The EPA’s goal for public exposure to PFAS from drinking water is zero, although it will not be enforceable.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set maximum levels for “forever chemicals” in drinking water.
The EPA’s goal for public exposure to PFAS from drinking water is zero, although it will not be enforceable.
Rather, the agency wants to limit such chemicals to between 4 to 10 parts per trillion, depending on what category they belong to.
In contrast, the EPA’s 2016 guidance allowed PFAS exposure as high as 70 parts per trillion.
The EPA developed the standards based on 120,000 comments it received. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 committed $9 billion toward reducing PFAS contamination in drinking water systems.
The clusters were concentrated in the Ohio River valley and the Eastern Panhandle.
A new report has found “forever chemicals” in dozens of the state’s drinking water systems.
The U.S. Geological Survey detected at least one kind of PFAS in 67 of West Virginia’s drinking water systems.
Of those, 20 were from surface-water sources and the remaining 47 were from groundwater.
The clusters were concentrated in the Ohio River valley and the Eastern Panhandle.
PFAS are synthetic chemicals that don’t break down in the environment. They’re used to make common products such as nonstick cookware, firefighting foam and stain-resistant fabrics.
The U.S. Geological Survey says more data and research are necessary to best understand the potential risks to water quality in areas with unconventional oil and gas development.
After searching through water data that’s been collected between 1970-2010, USGS scientists are saying they have only been able to access long term trends in 16 percent of watersheds where unconventional gas development exists.
The USGS explained in a press release, there’s no national water-quality monitoring program in place that focuses on oil and gas development. The organization’s recent study of existing water data found no widespread and consistent trends in water quality in areas where unconventional oil and gas wells are prevalent.
“Comprehensive, published and publicly available information regarding the extent, location and character of hydraulic fracturing and potential effects on regional or national water quality in the United States is scarce,” the release said.
The state will survey fish life in the Elk River after a massive chemical spill polluted the waterway in January.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Fish Health Laboratory in Leetown will aid the state Division of Natural Resources in the project next week.
The Freedom Industries spill contaminated the drinking water supply for 300,000 people for days.
The state Division of Natural Resources says no fish kills were observed after the spill. The survey will look at possible health impacts on fish from the disaster.
The division will perform a similar fish study on the Kanawha River. That survey is part of a statewide fish health assessment project with the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service’s Northeast Fishery Center in Lamar, Pennsylvania.
As the climate changes, scientists around the world are trying to figure out how plants, animals and even people will be affected. One scientist in West Virginia is conducting an experiment to find out how well a fish native to Appalachian streams might survive.
Biologist Than Hitt works at the U.S. Geological Survey Leetown Science Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia, where scientists explore everything from declining fish and mussel populations to the increasing presence of intersex fish in the nation’s waterways. Hitt has just started a new research project: trying to determine how climate change might affect the brook trout.
“These trout were here over the course of multiple glaciation events,” Hitt said. “They’ve adapted to cold water streams that quite frankly are jeopardized by the change in climate that we expect over the next 30 to 50 years.”
“So the southern Appalachian brook trout can be a canary in the coal mine for us to understand how streams are responding to climate change,” he added.
There are 12 large round blue tanks in the lab: four sets of three connected tanks so the fish can travel from one to another. It’s basically a room full of giant aquariums set up so Hitt can control things like temperature, water chemistry, flow rate, food supply during the two month study.
“We want to understand what the relative importance of thermal stress is and interactions with other stressors like changes in invasive species showing up or changes in prey availability or other factors that we can control.”
The first invasive species these brook trout will encounter is the brown trout, which is native to Germany.
“Brown trout are a prized game fish in some places and they also are known for displacing native brook trout,” Hitt said. “It’s not clear though how that displacement effect interacts with the temperature effect. In warming streams maybe that’s where brown trout are able to displace brook trout fully whereas in the colder streams perhaps they’re able to coexist and persist in the same stream reach.”
Aside from conducting controlled experiments in these tanks at the lab in Leetown, West Virginia, Hitt will do field work in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and the Delaware Gap National Recreation Area. Partners in the project include the USGS Chesapeake Bay Program, the National Park Service and several state divisions of natural resources.
Mountaintop removal mining does have an effect on fish populations downstream from the mining operations, according to a study just released by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The study title is a mouthful: Temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of fish assemblages downstream from mountaintop mining, which is the fancy way of saying USGS scientists looked at how well fish populations are doing in streams down river from mountaintop mining sites.
The co-authors are Doug Chambers, a biologist and water quality specialist in Charleston, West Virginia, and Than Hitt, a fish researcher at the Leetown Science Center in Jefferson County, West Virginia.
The study looked at changes with respect to:
The number of species found in streams below mountaintop removal sites
The number of fish
How the fish behave
Their feeding traits and the strategies they use to survive
Physical habitat and water quality
“And by looking at how those things change over time we can get some clues about what’s really happening in the system,” Hitt said.
Over a two year period of time, in 2010 and 2011, Chambers and Hitt collected samples from the Guyandotte River Basin in southern West Virginia. Streams that were studied include the Upper Mudd River, the Left Fork of the Mudd, Big Ugly Creek and Laurel Creek. All these streams are down river from mining sites. They were able to compare their samples to data collected in 1999 and 2001 for a water quality study done by Penn State University researchers.
Some study results:
The streams in the study contain 25 species that are generally found in an Appalachian stream, including creek chub, minnows, sunfish and darters.
There were fewer fish downstream from the mining sites and half the number of species.
A minority of species can do quite well in the conditions created by mine runoff including the creek chub and green sunfish.
Mountaintop mining creates many changes to the landscape, including the way water flows.
The process of breaking big rocks into smaller ones releases more minerals and chemicals so the water below valley fills contains higher concentrations of selenium
Selenium is an essential, non-toxic nutrient that can be harmful when too much is consumed because it reduces the fish’s ability to reproduce.
How well the fish survive changes in water quality depends on what they eat and fish with more diverse diets do better.
And Chambers said the results can help policy makers as they decide how to regulate the state’s water resources. “West Virginia right now is blessed with abundant water,” he said. “If we’re going to continue to have readily available abundant water we need to understand the processes that affect its quality very broadly.”
Both scientists said the study also provides a framework for future research- both in the field and in a lab setting.
