Category: Pollution

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VT researcher working to provide clean water to Appalachia

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From CALS VT News  |  June 20, 2020

More than 2 million Americans live without access to safe drinking water or adequate sewer sanitation, according to a 2019 study by the U.S. Water Alliance. That includes around a quarter-million people in Puerto Rico and half a million homeless people in the United States. The biggest chunk, though — around 1.4 million people — are United States residents who live in homes that don’t have proper plumbing or tap water.

They are clustered in five areas: California’s Central Valley; predominantly Native American communities near the four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico; the Texas-Mexico border; the Mississippi Delta region in Mississippi and Alabama; and central Appalachia. Virginia alone has around 20,000 homes without plumbing.

Leigh-Anne Krometis, an associate professor of biological systems engineering which is in both the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, is one of the foremost experts on water quality and availability in Appalachia. And while the basics of her work seem, well, basic — “I just spent a decade proving that not having sewers is a bad thing, which we’ve known for literally thousands of years,” she said — the implications are more complex.

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Often, the best minds in American civil and environmental engineering are looking abroad, at how to bring clean water to remote villages and slums in developing countries. The crisis over lead in the tap water in Flint, Michigan, was a reminder that all over the United States, people lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation.

In the past three years, Krometis has authored a series of studies of water quality and availability in the Appalachian region. In 2017, she published “Tracking the Downstream Impacts of Inadequate Sanitation in Central Appalachia” in the “Journal of Water and Health.”

That article looked at what happens to streams when homes near them don’t have proper plumbing. Usually, that means a “straight pipe” that carries untreated sewage into an unlined hole in the ground, which drains either directly or indirectly into a stream. Krometis and her team found E. coli bacteria consistent with untreated human waste in those streams, in spots that were correlated with their proximity to homes without proper sewage systems. Sometimes the contamination carried as far as six miles downstream.

 

Image of Leigh-Anne Krometis

Krometis’ newest article on the subject, “Water Scavenging from Roadside Springs in Appalachia,” published in May 2019 in the “Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education,” connects her earlier research on wastewater to the issue of drinking water. Some untold number of people in Appalachia drink untreated water from springs or streams — often the same streams that are close to straight sewage pipes. Krometis and her team tested the water at 21 springs used for drinking water, and more than 80 percent of them tested positive for E. coli.

Krometis also surveyed people who drink untreated spring water, and found that most of them do have running water in their homes, often from wells. They said they preferred the spring water because it tastes better than their tap water, or because they don’t trust the quality and reliability of the water in their homes.

Fixing these two interrelated problems, of wastewater and drinking water, isn’t easy. The homes that use straight pipes and roadsides springs tend to be far away from the nearest municipal sewer and water systems, and often separated by mountains and ravines. It could cost $50,000 or more to hook one of these homes up to a sewer system, even if there is one nearby, Krometis said. Septic tanks are usually unsuitable because the soil isn’t deep enough.

“These are legitimately challenging engineering problems, and they require a lot of money, and these places don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “We haven’t figured out ways to get water and sewer to extremely rural areas, and there are also huge issues with the homeless and the working poor in urban areas.”

There are cheaper and easier solutions, of the type used in developing countries. Public water kiosks for drinking water are one, and are already in use in some parts of Kentucky and West Virginia; small water or sewer treatment devices installed for each home or cluster of homes are another option. Krometis supports these tactics, though she sees the political and cultural obstacles to using them in the United States.

“The technologies that are best practices in Africa or Southeast Asia, we don’t use in the United States. They’re unacceptable because we’re a developed country,” she said. “But in my mind, if you have somebody who’s impoverished and doesn’t have access to clean water, that’s a problem that we need to address.”

People are hesitant to give residents of Appalachian mountain hollows or California’s dry and dusty farm town water and sewer systems that aren’t up to the standards of their fellow Americans in cities and suburbs. Krometis understands that hesitation, but she also understands that many of those poor Americans are going without any access to reliable, clean water.

