Place Entry #3

Welcome back to Nine Mile Run.

It's Sunday morning, and it's a lovely time to be out stream-side. The temperature is up around 40 Fahrenheit, the snows are receding, and the run-off has swelled the creek enough to get it babbling over some of its rockier stretches. The ground still looks like a frozen hell, however, and color is essentially a forgotten concept. As pale and bleak as everything still looks devoid of leafy vegetation and covered in melting snow, it still looks better than its old hellish landscape.

The area we now know as Nine Mile Run was once the dumping ground for the Homewood Steel Company, which used the riverbank as a dumping site for slag. Now, "slag heap" takes on a lot of fun, sexy connotations if you're British, but we're talking about a different kind of slag today. If you're new to metallurgy, slag is the industrial by-product of the steel making process. When steel mills super-heat the ore that they mined from the Earth (a process called "smelting"), impurities in the ore (like metal oxides, metal sulfides, silicon dioxide, etc) separate from the heavier metals and rise to the top of the molten ore mixture. These impurities are then skimmed and dumped, as in the picture below.

Slag dump

The banks of Nine Mile Run, approximately 230 acres in all, were at one time under as much as 120 feet of slag and other wastes. This is a small stream, mind you. At its widest, I doubt whether it reaches more than 15 feet across, and there isn't a single point where you couldn't easily walk right across it and keep your knees dry. While I was walking the banks today, I struggled to picture how tall 120 feet of industrial waste would reach above me, how absolutely minuscule the stream would look right next to it.

The slag's been cleared by the Army Corps of Engineers, and restoration work still continues today, but the stream is far from healthy. I present to you the following two photos:

Item the first: located at the head of the Firelane trail

Personally, I like living in a city where the cash I spend on sales tax goes to something about which I care very strongly. Yes, I will take pride in these parks. Spend my tax dollars to clean this place up! Make it beautiful! Make it healthy again after everything it has had to endure! Keep it free of errant human feces!

About that . . . here's item the second, located a short distance upstream from the last sign:

In case you can't make out the words, here's what it says:

This outfall may discharge SEWAGE during rain events. These discharges may be hazardous to public health. Avoid contact with waters during these periods. For additional information, or if pipe is discharging during dry weather, please contact . . . 

Allow me to translate:

When it rains, this giant pipe will spew shit into the river, and this shit will kill you. Please don't go anywhere near this stream in the event of said shit storm. Even if it isn't raining, these waters may contain shit that will kill you anyway. Here's a phone number where you can learn whether or not you're totally screwed if you dare touch this open, flowing toilet of a creek.

Please do read this page about "fecal fountains" (their words, not mine) that occur here during as little as a tenth of an inch of rain. This is apparently because much of Pittsburgh uses what's called a "combined sewer system," which means that storm drains connect directly into the same pipes used to carry sewage to treatment centers. When it rains, the sewage pipes, which can't always handle the sudden increases in volume that result from rains running off of streets, roofs, sidewalks, and other impermeable surfaces, tend to overflow and dump raw human waste into nearby streams.

Like Nine Mile Run.

I'm starting to feel so very sorry for this little stream. It has its own charm, and I'm sure its beautiful when the plants and flowers are in full bloom; but it just keeps getting (good god, there'e a pun coming) dumped on over and over again. The waters keep coursing because that's what waters do, but not without having to pick up industrial and human wastes in the process.

Good sweet lord, why can't we (dare I say it?) get our shit together and build municipal systems that don't result in chronically poisoning something as vital to the surrounding ecosystem as a moving body of water? I need you all to hold me to this, but the next time it rains, I have to see what happens at that outflow pipe. I need to be able to see what it is that keeps sullying this otherwise quaint little stream. I don't want to, but I think I ought to check it out.