After two decades of seeking funds, Richard Mine Treatment Plant a reality

Apr. 23—MORGANTOWN — For decades, the Richard Mine leeched toxic elements and acid into Deckers Creek.

The thousands of pounds of drainage seeping out of the mine killed off wildlife that made its home inside the creek's water and suffused Morgantown with a sulfur smell.

No longer.

On Monday, officials from the U.S. Department of Interior, Friends of Deckers Creek and the West Virginia Rivers Coalition unveiled the Richard Mine Acid Mine Drainage Treatment Facility and $140.7 million in federal funds for the project. The water treatment facility will extract elements such as aluminum and iron from the mine seepage as well as address an old problem with the state's waterways.

"This facility is going to bring Deckers Creek back to life," Autumn Crowe, interim executive director of the West Virginia Water Coalition, said. "It's going to improve the whole watershed of Deckers Creek. It's going to be huge. All of those improvements will trickle down into the Mon River and Ohio River. We need pieces all over the state to make the whole state healthy again."

President Joe Biden's Investing in America agenda helped pay for the project. The program's initial allocation of $140 million went to West Virginia to help clean up abandoned mine sites and clear up polluted waterways. Steve Feldgus, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals at the U.S. Department of the Interior, said the program would also help create jobs across the state related to the creation and operation of these water treatment facilities.

Feldgus said he saw the location last March, when there was only a concrete pad. Now, it's a fully finished facility, capable of ingesting water seeping out of the mountain and the extracting toxic minerals within, before releasing the clean water into the river. Useful elements such as aluminum, iron and other rare earth minerals can then be sold at fair market value.

"There's things with amazing names, like neodymium and praseodymium," Feldgus said. "This whole laundry list of elements that we need for wind turbines, smartphones, batteries, this is going to be another very helpful source of those minerals."

Feldgus said each reclamation site takes around 500- to 1,000 days to build, creating jobs in the construction industry. The resulting facility also needs workers to run. Once an environmentally devastated area is reclaimed, it can be used for new development, such as a shopping center or business park, further adding jobs to the economy.

"We pay a lot of attention over time to make sure our investment is doing what we want," Feldgus said.

The main plant took roughly $10 million to build, according to Travis Parsons, deputy director of the Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation program from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. Parsons said the facility should offset around 85% of its operation costs every year from the sale of the rare earth minerals the plant collects as it cleans the water from the mine.

"Overall, the goal is to reclaim the streams and rivers, so if the communities and wildlife are able to use it, it's a win for everybody," Parsons said.

West Virginia has the largest inventory of abandoned mines of any state in the U.S., Feldgus said. Abandoned mines can leech poisonous substances into the surrounding environment, making it lethal for wildlife and dangerous for humans. Feldgus said West Virginia will be a prime beneficiary of the federal bipartisan infrastructure law signed by Biden, with regards to dealing with the state's abandoned mines problem.

The facility has been a long time coming. Brian Hurley, director of Friends of Deckers Creek, said his group had been beating the drum on doing something to clean up the river since the early 2000s. He said it had been a continual merry-go-round of receiving funding promises only to have them pulled away.

Finally, after the third or fourth time, Hurley said West Virginia DEP, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and Northeast Natural Energy stepped in to pay for the treatment system.

Hurley said the water used to run red with acid, and rocks within the creek were orange. The water conservation group put much work into the creek, now it's a well regarded trout and fishery creek. Swimmers enjoy the creek during the summer.

With the addition of the mine drainage treatment facility, the creek can be even cleaner. Hurley remembers receiving excited phone calls after news the facility was coming to the creek broke within the community.

"A lot of them were like, 'is this real? Is this really happening,'" he said. "I'm proud to say that today it was real. We have built the Richard Mine Treatment Plant."

Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com