“I see both sides of the coin,” she said. “The problem is, we’re not even having that debate.”

 

Written by Tony Biasotti

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Biodiversity Blog Climate Change Conservation Global Change Habitat Loss Pollution Research Water

Bye-bye mayfly: Can the burrowing mayfly’s decline serve as a warning system for the health of our environment?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From VT News | February 6, 2020

Sally Entrekin Field
Sally Entrekin samples a stream in search of aquatic insects, including mayfly nymphs.

 

Mayflies have long been indicators of the ecological health of the lakes, rivers, and streams. The more mayflies present in water, the better the water quality.

But scientists from Virginia Tech and the University of Notre Dame recently discovered that a particular species — the burrowing mayfly — had a population decrease of nearly 84 percent from 2015 to 2019. The measurements, using radar, took place during the annual insect emergence events at Lake Erie, when the transition of almost 88 billion insects moving from the waterways to the air marks one of world’s largest annual insect emergence events.

Although it was previously impossible to analyze the emergence of the burrowing mayfly, researchers were finally able to do so by using meteorological radar data and new methods in tracking the presence of airborne creatures. By observing the swarms on a year-to-year basis, the data showed a shockingly simple trend: over the same timeframe and time of year, the mayfly swarms are growing smaller.

“This refined radar technology that allows for tracking and quantifying aquatic insect populations at such a large scale is instrumental in understanding land-water connections,” explained Sally Entrekin, an associate professor in the Department of Entomology in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The finding speaks to more than just the mayfly’s decline: It highlights the growing problem of insect decline and the cascading effects that has on ecosystems around the world.

“Radar technology — coupled with traditional field sampling — can start to address the scope and magnitude of insect declines from global change in aquatic ecosystems,” said Entrekin.

Entrekin and her colleagues, Phil Stepanian, Charlotte Wainwright, Djordje Mirkovic, Jennifer Tank, and Jeffrey Kelly, recently published their findings in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences.

The emergence is visually spectacular (where the skies are darkened by the shear mass of flying insects), but this event also represents a new availability of food for many creatures throughout the food chain, providing more than 3,000 tons of insects for consumption by birds and other land-based plants and animals.

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An adult burrowing mayfly. Image credit (also header image): Whitney Cranshaw, Colorado State University, Bugwood.org

 

Fish, birds, bats, and other animals consume the mayflies as a source of food and nutrients. Some insect-eating birds in these areas have synchronized breeding habits that coincide with mayfly emergence, and they rely on them as a high-quality food source for their young. These bird populations have also taken a downturn, which has been partially attributed to the lack of insects to eat, particularly aquatic insects.

Historically, negative human impacts on mayfly habitat has led to reductions and disappearances of the mayfly swarms. While conservation and habitat rehabilitation have helped to clean up the waterways and bring back the mayflies, in the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois rivers, as well as Lake Erie, efforts to bring back the mayfly swarms took nearly 20 years to reach their previous levels. As the research shows, it appears the swarms are once again declining.

Multiple stressors in these waterways attributed to human activity could be a reason for the reduction in mayfly populations. A warming climate puts more stress on certain aquatic environments, leading to decreased oxygen levels, which can result in fewer mayflies coming out of the water. Runoff from rivers into the warmer surface waters of Lake Erie, for instance, can cause algae blooms, which release toxins that these mayflies are especially susceptible to.

Another type of runoff from agricultural land carries commonly applied pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, which can kill mayflies as immatures in the water. Even when these pesticides are present in nondeadly levels, they can negatively affect mayfly young by stunting their ability to reach adult stage. Many of these factors likely contribute to the decreasing mayfly populations, and policy and conservation efforts will be needed in order to change this trend.

Global insect population decline is an emerging topic that has sparked public awareness, however there are logistical challenges to analyzing these trends. Monitoring the life-cycle of the burrowing mayfly and other aquatic insects offers an early warning system for changes in our ecosystems.

