W.Va. Online Tool Helps Monitor Streams’ Water Levels

Morgantown Dominion Post
22 August 2010
Associated Press

WATER Withdrawal Guidance Tool is available online at http://dep.wv.gov/WWE/wateruse/Pages/WaterWithdrawal.aspx.

CHARLESTON — For the past two years, high salinity in the state’s streams during the dry late summer season has raised concerns over natural gas industry water withdrawals that reduce flows even further. As this summer’s dry season kicks in, residents have a tool: The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s (WVDEP) Water Withdrawal Guidance Tool.

"The DEP secretary has made it very plain that we are not tolerant of streams being dried up," said Mike Stratton, Water Use Section manager at DEP.

It was about mid-August these past two years when the level of dissolved solids salts, mainly shot up in parts of the Monongahela River drainage.

In 2008, late summer low stream flows combined with incompletely treated natural gas well brine to cause problems for industrial and drinking water uses on the Mon River in Pennsylvania.

Then, in late summer 2009, salty mine drainage in Dunkard Creek, a major Mon River tributary at the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border, resulted in the death of all of the fish and mussels on more than 30 miles of the creek.

But over this same two years, withdrawals from surface waters by natural gas companies drilling in the Marcellus shale have increased.

The Marcellus water-use issue has come up in a decade during which the state is getting clear about how much water there is and how to protect water quantity and regulate uses. It started with the Water Resources Protection Act of 2004 and, with the broader Water Resources Protection and Management Act of 2008, will result in a water resources management plan in 2013.

The Water Withdrawal Guidance Tool was developed to advise operators in the natural gas industry when it is safe to withdraw and from where.

Stratton said the guidance tool is the first place to go not only for gas well operators but also for residents concerned about withdrawals.

Users get withdrawal recommendations by clicking in the watershed of interest on an online map of the state. The map is divided into about 30 regions, each of which delivers recommendations based on readings from a U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge.