It was orange mud and it completely covered the state highway. That much, Belmont County’s Sheriff knew once he encountered the slide that occurred early Tuesday afternoon.
Sheriff James Zusack had traveled to Bridgeport to cast his votes on Ohio’s Election Day, and on his way southbound on Ohio Route 7 near the interchange with Interstate 470, he noticed something he’d never witnessed before.
“And I went right through that orange mess,” he explained on Wednesday on “Novotney Now” on River Talk 100.1/100.9 FM. “There came a time when I couldn’t see where the road was, and then I slowed down a good bit.
“There was someone behind me honking at me because they didn’t like it when I started slowing down,” he said. “But I really didn’t know what had happened to the roadway.”
A section of the hillside west of the state highway has been the site where orange, acid mine drainage has leaked for years from a former coal mine. The liquid is the result of iron in the ground reacting with water and oxygen to form iron oxide which stains nearby soil, according to Ohio EPA reports.
Zusack knows the drainage also stained the vehicles that traveled through the slide because, well, the AMD stained his.
“When I got back to my house, it took everything I could do to get that stuff off of my vehicle,” he said. “That’s when I called my son (Logan) and told him to stay away from that area so his vehicle didn’t get stained.
“I called our 911 center, too, so they knew what was going on, and they said they had received numerous calls about the slip,” Zusack reported. “They told me they had people from (the Ohio Department of Transportation) on the way to take care of traffic.”
Lauren Borell, public information officer for ODOT District 11, said quick action restored the area’s traffic pattern back to normal.
“This (incident) falls under the category of mine subsidence, not a slip. Currently, no immediate repairs are necessary,” she explained. “ODOT crews cleaned up the roadway shortly after it was reported and had the road reopened within about an hour and a half after it happened.”
Orange Muck
A large sinkhole opened on the Ohio side at the base of Interstate 470 in the summer of 1996, prompting ODOT to create a special commission to examine the existence of community coal mines.
That’s because, according to interstate-guide.com, of the discovery of voids from abandoned coal mines in the area. The information states:
“Between September and December 1996, approximately 1,700 feet of I-470 in Ohio was closed by the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT). The reason for the closure was that the rock formations above an abandoned mine underneath the freeway had become overstressed, creating large voids beneath the road surface. “
Sheriff Zusack remembers the detours, and he’s well aware of local industry.
“We’ve all grown up with the coal industry, so when you see that orange water, you know it’s something connected to an old coal mine,” he said. “This whole valley has coal mines all over it because that’s our history, and this was a slide that looks like it was caused by the subsidence. It’s just unfortunate that it happened because there are a lot of vehicles with orange all over them.
“I did see one car that was covered with it, and that’s because you couldn’t tell what it was when you were driving up to it. It must have just burst loose right before I drove through there,” Zusack explained. “But I feel lucky now because I didn’t get much of it on my Jeep. Some of the other cars and trucks I saw weren’t so lucky.”
Belmont County’s sheriff has some advice: Keep scrubbing.
“Based on how difficult it was to get it off the wheel wells of my vehicle, I think that area of roadway will be orange for a little while. I even had some orange on my driveway, and that was after driving up the interstate,” Zusack said. “Trust me, I’m not complaining because a lot of people got it a lot worse than I did. My son did say that there were a bunch of cars he saw in Bellaire that were covered.
“I haven’t heard anything yet about a project to address what happened, but the debris was quickly cleared,” he said. “The people who responded had to wait to make sure what was coming down that hillside was finished falling before they could clean it all up, and now we’ll see what can be done in that area to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
(Photos made available by Belmont County Sheriff James Zusack)
