Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
18 June 2008
By Don Hopey,
Paddlefish and 129 other species of fish swim in the Ohio River these days thanks in large part to a small, quietly effective quasi-governmental river health organization celebrating its 60th anniversary this month.
The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, an interstate technical agency with a low profile, has had an outsized impact on abating pollution, reviving one of the world's great working rivers and expanding recreational opportunities beyond slinging doughballs for carp.
Fish kills due to lack of oxygen in the river, floating masses of oil and grease, and the once all-too-common "rotting river smell" are no longer issues, replaced by concerns about the effects of flushing pharmaceutical drugs.
The idea for ORSANCO was floated by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce when the Ohio River was little more than a convenient, 981-mile sewer for residential and industrial waste.
"There was a real tragedy of the commons," said Alan H. Vicory, the commission's executive director and chief engineer. "Pittsburgh's sewage wasn't Pittsburgh's problem in those days and Wheeling's sewage was not Wheeling's problem. Fixing that sounds like common sense stuff now, but it was cutting-edge then. Then it was a bit of an experiment."
Once Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia agreed to cooperate, the commission began to tackle the problem of intrastate pollution. In 1951, it set up the world's first electronic monitoring system for water quality, with 35 stations reporting water oxygen levels each night, and led a drive to get cities and municipalities to construct sewage treatment plants. In 1970, two years before the passage of the Clean Water Act , the commission issued regulations requiring biological treatment of sewage and established a pollution spill detection system. It's been doing lock studies of fish since 1948 to evaluate the water quality changes in the river.
"We have a world reputation based on the technical work done in the Ohio in the 1940s, '50s and '60s," Mr. Vicory said. "The bacteria standard worldwide was developed by ORSANCO. We are the primary river health organization in the world."
Today the commission -- with a staff of just 27 and an annual budget of about $4 million, $175,000 of that from Pennsylvania -- monitors and assesses water quality in the Ohio River Basin, sets pollution control standards, coordinates spill response and conducts pollution research on the effects of the 1,500 combined sewer overflows that still dump into the watershed after storms. It is conducting a study of recreational uses of the river and holds public workshops and educational programs on the health of the Ohio, which transports 10 times the commerce carried in the Great Lakes and an amount equal to that going through the Panama Canal.
"ORSANCO doesn't want to be, and wasn't set up to be, an out-front agency. It is instead an instrument of its member states' collective will," Mr. Vicory said. "We're a technical agency. I'm an engineer. It's not our goal to have a press release every week."
As a consequence of that under-the-radar position, most Pennsylvanians know of ORSANCO, if they know it at all, as the primary sponsor, along with industries throughout the river valley, of the annual riverbank trash cleanup effort known as River Sweep, scheduled for this Saturday along 3,000 miles of shoreline in the Ohio and its tributaries.
Charles Duritsa, retired head of the state Department of Environmental Protection's southwest region based in Pittsburgh, said the commission also does lots of other things the states don't or can't do.
"ORSANCO does ambient water sampling that are used for research and to show trends, said Mr. Duritsa, who serves on the commission's board of directors. "It samples bacteria levels, and its organic detection system has picked up and identified so many spills over the years and let downriver public water suppliers know.
"It's very important. The small amount of money the states contribute to support the system is paid back many times over."
Volunteers are still needed for the 19th annual River Sweep, scheduled for Saturday. Contact Don Bialosky, of the state Department of Environmental Protection, at 412-442-4187.
Don Hopey can be reached at dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983.