PALO ALTO - While it's been mostly a brown winter with a little bit of white, borough council Vice President James Somers Jr.'s season will be ruined by another color.
"There's a mine pool filled with millions of gallons of orange-tinted water 12 feet below his property. It occasionally causes flooding in his basement," Mayor Thomas W. Beveridge said last week.
The pipe the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection installed under Somers' home six years ago to divert the rushing water into sewer drains, and so far, it is still doing its job, Somers said Thursday.
DEP has been doing some exploratory drilling to see if it's possible to drain the mine pool, Colleen Connolly, DEP regional spokeswoman, Wilkes-Barre, said Friday.
"We brought in a consultant to work with the Bureau of Mine Reclamation in Wilkes-Barre,"she said. "We're in the design phase to determine if we can dewater the tunnel by doing some horizontal boring."
DEP will decide if that approach will work sometime this year. If it will, Connolly said the project may get the green light by early 2013.
"Right now, we're not sure if this is going to be the solution. That's going to depend on the results of the survey," Connolly said. The survey is being financed by state and federal funds, she added.
Meanwhile, Somers, Beveridge and council President John Deatrich Jr. are keeping an eye on the mine pool, which still has the potential to flood the garage and spill onto the street.
In the middle of the 20th century, the area where Somers' home is used to be the entrance to a mine. In the 1970s, mine water began to flood the tunnels and steps were taken to divert the flow, according to Deatrich.
DEP did a repair job that held until 2005. Then an abandoned mine blowout flooded Somers' basement and the street, Deatrich said. While DEP installed a pipe under Somers' garage to divert water into the sewer system, it soon became clogged.
"It worked for about a month, then blocked up with orange sediment," Somers said.
Since then, rising waters have caused occasional problems for Somers and the borough.
"It floods once or twice a year," Deatrich said.
During previous winters, orange-tinted overspill froze onto the streets, frustrating the neighborhood and forcing the borough to bring out the road salt.
Frustrated and with no long-term solution in sight, Somers said he decided to take action on his own last March.
"I burst a hole through the floor and found that pipe, which is about 9 feet down. It's a 12-inch pipe which looks like it's made of corrugated plastic," Somers said.
Unable to unblock the debris, he said he used a "concrete saw and a sledge hammer" to cut a 12-inch hole along its side to allow the water to flow into it.
"It's nothing fancy, but it's kept the water off the street and kept the neighbors happy," Somers said.
Even when it isn't raining, the flow in the storm drain near sounds like a rushing river or a waterfall. It's a constant reminder to local and state officials that their problems with a mine pool holding millions of gallons of orange-tained water are far from over, according to Beveridge.
This story was corrected from an earlier version.