The 33rd annual Great Kanawha River Cleanup, sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP), is set for Sept. 9, 2023, from 9 a.m. to noon.
The 33rd annual Great Kanawha River Cleanup, sponsored by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (WVDEP), is set for Sept. 9, 2023, from 9 a.m. to noon.
Cleanup sites include Winfield Beach, St. Albans Roadside Park, the South Charleston boat ramp, and Kanawha Falls at Glen Ferris. Other cleanup sites could be added as the day of the event nears.
Last year’s cleanup saw 80 volunteers from Kanawha, Putnam and Mason counties collect nearly 4,000 pounds of trash and two tires from 11 sites along the Kanawha River.
The WVDEP’s Rehabilitation Environmental Action Plan (REAP) will supply bags and gloves for volunteers and will arrange for trash to be hauled away. All volunteers will receive a t-shirt, but they must register early to ensure there are enough supplies for each cleanup location.
To volunteer, or suggest an additional cleanup location, contact the WVDEP’s Chris Cartwright at 304-389-8389 or by email at christopher.j.cartwright@wv.gov.
REAP was created in 2005 to clean up West Virginia and rid the state of litter. The program empowers citizens to take ownership of their communities by providing technical, financial, and resource assistance in cleanup and recycling efforts.
More information is available on the REAP webpage.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) held a public hearing Thursday to discuss the findings of a final report on ethylene oxide (EtO) emissions.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) held a public hearing Thursday to discuss the final report on their ethylene oxide (EtO) emissions monitoring project.
The hearing also centered around a new agreement the DEP’s Division of Air Quality (DAQ) recently signed with Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) to reduce emissions of EtO, a known carcinogen, at its Institute facility.
On August 22, 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an update to the National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA). The national screen tool provides information on potential health risks from breathing air toxics, or hazardous air pollutants.
Using data from its 2014 National-Scale Air Toxics Assessment (NATA), the report identified Union Carbide’s facilities in Institute and South Charleston as emitting ethylene oxide (EtO) at one of the highest rates in the country. EPA has since succeeded NATA with the Air Toxics Screening Assessment, or AirToxScreen, starting with the 2017 data analysis. The mapping tool offers a new approach to air toxics with annually updated data and risk analyses to more easily identify existing and emerging air toxics issues. Their latest assessment uses 2019 data.
Under the terms of the agreement reached with DEP, Union Carbide agrees to continue its ongoing cooperation with the EPA and the DAQ. This would be done by providing in-kind or other tangible resources to assist with the development of air quality-related data collection, and develop monitoring protocols concerning EtO. The agreement would include securing meteorological data related to such research, and identifying and fixing leaks at levels 50 to 1,000 times lower than current regulations allow.
UCC Institute would also be required to develop a unique site-specific EtO emissions screening program for rail cars it has in EtO service. Each rail car would have to be screened within 12 hours of arriving at the facility. Should there be a reading indicating potential rail car emissions, appropriate action would be initiated based on developed response plans.
The Division of Air Quality conducted a short term ethylene oxide air monitoring project in 2022, with samples gathered over 24-hour phases at sites in and around the Union Carbide chemical facilities in Institute and South Charleston.
Michael Egnor, air toxics coordinator for the Division of Air Quality, spoke for almost an hour, explaining test comparisons.
The tests, which included other states, revealed the presence of EtO at all locations evaluated. The site near Institute where Union Carbide loads its railcars is one of two sites identified by the EPA as having a higher concentration of the chemical. Higher levels of EtO were also detected in areas where no known source exists, including Buffalo in Putnam County and Guthrie in northern Kanawha County.
Egnor said in South Charleston EtO emissions actually decreased from more than 1,800 pounds of ethylene oxide in 2014 to 357 pounds in 2021. But Laura Crowder, director of DEP, admitted that the methodology for the tests is not perfect.
“The method itself may not have all the steps necessary so that it would show the actual concentration,” Crowder said. “There are things that would allow it to be biased, where other things could interfere. The methodology needs to specify exactly what needs to be done.”
The department is considering using air modeling to replace air monitoring tests in the future to better predict potential risk in identified areas of concern.
Pam Nixon lives in the Springhill area of South Charleston and has lost both friends and family members to cancer. She said she worries about the unknown synergistic effects of chemical agents.
“Ethylene oxide is only one chemical. There are other carcinogens that are here. When they mix in the air, my nose isn’t just breathing in ethylene oxide for 70 years, it’s breathing all of the chemicals in,” she said.
Nixon said while the agreement with Union Carbide is a step in the right direction, she said it is only one step. She hopes that authorities will reduce the amount of carcinogens in general.
