Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 29, 1994 TAG: 9403290041
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SHELORS MILL LENGTH: Long
George Shelor hooked his arm around the young maple, leaned forward and contemplated the hole in the ground spiraling into blackness just one step away.
No telling how far down it goes - 50 feet, 100, maybe more.
"Throw a rock down there, go on," said Nola Albert, Shelor's cousin. A hefty rock was tossed in, and a handful of people stared at the blackness, waiting.
Nothing. Seconds went by. Nothing. They stepped back slowly. Nobody said a word.
As a child, Shelor used to play up here on Black Ridge in southeast Floyd County. The hillside is pockmarked with gaping holes and huge pits that can swallow one's imagination whole.
These abandoned mine shafts lead back to a time when Shelor's and Albert's forebears owned the land - when men with crude tools scraped iron ore and copper from the guts of the mountain, hauled it to nearby furnaces and kept this small community in business.
Shelor, now in his 60s, remembers watching rail carts piled high with red and purple rocks rolling out of the mine.
He remembers, too, when "old man Dixon" bought the land after the mine closed and tried to level the bumpy terrain. His bulldozer toppled into one of the pits, and they had to get a crane from Roanoke to lift it out. Shelor still chuckles at the story.
And a few years ago, he found an old cannonball by the creek, adding weight to his theory that iron dug out of Floyd County served a role in America's defining military moments, including the Revolutionary War.
It was with a certain sadness that Shelor watched last week as the Virginia Division of Mineral Mining began work on closing the mine shafts.
"It's history in a way, but in a way, you can't leave 'em open," he said.
But he's not at all sorry that the agency also will clean up the environmental mess wrought by two centuries of mining.
With a rare $75,000 grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state will use the mine to demonstrate a new technique in restoring polluted ecosystems.
"It's got a little bit of everything we do in reclamation," said Allen Bishop, special projects manager for the mining division.
Heavy metals - zinc and copper, mostly - have leached from the mine, contaminated the ground water, and killed almost all aquatic life in East Prong Creek, a tributary of Little River, for at least half a mile.
Albert said she hasn't seen fish in the native trout stream for years. Shelor remembers the rivulets of colorful water, tainted with the metals, seeping from the mine: "It was the prettiest thing you ever saw, like a carpet. It killed everything it touched."
The mine was in operation intermittently from the late 1700s to 1947, and at various times included smelters, tailing ponds, and copper and sulfuric acid processing sites. At a bog where acid was made, Bishop measured copper at levels thousands of times higher than the EPA's acceptable limit.
Entire hillsides around the mine are barren - the soil, stripped of nutrients, is too poisoned to grow trees or shrubs.
Bishop first examined the site a year ago, after the Shelor family contacted him. The agency has identified 3,000 abandoned mines, other than coal mines, in Virginia since the Orphaned Land Program began in 1978.
"When they have an old mine, we're who they call," Bishop said. The agency has inventoried 126 of the most polluted, dangerous mines, and reclaimed almost half, he said.
The Shelor mine, also known as the Toncray mine for a previous owner, was given a high priority because of the dangerous mine shafts, the level of pollution and the good chance of environmental recovery, he said. The mining division is putting up $46,000, in addition to the EPA grant, for the 15-acre project.
With help from Albert Hendricks, a Virginia Tech biology professor, an innovative wetland system was designed to filter out the heavy metals naturally.
First, a small stream that flows through the mine area and bog, picking up metals and other contaminants along the way, will be diverted from East Prong Creek.
Then, the bog water and ground water from the mine will be channeled into a wetland with a series of six cells, each one lined with plastic, limestone and mulch. Here's where the action takes place.
As water enters the top of the first cell, bacteria in the mulch begin to break down the contaminants, which settle to the bottom, where limestone neutralizes the acidity. A perforated pipe carries the water into the next cell, and so on down the line. Each time, the water gets a little cleaner. After the sixth cell, the water will be discharged into East Prong Creek.
Cattails, reeds and other water grasses will take up some of the metals as well, and provide food for the bacteria in years to come, Hendricks said.
The wetlands should be complete by June and will take about six months to fill up, he said. But he expects to see a reduction in the metals as early as August and will continue to monitor the soil and streams for a year or two.
Hendricks has designed similar systems for a leaking landfill in Dickenson County and coal mines in Wise and Buchanan counties. Results from these projects will add to the understanding of manmade wetlands, a relatively new science in reclaiming ecosystems.
How long will the Floyd County wetland last?
"That's what we don't know," Hendricks said.
The metals eventually will become nonpoisonous, returned to their natural state of iron sulfide, more commonly known as "fool's gold," Hendricks said. And because the wetland is lined with impermeable plastic, it may be a rich mineral deposit one day.
Perhaps future generations will mine it, Hendricks said, or maybe they'll unearth the plastic and dump it all in a landfill.
"Who knows what people will be thinking 40 or 50 years from now?" he asked.
by CNB