Nothing in Testing to Indicate Morgantown’s Water Unsafe
Morgantown Dominion Post
10 January 2016
By Paul Ziemkiewicz
As the director of WVU’s Water Research Institute (WRI), I am
frequently asked about water quality in the state’s streams and
rivers.
In Morgantown, the Monongahela River is critical for recreation,
commercial navigation and potable water. Perhaps most importantly,
the Morgantown Utility Board (MUB) draws our drinking water from
the river.
The WRI has been monitoring the length of the Monongahela River
since July 2009, with one of our monitoring stations at the MUB
intake in Morgantown. It’s important for the community to know
that, despite some recent reports about bromide in the water, our
research is conclusive that this is not a problem along the river
in West Virginia. We have, however, found elevated concentrations
of bromide downstream of Masontown, Pa., where a drinking water
utility report an excess of bromide and disinfection byproducts
such as trihalomethanes (THM).
We monitor the Monongahela River and its major tributaries for
many pollutants including bromide. Bromide is important because
when it passes through a drinking water plant’s chlorination
system it can attach to naturally occurring methane forming THM.
The relationship between intake bromide and output THM is not well
understood.
But all public water providers in the United States are required
to monitor THM in their distribution systems. The regulatory limit
for total THM delivered to customers is 0.08 mg/L. THM is
important because under chronic exposure it is considered a
carcinogen and is listed as a primary pollutant by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
There is no regulatory limit for bromide but we become concerned
when river bromide concentrations exceed 0.08 mg/L. That level has
been exceeded only once in the Monongahela River at Morgantown
over the past five years on July 10, 2014.
It’s important to remember that THM compliance is based on a
rolling four quarter average. So, given the low bromide
concentrations in the Mon River, it’s no surprise that MUB’s
compliance reporting indicates no exceedances of the total THM
limit since monitoring began several decades ago.
You can find MUB’s testing results for the last three years on its
website: http://mub.org/reports-ordinances.
Look under Consumer Confidence Reports.
Bromide is highly concentrated in waste water from gas wells. So,
the absence of bromide is a good indicator that the local wells
are not leaking.
Since 2011, Northeast Natural Energy (NNE) has drilled four wells
upriver from the MUB water intake. Bromide levels at the MUB
intake have remained low throughout this period.
Before the first NNE wells were developed in summer 2011, there
was justifiable concern in the community that a spill on the well
pad could contaminate the Morgantown water supply. As a member of
MUB’s Technical Advisory Board at the time, I recommended
secondary containment on the site to be implemented prior to
drilling the first well. NNE agreed and it was, to my knowledge,
the first well in the state with this level of protection.
Finally, the NNE well site on the Morgantown Industrial Park is
probably the most thoroughly studied shale gas operation in the
country. WVU, Ohio State, the National Energy Technology
Laboratory and other federal researchers are on site as part of a
U.S. Department of Energy-funded project called the Marcellus
Shale Energy and Environmental Laboratory (MSEEL).
NNE drilled two new wells last summer and hydrofracking began in
October 2015. As part of MSEEL we started monitoring the river,
flowback and produced water from the two new wells and will
continue for the next four years.
Parameters include organic, inorganic and radiological
contaminants. That information will be available to the public.
The results will be used to identify risks and further improve the
environmental safety of shale gas operations.
To reiterate, there is nothing in our testing to indicate that
Morgantown’s drinking water is unsafe, and we will continue to
monitor, paying close attention to potential contamination from
wells, to ensure it stays that way.
Our Monongahela River monitoring is supported by the Colcom
Foundation. The findings are available at http://3riversquest.org.
Paul Ziemkiewicz, Ph.D., is director of WVU’s Water Research
Institute. This commentary should be considered another point of
view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The
Dominion Post.