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The Region's Aging Locks and Dams Could Put Growth on Lockdown

Moving goods on barges is big business. But it’s a part of the economy that floats precariously on infrastructure in dire need of an overhaul.

Deckhands Jeremy Groves and Dustin Frazee descend from the towboat D.L. Johnsonto inspect their cargo—which today, is a single barge of coal. They circle the barge, walking along its edges—the gunnels—to make sure everything looks OK. Satisfied, they pick up Kevlar lines and loop them around the barge’s timberheads. A 40-ton winch aboard the D.L. Johnson pulls the barge snug against the boat. That way, the cargo won’t wander as it’s pushed down the upper reaches of the Ohio River.

For Captain Matthew Baumgartner, who’s watching from the wheelhouse, it’s easy to see why his crew’s work on the water is important.

“We move a lot of coal for power plants and steel mills,” he says.

And that keeps the lights on for millions of homes across the region.

LISTEN: Why the Lock and Dam System Still Matters

The D.L. Johnson is one of thousands of vessels chugging along the nation’s vast inland waterway system, which stretches for 12,000 navigable miles from the Gulf of Mexico to Minnesota—and a little ways east and west. The waterways are considered one of the cheapest, most environmentally friendly options for transporting goods—particularly as trucks and rail near capacity.

The towboats carry crews who work for weeks at a time: Fourteen days on, seven days off—or 20 days on and seven days off—depending on the boat. Moving things by water in Pennsylvania and West Virginia generates about $8 billion annually and supports almost 50,000 jobs.

But it doesn’t happen naturally. There’s a lot of infrastructure involved. Dams hold back water to create long, navigable pools; locks allow boats to move from one pool to the next. Together, they form a sort of water escalator that allows boats to get over elevation changes.

Deckhand Dustin Frazee (center) and lead deckhand Jeremy Groves look out over the Ohio River as their towboat, the D.L. Johnson, pushes a coal barge.

The D.L. Johnson picks up its coal barge just offshore from Congo, West Virginia. It’s there, right below some of the oldest locks on the upper Ohio River, that doing business gets tough. Ryan Newton is the manager of linehaul vessel operations for Campbell Transportation Company, Inc.—the company that owns the D.L. Johnson. For starters, he says the locks on the Ohio River start to get smaller as you head east toward Pittsburgh.

“All the lock chambers up until this point are 1,200 feet long,” Newton says. “When you get to Georgetown, and effectively Montgomery Lock, which is around the bend, it’s a 600-foot chamber.”

A 1,200-foot lock chamber fits a standard tow: five barges long and three barges wide, with room for a boat. A smaller lock means breaking a tow into smaller pieces, and then moving them through separately. So the difference in lock size means lost time.

But the bigger problem is that the region’s locks and dams are crumbling.

Marc Glowczewski is a project manager with the Pittsburgh District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He and his team recently completed a study of what it would take to rehabilitate and replace the first three locks on Pittsburgh’s end of the Ohio River: Montgomery, Dashields and Emsworth. He says that by 2028, there’s a 50 percent probability one of them could fail.

“I don’t want to say it’s a flip of the coin because that sounds trite,” Glowczewski says. “But at a 50 percent probability, that’s just as likely to happen as not. And so that makes it kind of—terrifying.”

It would take about $5 billion to bring the locks and dams on the upper Ohio and lower Monongahela Rivers up to snuff. If a dam fails, there could be flooding, which could threaten the availability of municipal drinking water. And shipping in the region would grind to a halt.

“You’d be able to walk across, shore to shore, at the point of Pittsburgh and get your ankles wet—and that’s it,” Glowczewski says.

That’s why many are continuing to push for a major update of the region’s locks and dams. Among them is Mary Ann Bucci, executive director of the Port of Pittsburgh Commission, which advocates for lock rehabilitation and funding along the port’s 200 river miles. And she says an overhaul isn’t just good for the region; it’s important for the rest of the country.

