(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig says his department is beginning work to restore seven abandoned mine sites in south-central and southeast Iowa. Coal was strip mined from the areas.”So in the 1800s and early 1900s in Iowa, and these were mined at a time where companies were not required to reclaim those sites,” Naig says. He says the soil and rocks were stripped back to get at the coal.

“What you’ve got is sort of the debris that’s left over, the rock, the rock piles and often times there’s a dangerous high wall, meaning that they’ve dug out an area the last place that they mined coal, there’s a large hole, often times a pond,” Naig says. He says the water in the pond is not not good quality, and often very acidic. Naig says this is NOT the same as cleaning up a superfund toxic waste site. “It’s not that we need to clean up any chemicals or those types of things. It’s got a lot to do with just moving dirt around, moving rock, restoring the landscape, and then we have a significant focus on, how do you restore the soil health,” he says. “Oftentimes, that ground is not able to be productive before reclamation. After reclamation, you’ve helped to restore the organic matter.”

Naig says you may not be able to grow crops on the ground, but it can grow grass and other vegetation after the process is done. Iowa is doing the cleanup in conjunction with the federal government in a program that was created in the 1970’s and 80’s. Naig says they’ve made progress in addressing the old mine sites here. “The state of Iowa has had roughly 300 of these abandoned mine sites. And to date, we’ve been able to restore 120 of those. Some have been restored outside of our work and we estimate that we’ve got about 140 yet to do,” Niag says. The program is spending 10 million dollars for these seven projects. Naig says it will take around one year to complete them.

Here are the projects:
Pella North and Pella South (Dutch Hollow), Marion County: 162 acres
Kuiper, Marion County: 81.2 acres
Bos, Wapello County: 34.6 Acres
Eden, Van Buren County:14 acres
Pedrick, Van Buren County: 14 Acres
Vanderzyl, Marion County: 57 Acres
Vanderzyl East, Marion County: 29.5 Acres