Day 2 Checking Water Quality onYellow Creek and the Blackwater River

The area pictured below is Yellow Creek near Thomas, WV.  It is hard to believe that this area is mine spoilage.  Dr Little said that this area was timbered and mined from the 1880's until the early 1900's.  He has a photo in a book that shows this area in 1906 after the mining company abandoned it.  The trees are all gone and the landscape is bare from the coal removal.  I did not realize that this area was once covered with virgin forests.  The ecosystem that is here now 100 yrs later developed on its own over the years.  Some trees have come back and lots of blueberries.  However, Yellow Creek is lifeless.  The coal here like that extracted nearby in Davis does not contain pyrites so the water seen below does not have the orange rusty color like what we will see on the North Fork of the Blackwater River later today.  The stream water has a brown color almost like tea or tobacco juice when it is in the stream. However when we took a test sample it was fairly clear.



This is our group checking turbidity Using the Lab Quest. Our results showed overall water quality to be 73.87 which is in the good water quality range.  We took our sample downstream from the mouth of a small creek that flows into the river.  We probably should have gone further downstream to get our sample.  Even though the water quality tested out in the good range there is still no life in the stream.



Our next stop after lunch was at the coke ovens near Davis.  The ovens are beehive shaped and made of bricks as can be seen below.

The floor in the 2nd oven I looked at was paved with square stones.



The coal was brought in by train and dumped into the ovens from on top through a round hole in the roof.



Once the impurities were burned off the pure carbon was removed from the bottom where I am standing in the photo above. The burning process left the tarry residue that can be seen in the 2 photos below. The purified coal was loaded onto rail cars and taken to Baltimore. The tracks are gone now and the railroad right of way is now the Blackwater Canyon Rim Rail Trail which is part of the Allegheny Trail system.





Our last stop of the day was downstream from the coke ovens on the North Fork of the Blackwater River. We tested the water quality below Douglass Falls.





This river system contains pyrites thus giving the rocks and the water the orange color.  The orange color is actually caused by a bacteria.  We took our first water sample from the middle of the pool in the photo below. The overall water quality was 52.07 which makes the water of medium or average quality.  Dissilved oxygen for this reading was 4.3 (about 50%).

We took a second sample from the white foamy area between the two rocks in the photo below. As we predicted the dissolved oxygen level was much higher 5.5 (about 63.5%)



The photo below is looking downstream from the falls.  As you can see the rocks here are orange from the bacteria as well.