By Tim Puko, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW, Tuesday, August 24, 2010

 

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."