is that a diversion well eats itself. The limestone dissolves, so somebody has to keep refilling it. On a different Pennsylvania creek, the US Geological Survey found that each diversion well went through about a ton of limestone every week. The work paid off quickly. In 1991, a lime dosing system started treating about half the acid flowing down Wilson Creek into Babb Creek and it made an immediate difference downstream on Pine Creek. More diversion wells on a small tributary called Red Run took its pH from 4.2 up to between 6.5 and 7. A wetland built at another old mine pushed its water from 3.5 to 7. And in May 1995, Finkbeiner saw big hatches of brown drakes and green drakes on Pine Creek again, the first in 15 years. That same year, the local sportsman's club in Arnott released trout into Babb Creek. That is worth slowing down on, because it is not the same thing as trout coming back. A stocked trout is raised in a hatchery and dropped into the water. It can swim in a creek without that creek being able to raise a single fish on its own. A wild trout is one that was born in the stream, from eggs laid in its own gravel. That only happens when the water stays clean enough, long enough, for eggs to hatch and young fish to survive. Stocking Babb Creek showed people were hopeful, but only a wild trout would show the creek was alive again. And in Babb Creek itself, the proof still was not there. In August 1998, a state biologist checked one spot on the main creek and found no mayflies at all. Another report that September said the creek had fewer animals than a stream its size should, and few of the kinds that need clean water. That year, according to a history written by one of its leaders, the people doing the work formally organized as the Babb Creek Watershed Association to see the job through and keep it running afterward. The next year, Antrim Mining handed its treatment plant over to the state, along with 100 acres of land and $1.5 million to cover 50 years of operating costs. Within a couple of years, the Watershed Group was running the plant. If you like watching damaged places come back to life, subscribe to Beyond Blueprint. Restoration stories like this one are what this channel is about. But the second biggest source of acid in the whole watershed was still pouring out of the Anna S. That old mine sits under roughly 850 acres of ground, and it drains out through three big discharges. The Hunter Drift, the one whose acid doubled in the 1970s, drains about 400 acres of tunnels on its own. Fixing it would take something much bigger than a few wells. And McCulloch was running out of time. By the early 2000s, he was close to 80. The Watershed Association worked with Bob Hedin, a mine water scientist from Hedin Environmental in Pittsburgh. Years later, Hedin remembered McCulloch as a challenging guy. Every time Hedin gave him a number or a date, McCulloch wanted it faster and cheaper. And he still wanted it done right. In 2003 and 2004, they built what Hedin designed. Two treatment systems with eight big ponds called vertical flow ponds, followed by wetlands spread across about 20 acres. A vertical flow pond is a giant pit built in layers. Mine water fills the top of the pond. It sinks down through a layer of compost, then down through a thick bed of limestone and drains out through perforated pipes at the bottom. Some people in the field have treated the compost as a nuisance, but it does a real job. It strips the oxygen out of the water and changes the iron chemically, and that helps keep the iron from coating the limestone in a hard shell and shutting it down. Then the limestone takes on the acid. That is where the 39,000 tons comes from. Those eight ponds hold 35,483 metric tons of limestone, which works out to about 39,000 of the shorter tons used in the United States. On top of that went close to 5,000 cubic meters of compost, and the whole build cost about $2.5 million. In 2020, Hedden called it the largest and most expensive mine water treatment project any non-profit group in the United States had ever put in. A company based in State College, Pennsylvania, called Greymont, supplied the limestone and lime used in Babb Creek's treatment systems. And it works! Over 15 years of monitoring, the two systems took in an average of about 500 gallons a minute of water with a pH as low as 2.8, and sent it out at a pH of 7.5, with almost no iron or aluminium left in it. In 106 samples, the outflow never once came out without a cushion of extra alkalinity, the chemical buffer that soaks up acid. Over those 15 years, the ponds produced about 5,600 metric tons of that buffer. And by Hedden's math, they did it for about half the cost of the lime treatment plants Pennsylvania was running at the time. But a pond full of limestone is not a one-time fix, either. The materials inside get used up. In 2012, after eight years of treatment, the monitoring showed the ponds were starting to lose ground. So, crews dug out the old compost and replaced it in two rounds, finishing in 2016, four ponds at a time, without shutting down the treatment. The first round cost about $220,000, and the second about $292,000, and each rebuild is expected to hold for another 10 to 15 years. The older systems need the same care. A pond built in 1994 at the Klondike mine had clogged up, and in 2016 it was rebuilt for about $253,000. Hedden put the stakes plainly at a conservation fair in Wellsborough. If that system stops working, there's problems downstream. Meanwhile, the state kept testing the creek. In 1996, the state had put Babb Creek on its official list of impaired waters. That is, the list every state keeps under the Federal Clean Water Act for streams too polluted to meet basic standards. By 2002, close to 14 miles of the creek were on it. The stretch of Pine Creek below it came off that list the same year. In 2006, Babb Creek's water met the state standards for iron, aluminium, manganese and pH. In March 2009, state biologists scored four sites on an index of aquatic life, where a stream needs a 63 to come off the polluted list. Bab Creek's sites scored in the 80s and 90s, and a variety of mayflies had turned up again. That September, the state asked the EPA to take Bab Creek off its list of impaired streams, and in 2010, 13 miles of it came off. All told, the EPA put the bill at about $10 million across 16 projects. Pennsylvania's environmental secretary at the time said they had turned a lifeless stream into a thriving sport fishery. McCullough had died in 2007, at 84, two years before that celebration. At the event, a member of the Watershed Association said it was a shame he could not be with us. He was not the only one missing. Two other early leaders of the cleanup, a former district forester named Jack Sherwood and Phil Stillerman, who founded a group to protect the Pine Creek headwaters, had also died before that day. So the official at that table in Wellsboro was right. McCullough did not live to see the job finished. At least, not on paper. Go back to 1999. That year, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission surveyed Babb Creek and found fish at spots where the state had found nothing in 1990. And, according to the watershed group's own history, that survey turned up brook and brown trout that had hatched in the creek itself. Those were wild trout, born in water that had been written off as dead since the early 1900s. And the survey that found them came eight years before McCulloch died. When his old fishing friend wrote about the creek in 2017, both kinds were still reproducing in Bab Creek on their own. The paperwork came too late for him. The trout did not.