Sunday, June 22, 2008
A diminishing quality of water
From the RoundTable blog
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John Eby
Eby, of Roanoke, has been a practicing dentist in Roanoke since 1971. He grew up fishing and crabbing on the Potomac. He is active with the conservation organization Izaak Walton League of America.
Two articles recently published in The Roanoke Times indirectly show failings at both federal and state levels from an absence of a uniform water purity policy.
An editorial on June 10 describes conflicting EPA and DEQ regulations for monitoring fly ash -- the residue from burning coal to generate electricity ("Fly ash regulations don't make sense"). Basically, this waste is contaminated with heavy metals that can leach into groundwater. In certain situations, the sites where fly ash is deposited are monitored by wells, but others are not. Regardless, the monitoring does not prevent water contamination.
Recently Outdoors Editor Mark Taylor published an article concerning fish kills on the James River. He accompanied Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologists who electroshocked the water to permit examining living fish for signs of disease. Many fish had significant lesions on their bodies.
The causes of the fish kills on the James, the Cowpasture, the Jackson and the Shenandoah rivers are officially unknown, but there is concern that they are linked to applications of chicken manure as fertilizer on pasturage or to grow corn. It should be noted that fish kills have occurred in the absence of chicken manure use, and that no absolute point-sources of pollution have been identified.
It is a fact, however, that growing corn severely depletes the soil of nitrogen, and that chicken manure is extremely rich in nitrogen. Also, there is increasing acreage being planted in corn for ethanol production.
Another state agency, the Department of Conservation and Recreation, partnered this past November with the Virginia Poultry Federation to use $600,000 to subsidize farmers for the removal of chicken manure from Page and Rockingham counties at the rates of $5 to $12 per ton. My understanding is that there is no record as to where this manure goes, and it would follow that no record exists as to the quantity of application to farmland or its proximity to stream banks, where it could wash into creeks and rivers.
At $5 to $12 per ton subsidy, this $600,000 translates into between 50,000 to 120,000 tons of basically raw, untreated sewage being used as fertilizer, with an absence of a paper trail as to where it is being applied.
Part of the debate concerning fish kills, chicken manure and the general health of Virginia's rivers, is that chicken processing waste can include antibiotics, hormones or other chemicals or metals, and that these can contribute to the injury or death of the fish. Regardless, nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from any fertilizer source is strongly associated with algae growth in both rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, and as a result the health of these fisheries is adversely affected.
As I first suggested, these examples reflect chaos resulting from an absence of a national, or minimally, state water policy. Virginia's DEQ should not be in conflict with the federal EPA, nor should we have conflicting agencies within Virginia's government.
This chaos allows the poisoning of our diminishing freshwater. As a recent letter to the editor from Rita Ross in Indian Valley concluded, "water will be the next natural resource in short supply."
