Tag: james river association

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Stop and smell the roses: COVID has changed the way we’re relating to nature

The Rivanna River and trails are seeing more patrons than usual, as people search for a reprieve from quarantine. Photo: Jack Looney

 

Just about everything has changed in the last month—and as our habits have shifted, so has our relationship with the local environment.

“People aren’t flying, people aren’t driving,” says Jamie Brunkow, the senior advocacy manager of the James River Association. Those transportation changes have effects for our air and our water. “Typically we think of that as less smog and less air pollution. But a lot of the nitrogen that ends up going into our rivers, going into the [Chesapeake] Bay, comes from the air.”

StreetLight Data, a firm specializing in transportation data, has been tracking the change in vehicle miles traveled all over the country since the COVID crisis began.

From the week of April 19 to April 25, Albemarle County drivers covered around 75 percent fewer miles than during an average week before the crisis. Charlottesville drivers were even more conservative, covering 82 percent fewer miles than in a baseline week. That drop-off is less pronounced but still visible in more rural counties—in Buckingham, for example, drivers only drove 40 percent fewer miles.

Charlottesville’s airport saw 84 flights canceled due to coronavirus in just the second half of March. Air travel has become a central concern for environmental activists—one widely repeated statistic says for every person who takes a round trip flight from New York to London, 30 square feet of ice is lost from the arctic. And short flights, like the Charlottesville airport’s regular connections to nearby hubs in Philadelphia and Charlotte, produce more harmful emissions per mile than longer flights.

Additionally, decreased traffic means the world is quieter and darker, which is good for animals like birds and frogs. “A lot of disruption in species reproduction has been attributed to the disruption of their light receptors or ability to hear calls for mating,” says Chris Miller, the president of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “There’s a lot of evidence that truck noise, car noise, and light pollution interfere with those natural cycles.”

Meanwhile, with social distancing in effect, outdoor spaces that remain accessible are seeing increased visitors. This March, the trail near the John Warner Parkway saw 607 bikers and pedestrians per day, according to the City’s trail counter. That’s roughly four times more than the 130 people who used the trail per day in March of 2019.

Lisa Wittenborn, program director of the Rivanna Conservation Alliance, says that the increased foot traffic is a double-edged sword for the Rivanna. “We’re really excited that people are out and using the resource,” Wittenborn says. “We hope people are being careful not to impact the river. That people are picking up after their dogs, and picking up their trash and not disrupting the banks, and that sort of thing.”

The crisis is having other messy effects. “They’re seeing evidence of the toilet paper shortage in the wastewater treatment plant,” Wittenborn says, “because of the things people are flushing. Those wipes say they’re flushable but they’re not. They can cause clogs and backups and sewage leaks. You don’t think about the little impacts.”

Overall, though, this period is a sort of experiment in a possible, more sustainable future: Zoom meetings aren’t fun, but they do decrease emissions. “There’s something about a hard stop like this that really forces you to reevaluate the frame and how to move forward,” Brunkow says. “It’s going to be really interesting to look back at these unintended consequences to see where things change.”

Maybe those changes will manifest as subtle attitude shifts. “I do think that this whole experience has brought to the forefront the importance of having these wild or semi-wild open spaces that we can all enjoy together,” Wittenborn says. “It’s gotten a lot of people to stop and really pay attention to what’s going on outside their windows. Seeing flowers bloom they’ve never noticed before, watching birds, whatever it is. I think people are much more in tune with the natural world right now. Because we’ve slowed down, and we have a chance to just observe.”

 

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Clean up your act: Local environmental groups sound off on Trump’s Clean Water Act rollback

The Clean Water Act helped depollute the James River.

Keeping our waterways swimmable, fishable, and drinkable seems like an uncontroversial goal—but the Trump administration apparently disagrees. Since assuming control, the administration has made a series of efforts to weaken long-standing protections for America’s waterways. Local environmental groups have grave concerns about the potential effects of these suggested laws in Virginia and across the country.