On a recent hot, August weekend, about a dozen citizens spent three days along the route of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Armed with cameras, smartphones and drones the volunteers traveled portions of the pipeline’s route under construction from Monroe to Doddridge counties.
“There was several things that we saw,” said Summers County resident and organic farmer Neal Laferriere.
Laferriere organized the three-day “violations blitz.” He said volunteers documented small problems like poorly-maintained erosion controls as well as much larger ones.
“Sediment-laden water in one situation was overflowing the controls and going directly into a creek,” he said. “So, definitely affecting the waterways of the state, which is a big violation.”
In total, the volunteers collected about 60 examples of what they deemed to be permit violations by the pipeline. Their efforts are part of a citizen monitoring program run by conservation group the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.
In 2012, West Virginia Rivers and Trout Unlimited created a program that trained volunteers how to monitor their local trout streams to determine if they were being affected by the state’s booming oil and gas industry. As more natural gas pipelines have been approved for construction in West Virginia, the program expanded to include pipeline construction monitoring.
“Pipeline construction releases a lot of sediment and sediment-laden water — muddy water — into what would otherwise be clear and pristine streams,” said Autumn Crowe, senior scientist with West Virginia Rivers. “That sediment, when it gets into the water body, it has multiple negative impacts on aquatic life and water quality.”
West Virginia Rivers collects the complaints and submits them to the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection. The group worked with WVDEP’s enforcement department to develop the training materials.
Crowe said citizen monitoring, including this most recent “violations blitz,” fills an enforcement gap in West Virginia.
“What the vio-blitz was showing us is that there were multiple issues along the entire route that were not being addressed,” she said. “And if not for our volunteers, a lot of those issues would have gone unnoticed.”
Credit Courtesty Neal Laferriere
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Monitors observed this example of erosion control devices failing along the MVP’s route in Lewis County.
Regulation Challenges
As hydraulic fracturing or fracking has boomed in the Marcellus shale, so too has pipeline construction in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Since 2015, federal regulators have approved the construction of 10 interstate natural gas pipelines through West Virginia.
The two most well-known projects — EQT’s Mountain Valley Pipeline and Dominion Energy’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline — are multi-billion dollar projects that are slated to carry billions of cubic feet of natural gas from Appalachia to the east coast and for export. Both projects have been besieged by lawsuits over issues ranging from forest crossings to water permits. Activists have locked themselves to equipment and protested in trees.
Unsafe construction practices have led to the temporary shutdown of some pipeline projects.
In the summer of 2017, construction of the Rover pipeline in West Virginia and Ohio and the Mariner East 2 pipeline in Pennsylvania was shut down by both state and federal authorities for haphazard construction.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general in March opened a criminal investigation related to the Mariner East pipelines. In December, Virginia’s Attorney General Mark Herring filed a civil suit against the Mountain Valley Pipeline citing more than 300 environmental violations.
“Just in terms of the resources that would be necessary to actually enforce compliance with all of our environmental laws, we don’t have those resources,” she said. “And it would frankly be very difficult to gather all those resources through government agencies.”
The regulatory challenge is further complicated by the fragmented way pipelines are regulated. Multiple federal agencies play a role as well as state environmental regulators in inspections and permitting.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC approves a pipeline’s route. The Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration is in charge of making sure it’s safely constructed and responding if there is an accident. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regulates construction impacts on wetlands and streams. And then state environmental agencies, like the West Virginia DEP, monitor the impacts of storm water on pipeline construction sites.
“I think anytime you have a fragmented legal system, it’s difficult for that system to work collectively well, and it also creates a lot of confusion among citizens who are wondering who to call,” Gosman said.
“Agencies have really had to run to catch up with the increased citizen attention as more wells are being drilled and fractured and as more pipelines are being built,” she said.
Resources remain an issue. In recent years Congress has given more money to the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration for inspectors. They agency has approximately 160 pipeline safety inspectors covering construction across the county.
The West Virginia DEP has 10 positions in its Stormwater Construction Inspection Group, which is charged with inspecting all construction sites larger than one acre so as to ensure compliance with permits designed to prevent stormwater runoff. Currently, only eight of those positions are filled, according to WVDEP Spokesperson Terry Fletcher. The group has grown from three positions in 2005.
In an email, Fletcher said the agency is confident in its ability to ensure pipelines are in compliance with their permits and values input from citizens.
Laferriere, the citizen pipeline monitor, disagrees. The Mountain Valley Pipeline alone traverses 200 miles in West Virginia and he fears the agency doesn’t have the capacity to monitor it and others across the state.
