DAVIS, W.Va. -- Corridor H's environmental shoe is switching to the other foot.
The superhighway being built through West Virginia's Allegheny highlands might well, a few years from now, be recognized for solving a major environmental problem instead of causing one.
"In the not-too-distant future, people will be fishing for trout in Beaver Creek," said Steve Brown, stream restoration program manager for the state Division of Natural Resources. "That will be a huge environmental victory, and the Division of Highways should get credit for making that happen."
Decades ago, Beaver Creek was a trout stream. Nowadays it's not. Its waters, contaminated by coal-mine drainage, are too acidic to support all but the hardiest forms of aquatic life.
That's about to change.
Construction is well underway on the highway's next segment, a 16-mile stretch between Davis and Scherr. The four-lane road, which will replace the existing W.Va. 93, parallels Beaver Creek for more than eight miles.
To help mitigate the effects of the road's construction, Division of Highways officials purchased all the land between the road and the creek, plus the land that holds the creek itself, for the express purpose of restoring the creek's water quality and re-establishing a trout population.
"Our plan is to build four access sites where the creek could be treated with limestone sand," said Carl Nucilli, the project's environmental monitor.
Similar treatments have restored acid-damaged streams in Upshur, Pocahontas, Randolph and Nicholas counties. The DNR's Brown believes they will work in Beaver Creek, too.
"The expectation within our agency is to get [the water quality restored] and to manage Beaver Creek as a seasonally stocked trout stream," he said.
Brown, who lived in the Davis area in the 1970s when the Beaver Creek watershed was still being heavily mined, said he would never have believed the stream could be restored.
"I would have said, 'No way.' At that time, it was an orange-bottomed slough, incapable of harboring any kind of life."
The DNR's success with other streams eventually led Brown to suspect that Beaver Creek might respond to limestone-sand treatment. When highways officials decided to route Corridor H through the watershed, Brown suggested a cooperative effort to bring the creek back to life.