“We are part of a system,” she says. “The more efficient and the more reliable the system is, the more successful the entire system will be. And if we’re not functioning, you’re cutting off part of the highway, so to speak.”

Mike Monahan, president of Campbell Transportation Company, also worries about the impact outdated locks and dams could have on Pennsylvania’s long game.

“You look at future economic investment. I don’t think anybody in this country would take a 100-year-old foundation and build a new home on it,” he says.

In this analogy, the 100-year-old foundation is the region’s water infrastructure. And the new home? Monahan says that’s a potential new sector built around the region’s energy resources—most notably, a spinoff petrochemical industry that could ride the coattails of the fracking boom.

But Monahan says if infrastructure remains unreliable, we’ll see something very different.

“The failure of future economic development for all the people in western PA.”

WATCH: Towboat Deckhands, the Ohio River’s Unsung Heroes

For example, this summer, Shell Chemical Appalachia announced it is building an ethane cracker plant in Beaver County, a short distance from the shores of the Ohio River near Pittsburgh. The plant will turn ethane from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale into the building blocks of plastics. To the Port of Pittsburgh Commission’s Mary Ann Bucci, Shell coming to Pittsburgh is a game-changer.

“You’ll also have offspring companies that will come in that either need to use your product [or] sell to Shell,” Bucci says. “And I think you’re going to see that whole petrochemical market increase.”

However, Bucci says it looks as though Shell will only use the waterways during the construction—possibly because of reliability issues with the locks and dams. Shell did not return a request for comment. But Bucci says updating the waterway infrastructure could help the region cash in on another big industry: moving shipping containers.

“It’s been successful on every other mode of transportation. There’s no reason why it cannot be successful on the inland waterways,” she says.

The container industry, which often moves consumer goods like electronics, is a high-value business. The Port of Pittsburgh is working with other ports nationwide to fine-tune the logistics. And individual companies, including Mike Monahan’s Campbell Transportation, are re-orienting themselves too. But he says the future is coming on fast. And unless the region acts, we’ll miss out.

“I have a saying, it’s probably a little hokey, but prior proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. We need to have that planning and we need to reinvest so we’re ready for this world economy.”

While it will take years, several billion dollars and some serious coordination, everyone is hopeful the region can fix its aging locks and dams. Even Congress is now back on schedule to approve and fund water resource projects.

Monahan calls the country’s waterway system “a blessing from God.” But getting around on them? He says that’s up to us.

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This story is part of our Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with the Allegheny Front.

What You Need to Know About 'Legacy Pollution' in the Ohio River

Industry has left a dirty legacy along the Ohio River. We’re talking about toxins like PCBs, dioxins and mercury—discharged into the water by steel mills and the petroleum industry for decades. This week, we caught up with Judy Petersen, executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, to tell us more about how legacy pollution—and new pollution—impacts more of our lives than we might think.

The Allegheny Front: So systemwide, what are the legacy pollutants in the Ohio River, and how did they get there?

Judy Petersen: Well, the worst legacy pollutants in the Ohio River are mercury, PCBs and dioxin. Many of them got there decades ago with steel industry and petroleum industry releases into the Ohio, and many of those pollutants date back to before the Clean Water Act was passed.

AF: And what kinds of impacts do they have on the environment?

JP: Their main impact on the environment is fish consumption. What happens with those kinds of pollutants is they accumulate in the sediment, and all of the little insects and bugs that form the base of the food chain in the river get contaminated. Small fish eat those and bigger fish eat them, and when it moves up through the food chain, that’s called bio-accumulation. So the worst problems are with people who eat a lot of fish out of the Ohio. And I believe that there are disadvantaged people in many of these communities—like the West End here in Louisville—who are down there fishing on the Ohio River every day. And they are fishing to supplement their family’s diet. And we can’t lose sight of those people.

LISTEN: How Legacy Pollutants Impact the Ohio River

AF: And exposure to these toxins, like mercury, has been associated with nervous system issues, problems with developing fetuses and cancer. But if you don’t eat a lot of fish from the river, should you still be concerned?

