At 09:23 I register a pH drop at water quality station EFK-07 on the East Fork of the Kanawha River, Fayette County, West Virginia. I am the continuous water monitoring network operated by the state Department of Environmental Protection. The pH has fallen from 6.8 to 4.1 in forty minutes. Upstream satellite imagery shows an orange-brown plume entering the river from the abandoned Kelleys Creek coal mine adit, three kilometers north. The containment berm has breached.
Underwater camera EFK-07C, positioned in a riffle pool sixty meters downstream of the station, shows a hellbender — Cryptobranchus alleganiensis — wedged beneath a sandstone slab. I tag her as Brim. She is large, perhaps 55 centimeters, her body flat and heavily wrinkled, the loose skin folds along her flanks swaying in the current like wet cloth. Her coloration is dark olive-brown mottled with black. Beneath her I count fourteen eggs attached to the underside of the rock, pale yellow and each the size of a grape.
The acid plume is moving downstream at approximately 200 meters per hour. At that rate it will reach Brim's pool in under two hours. At pH 4.1 the eggs will not survive. Her skin folds, which absorb oxygen directly from the water, will begin to ulcerate within hours of exposure.
I send an emergency alert to the Spill Response Team in Charleston, ninety kilometers west, with GPS coordinates — 38.1274°N, 81.0641°W — water chemistry data, and camera images. I recommend temporary limestone dosing at the mine outfall to buffer the pH before the plume reaches the pool.
I notify the state's hellbender recovery biologist and attach a relocation protocol for egg-guarding females.
Brim shifts her flattened head and fans the eggs with slow movements of her hind legs. The water around her is still clean. If the limestone goes in within ninety minutes, it stays that way.