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This article originally provided by
The
Charleston Gazette
DEP delayed action on pollution problems over the
last decade
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Three weeks ago, fish started dying in
Dunkard Creek, a scenic stream that winds along the West
Virginia-Pennsylvania border in Monongalia County.
Muskie, smallmouth bass and flathead catfish turned up dead. So did
mussels, minnows and salamanders. Just about all of the aquatic life
was wiped out for 30 miles.
"It was awful," said Lou Reynolds, a biologist who surveyed the
damage for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "This has just
been a massive event."
West Virginia environmental regulators, along with federal officials
and their counterparts in Pennsylvania, have struggled to figure out
what happened.
First, they looked at pollution discharged by a CONSOL Energy
underground mine upstream. Then, they investigated rumors that oil
and gas drillers had illegally dumped salty wastewater into the
stream. Now, they're focused on non-native algae as a possible
cause.
"It's been a very frustrating effort," said Randy Huffman, secretary
of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
But Dunkard Creek was having problems long before fish started going
belly up.
Since at least 2002, the DEP has listed Dunkard Creek and several
tributaries as "biologically impaired." At least two major coal
discharges have consistently violated water quality limits --
sometimes discharging five or six times the legal standards -- for
years.
Environmental groups say that DEP officials have been far from
aggressive in trying to remedy the problems.
At least three times in the last decade, the DEP gave CONSOL Energy
time extensions to stop violating its permit limits for chloride, a
pollutant believed connected to the fish kill.
And earlier this year, the DEP issued a proposed cleanup plan that
included no remedy for a growing problem and potential fish kill
culprit: The stream's high level of conductivity, which is also
linked to CONSOL's discharges.
Betty Wiley, president of the Dunkard Creek Watershed Association,
said her group would like to see EPA take over the fish kill probe
and any cleanup plans from the West Virginia DEP.
"They have more resources and they have the best resources," Wiley
said. "And based on past experience, we don't entirely trust the
DEP."
Salty water in a freshwater stream
From its headwaters northwest of Morgantown, Dunkard Creek
crisscrosses the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border several times
before it empties into the Monongahela River not far from Point
Marion, Pa.
Dead fish first started showing up not far from Wana, where a W.Va.
7 bridge crosses the stream.
But even before then, a West Virginia Division of Natural Resources
biologist had reported increases in the streams conductivity in late
August. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official noted a mussel
kill about a week later, according to internal government records.
Reynolds, the EPA biologist, visited the stream on Sept. 9, after
hearing reports of a "total kill" in the stream. He reviewed data,
consulted with state officials and wrote up his preliminary thoughts
in a field memo that was accidentally made public.
"At this time, all indications are that the outfall from [CONSOL's]
Blacksville No. 2 Mine is the likely culprit of this kill," Reynolds
wrote in the Sept. 14 memo. "The high amount of chloride in that
waste stream is certainly toxic to aquatic organisms and the kill
could very well be solely due to the high amount of TDS in this
outfall."
TDS stands for total dissolved solids, which are various salts --
such as chlorides and sulfates -- that are dissolved in water. All
of these things can be dangerous to aquatic life.
Conductivity, or ionic strength, is the ability of the water to
conduct an electrical charge, and it is a good measure of the TDS
and the salts in a stream.
Initially, West Virginia environmental officials agreed with
Reynolds that Blacksville No. 2 was to blame. Then, they found dead
fish upstream from the mine's pollution discharge outlet.
But not far upstream from Blacksville, CONSOL also discharges
pollution from the acid mine drainage treatment plant at its
Loveridge Mine. The new dead fish were discovered between the
Loveridge site, at the community of St. Leo, and Blacksville.
And for years, Loveridge has had the same pollution problem as
Blacksville No. 2: Failure to meet state water quality standards for
chlorides.
The Blacksville No. 2 and Loveridge discharges are part of a
collection of sites CONSOL operates in the Monongahela River
watershed between Fairmont and Morgantown. In this region, old
underground mines are filling up with tainted water. CONSOL pumps
out those mines to try to avoid blowouts of polluted water, and it
pumps water out of its active mines to protect miners from floods.
CONSOL discharges the pumped water to area streams, treating it
first for acid mine drainage.
Water quality experts in the region worry about the looming problem
of those old mines filling with acid-laden water, especially about
what would happen if CONSOL stopped pumping and treating.
