West Virginia Water Research Institute Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

WVU Art Exhibit Celebrates Water and the Women Who Protect It

A collaborative art exhibit at West Virginia University focuses on one of the state’s most abundant resources — water. It also celebrates the many women who protect it.

Featuring brightly colored panels covering wide swaths of the downtown campus library’s walls, “WATER: Exploring the Significance, Power and Play of Life’s Critical Resource” explores the state’s rivers and wetland ecosystems, celebrates the art and recreation opportunities afforded by water, and explores challenges and solutions facing the state’s water resources.

“We wanted to have a full picture of what West Virginia water looks like,” said Megan Kruger, the interpretive curator of WATER, and environmental education and outreach coordinator for the West Virginia Water Research Institute.

Kruger was part of the team that sifted through contributions from more than three-dozen scholars across campus and the wider water community, including restoration and advocacy groups working to preserve the state’s water resources. In addition to showcasing where the state’s water comes from, the exhibit takes on other water-related challenges such as the 2016 flood that impacted southern West Virginia and the pollution challenges posed by acid mine drainage, a remnant of the state’s coal mining legacy.

In addition to using vivid imagery, the exhibit also features tactile elements. For example, the staircase between the first and second floors of the library celebrates water-based recreation in a big way.

Vivid, life-sized photos of rafting and kayaking adorn the walls. In honor of the winter months, a pair of snowboards and numerous ski poles are suspended in the stairwell. The second floor features a full wall of plastic water bottles artfully hung to show the impacts of plastic pollution. Students crafted the message, “Water is life, plastic is not” from bottle labels.

Students also have the option of listening to a soundtrack while interacting with the exhibit.

Kruger said WATER is supposed to be splashy, and the multi-faceted approach to displaying information aims to draw in both students and the public. An estimated 4,000 WVU students pass through the downtown library daily, she said.

“So as soon as they come in the door, they’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, what are those cool panels on the wall,’ and we didn’t want it to be something where they had to kind of walk right up to see it, because many people work on the computers in the library,” she said. “So, something where they can kind of view and appreciate from afar, and then if they were more interested, they could walk up and and check it out.”

The WATER exhibit is free and open to the public. It will be up through June 2019.

Celebrating W.Va. Women Water Stewards

Inside the library’s tutoring center, a complimentary 20-item exhibit featuring photos, paintings and sculptures created and curated by women working to protect West Virginia’s water resources, will run through the end of April.

The exhibit was born from research conducted by WVU Assistant Professor of Geography, Martina Angela Caretta. Caretta studies gender, climate change and water.

“Being that West Virginia is a water state, I was really interested in understanding their all different roles women and men play in the management of water in the state,” she said. “What I realized was that the most important watershed organizations in the state that work on water quality and water restoration are actually headed or completely staffed by women.”

In 2017, Caretta interviewed about 30 women working on water issues across West Virginia. The next year, the participants gathered to discuss the work, but also how to balance advocating for the state’s water resources and having lives outside of that work. As an ice breaker exercise, Caretta asked each woman to bring a photograph or object that sparked joy or inspired them to keep working on water-related issues.

“The pictures depict the women — what they like about their job, what they don’t like about their job, what makes them inspired to work in West Virginia, and for West Virginia,” she said. “It’s an honest picture or recollection in a way of, you know, the struggle of doing work that’s often underpaid, that offer requires free work during weekends, and the results are not fully recognized by the communities and the society around them.”

Many of the pieces collected in the exhibit depict aspects of the 2014 Elk River chemical spill. Caretta said for many of the women she interviewed, the event really mobilized them.

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition Project Manager Robin Blakeman was one of the women who contributed to the exhibit. She submitted a cloth tapestry created during the first Radical Joy for Hard Times event hosted by OVEC. The event was hosted in the Kanawha State Forest near a mountain top mining site. During the gathering in the park, Blakeman said people celebrated their favorite places.

“The slips of papers pinned on the the tapestry were their thoughts about those places or their prayers for those places,” she said. The tapestry was also taken to North Carolina for another event where additional prayers were added.

