Midwestern Reclamation Site - Pike County, IN - Mines on Waymarking.com

The 270-acre Midwestern Site sits just north of Highway 64 about 4 miles east of the town of Arthur, Pike County, Indiana, within the larger 6,000-acre Mill Creek Abandoned Mine Land Area, which has significant value as a wildlife habitat.

Millions of years ago, when the area that is now called Southern Indiana was located around the equator, it was covered by a mixture of shallow inland seas and swampy areas. The waters eventually receded as the continents shifted locations, leading to the death of most of the tropical plants that existed in the area. As these plants died, they accumulated in layers, forming a carbon-rich material called peat over the next several thousand years. Subsequently, heavy layers of sediment were deposited over the peat, combining pressure and high temperatures to squeeze the water out of the peat and turn it into coal.

Layers of peat formed seams of coal, which were subsequently mined in strip mines such as those that existed on the land that is now the Midwestern Abandoned Mine Lands Reclamation Site. Unfortunately, the strip-mining process is not an environmentally-friendly one. Four mining companies mined coal at this site from August 1977 to November 1990. All four companies, as well as their bonding companies, went bankrupt, leaving the area in an unreclaimed state.

Prior to reclamation, site conditions included: exposed coal refuse, unreclaimed mine spoil, exposed high walls, old slurry ponds, ponded acid water adjacent to high walls, acid water seepage from old underground mines, and acid drainage into Midwestern Creek, a tributary of the Patoka River.

The Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Reclamation, was able to obtain in excess of $4 million of reclamation funds from a variety of sources, including Abandoned Mine Lands funds and lost surety/bond forfeiture funds to reclaim the area. The goal of the Midwestern Reclamation Project was to improve site safety and reduce environmentally-degrading conditions by: backfilling/removing over 4,400 linear feet of dangerous highwalls, reducing the potential for acid mine drainage, eliminating 30 million gallons of acid water in slurry ponds, disposing of abandoned mine equipment, and reducing erosion by re-grading and re-vegetating over 250 acres of acidic spoils.

The most unique feature of the reclamation of the Midwestern Site was the use of coal combustion byproducts (CCBs). In Indiana, there had been little use of CCBs in the reclamation of active surface mines up to this point in time. Although such byproducts had not previously been utilized in the reclamation of abandoned mine land sites, the Division of Reclamation was interested in assessing the suitability of these materials for use as alkaline cover and structural fill in AML settings, because good borrow materials are often scarce in surface-mined areas, and because mine spoil, which is abundant, often has undesirable physical and chemical properties.

The Division of Reclamation determined that the Midwestern Site was well situated to assess the use of ponded ash and fixated scrubber sludge (FSS), which is a mixture of fly ash, gypsiferous flue-gas desulfurization sludge, and agricultural limestone. Because FSS has a very low saturated hydraulic conductivity, it was proposed to use such material as a cap over the pyritic refuse to prevent percolation of infiltrated rain water into the refuse deposit. The final reclamation design utilized fly ash and FSS from the Petersburg Generating Station of Indianapolis Power and Light to backfill highwalls and to construct cover over exposed coal refuse.

Reclamation began in October 1995. Highwall lakes were drained and backfilled, as were other low-lying areas. By late 1996, all of the ash had been delivered to the site and emplaced. A passive anoxic limestone drain (PALD) was constructed to capture and treat flow from the spring that issues from the abandoned underground mines. A network of riprap drainage channels was created to capture surface runoff and direct it into sediment ponds at the outlet from the site. Wetland cells were installed to passively treat a zone of seeps located in the southern part of the site. By late September 1997, re-vegetation and re-grading were finished and reclamation was complete.

The results of a study of the site by the Indiana Geological Survey showed that this reclamation approach has favorably altered both the hydrological and hydrochemical conditions on site in such a way that rain water has a shorter residence time and is less exposed to acid-generating conditions. Water monitoring onsite at the site’s outlet indicate that the mine water leaving the site has improved. Overall, the reclamation efforts at the site have been a tremendous success, which you can witness for yourself at the site when you visit.

Mine Type: Abandoned Mine Mineral Collecting: Not Known Material Mined: Coal, Lignite Operation: Opencast Mine Surface Features: No KNOWN DANGERS: None Any associated website: Not listed Any Other information: Not listed

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