The Clean Water Act prevents people, farms, and factories from dumping waste into water and using chemicals that could lead to harmful runoff. The most recent piece of Trump legislation, announced in late January, would redefine which types of waterways are protected by the act. 

“These rules will reduce the scope of Clean Water Act protection in an unprecedented way, in terms of putting hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands in Virginia at risk,” says Jamie Brunkow, senior advocacy manager at the James River Association.

“There are industrial and other interests that stand to profit by a narrower scope of Clean Water Act protections,” says Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Jonathan Gendzier. “That includes big industrial agriculture, homebuilders, and other polluting industries.”

Trump’s rules “reflect a simplistic notion that we should only be regulating navigable waters,” says Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council.

Confining the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction to “navigable waters” means leaving out smaller tributaries that feed in to larger waterways. Vernal pools, intermittent streams, prairie potholes, and other seasonal but critical water features could lose protection. Since all of these waterways are interconnected, pollution anywhere means pollution everywhere. “All the little ravines that have rocks in them and no water until it rains, if you’re allowed to dump whatever you want in there, the second it rains all that is going to come into your streams,” says Bryan Hofmann, deputy director of Friends of the Rappahannock.

The Clean Water Act was initially passed by the Nixon administration, with bipartisan support, in 1972. It’s widely considered an environmental success story, and has directly resulted in improvement of water quality in places like the James River, says Brunkow.

“It’s hard to imagine, but we didn’t have any rules in place that prevented you from directly putting sewage into waterways,” Brunkow says. “The James in Richmond was largely considered an open sewer prior to the Clean Water Act.”

This rollback is bad news for people and animals alike. Brook trout, endangered Shenandoah salamanders, oysters, otters, blue crabs, bald eagles and even dolphins all rely on the Rappahannock system, says Hofmann, and any pollution wreaks havoc on those fragile systems. Meanwhile, “In Charlottesville, most of the public drinking supply comes from surface water, which runs off the land,” Miller says. 

Repealing the federal rules means more responsibility falls to states. Virginia has decent protections in place, compared to neighboring states like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, says Hofmann, but the rollback means fewer staff and a decreased budget. 

The rule change “puts an additional strain on our state agencies,” Brunkow says. “It’s really a devastating blow to have lost that national standard.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center has been fighting against Trump water deregulation since the administration took office, says Gendzier. They plan to challenge this new rule as well, and anticipate a months-long legal battle.

“Having a big power plant go through and discharge whatever they want into the water, farms having their cattle sitting there all day long and defecating into the stream—” Hofmann says, “The Clean Water Act prevents those huge bad things from happening.”

 

 

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Don’t eat the fish: Push to study toxins in local waters

Catch a flathead catfish in the James River, and you’d better throw it back. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife service

Quillback carpsucker. Flathead catfish. Gizzard shad. American eel. Carp. If you catch one of these in the James River, you’re better off throwing it back in.

Danny Hodge, a visiting fisherman recently stationed on the James, did just that when he says he reeled in a 20-pound catfish last month.

“I wouldn’t eat none of them,” he says, standing on the riverbank in Scottsville. With a tackle box to his left and a fishing pole gripped in his right hand, he says the warning signs about contaminated fish (there’s no threat to swimmers) posted around the river worry him.

Locally, those five species are most likely to be contaminated with high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls—or PCBs—according to signs posted by the Virginia Department of Health at James River public access locations.

PCBs, a known carcinogen, are a group of man-made chemicals that consist of 209 individual compounds and were once used as coolants and lubricants in transformers and other electrical equipment. Though the federal government banned their production in 1977, their legacy remains.

Chris French, a former Virginia Department of Environmental Quality employee and a current member of the Chesapeake Bay Program’s toxic contaminants group, says PCBs are still entering waterways from old, remediated sites that haven’t been cleaned up, and also from burning waste oils.