Credit Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC
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“They’re not doing a good enough job,” he said. “If we can go out and in three days find 60 violations here in West Virginia with a handful of people, how many violations, how many things are we missing? How many watersheds are being affected by this project that nobody’s aware of?”
In response, Fletcher noted WVDEP, as a state agency, “cannot simply create permanent, full-time positions without first having allocated funding for new positions, and then receiving approval from the state Division of Personnel.”
Gosman, at the University of Arkansas School of Law, said it’s likely citizen concerns over natural gas pipelines will continue to grow, and not just over whether they are being constructed safely, but if they’re needed at all, and whether they’re being proposed for the right places.
“We need to think holistically about pipelines, about where they’re placed, what it means to have an accident in that particular place,” she said. “What it means to have issues around stormwater and wetlands impacts in that particular place over the long term, rather than treat each of these particular issues construction, operation, emergency response as being separate.”
According to WVDEP’s online system, inspectors have investigated just a handful of the citizen complaints. No official violation notices have been issued.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is holding a public meeting Tuesday to collect and share information about the revision of human health criteria in the state’s water quality standards.
According to the agenda, the purpose of the meeting is for agency officials to present information, answer questions and take public input about the revision of human health criteria in the water quality standards.
The rules govern pollution discharge into the state’s streams and rivers.
DEP’s proposed updates to the state’s water quality standards sparked controversy during the 2019 legislative session.
After more than a year of public comment and deliberation, the agency last summer proposed updating standards for 60 pollutants in line with 2015 suggestions by the U.S. EPA.
After much debate, the Legislature ultimately adopted a bill that contained no changes to the water standards. The move was supported by many of the state’s manufacturers.
A public meeting to gather additional information that may affect an embattled regulation to limit pollution discharged into the state’s rivers and streams yielded little new data, but prompted concerns by environmental advocates that the state agency tasked with protecting human health and the environment is prepared to side with industry.
About two dozen people — from environmental groups to industry representatives to concerned citizens — attended the listening session at West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Charleston Thursday, Jan. 17.
After a years-long public process to update the state’s water quality standards — rules federally mandated under the Clean Water Act — DEP was tasked by the Legislative Rulemaking Review Committee in November to gather more state-specific data that could affect the pollution limits set in the regulation.
At the meeting, the committee voted to remove DEP’s recommendations to update standards for 60 pollutants known to have human health effects. That decision came after hearing from the West Virginia Manufacturers Association that its members had concerns over the updated rule.
However, by the conclusion of the two-hour listening session Thursday, DEP officials said they had only received one piece of new information to consider: comments by a public health researcher that urged the agency to select the most protective pollution limits.
No new data or analysis was presented that could be used to fundamentally change the way the agency calculated the water quality standards suggested in the regulation. When asked, DEP officials would not commit to standing by their recommendations to the Legislature.
“I can’t really say today exactly what we’re going to do because we just have started to listen to you all one more time,” said Laura Cooper, assistant director of water and waste management for DEP and one of the architects of the regulation. “I don’t know what the decision will be.”
A Process ‘Stalled’?
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
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WVPB
About two dozen people attended a public listening session about the water quality standards at DEP headquarters Thursday Jan. 17.
Environmental advocates and some citizens in attendance expressed bewilderment that the agency would not stand up for its own recommendations, which took more than a year to craft and did factor in a 2008 study that showed West Virginians eat less fish than the national average.
“On its face, it appears that the DEP, a state agency serving the people of West Virginia whose task is to protect public health and the environment is being complicit in a tactic to stall these updates,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition.
The final proposal, which was released last summer, garnered hundreds of pages of public comment. The agency proposed adopting 56, of the 94 human health criteria updates the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suggested in 2015. Two-thirds of the updates made it so less of certain chemicals could be discharged into rivers and streams and one-third loosened pollution levels.
Human health criteria represent specific levels of chemicals or conditions in a water body that are not expected to cause adverse effects to human health, according to the EPA. States are encouraged to develop their own specific criteria and draw from things like how much fish residents consume, water consumption, body weight, and the level of risk to disease state regulators deem acceptable.
Rosser and others noted that DEP spent more than a year drafting the updated rule and the process included multiple public comment opportunities.
“Suddenly now, today, or November, we’re hearing from the Manufacturers Association that they’re just now starting their study of this, and that the DEP is saying, ‘well, manufacturers we’ll wait for your study. You show us what you got,’” Rosser continued. “When? A year from now, three years from now, 10 years from now? Like, how long is this process going to keep stalling while we’re living in the 1980s?”