This monitoring system is also applicable in other parts of the world where large aquatic emergence events occur, and it can be useful in pinpointing regions that would benefit from waterway conservation efforts or ecological rehabilitation efforts. With the impact the climate crisis is having on ecosystems, tracking the emergence of certain aquatic insects could serve to motivate and inform the public as to the effect humans are having on their local waterways.

 

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Sally Entrekin and her lab on a collecting trip

CONTACT:

James Mason
540-231-6826

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Blog Climate Change Global Change Ideas Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Opinion Pollution

End of Expertise & Politicizing Science: IGC Seminar Reflection Series

by Suwei Wang & Abby Lewis

Between September 20th and 27th, 2019, at least 4 million people from over 150 countries stepped up to support young climate strikers and demand an end to the age of fossil fuels. Greta Thunberg, a 16 year old Swedish environment activist, hit the headlines again. 

Thunberg began striking for action on climate change last year leading up to the Swedish parliamentary election. Her solitary strike from school has since transformed into an international movement of students that leave school each Friday to fight for climate action. The Global Climate Strike from September 20th to 27th was the first event that specifically invited all generations to participate, and it brought the movement to the forefront of national and international news.

In the midst of all of this, our first year Interfaces of Global Change (IGC) seminar met to discuss politicization of science and the end of expertise.

What does it mean that the world’s most prominent climate activist is a 16-year-old child? What authority does she have? How does her work politicize science? What is the role of scientists in these public demonstrations? 

We drew from the week’s events to begin diving into the subject of politicization of science because the climate strikes were impossible to ignore, and because they helped to shed light on some of the complex and highly relevant issues surrounding the intersection between science and policy.

More broadly, our discussion focused on ideas of expertise and science politicization. Various studies and surveys have shown that there has been an alarming increase in the distrust of scientists and experts in Americans. In the seminar, we broke into small groups to discuss what makes a person an expert in a field and why the authority of experts has been undermined over time. We also discussed the politicization of science. While there is a consensus of scientists that climate change is real and human activities are causing it, the way this knowledge is disseminated to citizens by various powers, including politicians, can be selective or biased, creating a political distortion of the scientific facts. This is perpetuated by people’s desire to hear identity-confirming news from media outlets and politicians.

At the end of the discussion we came back to Greta Thunberg and the Global Climate Strike. 

According to an anonymous survey, the majority of students in the class (65%) went or would have gone to the strike if they were able to. In reality, three-fourths of the students did not go. 

Forms response chart. Question title: Did you intend to join the global climate strike on Sep 20th? Did you make it? . Number of responses: 20 responses.

We discussed some of the reasons students of global change would decide to participate or not participate. Some students argued that taking a visible political stance in this way may undermine their ability to talk about climate policy with others who disagree with their views. Some argued that their time is better spent doing research that could potentially contribute to the fight for environmental protection in the future. However, other students disagreed, arguing that this type of action is an important extension of the theoretical discussions we have our seminar, and scientists should use their authority as experts to support a movement that is advocating for evidence-based policy.

Ultimately, there probably cannot be a proscriptive answer to this question that works for every scientist, and having a diversity of approaches from different individuals is often helpful. However, it is often useful to revisit these issues on an individual level in order to ensure your actions are in agreement with your beliefs.

Suwei Wang is a third year PhD student from Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Program, working in Dr. Julia Gohlke’s lab in Environmental Health. 

Abby Lewis is a first year PhD student in the Biological Sciences department. She works in Dr. Cayelan Carey’s lab studying freshwater ecology and biogeochemistry.

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Blog Conservation Interfaces of Global Change IGEP Newsletter Outreach Pollution Special Events Water

IGC Fellows take on ReNew the New: Giles County Edition

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August 30, 2019

By Lauren Wind

Early on the morning of August 28th, twenty IGC fellows and friends met in the dense fog at the Eggleston Community Park to take part in an epic “Fall into the New” New River cleanup endeavor. ReNew the New, a group comprised of multiple local NGOs, outfitters, local government officials, and concerned citizens, focuses on the stewardship of 37 miles of the New River that run through Giles County, VA. They sponsor two major river cleanup events each year. his event also included cleanup of New River miles winding throughout the valley in Montgomery Co, Pulaski Co, Floyd Co, and Radford.

