Mon River QUEST Harnesses Volunteers as Early Warning System -
The State Journal
10 January 2012
By Pam Kasey
MORGANTOWN - In a watershed hit by two major pollution events in
recent years, a West Virginia University-based program is helping
residents monitor and document the quality of the streams they
care about.
Mon River QUEST is a volunteer water quality monitoring program
for the Monongahela River organized by the West Virginia Water
Research Institute at WVU.
WRI started its own Mon River monitoring program in July 2009
after an episode of salty pollution from energy extraction
activities.
In 2008, gas industry waste fluids elevated the river's level of
total dissolved solids — salts, mainly, abbreviated in water
quality lingo as TDS — to concentrations that caused problems for
industrial water users and affected the taste and odor of drinking
water.
When WRI's program had not yet ramped up to its current level, a
September 2009 incident underscored the need for regular
monitoring in many locations. Acid mine discharges high in
dissolved solids led to a fish and mussel kill on the Mon River
tributary Dunkard Creek. Detailed water quality data were too
scarce to quickly pinpoint the source and timing of the pollution.
Foundations of Mon River QUEST
WRI now tests 19 water quality parameters at four points along
the river and at the mouths of 12 major tributaries every two
weeks.
The institute tests for such indicators as conductivity, which is
closely related to TDS and can be read in the field, as well as
for more sophisticated measures that clarify the make-up and
source of TDS and can only be obtained in the laboratory.
It makes its data available online through an interactive map.
The monitoring program is now, in cooperation with coal companies,
helping to control TDS levels in the river.
But there is far more to the Monongahela River basin than those 16
points. Nearly a million people get their drinking water from the
Mon. Formed at the confluence of the West Fork and Tygart Valley
rivers at Fairmont, it flows about 130 miles north to Pittsburgh
and drains more than 7,000 square miles of coal- and gas-producing
territory.
"What we are missing is data from the headwater streams of the
main Monongahela tributaries," said WRI Director Paul Ziemkiewicz.
"By expanding this project to include a network of volunteers, the
data set will be much greater and provide a better overall picture
of the health of the Mon River basin."
Volunteers and quality data
WRI's Mon River QUEST is providing the training and equipment
that will get volunteers out on the streams, collecting
conductivity data as an "early warning" system. The group held a
training in December for watershed groups in the West Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Maryland headwaters of the Mon River, according
to Mon River QUEST Program Manager Melissa O'Neal.
The training was conducted primarily by the Alliance of Aquatic
Resource Monitoring of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
Volunteer monitoring is a time-tested practice, said ALLARM
Director Julie Vastine, noting that the National Weather Service
has used volunteer monitors since the 1890s, and programs in at
least 48 states enlist volunteers to monitor water quality.
In West Virginia, Vastine pointed out, the Department of
Environmental Protection's Save our Streams program already
teaches volunteer monitors to identify and count stream-bottom
life in order to rate a stream's health on a stream condition
index.
ALLARM was formed 25 years ago to address acid rain. The program
developed its conductivity monitoring program more recently in
response to concerns about accidental or illegal discharges of gas
industry wastewater into streams and has trained 600 volunteers in
Pennsylvania in the program so far.
ALLARM has given careful attention to the challenges of having
non-scientists collect data. Quality assurance comes through
several measures, Vastine said.
First, volunteers are self-selecting. The rigorous six-hour
training and the expectation of visiting a monitoring site weekly
and following strict protocols weeds out people who aren't
serious, she said.
"The people that actually sign up for or buy meters at the end of
the day, they're the folks that feel comfortable with and
confident about the techniques," she said.
Those meters provide another level of quality assurance.
ALLARM tested 11 monitoring devices priced under $200. The Lamotte
Tracer PockeTester stood out for volunteer-friendliness and
robustness, she said. Mon River QUEST has obtained and is loaning
those devices to the watershed groups for volunteer use.
Finally, the first time a volunteer goes out, he or she collects
two samples, then analyzes one and sends the other in to the
program organizers — WRI, in this case — for a confirming
analysis. If the two results don't match, the volunteer is
retrained.
The same split-sample test is conducted twice yearly to ensure
that both volunteer and equipment continue to function properly.
ALLARM's volunteer monitoring program has gained the respect of
Pennsylvania state regulators, Vastine said.
Turning data to action
Watershed groups that attended the December "train the trainer"
workshop in Morgantown will teach their organization's volunteers
in turn, making them vital players in the river's early warning
system.
Volunteer field data will be mapped on the Mon River QUEST website
with WRI's laboratory data. Users will have access to an
increasingly rich picture of water quality in the river basin at
given locations and times. Clicking on a monitoring site
brings up a pop-up window with water quality data, graphs and
charts.
"Ultimately the ‘wow' factor is having the data from multiple
groups up on a website, their field conductivity data along with
our data that, with the actual constituents of TDS, lets us see if
it's high because it's influenced by treated acid mine drainage or
untreated acid mine drainage or if it's something that could be
influenced by hydraulic fracturing flowback," O'Neal said.
"If the volunteers turn up a hot spot, the right agency can follow
up with laboratory analysis," O'Neal said.
White Day Creek Watershed Association has begun entering data on
the Mon River QUEST website, and O'Neal expects that the other 13
groups participating so far will begin monitoring and entering
data by spring. The website soon will have a list of watershed
organizations and where they operate, she said, so that people
wishing to help with monitoring can contact them to get involved.