Sand Coulee overcomes 'third world' water system
A new well, storage tank and distribution system in Sand Coulee have replaced a dated system that was contaminated due to abandoned coal mines.
Residents of Sand Coulee gathered in the fire hall on March 2, 2010, for a meeting on the community’s terrible water system with its brittle distribution lines frequently breaking, allowing coal waste to seep into the water.
Gary Shick, an engineer with NCI Engineering at the time who was scheduled to speak, filled up a Styrofoam cup with water from the tap.
“I said, ‘That’s coal in the water,’” recalled Kent Luoma, president of the Sand Coulee Water Board, when Shick and officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality inquired about the black particles floating in the white cup.
The coal-speckled water was an inadvertent exclamation point on the public health and safety problems facing the community due to poor water quality and quantity related to the area’s past coal mining.
Today, the 220 residents of Sand Coulee are celebrating a new $2.6 million water system that is receiving national attention for improving the former coal community’s water and the quality of life.
“This was a blessing,” Luoma said one day in late July, standing at a new well house with a computerized panel inside that tells him how much water a new 785-foot-deep well uses each day.
“Manna from heaven,” added Mary Ann Freeman, the water district’s secretary.
Previously, residents relied on what was described as “third world” water system that couldn’t produce enough water, leading to rationing. And the thin-walled distribution lines often broke, allowing coal waste to enter the water, turning filters black. Unfiltered water contained black particles, like the cup Shick sipped at the 2010 meeting.
Sand Coulee was part of the Great Falls Coal Field, once the largest producer in Montana before diminishing as reserves and coal demand waned.
In the rugged Sand Coulee drainage, 14 miles southeast of Great Falls, coal mined from an 8 1/2-foot-thick seam from the 1880s to the 1940s powered train locomotives over the Rocky Mountains and fueled ore smelting and refining in Great Falls.
“Apparently, back in the day, you could walk to Stockett underground,” Tom Henderson, a reclamation specialist in the DEQ’s Abandoned Mine Lands Section, said of the massive complex of underground mine workings.
As the crow flies, that would have been a five-mile walk.
The turn-of-the-century coal mines near Sand Coulee were the downfall of the old water system, and continue to pollute and dewater groundwater and streams today. That’s a problem the DEQ continues to address.
But the town’s drinking water supply is now clean and abundant, thanks to the new water system.
Two new wells were drilled deep into the Madison aquifer.
And nearly two miles of 8-inch water main line were installed along with 83 private service connections, with each house receiving a meter to monitor water use.
A 150,000-gallon storage tank sits on a ridge high above the town.
The former water tank, undersized for firefighting purposes, contained iron sludge from decades of pumping waste from the coal seam.
There are now 22 fire hydrants compared to one.
“Literally, this is the best contaminated mine lands cleanup project in the country,” Henderson said.
Each year, the federal Office of Surface Mining and Enforcement, which funds abandoned mine cleanups with taxes on coal production, honors the highest quality projects cleanups in the nation.
The state DEQ’s abandoned mine lands program learned in July that the Sand Coulee water restoration project was named the country’s best abandoned mine reclamation project for 2016.
“I’ll tell you, it’s quite a change,” Gordon Lencioni said as he filled a coffee pot with clear water and sprinklers sprayed his green lawn.
Lencioni, a retired 72-year-old electrician who grew up in Sand Coulee, still has a couple of chunks of coal that were found in his old water line.
Growing up, Lencioni used to haul water in a cream can to his house on the hill because of the system’s lack of water pressure.
In 1889, 300 miners were employed at the Great Northern Railway’s mine in Sand Coulee, producing 1,000 tons of coal daily.
People from 21 countries and 30 U.S. states came to work in the booming area.
Underground mine passageways in the Stockett-Sand Coulee-Tracy-Centerville area total 600 miles, about the same distance between Great Falls and Salt Lake City, and 29 abandoned mine sites are within a mile of town, with four bordering it.