Blakeman said while there are some really great men working as environmental advocates across the state, women seem to more intensely connect with this work in part because of their ability to have children. That amplifies concerns about what the world will look like for future generations.

She said it was “powerful” to see that expressed in the exhibit.

Caretta said many of the people who have so far interacted with the exhibit or attended the outreach events associated with it have been surprised at the critical and leading role women in West Virginia play in protecting the state’s water.

“I think a lot of people don’t think that women play such a big role in the community — although West Virginia has a very strong history when it comes to women being engaged in the labor movement, union movement, also environmental movement — for some reason people keep forgetting about it,” she said. “So, that’s why it’s important to have this exhibit, to actually highlight something that we tend to forget, like, pretty quickly, which is that there are a lot of people and among the majority of women, that putting in a lot of free time to preserve the natural resources of our state.”

Bethani Turley, a geography graduate student at WVU, Amanda Pitzer, executive director of the Friends of the Cheat, and Beth Warnick, media and outreach specialist for the Friends of the Cheat helped curate the exhibit. The exhibit will run through the end of April. Two more events associated with Women & Water are scheduled and will be held at the WVU downtown campus library in room 104.

March 28, 4-5:30 p.m. — A panel titled “Flint and Charleston: Drinking water pollution and its impact on women’s health.” Panelists will discuss drinking water and its impacts on reproductive health. WVU Department of Public Health PhD candidate Maya Nye, WVU Economics Assistant Professor Daniel Grossman and WVFree Executive Director Margaret Chapman are expected to attend.
April 11, 5-6:30 p.m. — A screening of short films by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection

Four Concerns About Storage Tank Legislative Rollback

A bill to roll back regulations of storage tanks is making its way through the legislature. This week the House Judiciary Committee passed a version of Senate Bill 423 by a narrow vote of 13 to 12 without making any significant changes to the proposed legislation.

In the wake of last year’s Freedom Industries spill that contaminated drinking water for 300,000 people in and around the state’s capital city, the Above Ground Storage Tank Act was passed into law. A year later, a set of bills emerged in the House and Senate that aimed to reduce the number of regulated tanks regulated in that act from about 48,000 to about 100, according to policy analysts.

The Department of Environmental Protection reports that they played no part in initiating this new legislative action. Legislators say the 2014 act went too far by requiring duplicitous regulations for industry. Their answer to industrial push-back is now an amended version of Senate Bill 423 which also reduces the scope and stringency of last year’s act.

Graphic Detailing the Elk River zone of critical concern, from downstream strategies new report.

1. Regulations don’t matter if there’s weak enforcement.

Paul Ziemkiewicz is the director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute. He remembers presenting information to the Legislature after last year’s chemical spill.

“My point was that we had rules on the books,” Ziekiewicz recalled. “One was federal legislation 40 CFR 112 which is the Oil Spill Control and Countermeasures Act. That requires that all tanks that are 1,320 gallons have secondary containment, regular inspections. It’s a nation-wide rule.”

Ziemkiewicz also points out additional state rules enacted in the mid-1990s that require almost the same measures as the federal rule. He said the MCHM spill in January of 2014 was really the result of inadequate enforcement.

What came to light during the course of the Freedom Industries investigation was that regardless of the rules on the books, the Freedom tanks, perched on the Elk River a mile and a half upstream from a major public water intake did not have a groundwater protection plan as required by state law.

There was a compliance report filed in 2009 by the DEP’s Department of Air Quality that mapped and detailed the site and contents therein. But agency officials say it wasn’t the responsibility of the DEP to inspect storage tanks or secondary containment measures.

That lack of oversight is something last year’s act set out to address.

2. Protecting groundwater isn’t the objective.

Julie Archer from West Virginia Surface Owners Rights Organization says last year’s bill extended extra protections to not only public water systems, but to groundwater in general.

“It has the potential to improve the inspection and the maintenance of tanks that could affect rural landowners who rely on private water wells for drinking and other uses,” Archer said.

