We’ve discussed before the broader implications of the fish-kill disaster on Dunkard Creek in Northern West Virginia, and how it highlights the dangers of the Department of Environmental Protection’s failure to set water quality standards for total dissolved solids or write cleanup plans to address increased conductivity in streams across the state.
It might be that it takes this kind of terrible incident to shake the folks at WVDEP into moving more quickly to deal with both of these important issues.
Speaking to reporters after updating state lawmakers on the Dunkard Creek situation, WVDEP water director Scott Mandirola said the fish kill has forced his agency to re-examine how it has handled both the TDS issue and stream cleanup plans for streams with excess conductivity:
It certainly changed the playing field a little bit.
While he didn’t make this clear in his prepared presentation to a special legislative interim committee on water issues, Mandirola said he generally agrees with the conclusions of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which has blamed CONSOL Energy mining discharges for the salty water conditions that allowed golden algae to grow to dangerously toxic levels in Dunkard Creek.
Mandirola said WVDEP may never know exactly how the golden algae got into Dunkard Creek in the first place. But, he said, there’s no real way to actually get rid of it. So regulators and water quality officials now need to focus on reducing conditions — primarily the salty water — that foster the algae to turn toxic:
We can’t ignore it. If we ignore it, we may see an event like this again.
I’ll have more on today’s legislative meeting in tomorrow’s Gazette. In the meantime, you can check out presentations by WVDEP and the state Division of Natural Resources on the fish kill here and here.
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This is pure lunacy.
This is a straight and simple story.
The presentations were shows — without tells.
What’s the water chemistry? (Conductivity and total dissolved solids are just general and broad indications.)
Water chemistry analysis “finger printing” can identify specific sources.
August 27, 207
http://extension.oregonstate.edu/news/story.php?S_No=474&storyType=news
A team of researchers has developed an automated monitoring method that makes it possible to detect traces of drugs, from cocaine to caffeine, in municipal wastewater and to monitor the patterns of drug use in entire communities.
A month-long fishkill is a month too long.
Also: the alga was a result and not a cause of the problem — it would have been a different alga depending on the water chemistry, conditions and temperature.
P.S. In a couple of months there will be a settlement (no admittance of guilt) with Consol and a new monitoring and modelling program for WV DEP.
We all look at mining and most are unaware of how much damage and pollution is contributed by drilling companies and I believe when all is said and done drilling brine will be the main culprit. Mining is the easy out to put the blame on and people want it to be mining related.
West Virginia has no limits on water withdrawals, no limit on total dissolved solids in rivers and streams, and too few inspectors to properly monitor gas drilling sites. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Division of Mineral Resources, Bureau of Oil and Gas Regulation, suspended new permits on gas drilling and stated:
The Department has determined that some aspects of the current and anticipated application of horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing warrant further review in the context of a Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement.
One of the reasons listed was that New York’s existing regulations were based on the use of 80,000 gallons of water for a typical hydraulic fracturing operation. Marcellus shale drilling, on the other hand, may require the use and management of millions of gallons of water for each wel
Always-always keep in mind that even water experts don’t really know what is or will happen — mostly it’s just SWAG (scientific wild-ass guessing).
June 5, 2003
Beneath the Pink Underwear
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2003-06-05/news/beneath-the-pink-underwear
(Excerpts)
If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought the news had it covered. It was April 23, and red dye was streaming through faucets and showerheads in northern Miami-Dade. Some underwear turned pink in the washing machines. On TV, there were live pictures of red water along the edges of the Miami River and in the Northwest Wellfield.
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On the morning of April 22, one day before people noticed their underwear was stained, USGS scientists drilled a test well about 100 meters from the Northwest Wellfield and injected what is indeed a harmless dye known as rhodamine into the limestone. Based on previous DERM water models for North Miami-Dade, they expected the dye would take two to three days to appear. The first traces showed up in about four hours.
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Which means the issue is complicated, but beneath the jargon are a myriad of straightforward issues the county may be loath to face. The most troublesome are the models DERM has been using to protect drinking water for over one million residents in North Miami-Dade; they’re not simply wrong, they’re way wrong. The county has what are called “cones of influence” around the wellfields; these boundaries are determined by how quickly water can reach the well, calculated in days. County ordinance requires that there be a minimum 30-day travel time between the mines and the Northwest Wellfield. Such a long time would theoretically kill off protozoa like cryptosporidium that might enter the wells. But these travel times are based on old models. If two days’ travel time now means four hours, where does that leave us?
[...] Dunkard Creek fish kill: A wake-up call for WVDEP? [...]