Mon River Summit Focuses on Regulation, Rehabilitation
DEP Secretary Randy Huffman says the state has a "dissolved solids
issue."
The State Journal
22 April 2010
Story by Pam Kasey
MORGANTOWN -- Regulatory efforts to protect streams from the effects of
coal and natural gas extraction have converged on one issue: salts.
But it’s possible to go too far, West Virginia Department of
Environmental Protection Secretary Randy Huffman said April 19 at the
fifth annual Monongahela River Summit in Morgantown.
“Whether we’re talking about surface mine drainage, deep mine drainage,
Marcellus frack water disposal, or whether we’re talking about
(wastewater treatment plants) or any other industrial activity, we’ve
got a dissolved solids issue, and we need to be smart about how we
approach it,” Huffman said.
Dissolved solids — referred to in water quality lingo as total
dissolved solids, or TDS —fouled drinking water for Mon River
communities in Pennsylvania in 2008. Poorly treated wastewater from
Marcellus Shale gas wells spiked the river over the state’s TDS
standard of 500 milligrams/liter.
Then, in 2009, high TDS from Consolidation Coal Co. deep coal mines
contributed to a massive fish and mussel kill on Dunkard Creek at the
West Virginia–Pennsylvania border.
The two states’ environmental regulators are working to control salty
discharges through steps ranging from restrictions on municipal sewage
treatment plants, which can’t remove dissolved solids, to requiring
Consolidation Coal to treat its mine water.
WVDEP has drafted a protocol for implementing the state’s narrative
water quality standards, a “you-know-it-when-you-see-it” regulatory
approach to stream health that should supplement numeric standards for
contaminants but has been underused by the department.
Meanwhile, though, earlier this month, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency cut through all of that by issuing a provisional
standard for conductivity — another measure of salinity — for surface
mine permits. A water quality standard can’t be applied to just one
activity, Huffman said. The standard corresponds with about 200-300
mg/L TDS — below the natural level of some healthy streams, he said.
Huffman said he expects to release the draft narrative standards
protocol for public comment in “weeks, not months” and said he’s
optimistic the EPA will be “reasonable” as the agency considers a final
conductivity standard. “My instincts tell me what they want is to stop
mountaintop mining,” he said, not impair all economic activity.
Golden Algae, Nutrients
Investigators of the Dunkard Creek incident concluded that high TDS
caused a toxic bloom of nonnative golden algae that killed the fish and
mussels.
Golden algae have since been found in six more high-TDS West Virginia
streams, raising fears that more fish kills will result.
Experience in the southwest, where the algae have been present for
years, seems to indicates that it may not be possible to eradicate the
algae but only to keep populations down by controlling TDS.
But Mindy Armstead of Potesta and Associates Inc., consultants to
Consolidated Coal, noted in her presentation at the summit that their
food source also could be limited.
“We have to get a handle on nutrient loads,” she said — mainly,
straight sewage pipes from homes and runoff from agriculture. “We need
to manage waste-handling systems correctly and keep buffer zones and
stream banks intact.”
Rehabilitating Dunkard Creek
As for bringing back Dunkard Creek’s popular fishery, state Division of
Natural Resources fish biologist Frank Jernejcic said some mature fish
will swim up from the Mon River and minnows will come back from the
tributaries.
DNR plans will stock smallmouth bass if necessary and muskellunge in
three to four years after small fish populations have rebounded.
Mussels, long-lived and sensitive organisms, are another matter.
Dunkard Creek supported 14 to 17 species, by far the most diverse
population in the Mon River basin. “We’ll have to develop a plan,”
Jernejcic said.