JP: First of all, there is commercial fishing in the Ohio. There can be fish sticks at your local food store that came from Ohio River fish. But we should care for a whole lot of different reasons. We should care because of all the wildlife that are going to eat those fish, [like] the eagles we see coming back throughout the Ohio River Basin. One of the reasons some of those pollutants were originally banned was because we saw the devastating consequences that they had on the reproductive viability of eagle and osprey and hawks.

AF: On the Hudson River in New York, there was a major issue with PCBs, and it was addressed by dredging that portion of the river. Is the Ohio to that level of pollution, or is it more like a “sleeping giant”—that is, we don’t want to disturb what’s there by dredging it up?

JP: Once you start dredging the river, you stir up all those contaminated sediments and they can remix with the water. So in most cases, it just makes sense to let nature take its course. I think PCBs and dioxins are a little different than mercury. We’re not really discharging PCBs and dioxins—those are legacy contaminants. Mercury is also a bit of a legacy contaminant, but what we’re worried about is new and continued discharges of mercury into the river when parts of the river are already contaminated. If we tip that scale even further, the entire river will be contaminated. Then, we’ve done a disservice for not just fish consumption, but possibly for some of the smaller drinking water systems that rely on the Ohio River. Mercury is not an easy thing to get out. If you live in Louisville or Pittsburgh, they have sophisticated water treatment. If you live in a smaller town, and there is too much mercury in the river, it’s going to escalate their treatment costs enormously. They may or may not be able to afford to treat for mercury. It’s one of the reasons why we’re actively fighting new discharges of mercury into the river. A number of years ago, ORSANCO [the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission], an eight state agency, said that there would be no more discharges of mercury above a certain level into the Ohio River. And they gave industries 10 years to comply with that. Come 2013, they found that they weren’t ready to comply. They have indefinitely extended that waiver, and they have given that responsibility back to the individual states. As a headwaters state, what that means for Pennsylvania may not be the same thing as for a downstream state like Kentucky.

According to the EPA, the Ohio River is the most polluted river in the country and has held that ranking for the last seven years. In 2013, industry discharged more than 24 million tons of pollutants, more than double what industries dumped into the second-ranked Mississippi River.

AF: In other words, you’re receiving whatever is coming downstream.

JP: Yep—we all live downstream, [even if] it’s a little bitty stream that feeds into a larger stream that feeds into the Ohio River. If you’re a major river city like Louisville, then you live downstream from Pittsburgh and Wheeling and Cincinnati and big and little towns that are upstream of both the Ohio as well as the Allegheny and Monongahela.

AF: How does legacy and new pollution impact the Ohio River Basin’s future, economically and with regard to recreation?

JP: I don’t want to get so far into the pollution scenario that we lose sight of the fact that the Ohio River is cleaner than it has been in many, many decades. People cleaning up all the sewer overflows and the Clean Water Act that put limits on many of these kinds of industrial facilities that discharge into the Ohio—all of those have had an enormous impact. I just want to make sure we don’t start sliding backwards because the job is not done.

AF: And the Ohio is still ranked as the most polluted river in the country.

JP: It does have that ranking. And that is based on data in a particular index called the Toxic Release Inventory. But believe it or not, there is one facility in Indiana that discharges a lot of nitrates that puts the Ohio over and above all those other rivers. So there are things we can do to clean it up. And I think that people need to stand back up and demand that we have a clean environment and say that this is one of the basic government functions that we all need.

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Judy Petersen is executive director of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance

In Photos: Life on the Ohio River

For decades, the Ohio River was the poster child for a “working” river. But that portrait of the Ohio is changing. Where industry once dominated the landscape, boaters, fisherman and others turning to the river for recreation are becoming a bigger part of the picture—even as the region still struggles with a legacy of industrial pollution. Photojournalist Kara Lofton documented some of these varied—and sometimes competing—forces that are shaping life on the Ohio River today.