In an effort to keep the New River clean and pristine, we were charged with pairing up in canoes or solo trips in kayaks to retrieve as much trash as we could fit in our vessels along a four mile stretch in Giles Co. Before we embarked on our journey, ReNew the New founder Ann Geotte spoke words of wisdom to us: “Do not be upset if you don’t get a tire… this isn’t an Easter egg hunt!” From that moment on, the challenge was upon us IGC Fellows to collect the most tires. And we did not disappoint!

In total we collected 18 tires, one sleeping bag and pillow set, four cans of unopened beers, dozens of empty cans, a table, and countless other items. Shout out to Stephen Plont, who deemed himself the winner by finding… a Porta-Potty within the first half-mile stretch of the river. It was all hands-on deck to pull most of these items out of the water, and some of us had to leave our safe and dry vessels to retrieve sunken tires and trash. Our efforts were rewarded with internal bragging rights to each other on what we found, soaking up sunny rays on the river, and a lunch and t-shirt following the event.

Please visit ReNew the New’s Volunteer page to learn more about future volunteer events; and to view the statistics on how much trash collectively was retrieved throughout “Fall into the New” event this fall.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Climate Change Drinking water Ideas New Publications Pollution Science Communication Water

Human domination of the global water cycle absent from depictions and perceptions

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From Science Daily | June 10, 2019

Pictures of the earth’s water cycle used in education and research throughout the world are in urgent need of updating to show the effects of human interference, according to new analysis by an international team of hydrology experts.

Leaving humans out of the picture, the researchers argue, contributes to a basic lack of awareness of how humans relate to water on Earth — and a false sense of security about future availability of this essential and scarce resource.

The team has drawn up a new set of diagrams to promote better understanding of how our water cycle works in the 21st century. These new diagrams show human interference in nearly all parts of the cycle.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, with an additional comment in Nature, was carried out by a large team of experts from Brigham Young University and Michigan State University in the US and the University of Birmingham in the UK, along with partners in the US, France, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden.

It showed that, in a sample of more than 450 water cycle diagrams in textbooks, scientific literature and online, 85 per cent showed no human interaction at all with the water cycle, and only 2 per cent of the images made any attempt to connect the cycle with climate change or water pollution.

In addition, nearly all the examples studied depicted verdant landscapes, with mild climates and abundant freshwater — usually with only a single river basin.

The researchers argue there is an urgent need to challenge this misrepresentation and promote a more accurate and sophisticated understanding of the cycle and how it works in the 21st century. This is crucial if society is to be able to achieve global solutions to the world’s water crisis.

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“The water cycle diagram is a central icon of hydro science, but misrepresenting the ways in which humans have influenced this cycle diminishes our awareness of the looming global water crisis,” says Professor David Hannah, UNESCO Chair in Water Sciences at the University of Birmingham.

“By leaving out climate change, human consumption, and changes in land use we are, in effect, creating large gaps in understanding and perception among the public and also among some scientists.”

The new diagrams drawn up by the team show a more complex picture that includes elements such as meltwater from glaciers, flood damage caused by land use changes, pollution and sea level rises.

Professor Stefan Krause, Head of the Birmingham Water Council states: “For the first time, the new water cycle diagram adequately reflects the importance of not just quantities of water but also water quality and pollution as key criteria for assessing water resources.”

Professor Ben Abbott, from Brigham Young University, is lead author on the paper: “Every scientific diagram involves compromises and distortions, but what we found with the water cycle was widespread exclusion of a central concept. You can’t understand water in the 21st century without including humans.”

