Morgantown Dominion Post
25 September 2005
By Eric Bowen
DEP begins series of public meetings on water-quality limits.
Contamination in the Monongahela River, Cheat Lake and Deckers Creek has landed the waterways on the state Department of Environmental Protection's list of impaired streams, according to a report published earlier this year.
DEP Chief Communications Officer Jessica Greathouse said being named to the list means the state will attempt to find the source of the contamination and clean it up during the next five years. But Greathouse said the waterways are not dangerous to human health, and fish taken from the river are safe to eat in limited quantities.
"Should you be drinking the water? No," Greathouse
said. "But that's the case for every river."
Clement Solomon, with WVU's National Environmental Services
Center, said a stream or body of water is placed on an impaired
list "when it doesn't meet a certain protocol set by the
EPA. In a nutshell, what I would say is they are not meeting
standards."
He hasn't had a chance to study the latest impairment report, so he wouldn't comment on it. But he did explain what the report involved.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established a "total maximum daily load." This, Solomon said, "is a calculation of the maximum amount of pollutant that a body can receive and still meet water-quality standards."
The EPA has a number of different areas it measures. A stream can be impaired for any number of reasons, he said. The report for each stream will differ. Cheat Lake made the state's list for mercury contamination. Deckers Creek has high levels of aluminum and lead, while the Mon River has high levels of fecal coliform.
The DEP recognized there was a problem with coliform contamination as far back as 1999, when it found high levels of fecal coliform in Burroughs Run creek, Greathouse said. The test showed a concentration of 2,500 colonies per 100 milliliters, which is about six times the accepted level of 400.
The DEP also received a copy of a 2000 study performed by the Morgantown Utility Board that took water samples in Burroughs Run, Poponoe Run, Deckers Creek and the Mon River. The study showed high levels of coliform, especially during heavy rains, when sewage from MUB's sewer system mixes with rainwater and flows into area streams.
But the water-quality division apparently didn't receive MUB's report, Greathouse said. The agency that handles water quality has no record of getting it.
The lack of communication between departments may have delayed getting the Mon River watershed on the list for cleanup.
Normally when a test finds coliform bacteria, it is flagged for further study in the next testing cycle five years later, said Mike Arcuri, waterquality-section supervisor for the DEP. But in 2004, the DEP ran a test on a sample of rivers in the Mon watershed, and Burroughs Run was not retested.
When asked, Arcuri could not explain why Burroughs Run was not retested or placed on the DEP's list of "impaired streams," which means a stream does not meet water-quality standards.
"I believe the reason ... is that there were some other watersheds that were higher priority," Arcuri said. "We had a limited number of resources."
Now that the local waterways have been identified as contaminated, Greathouse said, the state will put together what is called a "total maximum daily load" plan to reduce the pollutants. The plan will examine possible sources of contamination and try to find ways to clean them up.
The DEP will develop the plan during the next four years before it does another round of testing for coliform bacteria in 2009, Greathouse said.
She said the DEP is concerned about coliform contamination throughout the state. But Morgantown will have to wait until the next cycle of testing to get a solution.
"We try to take care of them systematically and make sure we are protective of health and the environment," Greathouse said. "We've come a long way ... but we have a long way to go."
Despite the contamination in local rivers, Martin Christ, executive director of the Friends of Deckers Creek, said he is not worried about boating or swimming in the Mon River. He said he has weighed the risk and decided that he should not be concerned.
Though he enjoys boating and swimming in the river, Christ said he does want the rivers to be cleaned up to reverse the environmental damage that has been done to them.
"The law of the land is that the streams should be clean," Christ said. "I want streams to be clean. And we all have to work very hard to make sure the streams are clean."