Following a request by the West Virginia Manufacturers Association that DEP should consider more state-specific studies and data that might alter the levels by which exposure to pollution is safe, the Legislative Rulemaking Review Committee during a November Interim meeting removed the updated standards proposed by the agency and tasked DEP with gathering more data.
“From the beginning, from the time the Water Quality Standards were proposed, industry had asked that they be calculated in accordance with West Virginia-specific data,” Dave Yaussy, an attorney with the law firm Spilman, Thomas & Battle who represents the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, said at the public hearing.
Cooper, with DEP, pushed back against that assertion.
Credit Brittany Patterson / WVPB
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WVPB
Laura Cooper, assistant director Division of Water DEP.
“So EPA put out their recommendation criteria in August 2015. Just a few days later we had a water quality standards meeting at which we mentioned, first of all just FYI everybody, EPA recommended some new criteria a few days ago,” she said. “And in September 2017 we had a specific water quality standards public meeting that was all related to human health criteria where we went over the equations and all that and how they were calculated So, it’s been some time since then that we’ve had to look at them so far.”
At the meeting, Yaussy introduced environmental consultant Jennie Henthorn who had been been retained by the trade group to begin this work, described in highly technical terms.
Henthorn said she had “just started” to dig into the data within the last week and couldn’t yet say how long it might take.
“We want to review all of it, or at least all of it that’s relevant to our members to see if that would have an effect on what the criteria would end up being,” Yaussy said. “We’re not aware of any place in the state where drinking water is being affected as a result of any of these criteria, so we don’t see any danger to the public in allowing some time to do that study.”
Danger Unknown
Continuing to wait on that study’s completion did not sit well with many of the attendees.
“DEP should defend what they did in July and the whole process. It took so many years. It wasn’t just the one year it was input all through those years,” said Helen Gibbons with the League of Women Voters. “We shouldn’t just throw something out because one group doesn’t … or maybe more than one group .. doesn’t think West Virginia is up to snuff in putting these standards in our scheme of things.”
Rosser, with West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said if state adopts the non-updated regulations, there are three examples of water quality standards that allow more chemical pollutants into streams and rivers than current drinking water standards.
That’s important because in some parts of the state, especially along the Ohio River, rivers recharge aquifers that are drawn upon for drinking water.
“Generally we have that concern that if we don’t make these updates, we’re continuing to allow more chemicals in our drinking source water than [sic] we want in our consumable water,” she said.
Environmental groups and public health advocates also expressed concerns that DEP’s proposal to include 56 of EPA’s suggestested human health criteria was not as stringent as it could be.
In an emailed statement, West Virginia University Public Health Professor Michael McCawley said any exposure to cancer-causing carcinogenic pollutants — even at levels deemed safe by EPA — may be too high of a risk.
Concerns were also voiced about two additional changes that remain in the proposed water quality standard update. DEP changed the way it calculated permitted limits how much pollution could be discharged and it adopted language that would allow the “mixing zones” for multiple chemicals to overlap as long as it didn’t happen near public water supplies.
Both of those changes were mandated by the Legislature in a bill it passed in 2017, HB 2506, which was put forward by the West Virginia Manufacturers Association.
The Senate Energy, Industry and Mining Committee is expected to take up the bill that contains the water quality standards Tuesday.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Abandoned Mine Lands and Reclamation is accepting applications for a portion of $25 million in grant funding for economic development projects.
Applicants have until June 15 to apply.
The grant application can be found here on the WVDEP website.
The state DEP stated in a news release that to qualify, projects must be located on or adjacent to mine sites that ended operations prior to the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act in August 1977.
The DEP will be responsible for determining which projects get funded, and will work with an advisory committee made up of representatives from the West Virginia Department of Commerce, and the Governor’s Office.
Recipients of grant funding could be announced as early as September.
From the WVDEP news release:
“Since 2016, 18 projects have received a total of $53 million dollars in grant funding through this program. Those projects are located in Boone, Clay, Kanawha, Fayette, Lincoln, Logan, Marion, Mason, McDowell, Mercer, Preston, Raleigh, and Tucker counties. The projects that received grant funding ranged from water line expansions and public sewer system improvements to new construction at a YMCA facility and development of an ATV trail.
‘These vital projects will help improve the lives of people who live near or on abandoned mine land sites and will help to promote tourism and other economic development,’ said WVDEP Cabinet Secretary Austin Caperton.
The grant funding, provided by the federal government, is being administered by AML and all funding must be approved by the US Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining, Reclamation, and Enforcement.”
