PORT MATILDA -- Eight rail cars full of Bauxsol, with much more...

PORT MATILDA -- Eight rail cars full of Bauxsol, with much more to come, rolled into this tiny borough on Wednesday as the state begins a $1 million, summer-long test of a chemical fix for the massive environmental hazard at an Interstate 99 construction site at Skytop.

The cars of Bauxsol, a nontoxic, alkaline red powder produced from aluminum refining waste, were dropped off on a rail siding at the corner of Water Street and South High Street, next to the borough building, where unloading is scheduled for today.

Plans are to use a big track hoe mounted on a frame atop the rail cars to put the 675 cubic yards of Bauxsol into five trucks that will cycle back and forth for 10 hours today between Port Matilda and the acid-rock drainage site eight miles to the east.

Neil Bardach, U.S. operations director for Bauxsol manufacturer Virotec, said Wednesday that Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc. will truck the material on U.S. Routes 220 and 322. Today's operation was set to begin at 10:30 a.m.

Three weeks ago, plans were to keep the Bauxsol shipping off public roads by parking the rail cars about a mile south of Port Matilda, where an adjacent I-99 construction area would have provided an off-road corridor to Skytop.

But there is no rail siding there. Nittany and Bald Eagle Railroad business manager Todd Hunter said Wednesday that the unloading from the main line may have interfered with I-99 construction, and the railroad couldn't block the tracks to other rail traffic.

"It was talked about," Hunter said. "Every idea was talked about on this. You have to use the infrastructure you have without disrupting the contractor."

Wednesday's Bauxsol shipment represented the first installment of what could amount to four times that much during the weeks ahead. The state Department of Transportation has contracted with Australian manufacturer Virotec for up to 4,000 tons of it for what PennDOT Secretary Allen Biehler earlier this month called "a million-dollar test."

The pilot test through July and August will determine how effectively injections of a Bauxsol and water mixture counteract the acidity of about 55,000 of the 918,000 cubic yards of pyrite-laced spoil piles and fill areas at Skytop.

The pilot test will be carried out in three areas:

u A section called the small cut-face, a tarp-covered area at the Skytop crest that U.S. Route 322 motorists can see on their left as they drive to Altoona.

u A fill area a little farther west, above and between an already paved section of I-99.

u Another fill area between Routes 322 and 550 near the Matternville School.

Jerry Conner, general manager of Roanoke, Va.-based Transloading Services Inc., which will transfer the Bauxsol from rail cars to trucks, said three more Bauxsol rail shipments lie ahead for the pilot tests.

PennDOT said it will decide after September whether to use Bauxsol, and if so how much, in its permanent remediation plan for Skytop. Virotec's Web site said it has offered Bauxsol to PennDOT for $18 per cubic yard, which could amount to about $16 million if it is used to treat all 900,000 cubic yards of acid-producing rocks.

The eight rail cars that arrived Wednesday straddle Port Matilda's South High Street, four cars to a side. It got there by way of barge from St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Virotec makes it, to a warehouse in the port of Chesapeake, Va. It stopped over two days in Norfolk Southern's Rose Yard in Altoona.

In Port Matilda on Wednesday, Transloading Services heavy equipment operator Travis Bibb used a track hoe with a heavy chain and hook attached to the bucket to raise a 7,000-pound ramp to the top of the rail cars, and then drove the track hoe up the ramp to perch on top, ready for today's work.

The $1 million to $1.3 million that PennDOT is paying for the pilot-test quantities of Bauxsol is the biggest U.S. contract the Queensland company has had. PennDOT got interested in Bauxsol during a December conference on the acid-rock drainage problem hosted by ClearWater Conservancy and Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

Mike Joseph can be reached at 235-3910.