Abating Stream Pollution . . . in the Anthracite Coal Fields

ON Oct. 27, 1941, the Sanitary Water Board of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania called a meeting of the representatives of the coal operators in the Schuylkill River Basin, and frankly suggested to the operators that they "clean up their house" before someone else came in and did it for them; that they should not emulate the railroads with their "public be damned" policy and its fateful results. It had been four years since the passage of the antipollution law of 1937, a law which exempted silt from collieries until such time as a practical method existed for the removal of their water polluting properties. It had been fifteen long years since Sisler, Frazer and Ashmead concluded that 900 million tons of culm and silt had been deposited in Pennsylvania's streams in the process of preparing five and a half billion tons of anthracite for the world's consumers. Fine coal was being "mined" in the streams by "washeries" and river dredges downstream from the collieries, and silt banks no longer held back the endless black stream entering the Schuylkill at the rate of 350,000 tons per month. The coal operators were apparently working on the outmoded assumption that each ton of fine coal prepared displaced a ton of larger sized, more profitable coal. The meeting between the Sanitary Water Board and the coal operators signaled the beginning of the end of Pennsylvania's pollution problems. As a result a committee was formed at that meeting by the operators to find out what conditions were at each colliery. The Bureau assisted in the indication of methods of measurement and sampling and in the development of forms for reporting the needed data. One large producer had its chief engineer supervise the gathering of the information concerning the quantity of waste waters, the amount and sieve analyses of the waste solids, and the existing means for retaining