For the past century, water in the form of rain and snow has flowed through the old coal mines and exited containing heavy metals such as iron and aluminum, turning tributaries of Sand Coulee Creek orange or white and contaminating groundwater.
The coal also has a high sulfur content. As a result, when it is exposed to oxygen and water, it creates sulfuric acid. Water exiting the mines has a pH level of 3, which is acidic, and is among the worst acid mine drainage problems in Montana, Henderson said.
“It’s useless,” Henderson said as he walked recently along Kate’s Coulee, which was carrying orange-colored discharge from an old mine called Mt. Oregon.
The majority of the entrances have been filled in, but much of the abandoned mine workings are partially open and filled with water.
As a result of the acid mine drainage, residents abandoned private water wells decades ago, and, in 1959, five men from town drilled community wells into the shallow Kootenai sandstone aquifer overlying the coal, and, using a tractor, dug the lines for a distribution system.
“Bless their hearts, they worked awfully hard to get water to all of us,” Freeman said.
Two problems with the community water system arose later.
While groundwater quality from the community system was not affected by the mines, studies showed that the network of abandoned coal mines served as drains, intercepting the groundwater before it could reach residents and depressurizing the sandstone aquifer.
“There’s just not enough water here for a community,” Henderson said.
Buildup of minerals in the wells and distribution pipes aggravated the water shortage.
On top of the lack of water, the distribution system was constructed using plastic pipes, and those lines were backfilled with coal waste from the mining operations.
When the thin distribution lines broke, as they often did, coal waste entered the lines.
“This is what you would see in Third World countries,” is how Shick, with NCI Engineering at the time, described the water system when he testified about it before the Long Range Planning Committee of the state Legislature in February 2011.
A water filter blackened with coal waste was brought along as a visual aid to that legislative hearing.
On July 3, 2012, the Sand Coulee Water District inspected the water storage tank. It was almost empty.
The DEQ says the project eliminated human health risk from exposure to coal wastes and acute dangers associated with water shortages, such as a lack of water for fighting fire.
“The whole system has made our life a lot easier for all of us,” said Freeman, the water district secretary.
Water pressure was so bad in the old water delivery system that emergency rationing was instituted in 2008.
Late last month, Freeman’s garden was blooming with 6-foot high corn, tomatoes, kohlrabi and cucumbers thanks to regular watering.
Boland Construction was awarded the contract and work began in August 2014, with the final work completed earlier this year.
“This is the best you can get,” Luoma said of the water system.
Now the DEQ is looking into reducing the prolific acid mine drainage.
It’s taking public comment on a $300,000 pilot project to intercept groundwater in the Kootenai sandstone before it enters the mine workings and becomes polluted, which would improve groundwater and stream quality.
One option is drilling a 1,500-foot-long horizontal well to dewater the Kootenai upstream of the mine workings and discharging the clean water to streams.
If approved, the work would be conducted next summer.
Intercepting the water before it reaches the mine workings is a less expensive option than building a water treatment system to treat the water exiting the mines, which Henderson said would be the most aggressive approach.
To build the new water system, Sand Coulee residents thought they would need to take out loans, like most small towns facing large infrastructure improvements, and a large monthly water bill increase was a concern.
But the DEQ showed a direct link between the town’s water woes and coal waste, and that made Sand Coulee eligible for federal coal cleanup funds, Henderson said.
All but $360,000 of the $2.6 million overhaul came from federal funds to states raised from taxes on coal. A $360,000 grant from the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation covered the rest.
Monthly water bills have increased from $16 to $32. But had the town tackled the project in the usual way, the monthly water bills would have been $134.
“It’s kind of a Christmas gift,” Henderson said. “Then again, they’ve been dealing with this for 50 years.”
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The state Department of Environmental Quality is taking public comments until Sept. 3 on an environmental assessment to capture groundwater before it reaches abandoned coal mines in Sand Coulee. The environmental assessment is available at abandoned mines. Email comments to THenderson@mt.gov or mail to Tom Henderson, P.O. Box 200901, Helena, MT 59620-0901.