How Kayakers Saved a River and Started a Movement

While most mines in the eastern region of the Appalachian Mountains are no longer in operation, they are far from inactive.
In lightly populated places such as Albright, West Virginia, water with heavy metals seeps from mines into tributaries — the small streams that flow into rivers — finally pooling in reservoirs near the Chesapeake Bay. It’s also here where a group of kayakers made it their mission over 20 years ago to clean up one of the most polluted rivers in America: the Cheat River, a 78.3-mile tributary that runs through eastern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. And they’re still at it today.
Jim Snyder, a 64-year-old thrill-seeker who lives on the banks of the Cheat River near Albright, was one of those initial kayakers.
“The pollution there would burn your eyes,” Snyder says, recalling the condition of the river in the mid- to late-’90s, when a series of underground coal mine blowouts released orange-tinged water thick with heavy metals into the river.  
The first blowout, in 1994, lowered the pH of the water to dangerous levels, killing off fish as far away as 16 miles downstream. Another blowout a year later eventually devastated the area’s tourism industry, known for its whitewater recreation. The Cheat River soon after became ranked as one the nation’s most endangered.
To reckon with the pollution and damage to the river’s ecosystem, Snyder and other kayakers in the community formed Friends of the Cheat to clean up the dirty streams and creeks that fed into the Cheat River. Their efforts helped the river recover and, with it, a tourism industry centered around its rapids.
“I’d never done much work on committees at that time so it was an awkward fit for me, but we kept making it work,” Snyder tells NationSwell. “We were rookies, but we endured.”

Kayakers River 2
Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation works to counteract the damage done to rivers by mining.

After the mine blowouts, the whitewater industry suffered from more than a 50 percent drop in business, while whitewater participation increased nationally by 33 percent during the same time period.
“Twenty-thousand people were going down the canyon annually in the ’80s and ’90s,” says Owen Mulkeen, associate director of Friends of the Cheat. “Albright [became] a ghost town compared to what it was like at the height of rafting.”
Friends of the Cheat led an effort with the Environmental Protection Agency to use various methods of water treatment, such as limestone filtration, to clean up the tributaries in the area. The success Snyder and the others had with bringing back the Cheat River became widely considered one of the most successful conservation stories.
“[Kayakers] have a passion and that usually keeps them in West Virginia,” says Mulkeen. “We are blessed with the natural beauty and recreation here.”
And that has helped keep the organization’s ranks filled — a necessity, given that mine pollution is still a very real problem in the waters around the Cheat.  
Over 7,500 miles of streams in Appalachia are still polluted by heavy metals from abandoned mines, according to data collected by Friends of the Cheat. Before the passage of the Surface Mining and Reclamation Control Act in 1977, mining companies could seal their operations in whatever way they liked, with little or no oversight. And over the decades many of those seals have busted open.
“Mining had a huge impact on the industrial revolution, and allowed us to win or at least participate in two wars,” says Gavin Pellitteri, a recreational kayaker and outreach specialist for the nonprofit Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. “There’s a lot of that culture and pride left in the area.”
Pellitteri’s coalition works to correct for acid mine drainage, known as AMD. Similar to Friends of the Cheat, EPCAMR’s treatment strategy is to find an empty piece of land that can be filled with mine water into a pondlike basin. Limestone is used to neutralize the water’s acidity, and exposure to oxygen removes iron and drives off  sulfates. Once done, the clean water is put back into a river.
“If you look at where these impacts are, it’s the spine of Appalachia — Northern Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, up to Pennsylvania,” says Pellitteri, who estimates that there are over 400 billion gallons of mine water in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area alone.
As water conservationists like Snyder and Pellitteri continue to clean up the area’s waterways, where a virtually endless flow of polluted water streams from abandoned mines, there’s a fear that they’ll fail to attract a younger generation of outdoor activists to the mission.
“Unfortunately, there’s a brain-drain out of West Virginia,” Mulkeen says. “But we’re born and bred by paddlers, and we hope to continue that relationship. That’s our base.”
Because unlike a tree falling in the forest, a blown-out mine will matter, even if no one is around to witness it.

Can Citizen Science Save Us From Environmental Disasters?