When PCBs wash into a body of water, they settle into vegetation, which travels up the food chain when a big fish eats a smaller one. The highest levels of the toxins are found in the most predatory fish, such as catfish.

Bob Peyer, another out-of-towner, sat in his jacked-up black truck while he looked out over the water. “Never eat the catfish,” he warns, and mentions the PCB levels in his home state of Wisconsin, where the Fox River is so toxic that those studying it suit up in protective gear and respirators before wading in.

How much exposure is too much?

“Oddly enough, it really varies from state to state as to what the acceptable level of ingestion is,” says Pat Calvert, a James River Association riverkeeper. For at least six years, he says, the DEQ has been working to set a total maximum daily load of PCBs and a pollution diet for the river. Without establishing those numbers, it’s hard to initiate cleanup efforts.

“I would like to see the DEQ step up and prioritize setting the [total maximum daily load] for the James River,” Calvert says, but progress has been slow. In the past, he’s volunteered to post warning signs, like the one Hodge saw, to raise awareness for the issue—and because the Virginia Department of Health is required to post them at all public access points, though many sites are missed.

“Over the last 10 years or so, science has indicated that PCBs can also mimic hormones in various animals and people,” French says, and the endocrine disruptors could cause developmental concerns. He believes more studies on the actual effects of PCBs need to be commissioned, and existing ones need to be updated with new technologies to better reflect their current status.

“It could be a bigger issue than we realize, or not as much of an issue as we once believed,” French says. “We really have no way of knowing until we have updated and current, relevant data.”

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Riverkeeper pleased with coal ash settlement

Wastewater will be discharged from the Bremo Power Plant in Fluvanna County. Photo by Robert Llewellyn

Charlottesville’s Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the James River Association, reached a settlement with Dominion on the utility’s plans to dump coal ash wastewater from the Bremo Power Station in Fluvanna. A local riverkeeper says new standards will protect human and aquatic life.

The deal between the groups, which will be enforceable by law, requires Dominion to go beyond the Department of Environmental Quality’s expectations, enhance the treatment of the pond water and to monitor the river’s fish. The SELC, in turn, will not appeal the wastewater permit issued to the Bremo Power Station.

“We had to act,” says Pat Calvert, a James River Association riverkeeper who is trained to monitor river water for pollution. The DEQ had already issued Dominion a permit to dump the wastewater and a crew is currently setting up the required systems at the power plant. “It was coming down to the wire for us.”

While Dominion’s permit allows a high concentration of metals in coal ash—arsenic, chromium, lead and cadmium—to be dumped, Calvert says the SELC was able to create a plan that wouldn’t require changing the permit, but would obligate the power company to follow guidelines set in an engineering plan and install better technology.

According to the Clean Water Act, companies treating water must use the best available technology.

“It’s DEQ’s responsibility to ensure protective permits and that didn’t happen,” Calvert says, adding that the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, which is also represented by the SELC, is still working to reach a similar settlement with Dominion for the power plant at Possum Point.

“DEQ’s weak permits compel us to fight for strong, enforceable limits that require Dominion to treat its coal ash waste with the best available technology,” SELC senior attorney Greg Buppert said in a statement. “We cannot only rely on Dominion to police itself at Possum Point. That means seeking a court order for the Potomac River to require the removal of enough arsenic and toxic metals to protect the river ecology and public health.”

The written statement says Dominion’s own records show that coal ash pits at Possum Point have leaked toxins into the groundwater and public waterways for over 30 years.

But at the James, Calvert says locals can rest easy knowing that “people who fish, swim and play in the water are going to be protected.”

“We are pleased that this agreement with the James River Association allows us to move ahead with this important environmental project,” said Pam Faggert, chief environmental officer for Dominion in a joint statement between both groups that was released after the settlement. “The James River Association has helped us create a plan that reflects the commitment of both of our organizations to maintain the quality of the James River.”