“Other scientific disciplines have done a good job depicting how humans now dominate many aspects of the Earth system. It’s hard to find a diagram of the carbon or nitrogen cycle that doesn’t show factories and fertilizers. However, our drawings of the water cycle are stuck in the 17th century.”

“Better drawings of the water cycle won’t solve the global water crisis on their own, but they could improve awareness of how local water use and climate change have global consequences.”

 

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Ideas Pollution Research Water

New working group: plastic pollution in freshwater systems

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April 17, 2019
Plastic pollution – specifically microplastics (MPs), which are <5mm sized plastic particles – is now ubiquitous in oceans and rivers. A combination of physical, chemical, and radiative (UV light) processes degrade large plastic materials into small fragments (MPs and even smaller nanoplastics) and leach chemical by-products. Once small, MPs become highly mobile, can adsorb other pollutants (such as DDT, PCBs, dioxins), and can be ingested by biota where MPs can have direct effects on an organism or bioaccumulate. MPs can be found in freshwater systems in concentrations just as high as in marine environments, although much less is known about their transport and fate given that less than 4% of MP studies during the past 15 years focused on freshwater systems.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]We are forming a “Plastic Pollution in Freshwater Systems” working group and are looking to organize individuals interested in collaborating on physical, chemical, environmental, ecological, biological, human health, social science, economics, etc. aspects of plastic pollution. In May, we will meet informally to assess interest and capabilities, then decide on whether to offer a seminar class in Fall 2019 on plastic pollution, and begin developing a strategy to submit a proposal(s) within the next year.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

For more information on plastic pollution in freshwater systems see:
Freshwater Microplastics: Emerging Environmental Contaminants?
Editors: Martin Wagner & Scott Lambert

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-61615-5

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If interested in forming the “Plastic Pollution in Freshwater Systems” working group, please contact Jon Czuba, jczuba@vt.edu

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News Pollution

What’s in your indoor air?

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]From NPR Radio IQ

By Robbie Harris | March 19, 2019

Listen to the radio interview clip here!

For decades, indoor air pollution has actually exceeded outdoor pollution. And that’s because in a closed environment, synthetic materials in things like flooring and furniture, outgas, sending particles into the air. Some are harmful to health. Now, scientists at Virginia Tech are working to flag which ones are dangerous, so they can be replaced with safer materials.

Credit: Sciencedirect.com

And then once they’re in the air they sort of adsorb to other surfaces, so they adsorb to the wall or the desk or to the dust in your house.”

John Little is a civil and environmental engineer, who’s working to come up with an international standard for safe exposure to the products in our homes and offices.  Not a simple task.

 

“The particles will even adsorb to your skin, and once they’re in your skin they can diffuse into the blood.  Or, they attach to the particles in the air we breathe so there’s many routes to exposure to these semi-volatile organic compounds.”

And one of the health effects, that worries scientists, is endocrine disruption. Little is spearheading what he hopes will become a group effort to create an international testing model to determine safe levels of exposure and to identify products that should be replaced with safer materials.

“These products are made all over the world now,” says Little, “and they’re traded all around the world, so we need a consistent way of estimating exposure, globally.”

The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are helping to support the project financially.

Little is working with colleagues in the US, Europe and China. “We’re trying to come up with a sort of consensus-based set of exposure models so we can all agree that the models we’re using are consistent.”

It’s been decades since scientists have known about the dangers of SVOCs. “What I see, when I go to conferences is, everyone is saying ‘Oh there are these SVOCs in this product or they show up in polar bears in the Arctic, and no one really seems to be trying to solve the problem.  Now we’re trying to say, ‘OK, we’ve been studying this for long enough. Now we need to try to solve the problem.”

Little wants to make it clear, he’s not looking to create some kind of ‘worst offenders’ list.  “It’s not a name and shame thing.”  He says.

“It sometimes seems to me that academics and industry often seem to be in different worlds or in opposition; an adversarial relationship. I feel that we need to work together, so we don’t want to set things up where we’re penalizing industry. I prefer a collaborative endeavor where we work with (industry) and we say, “hey look, here’s what we need to change, and have them willing to work with us.”