During the rush-hour commute on Tokyo’s trains, it’s easy to spot riders gaming on their phones, sorting sweets in Candy Crush or mustering armies in Clash of Clans. But Kevin Hemphill, a geeky ex-pat, played a different game on his iPad, flipping through images of forests and meadows in Pennsylvania that had been cleared. Tapping the screen, he marked the location of ponds and transmitted the data to a nonprofit halfway across the globe.
Through the web-based FrackFinder, a project of the nonprofit SkyTruth, Hemphill, nostalgic for his childhood home in the Rust Belt of Ohio, pored over the images of the Keystone State. He was looking for evidence of hydraulic fracturing. Better known “fracking,” it’s the process of blasting chemicals, sand and water into underground rock layers to dislodge natural gas — a controversial method of energy extraction that’s brought jobs to the region while potentially putting locals’ health at risk. In a uniquely digital “citizen science” effort, Hemphill and hundreds of volunteers around the world have plotted Pennsylvania’s energy infrastructure, creating a detailed map that can be shared with activists, regulators and academics.
Biologists have long relied on group expeditions to study wildlife populations, but FrackFinder brings the process online, giving anyone with a keyboard the chance to participate. As users click through FrackFinder, SkyTruth’s team hopes the abstract science of environmental exploitation becomes tangible. Their pictures, shot from aircraft and 400-mile high satellites, clearly depict the damage that can be hard to visualize, and even harder to reverse.
“We can look at not just one township or county or state. We’re able to look at changes across entire regions over decades. That’s almost like having access to a time machine,” says David Manthos, SkyTruth’s program coordinator. “It’s the region-wide perspective we offer that you just can’t get from one place on the ground.”
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Geologist John Amos founded the nonpartisan Skytruth, which collects satellite images of potential eco-hazards, in 2001, moving it to tiny Shepherdstown, W.V., two years later. A former consultant for a natural resources exploration firm, Amos put similar tracking tools into the hands of conservationists, as a way to atone for his past “disservice to the planet.” But for nearly a decade, SkyTruth remained a one-man shop. Few donors could see how SkyTruth’s aerial imagery might help the environmental movement. That all changed in April 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Coast Guard estimated 1,000 barrels of oil were gushing out each day, but after studying photos of a vast, shimmering pool of oil on the ocean’s surface, he and oceanographer Dr. Ian MacDonald calculated the spill was more than 20 times worse than officials claimed. After publishing a critical blog post, the federal government quickly revised its numbers upward.
Now a 12-person staff, SkyTruth has used their planetary perspective to create the first repository of mountaintop-removal mining sites in Appalachia; to film flaring over North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields by equipping a high-altitude hydrogen balloon with a camera; and to track unregulated commercial fishing in the world’s most remote waters. After wrapping up in Ohio, FrackFinder will launch in its third state, West Virginia, early this year. Analyses of other states will likely follow.
How is this data used? FrackFinder’s crowdsourced analysis confirmed the exact location of 1,400 active wells and 7,835 wastewater ponds, allowing a team of public health researchers at Johns Hopkins to verify a list of drilling permits provided by the state. Guided by that knowledge, paired with extensive medical records, the university epidemiologists proved that asthmatics were 1.5 to 4 times more likely to have an attack near the drilling, and mothers were 40 percent more likely to give birth prematurely near the most active sites. The researchers weren’t able to pinpoint why locals sickened — maybe sleeplessness from noisy, earth-shaking vibrations, stress from dropping home values or the chemicals themselves — but SkyTruth’s data helped them prove a point.
Surprisingly, crowdsourcing the information is actually harder for SkyTruth than sifting through the images themselves. But the team continues to invest in citizen science because they know the value of the public’s involvement. “It actually puts an image of what’s going on in the world in front of citizens, so they can see for themselves,” Manthos explains. “What kinds of regions are being developed? Is it all forest, rural land or a little of the suburbs? We’re exposing people, up close and personal, to these images. That’s a formative process, and they can draw their own conclusions.”
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Hemphill, for example, says he used to support fracking as a reasonable way to bring much-needed economic growth to Northern Appalachia’s struggling towns. His support persisted, even as he analyzed nearly 5,000 images of Pennsylvania’s scarred terrain. “Wow, they’re really tearing up the earth,” he thought, almost disinterestedly. But because of his exposure to the issue through FrackFinder, he began paying more attention to relevant news stories, reading, for instance, that some homeowners could set the contaminated water in their kitchen sink on fire. Eventually, he turned against the unconventional drilling method for good.
The process influenced Hemphill in another way, too, by reaffirming his faith in technology’s possibilities beyond our social media addictions and diversionary entertainment. “People are on the internet a lot. What do you have to show for so many hours of your life?” he asks. “Especially for millennials, where does it go from here? It’s not a guaranteed thing that we all will just watch Netflix forever. The internet needs to go beyond that now.”
Hemphill imagines closing our Tetris-stacking apps, halting the Instagram scroll and doing something meaningful online. With just a few clicks, he still believes, the Earth can be improved.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.