CONSOL's current treatment is far from perfect. It doesn't do
anything, for example, about the excess chloride discharges.
In 2002, DEP officials cited the company for those problems. But
then, the agency made a deal to give the company more time to fix
its violations.
In 2005, CONSOL tried to resolve the issue for good, by seeking a
variance from state water quality limits. Company officials argued
the costs to get the chlorides out of its discharge were too high.
The DEP denied that request, but granted more extensions. Most
recently, CONSOL was given until 2013 to stop its violations.
"Right now, there is no cost-effective technology to simply treat
for these dissolved salts," said Tom Hoffman, a vice president and
media spokesman for Pittsburgh-based CONSOL.
Company officials have proposed a variety of solutions, from
expensive "reverse osmosis" treatment to building dozens of miles of
pipes to pump the polluted water directly into the Monongahela
River, where it might more easily be diluted to harmless
concentrations.
Derek Teaney, a lawyer with the Appalachian Center for the Economy
and the Environment, warned DEP in September 2008 the agency's
latest compliance extension was allowing CONSOL to "game the
system."
"It is likely that the permittees could install pollution control
equipment to reduce their chloride discharges to the regulatory
limits in well less than five years," Teaney wrote. "The time for
compliance under a compliance schedule, however, is to be 'as soon
as possible,' not 'as soon as the permittee's preferred treatment is
possible.'"
Golden-brown algae
Was the disaster avoidable? Were there problems that regulators
could have moved faster to address? And did those problems
contribute to the huge fish kill?
Under the federal Clean Water Act, state regulators are supposed to
put together lists of their most polluted streams and devise plans
to clean them up. But like state officials across the country, West
Virginia's DEP never did -- until environmental groups took them to
court to force action. Under a decade-old legal settlement, DEP and
EPA have been writing these cleanup plans, called Total Maximum
Daily Loads, or TMDLs, for streams across the state.
Since at least 2002, DEP has listed Dunkard Creek and several
tributaries as "biologically impaired" because of increased
conductivity.
But in a draft TMDL published in March, DEP officials declined to do
anything about the problem.
DEP concluded that, "because available information is insufficient
to address biological impairment attributed to ionic toxicity," the
agency proposed no action on the problem.
Teaney, the environmental group lawyer, objected.
In an April 3 letter to DEP, Teaney noted that a plan to fix Dunkard
Creek would help deal with drinking water problems downstream in
western Pennsylvania.
Last fall, Pennsylvania towns near the West Virginia border noticed
unpleasant tastes and odors in the drinking water they draw from the
Monongahela River. Officials have pointed to the untreated discharge
of oil and gas drilling wastewater as one cause.
Regulators in Pennsylvania have complained that West Virginia isn't
doing enough to deal with that issue. But Huffman, the West Virginia
DEP director, noted that one potential major culprit -- a CONSOL
coalbed methane operation that pumped its wastewater underground --
is located in Greene County, Pa., and was originally approved by the
federal EPA.
West Virginia officials have also acknowledged that Dunkard Creek's
pollution is a big part of the Monongahela's problem. They just
haven't done anything about it -- yet.
Huffman said that would change. He said he wouldn't approve CONSOL's
plan to just pump the chloride-laden water from Blacksville and
Loveridge over into the Mon River.
"[That plan] was brought to me, and I said it doesn't make any
sense," Huffman said last week. "It moves the chlorides around and
gets them to the standard that we're looking for, but it doesn't get
any chlorides out of the water."
Late last week, Huffman and his staff announced they believe a
non-native algae is the cause of the fish kill. They explained that
the golden-brown algae was likely encouraged to grow because of
Dunkard Creek's high chloride levels.
But Tom Clarke, director of the DEP Division of Mining and
Reclamation, said his agency wants to withhold any further actions
on CONSOL's discharge problems until it understands more clearly the
factors behind the fish kill.
"Until we know the cause and whether CONSOL is part of what we need
to deal with, we wouldn't move forward," Clarke said.
All of that comes too late for folks like Betty Wiley. The retired
West Virginia University employee now lives in Westover. But she
grew up along Dunkard Creek. Her mom still lives along the stream,
and Wiley is volunteer president of the local watershed association.
"We were in the creek all the time every summer," Wiley recalled
last week. "So I have a real strong attachment to the creek.
"It was an ecosystem, and now it's all dead," she said. "It's an
environmental disaster is what it is."
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kw...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1702.
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