DEQ report calls for 96 percent reduction in PCBs in Staunton River

BROOKNEAL - More than 10 years after the Department of Environmental Quality first announced that certain game fish in the Staunton River contained high levels of PCBs, the agency has released a draft study on the issue.

The report, called a total maximum daily load study, calculates exactly how much of a pollutant can exist in a waterway in order to meet water quality standards. DEQ’s goal is to reduce the total amount of PCBs in the water such that game fish species, including striped bass and flathead catfish, no longer contain levels that exceed health standards. The agency will accept public comments on the draft report until Aug. 28.

The report calls for a 96 percent reduction in how much of the chemical washes in the Staunton River each year. Another section of the report deals with the Roanoke River upstream from Smith Mountain Lake. The study was presented to about a dozen citizens at a public meeting in Brookneal on Thursday.

“Once those sources are controlled, the contaminated sediment that already exists can be dealt with naturally,“ said DEQ water engineer Amanda Gray, who coordinated the study.

PCBs, or polybichlorinated biphenyls, are chemicals once used extensively in many manufacturing industries because they didn’t break down and could withstand high amounts of heat. The chemicals can cause cancer, harm the immune system and can cause numerous other health problems.

There’s no way to tell how much of the PCBs were used before they were banned in the late 1970s or exactly where they were used, but new analytical methods are able to target where the residue chemicals enter the water in tiny quantities, said David Miles, DEQ’s deputy regional director for the Blue Ridge regional office. “We’re talking parts per quadrillion. The bad news is we’re looking and finding stuff in these smaller and smaller levels.“

Residual amounts of PCBs remain in contaminated soil and landfills. The chemicals accumulate in fatty tissue, particularly in fish, and also bind to sediment. Known hot spots exist in Altavista, Hurt and Brookneal that are associated with old manufacturing sites.

Since 1993, PCB amounts in carp caught from the Upper Roanoke River gradually declined, said Mark Richards, a DEQ environmental scientist. Striped bass from the Staunton exhibited the same trend. “The take-home point is the levels in the fish are coming down over time, just not as rapidly as we would like,“ Richards said.

“That’s a promising profile there, but we’re still roughly six times over the (health limit) so there’s still some work to be done there,“ said Mike Shaver, a DEQ fisheries biologist.

Once this report is finalized, DEQ will start finding a way to implement a cleanup - a process that Miles and Gray said would be more complicated than what similar studies on bacteria called for because the sources are mostly industrial.

“One step in that is through our industrial stormwater permitting program,“ Miles said. “We will be looking at individual industrial facilities that either have a PCB use in their history or we know they’ve had some potential or known problems with PCBs on their sites and they will be asked to establish a monitoring program.“

To read the draft report, go to http://www.deq.virginia.gov/TMDLDataSearch/DraftReports.jspx.

Watson is a staff writer for the News & Advance in Lynchburg, Va.