Silty, salty Monongahela River at risk from pollutants
By Tim Puko, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW, Tuesday, August 24, 2010
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(http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/pittsburgh/s_696233.html)
The Monongahela River is at a crossroads.
Not just at the Point, where the dark, silty Mon -- lifeblood to heavy
industry -- merges with the clearer Allegheny. The Mon might be one of the
country's most endangered rivers, according to scientists studying the river.
Since 2008, the river has filled each summer with levels of contaminants
higher than in at least 10 years. What role the region's gas boom might play
in the pollution is unknown. State environmental officials are employing
stronger regulations and may ask for federal intervention to save the river
from new threats and a legacy of mine pollution.
"There's been dry seasons before, and it's never affected everything as
much as it has now," said Mark Stoner, a chemist with the Pittsburgh Water &
Sewer Authority and chairman of RAIN, the River Alert Information Network,
an alliance of about 30 water utility companies. "I have colleagues who are
in RAIN that worked on the Mon, and they've not seen this in 20 years, not
to these levels at all. ... This is not normal."
The problem started in late summer 2008. A pollutant that scientists call
"total dissolved solids" turned the water smelly and sour for some of the 1
million people in Pennsylvania and West Virginia who get drinking water
from the Monongahela basin. After decades of improvement to the river, the
pollution surprised water experts from around the region.
Total dissolved solids, or TDS, is a catchall term for different minerals
that essentially turned the river into mild saltwater. It was only about 3
percent the strength of ocean water, but that's high enough to violate the
state's secondary drinking water standards for taste and smell. As river
flow decreased in the dry summer, high levels returned for shorter spells in
2009 and this year since late July.
Scientists at the Department of Environmental Protection, West Virginia
University and Carnegie Mellon University began analyses of chemicals in the
river.
Drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus shale caused more than a fifth of
the pollution in 2008 because drillers diluted wastewater by dumping it
into the river through sewage treatment plants, according to RAIN and the
DEP. But DEP stopped most of that with new rules; gas wastewater probably
doesn't cause more than 5 percent to 10 percent of pollution now, said Ron
Schwartz, assistant director of the department's southwest region.
Gas drillers are adamant their expanding industry isn't responsible for the
river's pollution.
"You'd have salt trucks lined up from here probably all the way to Wyoming
to make that much impact on the water," said Tony Gaudlip, the water
operations manager at Range Resources Corp., which essentially discovered the
Marcellus shale. The Houston, Texas-based company has offices at Southpointe.
Gaudlip blames acid mine drainage for the problem, and other scientists
agree it caused most of the Mon's pollution for decades. Power plants started
to screen out harmful metals from their exhaust to meet air quality
standards and dump that pollution instead into the river, Schwartz said.
This spring, the DEP began the process to have the river designated as
"impaired," which would allow the federal government to set standards for river
polluting. The Environmental Protection Agency would commission a study to
determine limits for industrial dumping of total dissolved solids in the
river.
The DEP is implementing its own strengthened standards. Starting this week,
gas drillers must treat wastewater to secondary drinking level standards
-- solids must be fewer than 500 milligrams per liter -- before dumping it
into the river. Most other industries have limits four times as high, and
abandoned coal mines -- which fill with water -- are exempt, Schwartz said.
Ken Zapinski, senior vice president at the Allegheny Conference on
Community Development, said targeting gas drilling wastewater is unfair and adds
to the false perception that the gas industry is to blame for the
Monongahela's condition.
"We hoped that further work would be done to document where the TDS is
originating from," he said.
There's no scientific consensus that shale drilling isn't playing a role.
The industry uses millions of gallons of water per well; a lot of that water
comes from the Mon and its tributaries, which means the river has less
water to dilute pollutants, Stoner and Schwartz said. In parts of the Mon, the
river flow is less than half of what it usually is this time of year, and
September often brings even drier conditions, according to the Army Corps
of Engineers.
Some early indicators from about a year's worth of detailed readings show
more evidence of salt, a sign of the shale drilling industry, said
researchers at West Virginia and the University of Pittsburgh. The change in the
Youghiogheny River tributary has been especially dramatic, said Paul
Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute.
That river historically was low in TDS, mostly from calcium sulfate, the
signature chemical of mine drainage, he said. But readings since January show
the number doubled, primarily from salt, sodium chloride.
"Something is dumping a lot of sodium chloride in the water. Where that's
coming from, I don't know. But one might suggest (gas drilling wastewater)
was getting into the Yough," Ziemkiewicz said. "I think if we ... don't get
a grip on fluid disposal, we could have some serious problems."
