On a sunny afternoon in late February, Reed Johnson trudges through the slushy snow on his 33-acre property in central Pennsylvania.
The property has been in his family for decades. It was once a mine for a special type of clay used to make “fire brick” for the steel industry.
Now it’s a maze of waste piles, separated by deep gullies.
“We try to avoid getting kids in here because of the high walls and the open mine shafts in here,” said Johnson, 72. “You don’t want kids in here running around because of that. Somebody can get killed pretty easily.”
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Coal and shale at an abandoned mine site in Clearfield County, Pa. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
In addition to being a danger, the waste piles are a scourge on the stream that runs through the property, Little Anderson Creek.
Fed by runoff from the waste piles, the creek has a pH below 3 – about as acidic as vinegar – far too low to support aquatic life.
Johnson has been trying for decades to get the state to clean up the site. The effort accelerated in 2021 when former president Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The law appropriated nearly $3.8 billion over 15 years to clean up abandoned mines like this one in Pennsylvania.
Last year, his property was listed as one of the first abandoned mine cleanups in the state to be funded by the BIL. The Clearfield County Conservation District, a local agency focused on soil and water conservation, would oversee a $530,000 project to develop a plan to clean up the site.
When he heard that the money had been allocated to his project, Johnson was happy.
“I was excited by the fact that maybe now we can clean up this mess and clean up the streams,” said Johnson. “I was just overwhelmed with excitement.”
Then came President Donald Trump. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order blocking any spending from the infrastructure law. That meant the more than $700 million dollars already allocated to Pennsylvania for mine cleanups were unavailable.
That also meant Reed Johnson’s project was frozen too.
Impacts to county conservation district
The news of the freeze immediately worried Kelly Williams, the watershed specialist with the Clearfield County Conservation District who was overseeing the project and others like it.
“My immediate reaction was, how can I keep people working on these projects and get them done if I don’t know if I can pay them?”
Williams lost sleep, worrying about the various projects she had contractors already working on. Some contractors had to lay people off during the freeze.
Williams said the funding from the infrastructure law was so important because it is very expensive to clean up the thousands of abandoned mine sites in Pennsylvania.
Kelly Williams of the Clearfield County Conservation District at an abandoned mine site. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
The law allocated $244 million a year for mine cleanups in Pennsylvania for 15 years, “which is amazing,” Williams said. “Like, without that kind of funding, we could never affect the [mine] discharges and the problems that we have throughout Pennsylvania.”
The cleanup of Johnson’s property on Little Anderson Creek could cost $10 million when it’s all told. “A project that size I couldn’t even consider with state funding. Like there’s just not enough of it to do,” she said.
The most abandoned mines in the country
Abandoned mines are a particularly important problem in Clearfield County, which sits an hour east of State College. Williams said the county has the most abandoned mine cleanup sites in Pennsylvania, which has the most abandoned mine sites of any state in the U.S.
“We have more mileage of impaired [streams] than any other county in the state, with over 676 miles impaired,” said Williams. “And we also have the most abandoned mine land features – things like subsidence areas, high walls, dangerous pits.”
Pennsylvania’s abandoned mine problem is estimated at around 5 billion dollars by the state. Andy McAllister, regional coordinator for the Western Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, says that’s largely due to Pennsylvania’s long history of mining, especially coal.
“Coal mining started in Pennsylvania sometime in the mid-1700s and has continued on,” said McAllister.
Modern reclamation laws were only signed into law during the Carter administration. So for over 200 years, companies could simply abandon work sites once they were mined out. The state has over 5,000 miles of mine-polluted streams and 288,000 acres of abandoned mineland. McAllister says fixing the problem would clear streams and help the economy.
A coal seam is visible at an abandoned mine site in Clearfield County, Pa. Photo: Reid Frazier / The Allegheny Front
“If all the affected streams were again fishable, it could create $29 million a year in angler-generated revenue–that’s just fishing,” he said. That total doesn’t include the improvements to property values and quality of life in former mineland areas.
Finally, in late February, Governor Josh Shapiro announced the funds were unfrozen– a month after Trump’s executive order.
Earlier in the month, Shapiro filed a lawsuit over the suspended money. Legal experts have said similar funding freezes from the Trump administration are unconstitutional, since Congress, not the President, is endowed with the “power of the purse” by the U.S. Constitution.
Johnson was relieved that the funds could be unfrozen; his project could get back up and running.
He says he and his wife didn’t vote in last year’s presidential election because they were sick of seeing campaign ads.
“We turned the TV off. We couldn’t stomach all the political ads. And it got to the point where neither one of us even wanted to vote for anybody.”
He doesn’t regret this decision, despite the funding freeze. The truth is, he says, neither candidate deserved his vote.
He’s hopeful work on his property can proceed. He says the land supplied the clay for bricks inside Pittsburgh’s steel mills at a crucial point in U.S. history.
“We were in the middle of the First World War. We were in … then the Second World War. I mean, it was …it was a matter of getting enough material to win those wars.”
Clearfield County helped build the nation; he says it’s time the nation helped repair Clearfield County.
