This story is part of our series, “Reporting from the Mon,” supported by the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds.
Aquatic biologists from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and a small crew of volunteers waded into Dunkard Creek in Greene County on a recent sunny day. This remote, gently curving stream meanders across the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Their mission: Restock mussels in the stream.
Dunkard Creek was once teeming with aquatic life. Chris Urban, Natural Diversity Section chief at the Fish and Boat Commission, called it “an old gem of a stream.
“In the Monongahela system basin, it’s one of our top stream systems that have a diversity of fish and mussel species, some of the highest densities that we see as far as species richness goes,” he said.
LISTEN to the story
Over 51 fish species, including musky, walleye and a variety of sunfish, made their home here, along with 17 species of mussels and six amphibian species, notably the mudpuppy salamander, the only known host of the endangered salamander mussel.
But that changed in September 2009, when a pollution event along 30 miles of Dunkard Creek killed all of it.
A restocking day at Dunkard Creek
Sixteen years later, Josh Arnold, a fisheries biologist with the commission, reached into a mesh bag filled with aptly-named plain pocketbook mussels and pulled one out. This juvenile was only 2 inches long, but as it grows, it can double in size. The shell has a short side called the head-end, which contains its foot.
“Mussels, like ostriches, like to go into the sand head-first,” Arnold demonstrated to the volunteer crew. “So we’ll put the short end in first.”
Scott Ray, another aquatic biologist with the commission, picked out another mussel, stuck it in the shallow water, and nestled it into the riverbed.
“We’re just going to find a space in between those big rocks that is going to be a little bit gravelly and a little bit sandy so that we can actually push our fingers down into it,” he explained. “That way, when the mussel puts its foot out, it can reach into the sand and then pull itself down into the substrate.”
The group that day was stocking nearly 3,000 freshwater mussels in Dunkard Creek. Over the past decade, the commission has placed about 45,000 of them in the stream. Many were relocated from other Pennsylvania waterways.
Then, a few years ago, Ray and his colleagues started propagating mussels themselves at the new Union City Aquatic Conservation Center in Erie County. They brought 1,106 juvenile plain pocketbook mussels and 1,816 state-endangered fatmucket mussels from the center down to this southwestern Pennsylvania stream.
Each mussel sparkled with gold glitter that biologists glued to their shells.
“We glitter them that way [so] when we come back, and we do some surveys, then we can tell what year they were, and how many survived,” Ray said.
They’re focused on mussels because each one can filter and clean 10 gallons of water in a day.
“So when you’re talking [about] a couple of hundred mussels and water is flowing across them, they can really filter out a lot,” Ray said. “But when they’re filtering all that water, they’re also pulling out all the toxins.”
The pollution event
Urban remembers 16 years ago when he got the call from a colleague that dead fish had started showing up in Dunkard Creek. He rushed to the scene.
What they saw was disturbing: salamanders trying to scramble up the riverbanks out of the polluted water, and stunned fish stuck on the rocks.
One photo stands out to Urban. “I’m holding a catfish, and you can see the gills of the animal are really bright red, and there is almost like a rash around them,” he said. “They were struggling with breathing. They were very stressed out, and there are some visible signs of that.”
The water didn’t smell, but it looked kind of like apple cider, he recalled. As the pollution moved through more than 30 miles of Dunkard Creek, it killed more than 42,000 fish, 15,000 freshwater mussels and 6,000 salamanders.
“Everything that was living there at the time – they were annihilated. We didn’t find anything alive,” he said.
How did this happen?
The pollution discharges were traced to coal mines then owned by Consol Energy. In 2011, the Fish and Boat Commission filed a lawsuit for damages, claiming that between May and November of 2009, Consol’s Blacksville No. 2 and its other mines discharged chloride into Dunkard Creek in amounts that exceeded its water discharge permit limitations.
But that didn’t explain what caused the toxic golden algae to bloom. This was the first time the deadly invasive algae was reported in Pennsylvania. The only other time it was found was in the same year in Whiteley Creek, which is also in Greene County.
“It’s very complicated. It was alarming, and we weren’t sure what was causing it,” he said. “It took us a while to put those pieces together.”
The discharges included waste from fracking operations, according to an internal EPA email, published by Greenwire (via New York Times). This contributed to high salinity in Dunkard Creek.
“There’s a lot of underground mines that are vacated, and companies… doing Marcellus work, were dumping water down these mines, and there was so much water, I think it just started filling and putting pressure in the mines and the water started coming out,” Urban said.
He said the salty environment likely triggered the golden algae bloom, which led to the massive die-offs.
“And so like a two-pronged kill,” he said. “We call it the perfect storm. The freshwater fish can’t handle saline conditions. Then you had the golden algae that just knocked them off, just really wiped them out.”
The legal fallout
Without admitting liability, Murray Energy, which had purchased the Consol mines, agreed to a settlement in 2015 and paid the Commission $2.5 million. Earlier, in 2011, Consol agreed to pay $500,000 to West Virginia for the loss of natural resources, and $5.5 million in civil penalties to the EPA to settle hundreds of federal Clean Water Act violations at six of its mines in West Virginia, including Blacksville No. 2.
In addition, Consol agreed to spend over $200 million on a treatment facility to treat its mine water before it is discharged into waterways.
Lessons learned?
Since then, many fish species have returned on their own to Dunkard Creek, but the mussels have needed human assistance.
Ben Moyer, a nature writer, helped with the restocking effort. He used to canoe and fish for muskie and smallmouth bass near this spot.
“Like so many things, if you’re interested in and affiliated with nature in the modern world, so many things that happen that break your heart,” Moyer said.
Moyer is glad aquatic life has been returning, and he said he would like people to slow down and consider the potential impacts of energy development.
“There’s a price to be paid. For a lack of vigilance, yeah, or for being too quick to embrace something that nobody maybe really understands,” he said.
For the Fish and Boat Commission, the Dunkard Creek incident shed light on new aspects of its mission, beyond surveying waterways.
“I think we realized we needed to do more than just assess species, but part of our responsibility is recovering critters and trying to bring animals back where we can,” Urban said.
Just this year, the commission created a new aquatic restoration division, and the settlement money helped pay for that new aquatic conservation center that propagated the mussels being stocked today.
The biologists think the project is working. They’ve found mussels in Dunkard Creek that are reproducing on their own, which is a sign that the water is healthy enough to support them. They plan to do mussel surveys in the coming months to see if their restocking efforts have been successful.