The sun sets over Neville Island in Pittsburgh. The 1,200-acre island has been home to more than 50 industries over the past 100 years, including steel and chemical plants. It has long had a reputation as a “toxic waste dump” and has struggled to overcome that image. A third of the island is considered “brownfields”—former industrial or commercial sites that have been contaminated with hazardous substances. Several plans are currently underway to beautify and revitalize the island.

The ALCOSAN wastewater treatment plant sits opposite Neville Island on the Ohio River. The Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN) provides wastewater treatment services to 83 communities, including the City of Pittsburgh. The 59-acre treatment plant is one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities in the Ohio River Valley, processing up to 250 million gallons of wastewater daily. Recently, ALCOSAN began the largest public works project in the region’s history to address the issue of combined sewer overflows—events where stormwater overwhelms the system and causes a mix of sewage and stormwater to flow directly into the river. The project has an estimated budget of more than a billion dollars.

Rachel King, stewardship coordinator for Friends of the Riverfront, paddles on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh’s North Side neighborhood. To her right is ALCOSAN’s wastewater treatment plant; to her left is Neville Island. As the river becomes cleaner, more residents are turning to the river as a source of recreation. Boating, rowing and fishing are becoming increasingly popular.

In the past 25 years, several non-profit groups have begun revitalizing the riverfront up and down the Ohio. Paths like the one seen here are popular routes for commuters, athletes and tourists alike. One group, Friends of the Riverfront, has developed the Three Rivers Heritage Trail—a 24-mile urban rail-trail along the riverfronts of Allegheny County.

A man and his dog let off a friend on a dock at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, before continuing on their way. Cleaner waters have made recreation on the Ohio popular, but combined sewer overflows and algae blooms are still a challenge.

Early on a Sunday morning, trash floats just off Point State Park in Pittsburgh. The park is popular with families, runners and couples. While the river has gotten a lot cleaner over the past 50 years, storm water, littering and combined sewer overflows still impact recreation here.

Ducks preen along the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh. As the Ohio and its tributaries become cleaner, wildlife and fish are returning to the waters.

During the fall, rowers race behind the Pittsburgh River Rescue Crew. The River Rescue is a combined effort of the Bureau of Emergency Medical Services’ SCUBA Search & Rescue Team and the Bureau of Police River Patrol. The paramedics who staff the River Rescue Units are certified as Public Safety Divers and are responsible for surface and subsurface water rescue.

Rowers participating in the Head of the Ohio Regatta wait in the early morning light for the start of their race. Over the course of two days, hundreds of rowers competed in the annual event.

Trash decorates the shoreline just beyond Reddinger’s old fishing spot. While the water is undoubtedly cleaner since he was a child, trash can still be seen up and down the banks on either side of the river.

Water swirls in the grit remover at the West Virginia American Water Treatment Plant in Huntington, West Virginia. In it, heavier particles of sand and debris fall to the bottom of the huge container while clean water cascades onto the next step of the process. The water here is drawn from the Ohio River—just 100 meters to the north. The plant is one of more than 40 treatment facilities that get their drinking water from the Ohio. Filtering out contaminants is a constant balance. For example, if too much chlorine—a common chemical in water treatment—combines with organic materials in the water, you could create a toxin known as trihalomethanes. Use too little, and you could fail to kill harmful bacteria.

The Ohio River is visible from the West Virginia American Water Treatment Plant in Huntington, West Virginia. In 1987, the plant moved its water intakes from the shore to the middle of the river as part of a routine intake replacement. During the 2015 algae bloom, the intakes took in less algae than they might have otherwise because the pipes are now located well under the surface of the water.

Three Rivers Waterkeeper Rob Walters plays with his dog Rio beside the Ohio River in Pittsburgh. As part of his job, Walters monitors the water quality of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers and evaluates incidents of pollution, reviews permits and supports community education.

