W.Va. DEP Proposes New Water Standards

Morgantown Dominion Post
21 May 2010
Associated Press

CHARLESTON — The Department of Environmental Protection has a recipe for cleaning up West Virginia waterways: It calls for less salt and sewage, and a little more iron.

The DEP this week unveiled three proposed water-quality standards it hopes to present to legislators next year. All are subject to a 45-day public comment period and review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

To address concern that is growing with the proliferation of Marcellus shale gas drilling operations, DEP wants to establish a legal limit for total dissolved solids, including salts and chlorides. Gas drilling produces vast amounts of a briny wastewater, and how to dispose of it without contaminating rivers and streams is a challenge facing the industry and environmental regulators.

The DEP would limit dissolved solids to 500 milligrams per liter in streams, a standard that would be more stringent than neighboring Pennsylvania. That state has the same limit, but only at intake pipes for public drinking water systems.

Dissolved solids can harm aquatic life and make water taste and smell bad. They come from a variety of sources, including coal mines.

Pat Campbell, an assistant director of DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, said the goal is to keep all waters ‘‘suitable for consumption by our citizens and use by our industries.’’

Dissolved solids became a concern after Pennsylvania residents complained about the quality of water in the Monongahela River. The anxiety intensified after a massive fish kill last year on Dunkard Creek, a stream that runs for 43 miles along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border.

Regulators concluded that golden algae killed the fish, but dissolved solids in the water created conditions that helped that algae bloom, choking off oxygen to countless fish, mussels, salamanders and other aquatic life.

The Water Research Institute at WVU began monitoring water quality on the Monongahela and some tributaries last summer to come up with baseline data that could help indicate how new industrial activity is affecting the waterways.

‘‘We have gas drilling that we didn’t have before. We have coal mines going deeper into the basin and turning up different kinds of water. So we’re not just looking at the old time acidity and metals like we did with acid mine drainage; we have a different suite of problems,’’ said Paul Ziemkiewicz, the institute’s director.

The DEP also issued a proposal Wednesday to help control algae blooms in parts of the Greenbrier River, where pollution from sewage plants are affecting water quality.