See this: http://www.marcellus-shale.us/Dunkard_Creek.htm

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State settles lawsuit with mining firm over fish kill on Dunkard Creek
By Don Hopey / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 5, 2015

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has reached a tentative settlement of a lawsuit that sought damages for mine discharges that caused a massive fish kill on more than 40 miles of Dunkard Creek along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border in 2009. Details of the proposed settlement were not available Wednesday, but it will include financial payments by Murray Energy Corp. to the fish commission for damage to the aquatic life of the creek caused by discharges of polluted water from Consol Energy’s Blacksville No. 2 mine. The lawsuit was originally filed against Consol Energy in September 2011, but Murray Energy inherited the legal action when it bought the Consolidation Coal Co. from Consol in 2013.

The salty discharges from the Consol mine spawned a bloom of toxic, golden algae, normally found in Texas and other Southwestern states, that killed more than 42,000 fish, 15,000 freshwater mussels and 6,000 of a type of large salamander called mudpuppies. Consol, the Cecil-based mining and natural gas company that owned the Blacksville No. 2 mine at the time of the fish kill, paid a total of $5.5 million in civil penalties in 2011 to settle hundreds of federal Clean Water Act violations at six mines it owned in West Virginia, including the pollution discharges that contributed to the Dunkard Creek fish kill. Consol also paid $500,000 to the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources as compensation for the lost aquatic resources on the West Virginia portions of Dunkard Creek.

This article makes it sound like the first notice of high conductivity measurements in Dunkard Creek was in 2009, which is incorrect.  WV DEP knew of high conductivity readings in the Dunkard Creek at least nine years previous to that.  

Downstream Alliance, a non-profit group, conducted a stream quality inventory of Monongalia County streams from 1998 to 2000. In the summer of 2000 we documented 10 in-stream sites in the Dunkard Creek drainage that had conductivities greater than 2000 µS, the highest being 6400.  These were mostly in the West Virginia Fork drainage of Dunkard Creek.  At one site on Range Run, where the in-stream conductivity was 2400 µS we found a trickle of water entering the stream with a conductivity of 8000.  

With the permission of the property owner we followed that upstream to a pond. He told us the pond received water from a deep mine—it was not a treatment pond; water was intermittently pumped into the pond to keep the mine dry.  There was no discharge at the time we were there but the conductivity in the pond was roughly 14,000 µS.  Not as high as the conductivities measured around the time of the fish kill but still much higher than those of either treated or untreated acid mine drainage. We had some samples lab analyzed and they had very high chloride concentrations.

We met with WV DEP about the conductivity readings twice and they were already aware of them. They had been noticing high conductivity in the area for some unknown amount of time. They said they were in the process of including either conductivity or chloride in the NPDES requirements of the mines in the area. They seemed remarkably incurious about the source of the water though.  I think this was well before there was any Marcellus well activity in that area, although there may have been some coal bed methane extraction.

At any rate, there were indications of problems to come well before 2009.

Craig Mains, Downstream Alliance

The Earth Island Cover, and the cover of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators magazine, show a piece from the Reflections collection.

I just checked the Reflections site. It is still working for me:  

http://www.homage-to-dunkard-creek.com/Homage_to_Dunkard_Creek/Welcome.html

I haven’t updated it much, but it stands as a bit of history of the effort. I hope you find it meaningful.

Best wishes, Ann Payne