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Along the Ohio River, Past Accidents Have Led to Stronger Protections for Drinking Water

Chances are, one of the first things you do in the morning is turn on the faucet. For more than three million people in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, that means getting tap water that comes from the Ohio River. But according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Ohio is also one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

For residents of the region, news reports about toxic chemical spills shutting down drinking water supplies are the stuff of recent memory. In 2014, for example, a toxic chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia on the Elk River — a tributary of the Ohio — affected the water supply for more than 300,000 West Virginians and shut down schools, businesses and local governments.

The story of Charleston is well known now. Ten thousand gallons of a coal-processing chemical leaked into the river from a storage tank owned by Freedom Industries. It was just upstream from a water treatment plant, where Charleston pulls in water from the river to send to customers.

LISTEN: The Silver Lining of Chemical Spills

When Evan Hansen, head of an environmental consulting group in Morgantown, saw what was happening, he got to work.

“I started doing research online on source water protection and policy and started tweeting out information I started to find,” Hansen says. He wrote up a report about it, which quickly found its way to West Virginia lawmakers.

“The impact was so great because the drinking water system got contaminated,” Hansen says. “Systems were not in place, or actions were not taken, to prevent that contamination from happening.”

The accident, which was in a part of West Virginia nicknamed “Chemical Valley,” spurred the whole state to get more serious about protecting its drinking water from chemical spills. West Virginia increased its regulation of chemical storage tanks, and it required water treatment plants to spell out how they would protect their source water. Other states along the Ohio River, like Pennsylvania and Ohio, have been doing this for years.

“The Ohio River has been in front of any water system in this country—and probably around the world,” says Stanley States, who worked at the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority for more than 30 years. He now educates experts at water treatment plants around the country on how to protect drinking water from chemical spills and other environmental problems.

He says it wasn’t that other states had more foresight; the simply responded to earlier industrial spills of their own. “Unfortunately, they have to wait for definitive proof that this is really a threat before you can justify putting huge sums of money in it,” States says.

The 2014 toxic chemical spill in Charleston, West Virginia affected the water supply for more than 300,000 West Virginians and shut down schools, businesses and local governments. In this photo, Jonathan Steele, owner of Bluegrass Kitchen, fills a jug with water behind his restaurant. Steele installed a large tank in the back of his restaurant and was able to reopen using bottled water. Photo: Steve Helber / AP

Another silver lining of unexpected contamination in the Ohio River is improved water monitoring for problems. Richard Harrison is head of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO), and he says the agency gets about 600 calls a year about spills into the river. Sometimes it’s something really small. But when it’s a bigger spill, ORSANCO works with the water utilities to assess what should be done.

“[We] really help determine if it’s something the downstream utilities need to be concerned about,” he says.

For example, as the Elk River spill made its way down the Ohio River, water utilities were actively communicating with each other. By the time the contamination reached Cincinnati, they knew what time to expect it and how long to shut down their water intakes.

“And then we were able to work with the Greater Cincinnati Water Works to convey that same information downstream to Louisville and Evansville,” Harrison says.

You might also expect that treatment plants continuously test the raw water coming into their plants. In some cities like Pittsburgh, they do, and Charleston was required to do that after the Elk River spill. But that’s actually a new idea in many places. Some treatment plants don’t have the resources for constant monitoring.

That’s where new technologies could help. Christopher Tomaszewski is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, and at 26, he looks a little old to be playing with the toy-sized boat he’s just launched into a small pond in Pittsburgh’s Highland Park neighborhood. But it’s not just any old model boat.

“I work at Platypus, which is an environmental monitoring company,” he says. “And we use robots like this to survey areas for depth or pollution.”

It’s kind of like a drone in the water, and it uses a cell phone’s compass and GPS systems to navigate around. The Platypus boat has been used to collect water quality data near wastewater treatment plants—including information about salinity and dissolved oxygen, which Tomaszewski says are critical to fish and plant life.

