Tanoma Wetlands Trail Opening: Iron Man
Standing next to the small run-off that leads into the apocryphally named Crooked Creek, environmental scientist (with the Susquehanna River Basin Commission) Tom Clark shakes two small test tubes in his hands. In each one, a tiny amount of reactor powder is mixed into a few ounces of water - the way you might test the Ph balance in a swimming pool. The first one he shakes turns instantly bright rust-orange; the second, remains clear.
That first tube’s water is from just a few hundred yards away, at the start point of the new Tanoma Wetlands Educational Trail - a Community Connections Grassroots grant-funded project establishing a signposted trail along the Abandoned Mine Drainage-treatment site here near Tanoma in Indiana County. At the run-off point, where the second test tube is taken from, the same water empties back into Crooked Creek, empty of the poisonous iron that the water carries from an abandoned coal mine 120 feet below the surface.
On this beautiful Fall day, walking along the just-unveiled Educational Trail, Tom Clark explains to his tour groups the all-natural process that removes that iron and makes Crooked Creek safe for plant, fish, and insect life again: How the system of ponds in this former cornfield make the water move with subtle turbulence through densely packed cattails and other wetland plants, which naturally filter the iron out of the water. But when Clark’s not there, visitors to the open site aren’t left out in the cold: The new grant-funded signs posted by the Wetlands’ owners, the Evergreen Conservancy.
“This is taking almost 150 pounds of iron out of Crooked Creek per day,” Clark says to one tour group of about a dozen Girl Scouts and another half-dozen visitors. “That’s a whole person of iron every day. But we’re not only making cleaner water here, we’re creating a wetlands environment.” Clark points to the dense mass of cattails in one of the ponds. “That’s teeming with life - especially in the spring; you can’t imagine how much life is in there.”
The Educational Trail is just phase one of a multi-phase project - later stages include the building of a pagoda where sessions can be led, and a small parking lot. Clark points out that the Educational Trail, and the entire Tanoma Wetlands project, is doing something that many who work in science often forego: Public relations.
“There’s a need to explain what we’re doing,” says Clark, especially with such heavily public-funded processes as Abandoned Mine Drainage. “When I’m not here, [the signs] provide a self-guided tour, but it’s not dumbed-down - it’s not simplified. But we’re also just removing the skepticism - the idea that, ‘This creek has always been orange [from Iron], and it always will be.’ We’re showing that that can change.” And not just that it can change, but that it can be done relatively cheaply, and naturally.