But improving groundwater protection was never the objective, according to lawmakers. Legislators and Secretary Randy Huffman at the DEP indicate that SB 423 is more closely aligned with the original version of legislation Governor Tomblin introduced in 2014—legislation designed to protect public water systems specifically.

3. Five-Hour Zones of Critical Concern. During Fall or Spring?

Huffman says this year’s proposed legislation does allow for adequate regulatory controls for tanks deemed a high risk to public drinking water supplies. SB 423 tries to focus DEP regulatory efforts on tanks in zones where, if there were a spill, contamination could reach public water intake within five hours.

“The zone of critical concern is determined using mathematical model that accounts for stream flows, gradient and topography. The length of the zone of critical concern is based on a five-hour time-of-travel of water in the streams to the intake.”

While lawmakers have been told that about 12,000 tanks currently would fall into these “zones of critical concern,” the five-hour flow detail befuddles the director of the WV Water Research Institute, Paul Ziemkiewicz.

“If a stream is moving at say four miles an hour, then that zone is 20 miles long. On the other hand if it’s moving at one mile an hour, it’s five miles long. So that means you have a different zone of critical concern during winter, with spring run-off, than late summer. If you use the maximum value, there aren’t many places in the state that would not be in a zone of critical concern.”

4. Are we creating loopholes?

Executive director of the WV Rivers Coalition, Angie Rosser, is worried about the bill’s potential to create loopholes for industry. Tank owners of the 12,000 tanks in zones of critical concern, she says, can opt-out of the regulation by naming other regulatory programs that exist.

“We are looking to make sure that if that alternative compliance is pursued that it is at least as stringent as what is in the [Above Ground Storage Act].”

Rosser hopes that when the bill is heard in the House chamber this week, amendments will be adopted that specify more clearly the extent of and frequency of tank inspection as well as language to guarantee public water utilities are fully informed of water contamination threats.

More Fracking Slated in Morgantown

Amid much controversy, two horizontal gas wells were drilled into the Marcellus shale rock formation in 2011 just barely outside of Morgantown. Now two more wells are slated to be drilled on the same pad in the summer of 2015, but the company, Charleston-based Northeast Natural Energy is teaming up this time with a host of researchers.

$11 Million, 5-year Field Lab

An $11-million agreement between Northeast Natural Energy, WVU, Ohio State University, and the Department of Energy is allowing for the creation and management for five years of the the “Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Laboratory.”

Director of WVU Energy Institute, Brian J. Anderson said when a call came for proposals to develop a field laboratory to study natural gas drilling practices, he and his colleagues and collaborators jumped at the chance, and were then chosen to receive the federal funds.

“We’re doing a number of different monitoring efforts really to make this as transparent as possible. At times we call it the “Transparent Well.” Not transparent like glass, but transparent to the public,” Anderson said.

Northeast President and CEO Mike John said he’s excited to working alongside folks from West Virginia University and the US Department of Energy, to give researchers insight into the work Northeast does.

“And we will look forward to applying best-management practices to whatever work that we will do on the Morgantown Industrial Site in 2015,” John said.

The principal investigator and director of the lab, professor of geology at WVU, Timothy Carr, is joined by many researchers from the university and from Ohio State University, and federal partners from DOE.

WVU Schools/Departments participating in the study include:

Site Pros and Cons

The Northeast well pad is at the Morgantown Industrial Park–a site that concerns residents and utility managers because it’s located just up the hill from the Monongahela River, and just 1500 feet upstream from the city’s drinking water intake.

But researchers and industry professionals alike say risks are low at the this drilling pad because of the expected oversight.

“This is actually probably going to be the safest well in the world,” said Director of WVU Energy Institute, Brian J. Anderson. A Morgantown resident himself, he says he drinks Morgantown’s tap water, so he understands community concerns. But he doesn’t share them. He’s hopeful that research on site will not only be monitored to insure safety, but provide valuable information on best-practices for the industry around the globe.