He says the data and water samples collected by this little boat give a more comprehensive look at what’s happening in the water than researchers could get before. And this is just one way technology is being used. As projects like Platypus improve data gathering, others are now sharing that information online in real time. The idea is to keep giving water treatment plants more information—and more notice—so they can handle what’s coming down the river and protect our drinking water.

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Algae Blooms More Likely With Warming Temperatures, Posing Public Health Risk

Last summer, huge hazardous algal blooms shut down drinking-water intakes along the Ohio River. Some experts say the mix of farm runoff, wastewater, and rising temperatures makes blooms like this more likely, leading to major health issues and expenditure of public dollars.

“It started to cover the river,” said local resident Ethan Wells. “It started looking like a neon [green] slime across the top of the river, and it was kind of eerie in a way to have the river alive like that.”

Wells has lived along the Ohio River for almost all of his 32 years. One day last August he noticed blue-green algae growing along the riverbank near his home in Sistersville, an hour south of Wheeling, West Virginia. He said he knew what it was from growing up on a farm with ponds prone to algae. Toxins from these blooms can cause serious health problems, and Wells said he began calling neighbors and friends to let them know they needed to stay away from the water.

View of the Ohio River from the West Virginia American Water treatment plant in Huntington.

That summer, more than 600 miles of toxic algae, known as cyanobacteria, were reported in West Virginia, Ohio, and all the way downriver in Illinois. Touching the stuff can be dangerous, causing rashes, lung and kidney problems. Previous algae blooms around the world have been deadly, so U.S. states have issued health warnings to avoid contact with the thick, stinky slime. But water treatment plants began to find algae in their intakes during last summer’s outbreak.

“At a certain point we actually enacted our contingency plan for the Huntington water system to switch over to an alternate source,” said Laura Martin, a spokesperson for West Virginia American Water.

Since then, Martin said developing ways to deal with toxic algae is the plant’s number one priority.

During the 2015 bloom, water plants used chemicals to ensure the water was safe to send to customers.

Water swirls in the grit remover at the WV American Water Treatment Plant in Huntington. In it, heavier particles of sand and debris fall to the bottom of the huge container while clean water cascades on to the next step of the process.

But treatment of algae is expensive. The water plant in Huntington spent $700,000 to deal with the one outbreak on the Ohio.

Yet without statewide or even regional regulations, all the plants can do is figure out ways to filter and treat the algae.

“The ultimate solution to controlling cyanobacterial blooms is control of the release of excess nutrients into bodies of water,” said Stanley States, an instructor at Texas A&M University. States travels around the country teaching water utilities how to deal with health threats like cyanobacteria.

Nutrients, especially phosphates, have been blamed for algae blooms in rivers and lakes all over the world. Phosphorous comes from sewage plants, lawns and particularly agriculture. There are some 250,000 farms in the Ohio River watershed.

“If they [farmers] use artificial fertilizers, they are supplemented with phosphates, [and] if a farmer uses natural fertilizers – dung – that’s loaded with phosphates,” said States. “Rains wash these phosphates into rivers, lakes” and other bodies of water.

During the algae bloom of 2015, people were advised to avoid contact with the algae, including ceasing recreational activities.

When that phosphorus mixes with warm summer water, which is getting warmer as the climate changes, the combination creates the perfect recipe for cyanobacteria to bloom.

On Lake Erie toxic blooms have become something of a late summer ritual. The bloom was so big in 2014, nearly half million people lost their drinking water in Toledo, Ohio.

States said the Ohio River could also continue to have blooms, in part because all the locks and dams along the river create a series of lakes rather than a free-flowing river.

When the blooms took off on the Ohio River last summer, the state of Ohio was quick to respond.

“A lot of what we were doing on the Ohio River, we learned from our situation up in Toledo,” said Karl Gebhardt, deputy director of water resources with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

“We wanted to make sure that since they had never experienced this before, we were very quick in getting to them to make sure they were sampling the water before it came into the intake, and were implementing the proper treatment,” said Gebhardt.