Little will go to China this spring to work with an international team, on uniform standards for product safety worldwide. There are plans to present their findings at a symposium in Lithuania in August.

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News Pollution Research

New environmental sensing and monitoring system tested and evaluated at Virginia Tech

From VT News

JANUARY 8, 2019

On the edge of Virginia Tech’s campus, on a stretch of farmland that few students ever visit, small boxes are whirling through the season’s change to winter, collecting and transmitting data that will make it easier for scientists to monitor and collect data across landscapes.

This field test of an environmental sensing system is one step in a project between the College of Natural Resources and Environment; Innovative Wireless Technologies, a leading wireless mesh network company headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia; and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The project was funded by a Department of Energy Small Business Innovation Research grant intended to refine, develop, and advance new technologies.

“The call for this grant was focused on below-ground environmental monitoring and the development of new sensor networks and communication platforms,” explained Daniel McLaughlin, assistant professor in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and Virginia Tech’s lead investigator on the project. “The primary goal is to advance the ways in which we can monitor the fate and transport of certain environmental constituents and contaminants.”

The integrated environmental quality sensing system, called Envōk, is a user-deployed network composed of wireless microprocessing nodes that are capable of connecting to a wide range of environmental sensors. A grid of these nodes communicates through a wireless gateway to a server that allows operators to control the sensors remotely.

The testing of this system is taking part along Stroubles Creek on land dedicated to the Department of Biological Systems Engineering’s StREAM Lab. In addition to McLaughlin, Associate Professor Kevin McGuire and Associate Professor Brian Strahm, both of the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, and Assistant Professor Ryan Stewart of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ School of Plant and Environmental Sciences are participating in the project.

Matthew Fisher, the principal investigator for Innovative Wireless Technologies, described the site as an ideal location to test the system’s capacities. “We have a first version of our finished product, and we wanted to evaluate that product in a field simulation,” he said. “Virginia Tech is providing that evaluation. They are taking the system and, with support from us, they are going to evaluate it and see if it meets the criteria that we set for the project.”

For Virginia Tech researchers, the testing and evaluation of the Envōk system has run the gamut from small software preferences to broad considerations of sensing capacities and monitoring structures.

“We’re assessing and tailoring the system to meet user needs, ranging from software design and installation options to what kind of outputs and sensors are most useful in field applications,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve looked into what kind of triggers and communication abilities should exist and what kind of memory and battery configuration the system should have.”

A crucial component to the system, beyond ease of installation and the accuracy and reliability of data monitoring, is allowing users to incorporate a wide range of sensors in one system. “There are a lot of sensors available now, and what’s lagging behind is an easily deployable sensor network that would allow a team to use sensors from any vendor and for a wide range of parameters,” McLaughlin explained.

A further goal of the project is to design a system that allows users to “speak” to the monitoring network using mobile devices or personal computers and alter the data collected by sensors as conditions vary.

“We’re focusing on user-to-network communication but also communication among nodes, where measurements at one node location can trigger specified measurement protocols at distant nodes,” McLaughlin said. “Let’s say that one measurement location is in a stream, and some pre-defined condition like a rising water level is triggered. We’d like that node to have the capacity to tell nodes further along in the network to, for example, start recording data at a faster rate.”

On the Stroubles Creek site, sensors will measure water levels, soil dynamics, carbon fluxes, and stream conditions over the next three months. Virginia Tech researchers will be testing the hardware and durability of the system, the communication capabilities between nodes and to the server, and real-time adjustments to sensor measurements that would allow for adaptive modeling and data analysis.

The next phase of the project, set to launch in spring 2019, will be a larger field test along the Columbia River in Washington state, where the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will take the lead in verifying the Envōk product as it moves toward commercialization.