Anderson explains the site provides unique opportunities not only for it’s proximity to the University:

It’s a brownfield, meaning, the land has been used for industrial purposes and contains some level of pollutants. So the Environmental Protection Agency has data from water monitoring wells that have existed for many years.
It’s a slow-developing site. Instead of drilling six or eight wells on the pad at once, as is typical, Northeast is drilling one at a time, which is desirable for scientists who want to observe practices systematically.
It’s heavily scrutinized. The public utility board and mass of concerned citizens have made it a point to see that more precautions are taken given the proximity to larger population, and the municipal drinking water intake. Extra measures have provided for more site control.

The Plan
Anderson says Northeast will drill two wells this summer. One will be devoted to science, research and observation; the other will be a typical production well. He says research will explore noise, air, water, traffic, and waste as well newer drilling techniques like using gas on site to power the many on site generators (instead of diesel fuel), and perhaps using synthetic-based drilling mud instead of water-based mud to frack the wells.

Permit applications are in the process of making it through the Department of Environmental Protection.

Watching Over Water: Researchers Pool Resources

Citizen and university researchers involved in monitoring water quality at 54 sites on the upper Ohio River basin will gather for a first-of-its kind conference on Monday, Aug. 11, at Duquesne University.

The West Virginia Water Resources Institute at West Virginia University is partnering with Duquesne and Wheeling Jesuit universities and the Iron Furnace chapter of Trout Unlimited in a water monitoring project. Organizers say the project is one of the largest of its kind, covering a broad geographical area, collecting consistent, high-quality data, over a significant amount of time.

Every two weeks since January 2013, professors and students, local groups and individual citizen researchers collect samples from 54 sites on waterways of all sizes throughout the upper Ohio River basin. Their samples are then analyzed to provide more data and insight to help complete a picture of the basin’s overall health.

Convergence at the Confluence is the name of the day-long conference set to discuss findings as well as the continuation water monitoring. The event will feature presentations based on the data as well as breakout sessions on data collection and interpretation.

The Law Works – Safety of Our Water Supply

One of the things we typically take for granted is that our water is safe. Safe to drink. Safe to give our children. But three hundred thousand West Virginians are no longer sure–and we all have questions. Dan Ringer talks about safe water in West Virginia on a special hour long The Law Works. Guests include Alan M. Ducatman, M.D., West Virginia University; Paul F. Ziemkiewicz, Ph.D., Director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute; and Professor Patrick C. McGinley, West Virginia University College of Law.

The Law Works airs on WV PBS Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. and on WV PBS.2 Fridays at 11 a.m.

Fracking Waste: What Is It & What Do We Do About It

The natural gas boom continues to sound in what have become the northern gas fields of West Virginia. State lawmakers are working on ways to take maximum advantage of the economic benefits that are coming with it. The other byproduct authorities are grappling with is an excess of waste products, which, without proper disposal, can threaten public health.

The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 allocated funding to study the impacts of horizontal drilling. Legislators reached out to West Virginia University’s Water Research Institute. Director Paul Ziemkiewicz managed a study that looked at liquid and solid waste streams.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uO2XlXyhFTA

Liquid Waste

Horizontal wells produce two kinds of wastewater: flowback, and what’s referred to as “produced water.” Ziemkiewicz explains, once a well is fracked—meaning once operators take fracking fluid (5 million gallons of water mixed with sand and additives) and blast it deep into this hard, black, non-porous rock called Marcellus shale—the pressure is released and the first thing that happens is a regurgitation of some of that fluid.

“The stuff that comes out over the initial 60 days or so is called flowback,” Ziemkiewicz explains. “You have to get that flowback out of the system before you can start producing gas. You start producing a little bit of gas as soon as you release the pressure but when it gets to the point where you can start commercially producing gas you switch over to something called ‘produced water.'”

Ziemkiewicz goes on to explain that the longer the fracking fluid mingles with the rock formation the more stuff from that formation flows back out with the fluid like organic compounds, lots of salts, and yes, radioactive material.

“Sodium chloride, bromide, mainly chloride salts of one kind or another,” Ziemkiewicz says. “Strontium chloride, barium chloride. These things start pushing back up out of the hole and the concentration of those salts almost everything, including radioactivity starts to go up during the flowback cycle. So the longer you go into flowback and then produced water the higher the concentrations get.”

