MIDLOTHIAN -- In the woods at the fringe of this Western Maryland town, a mountain of waste 50 feet high is slouching into a creek that's tinted an eerie orange.
The "gob pile" is refuse from a long-abandoned coal mine. And the stream into which it's eroding, Winebrenner Run, is devoid of life - one of the state's worst cases of sulfuric acid pollution from mines.
At least 40 of these potentially toxic heaps rise in the forested mountains of Allegany and Garrett counties like tombstones for the state's declining coal industry. The Maryland Department of the Environment would like to get rid of the piles because they often ooze acid and can spontaneously ignite.
But the funding to clean up this and other pollution left by the state's roughly 800 abandoned mines is scheduled to end next year as a federal tax on coal companies expires.
Even if money is found, there's a dispute over how to dispose of the waste heaps. Maryland is examining Pennsylvania's decision to burn coal waste to generate electricity, but some environmentalists say that's a bad idea because it creates mercury air pollution and leaves ash with heavy metals.
Mike Garner, chief of abandoned mine land programs for the Department of the Environment, stood in the gurgling waters of Winebrenner Run and looked up at the looming mass of gunk.
"We are worried about a big slug of gob eroding down and blocking that stream, flooding the homes nearby," Garner said, his shoes muddy with acidic orange silt. "We'd like to remove this pile and restore this stream."
The term gob stands for "garbage of bituminous." It is shorthand for the rocks that miners threw away near mine shafts as they dug toward veins of coal, said Daniel L. Welsch, an assistant professor at Frostburg State University who is studying the piles.
The tar-colored waste heaps - also called "bone piles" - are typically made up of shale, iron pyrite and other minerals mixed with coal. When iron pyrite (called fool's gold) is exposed to water and oxygen, it can create sulfuric acid, which sometimes leaks from the piles. More often, Welsch said, acid wells up from forgotten mine shafts near the heaps, turning streams into lifeless ditches.
The orange color is from iron that precipitates out of the water when acid is added, Welsch said. More than 350 miles of streams in Western Maryland are tainted by this pollution.