Ohio has become a key state to watch when it comes to treating toxic blooms. Farm runoff in general has been largely unregulated. But last year, in an effort to reduce nutrient runoff, Ohio passed a law limiting when farmers can apply manure to farm fields.

“That was a big legislative achievement that the ag community, to their credit, bought into,” said Gebhardt.

Ohio isn’t going it alone. It’s working with other states around the Great Lakes to reduce nutrient runoff. Their collaborative goal? Cut this type of pollution 40 percent over the next decade.

Gebhardt said Ohio’s new runoff regulations apply to farms all over the state, so it’s also expected to keep pollution out of the Ohio River. So far, other river states haven’t taken these kinds of steps.

“Hopefully, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Indiana, would look at that and say, ‘Ok, do we feel confident in our program that we’re doing what we can do, or do we need to revisit that?’”

Gebhardt said state coordination could reduce pollution and prevent more toxic blooms all along the river. And, in the long run, that could save water treatment plants money, in addition to helping ensure safe drinking water for the five million people who depend on the Ohio.

This story is part of West Virginia Public Broadcasting and Allegheny Front‘s Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.

Why Big Industry is Paying Small Farmers to Cut Pollution in the Ohio River

Some water quality advocates think getting big industrial polluters to pay for farm runoff prevention projects is an innovative way to control water pollution. But critics of the Ohio River’s pollution credit trading system say it’s just another pay-to-pollute scheme.

There are about 55 cows and 10 pigs on Ken Merrick’s farm in eastern Ohio. It sits on a hillside above a creek that leads to the Tuscarawas River, a tributary of the Ohio River. It’s a part of the country Merrick is plenty familiar with. He grew up milking cows at his grandma’s place, which is right next door to the property he and his wife have farmed since 2005.

Today, they sell grass-fed beef and pasture-raised pork direct to customers. By a barn at the top of the hill, you can see one of their farm’s main hubs of activity: A spot where they feed their animals—and pile their manure.

It’s a muddy hill.

“This was literally, at times, waist-deep in mud in spots,” Merrick says.

LISTEN: “This Farm Could Be a Model for Cleaning Up the Ohio River”

The cows used to slosh around in it while they ate. And the manure? Today, the pile is more than five feet tall. But Merrick says that’s nothing.

“That pile’s actually half the size it was a month and a half ago.”

The manure and mud used to wash down the hill, mucking up the creek that runs through his property. And Merrick didn’t like that.

“I needed to change something,” he says. “The manure would wash off every time it rained. We didn’t have any way of containing it, and we didn’t have space for the cows.”

Ken Merrick and his wife, Natsuko, on their farm in eastern Ohio.

This type of agricultural runoff is common, and it creates a serious pollution load. There are more than 250,000 farms in the Ohio River watershed, which is part of the larger Mississippi River Basin. And farm runoff from the Mississippi, which contains nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, is considered the major contributor to the 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though agricultural runoff is largely unregulated, Ken Merrick decided he wanted to do something to stop it on his farm. His plan was to create a large concrete slab for the cows and manure at the top of the hill, secure the hillside and fence the cattle away from the stream. But the $20,000 price tag was pretty steep.

“That’s an enormous cost,” he says. “Most people would do [it] if they have the opportunity, but they don’t have the money to do it. So it never gets done.”

But Merrick was able to get it done with help from a regional water credit trading program. That’s where industrial polluters—like power plants—buy credits as a way of meeting their pollution limits. And the money goes to farmers to pay for projects like the one on Merrick’s farm.

“We started looking into it to try to test out if water quality trading could be an effective mechanism to protect America’s waters—and to meet company bottom lines,” says Jessica Fox, an environmental scientist with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which runs the credit program.

That’s one reason water trading credit programs have been popping up around the country: It might be more cost effective for industry to pay for farm projects that clean up nitrogen and phosphorus pollution than to control an equal amount of it at their plants.