Ziemkiewicz adds that while many people seemed to be very concerned with the initial fracking fluid being injected into the wells, he is much more concerned with the produced water that comes up afterward.

“The stuff that comes back out is almost always more concentrated,” he says.

Ziemkiewicz says in some cases this briny water produced a concentration of about 250,000 milligrams per liter of dissolved solids–which he explains is essentially 25 percent solid.

Where does it go from there?

Well Ziemkiewicz says about 25 percent of the fluid is pumped back into deep wells classified as injection waste disposal wells, while the other 75 percent of flowback is being recycled. That recycled portion has to be processed. Solids like clays, metals, and rock are filtered and precipitated out, leaving cakes behind. These cakes are then dumped into solid waste landfills, the same place that the mud and rock produced during the drilling process are dumped.

Solid Waste

Under the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA) hazardous waste is differentiated from industrial solid waste based on tests that determine chemical properties. Interestingly, federal laws exempt drilling waste from regulation as hazardous waste. But the WV Department of Environmental Protection is proceeding with some caution, nevertheless.

Scott Mandirola Director of the DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management explains horizontal well operators were just sort of spreading this waste on properties, or dumping it, burying it, whatever, wherever. By all estimations, a bad idea. The Horizontal Well Control Act of 2011 specified that instead the waste should be disposed of in appropriate landfills. That’s when municipal landfills started accepting the waste. And we’re talking about a lot of waste.

So DEP Cabinet Secretary Randy Huffman sent a memo out to solid waste landfill operators in July of last year saying that they could continue accepting waste if they took one of two actions: apply to expand their operation, or construct separate cells specifically for these waste products.

Bill Hughes is the chairman of the Wetzel County Solid Waste Authority. He’s concerned about new practices.

“Wetzel County which is legally permitted for up to 9,999 tons, round it off to 10, times 12, 120,000 tons per year? Our landfill last year took in about 330,000 tons. Of that, about a quarter million tons was drill waste, drill cuttings.”

Mandirola says Wetzel County—one of the most heavily drilled counties in the state—has seen one of the largest influxes of waste because of its proximity to so many well sites. This concerns residents for reasons such as the amount of space available in landfills, and also because there’s still so little known about the chemical characterization of the waste.

Enter Paul Ziemkiewicz, who, again, was tasked to look into that.

“I don’t think we’ve characterized this material adequately enough to determine whether or not it really belongs in solid waste landfills or whether it belongs in a higher standard landfill,” Ziemkiewicz says.

Ziemkiewicz did look at drilling mud. But he explains that a combination of bad luck, low response times from companies and the WV Department of Environmental Protection, bad weather, and an aggressive timeframe to report results contributed to the lack of access to drilling samples from the actual rock formation where Marcellus gas exists—the shale. So unfortunately, it’s still something of a mystery.

“They’re black shales,” Ziemkiewicz explains. “And black shales tend to accumulate uranium. Uranium breaks down into radium.”

While Ziemkiewicz wasn’t able to test drill muds from the Marcellus itself, he says the tests results from drilling samples of vertical sections turned up exceeding amounts of toxins considered safe by federal drinking water standards.

“Whether or not [comparing to federal drinking water standards] was the right approach I’m still not sure. Nevertheless, a lot of these drill cuttings and muds came out being well excess of drinking water standards.”

Recommendations

Ziemkiewicz is calling for an additional study to test these solid waste streams.

“By the time this stuff gets to the landfill and is diluted it may or may not even be a problem,” he says. “It may be that we’re focusing on radioactivity when that’s not a problem at all, but the real problem is organic contamination like benzene.”

Ziemkiewicz’s other recommendations include what he calls common sense measures like proper containment of drill sites to guard against spills, and thorough inspection and enforcement by well-trained authorities. He also suggests tracking liquid wastes to have clear knowledge of where it ends up.

Ziemkiewicz and other experts say it’s hard to predict the future of oil and gas development, but everyone seems certain that significantly more drilling is the most likely scenario, and therefore, more insight into the science and practices of the industry is the best course of action to safeguard not only communities, but also employees and first responders.