Red waters run deep in Western Maryland Mining: For years, drainage from old mines has contaminated residents' drinking water in Garrett and Allegany counties.

Once a week, the Midland fire company fills a 2,100-gallon tank next to Thelma Davis' home in Allegany County; her well water, once as pure as mountain snow, is rusty red and too contaminated to use, let alone drink.

The abandoned Kempton mine pours 4 million to 6 million gallons of highly acidic water a day into Laurel Run, a tributary of the Potomac River. The water from Kempton has killed Laurel Run and if not for a successful environmental program, 24 miles of the North Branch of the Potomac River would be dead as well.

Altogether, more than 410 miles of streams and tributaries in Maryland have been affected by acidic drainage from old mines, many so severely that nothing lives in their tumbling waters. It is almost impossible to find a well in the George's Creek basin that has not been sullied by mining. The Youghiogheny River valley in Garrett County, too, has its problems.

Bad water is perhaps the most bitter and enduring legacy of more than 200 years of mining in far Western Maryland.

"I tell you," says George's Creek resident Frank Ross, whose well became contaminated several years ago. "When you don't have water, you don't have nothing."

In recent years -- and even more so in recent months -- mining companies and state officials have begun joining with environmentalists and community activists -- once pronounced adversaries -- to repair the damage of the past.

Their tools are revolutionary and experimental -- microbes that "eat" the metals in mine drainage, grout made from alkaline power plant ash pumped into mines to reduce or improve the quality of the drainage, and the highly touted lime dosers that for almost four years now have been slowly bringing the North Branch of the Potomac River back to life.

The task is daunting -- and critical to the welfare of the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, as well as to the future of a ruggedly beautiful part of the state.

The state "will never get it all cleaned up," says John Carey, director of the state's Bureau of Mines. "No one has even projected a cost. It would be in the hundreds of millions just in Maryland."

Gradually, though, more people are willing to try a sort of "stone soup" approach, and the results have been encouraging. Coal companies have contributed labor and equipment for experiments -- such as the project near Friendsville in which a cement-like grout mixture of alkaline ash and slurry has been injected into an abandoned mine in a trial attempt to neutralize acid runoff.

William J. Vail, a Frostburg State University professor, has developed a treatment system in which microorganisms -- found growing near acid mine drainage spills -- have been combined successfully with lime beds to purify water.

And in one community, activists are forming a watershed association.

"No matter what we say or do or like or dislike, this valley has been coal mining all my life and all my father's life and all my grandfather's life and it's going to keep coal mining," says Bob Miller, a retired principal now organizing the Mill Run Watershed Association in the George's Creek area of Allegany County. "If we can get [the coal companies] to work with us, we can all accomplish something."

Mill Run is contaminated by acidic drainage from several abandoned mines and is responsible, Carey says, for about 20 percent of the acid in George's Creek. Most of the wells of the 20 or so families that live near Mill Run also have been contaminated by mining.

The community group, which is trying to obtain tax-exempt status to qualify for government grants, is working with the Bureau of Mines and has received offers of technical support from area mining companies.

"Most of the people in George's Creek can trace their roots back to someone who worked in the coal mines," says Gary DeShong, once an outspoken critic of mining in George's Creek. "There's no use trying to blame anybody for what happened. What's important is to try to straighten up the problems and improve [the water.]"

Today, DeShong, whose father mined the region, is as much a part of the new face of mining as are the geologists, engineers and chemists who are charged by their companies with finding cleaner and safer ways to extract the coal from the ground. An adversarial stance -- "it got us nowhere," DeShong says -- has given way to a pragmatic approach with an emphasis on problem-solving.

"The rap on the coal industry was that the old miners took the coal and left nothing," says Scott Rotruck, vice president for public relations for Anker Energy Corp., which also has been active in stream restorations. " but we're doing better."

The 'Rolaids fix'

Acid mine drainage occurs when ground water -- often from breached aquifers -- runs through acidic "overburden" or the rock and mineral material left after the coal is removed. The water, often contaminated with sulfur, iron pyrite and other minerals, spills out of the hillside and into local streams where it lowers the pH level and kills aquatic life.