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.