Virginia Lawyers Weekly

ROANOKE—About 1,100 miles of Virginia’s rivers and streams have been added to Virginia’s list of polluted waters in the past two years, bringing the total to 10,600 miles, state environmental regulators said last Monday.

The state Department of Environmen-tal Quality released its 2008 water quality report, which listed about 40 percent of the state’s waters as polluted. All the major rivers, as well as the Chesapeake Bay, had “some impairment,” DEQ spokesman Bill Hayden said.

“That number keeps getting larger, mainly because as we look around the state more thoroughly we find more,” he said.
About one-third of Virginia’s watersheds are assessed every two years. The agency has analyzed 95 percent of Virginia’s watersheds.

“We’ve now got polluted rivers that go from here to California and back twice,” said Mike Gerel, a scientist in the Virginia office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

The agency said the state’s polluted waters – which include rivers, lakes and estuaries – require a total of 1,677 cleanup plans. Hayden said only a couple of hundred have been developed.

“We’re very, very far behind in writing these reports,” Gerel said.

The DEQ also added 3,300 acres of lakes to the impaired list, bringing the total in that category to 94,000 acres. In addition, 2,200 square miles of estuaries are listed as impaired.

The DEQ said more than half of the new listings were polluted by excess bacteria. Low oxygen levels accounted for 18 percent of the listings.

Hayden said 105 waters were removed in the 2008 assessment, all of them streams that feed into major rivers including the James, Potomac, Shenan-doah, Rappahannock and Roanoke.

In some cases, streams were removed because conditions such as low oxygen were found to be their normal state rather than the result of pollution. Cleanup plans accounted for other removals, Hayden said.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation called for measures to reduce farm runoff, curb pollution from storm-water runoff and continue reductions in pollution from wastewater treatment plants. The cost of preventing the pollution is much lower than the cleanup cost, Gerel said.

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