Water Quality Bill Expires, But Advocates Say Fight is Not Over

West Virginia Public Broadcasting
15 March 2010
By Ben Adducchio

Several hundred bills didn’t make it to the governor’s desk this legislative session, including a bill to regulate the levels of
salts, minerals and metals in West Virginia streams.

Advocates of such changes promise the fight will continue however.

For two sessions in a row, a bill designed to set a limit on the amount of salt and minerals in state waters failed to reach the governor’s desk.

This time around, the bill did not make it out of the House Government Organization Committee.

Delegate Barbara Evans Fleischauer, D-Monongalia, is a sponsor of the bill. She is hopeful that a different approach will work.

“Our bill really was designed to require the DEP secretary to do that, and he has assured us that he is going to introduce regulations,” she
said.

“Although I’m disappointed, I think we are going to get to the same place anyway.”

Scott Mandirola is the Director of Water and Waste Management of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.

He says the agency is addressing the issue.

“We will be having a water quality standard meeting, in the next couple of months, and we will have a public hearing as well,” he said.

“And then finalize it and submit it to the Legislative Rulemaking Review Committee. It’s something that needs to be put into place, and the time is right to move forward with a water standard for TDS.”

TDS stands for total dissolved solids.

These are the measurements of salts, minerals and metals dissolved in the water.

They can come from organic material but also from industrial activity, like mining and gas drilling.

The bill that never made it to the House or Senate floor this session would have limited TDS levels to 500 milligrams per liter of water.

Mandirola isn’t the only one who thinks the time is right for TDS limits.

Betty Wiley is the President of the Dunkard Creek Watershed Association, a grassroots environmental organization.

She says a TDS standard is past due.

“We can’t afford to wait; you can never afford to wait another year. It should have happened 50 years ago, but that doesn’t mean all is lost,” she said.

“It just means that it will be harder to catch up when they finally do have the right kinds of laws.”

Last September, thousands of fish died in Dunkard Creek, a stream in Monongalia County.

State officials point to toxins from a golden algae bloom as the culprit.

But other officials say mining discharges created the conditions for the algae to bloom.

Wiley and other residents living in the Dunkard Creek watershed believe stricter standards on total dissolved solids and other pollutants may have prevented the fish kill.

“There’s an awful lot of controversy about this TDS. Some sources say you can never remove all the things,” she said, “that there’s no effective way to do it, and it’s expensive.

But they never have been required to do that. And that’s just the way it is.”