Abandoned Mine Posts

The Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation has created an interactive, visual tool to help comprehend how federal Title IV funding might be applied toward Pennsylvania’s abandoned mine problems. This new funding, the result of a 2006 revamp of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA), will bring an estimated $1.4 billion over the next 15+ years.

WPCAMR’s Title IV Calculator lets its user easily gain an appreciation of how the Title IV funding model works through playing “what if” by clicking buttons to change estimated values of Pennsylvania’s P1 & P2 inventory, AMD inventory, AMD Set-Aside, DEP overhead, and total Title IV funding.

The Title IV Calculator displays these interactions visually with pie charts and a table of values representing AMD left undone, clean water, restored P1s & P2s, and the remaining P1s & P2s left undone.

Check out the Title IV Calculator at www.wpcamr.org

“Ideas sought for use of mining funds” from the Indiana Gazette

Bruce Golden, WPCAMR Regional Coordinator, urged Indiana County residents and conservation district staff members to voice their opinions on how additional abandoned mine reclamation money becoming available should be used to mitigate mine pollution in the county and in Pennsylvania.

by Jeffrey Gerard, AmeriCorps OSM/VISTA

A new grant program in Pennsylvania will provide chemical analyses to monitor passive abandoned mine drainage treatment systems. The FACTS Grant (”Funding AMD Chemistry in Treatment Systems”) will ease the financial burden on cash-strapped grassroots watershed organizations that have accepted the responsibility of maintaining passive treatment systems.

Pennsylvania has invested heavily in passive technologies to treat the largest water pollution problem in the Commonwealth: abandoned mine drainage (AMD). Regular water sampling and testing is crucial in diagnosing a treatment system’s wellbeing and success. The FACTS Grant puts satisfactory monitoring programs within the reach of the volunteer-based groups by covering the cost of laboratory analyses—hundreds of dollars annually for each system.

In addition to funding the analyses, the FACTS Program streamlines the transfer of test results from laboratories using an Internet repository for water sampling data, called Datashed. Laboratories upload analysis results to Datashed using unique Sample IDs that link each water sample to a specific date, treatment system, and sampling location. Datashed will store the complete history of a passive treatment system, helping to diagnose problems and allowing researchers to study and evaluate various AMD treatment technologies.

The FACTS grant is administered by the Western and Eastern Pennsylvania Coalitions for Abandoned Mine Reclamation. Nonprofit watershed groups, county conservation districts, local governments, and RC&D councils in Pennsylvania can apply to the FACTS Grant program on the Web at http://www.wpcamr.org/facts.

by Jeffrey Gerard, AmeriCorps OSM/VISTA

This month, Microsoft released Office 2007, the company’s newest office suite. The release flaunts a radically different layout than you might be used to from previous versions of Office, almost making it seem like you’re learning an entirely new piece of software. With that in mind, you might consider upgrading not to Microsoft Office 2007, but to a completely free alternative: OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is a powerful, open-source office suite very similar to Microsoft Office. In fact, OpenOffice has parallels to Microsoft Word (called Writer), Excel (Calc), PowerPoint (Impress), Access (Base), and Publisher (Draw). Actually, OpenOffice will probably look more familiar to the MS Office you’re used to than would Microsoft Office 2007. It is also compatible with any documents and files that may have been created with Microsoft Office.

In full disclosure, OpenOffice is still somewhat weak when it comes to making complex charts from spreadsheet data—if this applies to you, consider sticking with Microsoft for now. Furthermore, if you’re entirely happy with whichever office suite you use already, there’s not much point in upgrading to either OpenOffice or Microsoft Office 2007.

OpenOffice is free, whereas Microsoft Office 2007’s upgrade runs $279 per computer, or $20 for nonprofits eligible to get it from TechSoup. OpenOffice also comes with the ability to export files in PDF format, so you won’t have to buy Adobe Acrobat either ($299, or $30 from TechSoup). OpenOffice works on Windows, Macs, and Linux.