News
Repairing The Land: Monday Creek Restoration
By: Fred Kight
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Next year, the Ohio Division of Mineral Resources Management is planning to spend more than $18 million to restore Southeast Ohio's hills and valleys, correcting the blight of past coal mining activity.
Mike Steinmaus is the Coordinator of the Monday Creek Restoration Project Coordinator.
He's got an office in New Straitsville and his goal is to repair the local watershed so people can fish and swim in it and he's hoping some of that money will be spent on Monday Creek Restoration projects.
"We are looking at a project right now to place a new limestone doser" (near Murray City), he says. "That stream is one of the worst contributors of acid into Monday Creek."
The Monday Creek Watershed encompasses 116 square miles in Athens, Hocking and Perry counties.
It contains 15,000 acres of abandoned underground mines and four-thousand acres of surfaced mined lands.
Blake Arthur is a project manager with the Ohio Division of Mineral Resources Management and he says, "If the public or government official has a problem related to abandoned mine lands they can contact our office. We have staff that's going out on a regular basis looking for old high walls, strip pits (and) deep mine openings."
Arthur says federal funding for future cleanup projects is unclear and will depend on how Congress acts on debt reduction.