Westmoreland County loan boosts long-planned Brush Creek remediation project

A long-planned remediation effort to remove orange-tinted polluted mine drainage discharged int0 Brush Creek may finally be a reality.

The eight-mile creek runs through Irwin and Trafford and into Turtle Creek.

Westmoreland County commissioners on Thursday approved a $75,000 interest-free loan to the Turtle Creek Watershed Association that officials said will kick-start the cleanup. Mine drainage for decades has rendered Brush Creek unsafe and unusable.

Officials said the creek is among the largest mine drainage sites in the state and is polluted by discharge of underground mine water through a pipe that empties into Tinker’s Run, a tributary just west of Irwin. About 9 million gallons of polluted water a day flows into the creek.

The county-supplied funds will be used to purchase a 50-acre parcel, formerly a Biddle coal mine location, across railroad tracks off Route 993 in the Westmoreland City section of North Huntingdon, where officials hope to build a treatment facility that will clean and replenish the water now polluted downstream by mine drainage.

“On top of making it look good, we are returning it to what will be a public waterway and into an economic driver that can be used for kayaking, tubing and fishing. People will see their property values downstream skyrocket,” said Jason McCabe, a member of the Turtle Creek Watershed Association, which is overseeing the reclamation project.

Officials said plans to remediate polluted discharge from an underground mine that stretches from the Export area through Irwin has been in the planning stages since at least 2013, when a state study identified a potential blueprint for the project. Revised plans now call for the construction of a facility east of Irwin where polluted water will be pulled out of the mine, treated, cleaned and placed back into Tinker’s Run to flow downstream into Brush Creek.

McCabe estimated the project could take up to a decade to complete and cost about $20 million.

“The purchase of this property is just the first step,” McCabe said.

Westmoreland Conservation District Chief Executive Officer Rob Cronauer said at least three federal and state grants will be needed to pay for the project, the first of which will be applied for this fall to fund initial planning work.

Officials want to leverage a portion of $3.7 billion allocated to Pennsylvania, authorized under the federal infrastructure bill approved by Congress in 2021, as financing for the planning, design and construction.

“Treating mine drainage is nothing new, but treating something this massive is a big deal,” Cronauer said. “It will impact everybody downstream, increase property values. People will see the impact of this as far away as where Turtle Creek meets the Monongahela River.”