A huge project to restore a mining-altered Luzerne County creek should get underway this summer.
The $18 million project will re-channel about 15,000 feet of Nanticoke Creek in Hanover Township and Warrior Run Borough.
Terry Ostrowski is president and CEO of the Earth Conservancy, which owns the land where the creek runs. He said the project will take three to five years.
“This is a legacy project for the Earth Conservancy. It's certainly the largest project in a stream-restoration standpoint that we've taken on. So we're very excited about this getting started," Ostrowski said.
Ostrowski, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and other officials highlighted about $1.3 million in funding for the project during a news conference Monday in Hanover Twp.
State Department of Environmental Protection Acting Secretary Jessica Shirley said Pennsylvania tops the country with $5.1 billion worth of remaining abandoned mine damage.
“To put that into perspective, West Virginia is number two, and they have $2.3 billion in liabilities,” Shirley said.
Casey credited President Joe Biden’s federal infrastructure bill for producing $3.7 billion for Pennsylvania over 15 years to fix abandoned mine problems.
“We're surrounded here by public natural resources that need to be restored, that need to be cleaned up. And we've got to make sure that we fulfill that obligation,” Casey said.
Decades ago, before serious environmental regulation took hold, Blue Coal Co. rerouted the creek to get at coal. The project will include removing part of a massive embankment of culm, the rocky waste of mining. The idea is to reconnect separated creek parts.
The restoration should mean less water flowing into abandoned underground mines and eventually into the Susquehanna River.