“We’ll be deploying a fully functioning system on the Hanford Site, a former nuclear production facility along the river, with five times the number of nodes and additional sensor technologies,” Fisher said. “That will be the production evaluation period, the final test of the system before we begin production.”

The project has the potential to make the collection and processing of field data more dynamic and easier for scientists.

“This project is not just about what we can measure but rather developing new ways to make and communicate those measurements,” McLaughlin said. “Our goal is an easily deployable sensor network that is flexible and with communication capabilities for real-time measurements across parameters and over large study areas.”

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Environmental Justice News Pollution

Radford Arsenal Transparency and Virginia Tech Data Forge Positive Community Relations

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From WVTF.org
BY ROBBIE HARRIS  |  DECEMBER 15

 

After decades of suspicion about what exactly is going on at the Radford Arsenal in southwestern Virginia, community relations are improving. Not only did the first ever area soil and air test results come in at safe levels, but the whole vibe at meetings is changing.

 

Emily Satterwite teaches Appalachian studies at Virginia Tech. She says, “It’s been amazing to watch over the past year, the degree to which the tone of the community meetings has shifted from police presence and combative to ‘let’s keep working together.’”

Working with several colleagues, she spearheaded a study that included third party testing of soil air, beyond the arsenal’s walls.  “It was important to everyone to make sure that whatever studies we did felt like they were not swayed by government funding sources.”  Colleague Julia Gohlke, an associate professor in the department of population health science, led a class conducting a community survey on perceptions of the place, where open burning of hazardous waste and the sounds of explosions along the river banks, have long kept people on edge.

“There’s what science would say is the risk, we call that ‘risk assessment’,” says Gohlke. “We base it on, for example, what we think a human health level of concern would be – that’s what EPA uses. But there’s also the perception of risk that we want to measure. Both actually are important ultimately, in determining health, because anxiety is a health concern as well.”

She says, “Of the people that did have a concern and got the opportunity to tell us what those concerns were, chemical discharges to the New River came out on top, and concerns about employee safety was not far behind.”

It was recently announced, the soil and air tests came back below within EPA safety standards. Two years ago, a coal fired plant on site that dates from the 1940s, closed.  This year, Lt. Col. James Scott, after persistent requests from the community, announced a state of the art contained incinerator that will cut the amount of open air burning of military waste on site by 95 percent is expected to be online in 2023.

Despite the positive reception to these developments, the arsenal’s public image is another matter.

Emma Ruby is a junior at Virginia Tech, studying political science and sociology, who worked on the community survey. Four hundred thirty-four people responded to it. “What we found is people are still worried about the arsenal. But they are seeing a positive trend in transparency (about what goes on behind its walls). They have a sense that things are getting better and that they’re being listened to by the arsenal.”

It’s important to note that the public sentiment study was done before the results of the air and soil tests were known.  Also, the students pointed out that granular public health data is not available.  For years, people have feared that there is thyroid cancer cluster in people who live near the arsenal.  It has never been proven.  Ruby explained that while there is data on the county level, “We would need data on individual zip codes” and she points out, that kind of personal health data is often private.”

Lt. Col. James Scott, who usually leads the meetings –he served as tour guide when the Arsenal invited the public and media for a 2-hour tour of the grounds— says he understands why there has long been so much suspicion and fear about the arsenal.  It stretches some 6,000 acres in Pulaski and Montgomery counties.  Located on the bank of the New River, the nitrates it releases into the water earn it the dubious distinction of ‘Virginia’s number one polluter’ every year.

“When you’re a closed facility, for security reason and for safety reasons, the things that go on here, it’s not an open facility, and no matter how much our neighbor tells us, nothing’s going on behind the fence it just I think human nature (for people to be concerned.)”

But the new transparency by the arsenal is leading to new attitudes.

