"Two centuries after the coal miners arrived, residents are racing to save the stream and bring back the trout."
"When the lingering sun of late May inches along to peer down on the Tioga River — its water glistening — it does so as birds chirp overhead, as a chipmunk darts through rustling riverbed brush, and as yellow butterflies dance into the gorge.
This river doesn’t roar; it trudges along steadily. Water laps over rocks and flushes back to create a current that freshwater kayakers might consider a Class 2. As it does, it leaves behind deposits of minerals dredged up from mines that coal barons dug nearby more than two centuries ago.
Standing above the river on a bridge in Blossburg, a North Central Pennsylvania town of 1,500 that straddles the Tioga, it’s not immediately apparent that there’s anything wrong with the red-rocked river. Except, while life teems along its banks, there is virtually nothing beneath the water’s surface.
In this stretch of the Tioga, there are no fish. There are no bugs — save for a small number of macroinvertebrates. And there haven’t been for decades. Five coal mines that line its tributaries, left unsealed at the end of their productive lives, have long leaked highly acidic water rich in metals like iron and aluminum that chokes out aquatic life. It’s a process known as acid mine drainage; as of 2020, abandoned coal mines left more than 850,000 acres still damaged across the country — 84% of them in Appalachia."
