WPCAMR Western Pennsylvania Coalition
for Abandoned Mine Reclamation

QUarterly Meetings

OSM-VISTA Member Report

Jeffrey Gerard
August 10, 2006

18 Projects Grant Update

Several years ago, WPCAMR received a grant to revisit the original 18 passive treatment systems funded by the 319 Program through WPCAMR. The goals of these studies are to identify who has taken responsibility for the systems, their current statuses, and what steps are being taken towards their operations & maintenance responsibilities. WPCAMR hired a consultant to do 13 of the reports, but low funding required WPCAMR to study the other five.

Since joining WPCAMR in May, I have done field work and completed four of these five reports: Friedline, Scrbgrass, Glade Run, and Langeloth..  The final system review is at Wilson Run in Westmoreland County, which I will be visiting next week.  Meanwhile, our contractor has completed the field work—and most of the write-ups—of the systems.  Upon completion of the Wilson Run review, the reports will be compiled and published.  This will close this Growing Greener grant.

Monitoring Support Grant Update

My primary responsibility over the next year is to establish use of our up-and-coming online database of chemical analyses for passive treatment systems among Pennsylvanian watershed groups.  Through a Growing Greener grant, WPCAMR will fund a majority of these analyses, fulfilling an enormous need for regular operations & maintenance (O&M) activities on the systems.  I will also be working with the chemical laboratories so that they will be able to add sampling data directly to the database—and so that WPCAMR can get good deals on the tests!

The firm we contracted to design the online data system had been behind for quite a while, but they finally showed us the system in July.  We have worked with them interactively to have the system customized to our specifications.   There are still a handful of considerations that need to be fixed, but overall I am very pleased and confident that this project will serve the O&M needs of watershed groups.  We’re doing pilot test of the system for the Cessna Run (Indiana County) system, with Tom Clark’s assistance.  If you’d like to get one of your systems signed up with this support project (whether you have funding for analyses or not), I’d love to work with you.

 

PO Box 295 Luxor, Pennsylvania 15662
email: info@wpcamr.org

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