Ruby noted that Lt. Col.  Scott was cited by respondents to the survey results for having a positive effect and making people feel their concerns are being heard. “

Regular attendee of the Arsenal’s quarterly meetings, Beth Spillman, applauded the efforts at more transparency and better communication, than in the past. The Arsenal now has its own Facebook page and people say that instead of quarterly meetings feeling as if they’re a chore for officials, they now seem more cordial and responsive.  She asked Scott to include the data the students gathered and to keep telling the ‘story’ of the arsenal and the community, how it’s evolving, and what new information is coming in, so that, “We have confidence that we can live in a healthy way, and be defended, and have jobs and have environmental justice. So yeah” she said, “Thank you guys.”

The students are working on a new website to continue sharing information with the community. It expected to go live, next spring.

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Categories
Ideas Invasive Species News Pollution Research Water

People Need Lakes and Lakes Need People

From WVTF Radio IQ
BY ROBBIE HARRIS  |  OCTOBER 17

After Hurricane Florence hit the southeast coast last month, Claytor Lake, hundreds of miles away in southwestern Virginia, took a hit.  More than fifteen tons of debris ended up in the lake – everything from the usual ‘flotsam and jetsam’ to at least one toilet, a mannequin, and an empty boat.

This part of Virginia is not home to very many lakes, and that means people here work hard to keep them clean and healthy.

Kelly Coburn

 

And sure enough, it wasn’t long before all that driftwood and detritus has been dragged out of the lake, with help from the friends, work crews and several nonprofit organizations. And that network of people who care about lakes is vital to its health and longevity said Kelly Cobourn, assistant professor of water resource policy in Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment.  “We’re trying to understand: How do people make decisions about using the land and what does that mean for water quality of the lake over the long run?”

Cobourn is the lead investigator on a project in its third year exploring how humans and lakes affect one another.  They’re finding, that when people feel a connection to a lake, “It can galvanize people to come together and start to work around a common cause,” she says.

That’s what started it all back in 1992, when a disaster lead to the formation of “Friends of Claytor Lake.” A chemical spill in Pulaski county turned the water blood red.  It took a crisis to call attention to the importance of lake health and safety, but these days, it can be subtler, less dramatic things that threaten the health of the lakes.

“We might have a mowed lawn that comes to right up to the shoreline, like it does here. How do we think about how we prevent that fertilizer from running off into the water?” Cobourn says those fertilizers full of nitrates and sometimes phosphorous are considered the largest threats to many lakes.

“So, you could think about when you put the fertilizer on, because if you put it on before a rain, that could be problematic.  Or you could think about creating buffers, like for example there’s a little bit of a buffer here that’s rocky, but it may be preferable to put in a buffer that is some form of plant life that would pick up the nutrients before they run into the lake.”

Claytor Lake is just under 5,000 acres, a relatively small water body. It was created by the Appalachian Power Company, which built a hydro-electric dam on the New River in 1939. Project manager of the lake health study, Reilly Henson, says, fortunately, it borders Claytor Lake a State Park, so it’s mostly surrounded by huge forests “Forest tends to be really good for the watershed because they provide a large area where natural processes can continue and where people aren’t actively putting it into the watershed.”

But there are other threats to Claytor lake that no one is putting into the watershed, on purpose anyway.

Jeff Caldwell says the invasive water plant called, Hydrilla is like Kudzu of the lake. “Hydrilla will completely engulf other vegetation and choke it off.”

He’s been leading the struggle to beat back the invasive plant that hitched a ride here from China. Unfortunately, it’s an excellent traveler. “If you put your boat in the water and just graze across a plant and then you stick your boat in the water in Smith Mountain lake, you just moved Hydrilla from Claytor to Smith Mountain Lake.”

Caldwell says you can’t ever get rid of it entirely.  A few years ago, they introduced a species of Carp into the water to eat the invasive plants and they do a pretty good job of keeping them in check, but no matter what they do, the plants will come back.  And that’s one reason that Claytor Lake will need to continue making new friends, who can help keep it a clean and healthy source of recreation and drinking water in the New River Valley.

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Related: Study explores connections between land management, water quality, and human response in lake catchments

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