The field in Somerset County where Flight 93 came down twenty-five years ago is hallowed ground. It is also reclaimed strip mine land, and the memorial built there quietly doubles as one of our region’s most meaningful mine drainage treatment projects.
For the September 11 anniversary, The Allegheny Front revisits the Flight 93 National Memorial, where designers restored a mined landscape and engineered treatment ponds that settle metals out of mine influenced groundwater before it reaches Lamberts Run.
A memorial on mined land
When the nation set out to honor the forty passengers and crew, it inherited a landscape scarred by surface mining, with groundwater that picked up metals as it moved through old workings. Rather than treat that as a side issue, the memorial’s designers made healing the land part of the memorial itself, reforesting the grounds as a living monument and building water treatment into the site plan.
No ordinary treatment project
The companion story details why treating water at the crash site was anything but routine: the ponds had to handle drainage from historic mines while fitting within a place of national mourning. The result is passive treatment doing what it does best, letting gravity, time, and chemistry settle out metals before the water moves downstream. The reporting also notes the living memorial now faces both old threats and new ones, a reminder that restored landscapes need tending forever.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Watershed groups in the Yough and Casselman country spend their lives explaining that abandoned mine drainage is fixable and that reclaimed land can carry real meaning. There may be no better proof in America than this one field in Somerset County, where AMD treatment is woven into the most visited memorial landscape in Pennsylvania. Share this one with your members, your county commissioners, and anyone who thinks mine scarred land is beyond saving.
Sources: The Allegheny Front, the living memorial faces both old and new threats and treating the water there was no ordinary project, September 11, 2026.