Currently in the Ohio River watershed, there are limits on nitrogen but not on phosphorous pollution. As these nutrients are increasingly blamed for toxic algae blooms, that’s expected to change. For instance, environmental regulators in Ohio are now pushing for new limits on phosphorus pollution in the Ohio River. And that could make those credits—which cost $10 for a pound of nitrogen or phosphorous—more appealing.

Jessica Fox has worked for more than a decade on this water pollution marketplace between Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. It’s the first multi-state program in the country.

“The first thing outright is that there’s rigorous science and verification to say that nutrient reductions that we claim we are achieving and turning into credits is real and valid, [so] that we know that those reductions are legitimate,” Fox says.

But some environmental advocates says the credit trading program is just another ‘pay-to-pollute’ scheme.

“We are trading accountability for unaccountability,” says Food and Water Watch’s Scott Edwards. His group investigated water trading credits in the Ohio River and the Chesapeake Bay. And he says these programs have made it impossible to track exact pollution loads from power plants.

“A power plant has to measure its discharges at the end of the pipe—tak[ing] water samples every month, or every quarter, depending on what their permit says—and report those results,” Edwards says. “I can tell you—or I used to be able to tell you—exactly how much pollution was coming out of a power plant and into a stream.”

Edwards gives the example of the Brunner Island Electric Plant. The plant has a permit from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to discharge pollution into the Susquehanna River, which runs into the Chesapeake Bay. Both are officially impaired waterways. But in 2013, for example, Brunner Island used water quality trading credits to offset all of its nitrogen and phosphorous discharges.

“When I look at Brunner Island now, I see that they’ve discharged 87,000 pounds of nitrogen,” Edwards says. “[But] can you prove to me that that those groups of farms that you bought credits from have reduced their discharges by 87,000 pounds? All they can do is hold out their credits that they purchased and say, ‘Here, we bought 87,000 pounds of credits.’ No one will ever know if those farms reduced their load by 87,000 pounds or not.”

Many of those credits paid for projects that hauled away millions of tons of chicken manure from farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. That sounds good for water quality in the bay. But Edwards points out that all the manure was trucked to southwestern Pennsylvania—and into the Ohio River watershed. He says that means they didn’t reduce pollution; they just moved it.

WATCH: Ken Merrick Talks About Reducing Farm Runoff

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says it regulates how manure is applied to farm fields, although it hasn’t specifically tracked final distribution of the Chesapeake Bay manure. And Edwards says that’s the crux of the issue: There’s no way to test exactly how much pollution is being reduced by mitigation measures, like manure pads or buffer strips on farms.

“No one is ever going to measure whether those thousand of pounds ever were stopped at that farm from entering into a waterway. There’s no monitoring going on, there’s no water sampling going on.”

The difficulty in verifying results on farms led environmental regulators in New York to reject a water credit trading program.

But Jessica Fox, who helps manage the credit trading program in the Ohio River watershed, says they use well-established modeling to estimate pollution reduction on farms. And they work with state regulators to verify annually that the projects are being maintained.

“I go out there,” Fox says. “I can see the projects where there used to be all kinds of sediment and manure running right into the river. There’s no question when you see these projects on the field that nutrient recovery is happening.”

She acknowledges that they can’t exactly measure pollution reduction on a farm the way they can at the end of a pipe. But she says that doesn’t mean there aren’t as many benefits. So far, the program has helped fund projects on more than 30 farms and prevented more than 100,000 pounds of nitrogen and phosphorous from getting into the Ohio River.

Beef farmer Ken Merrick has also witnessed the benefits of the controls he’s put in using the credit trading program. Now, the mud from his farm no longer washes into the water, and his stream has come back to life.

“My wife was actually out here last summer catching fish with the kids,” he says. “My grandpa used to do that. I never caught anything. It’s kind of cool to see the fish coming back into the area.”

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This story is part of Allegheny Front’s Headwaters series, which explores the environmental and economic importance of the Ohio River. Headwaters is funded by the Benedum Foundation and the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds, and is produced in collaboration with Allegheny Front.