West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Coal River

A once dead river shows sign of life.

August 12, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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Not too long ago, folks fishing the Little Coal River near Madison were either gluttons for punishment or didn't care if they caught anything. The fishing conditions were just that bad. It stayed that way until a couple of years ago when the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, and a local coal company, got together to make things better.
Bill Simmons, Deputy Director for The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, says the river presented a challenge for the agency.

"Most of this river, there's some good structure up stream in some of the riffles throughout the river, but for the most part, it's sandy and shallow and no structure. In these places, when we began this, we did a little fishing in the river, saw a lot of fish in the structure area and the other parts of the river were just dead."

So the restoration efforts began and it turned out to be a river-long project. Logs and rock were put into the river in an inverted U, basically creating a natural fishing environment.

"These structures are all designed to work sediment downstream as nature intended in a natural setting before it was impacted. These are built up to what we call bank full, a normal two year storm, a high flow every two years, and we've narrowed the river down," says Simmons.

That was supposed to decrease the number of shallow, sandy areas and increase the fish friendly riffles. It's working, too. Dennis Stollemyer of the DEP says the river is improving.

"In the two years these structures have been in, we've already seen the percentage of sand in the river bottom go from 67% to 37%.
The immediate area around the structure has improved greatly."

Take it from me, spend a couple of hours on the Little Coal River now and you'll walk away with some bass, and that's what this project is all about.