Tale of Two Data
Medora Corporation, the manufacturers of the SolarBee technology being tested at Jordan Lake as a substitute for the Division of Water Resource’s clean-up plan, has published an FAQ on their website defending their technology’s performance. Their comments are a hodge-podge of thoughts on the value of in-lake treatment, the importance of watershed planning, and suggestions that their in-lake experiment should be expanded to include the use of silica as a way to discourage harmful cyanobacteria growth.
Medora prefaces comments on the technology’s performance stating things like “…no U.S. lake over 1000 acres in size where the main nutrient load is from non-point sources (like Jordan Lake) has ever been “restored” by watershed management.” They also point out that the deployment of the 36 units is only serving a small potion of the 14,000 lake. While true, Medora claims each unit should suppress algae for 35 acres. Intentionally, the units have been concentrated in the most polluted areas of the lake at a density that should allow them to be effective at improving the water quality where they are located.
So, does Medora believe the technology has been effective? Here’s are their main findings:
“The small “impaired” SolarBee-treated areas of the lake do in fact have a strong standing crop of algae from time to time, which in turn pushes pH and chlorophyll-a standards into exceedance. Medora data shows this occurs less frequently than that of the DEQ.”
They provide analysis supporting their claims. Their charts illustrate that, DWR dtata is consistently showing higher levels of algae than Medora data. It will be interesting to see how the discrepancy gets resolved. Even with their more positive monitoring data, the lake would still be considered impaired for failing to meet water quality criteria. The State has committed to this in-lake approach for another four years so there will be more data to compare in this experiment.
Good News on Hoffman
Troubling Update
The Division of Environmental Quality (DEQ) was up before the NC legislative Environmental Review Committee last week. These committee meetings can be a harbinger of forthcoming legislation. Agenda items for the meeting included solar panel oversight, stormwater controls, riparian buffer protections, and the State’s nutrient reduction strategies. In his update on nutrient strategies, the Department’s Assistant Secretary, Tom Reeder, saw little benefit to implementation efforts over the last 20 years aimed at controlling nutrient pollution, questioning nearly everything the state has done to reduce nutrient pollution in the State’s reservoirs and estuaries but without exploring the causes. The premise for dissing these efforts is that monitoring data at the outlets of the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico rivers show little change in nitrogen and phosphorus loading.
Mr. Reeder wouldn’t have to look far to find reasons for the lackluster results. DEQ publishes assessments of the nutrient strategies in their basin plans. The most recent plan for the Tar-Pamlico Basin Plan was published in 2015. Its findings state, “reductions in the NOx (nitrogen oxide) concentration at all the stations tested in the watershed are offset by increases in TKN (organic nitrogen fraction) at almost all the stations in the watershed.” According to the USGS, sources of organic nitrogen include “animal wastes and urban and industrial disposal of sewage and organic waste.” If Mr. Reeder seriously wants to make nutrient reduction strategies work, he’d have mentioned what’s needed to identify and reduce these potential sources of organic nitrogen and not disparage what the State has worked so hard put in place. His update to the committee, however, was as troubling as the monitoring data showing that the gains made early in the implementation of these strategies has been lost with an overall result of little-to-no progress in lowering total nitrogen flows to the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico estuaries.
Approved!!!
This past week was a milestone one at Watershed Investments. The State’s Division of Water Resources approved our first nutrient and buffer bank, Neville Farms, located in the Upper New Hope Watershed of Jordan Lake. After working in different aspects of environmental restoration for over 15 years, this approval gave us the green light to open our first bank and is worthy of a post to commemorate the occasion.
The bank’s formation was made possible by the Neville Family. Going back over 200 years, the Neville’s have farmed land south of Chapel Hill. They currently raise cattle and hay and have a committed legacy to keep farming the land in this corner of the State.
Nettie Mae Neville, the landowner, is the impressive woman that made it all possible. A 30-year elementary school educator, Nettie partnered with us to develop the Neville Farms project. I’ll share more of her story in a future post.
For now, the bank’s been approved and will open for purchases within a week. That feels good!
Floodplains Rule
Floodplains come in lots of shapes and sizes. This was evidenced by the rainstorms that moved through North Carolina at the end of December. Those storms came over a period of two days dropping between 2 and 3 inches of rain across most of the region.
With most plants dormant this time of year, there was little uptake of the rain and most of it found its way to our local streams, lakes, and rivers. Indeed, according to one news report, the levels at Jordan Lake peaked at about 17 feet above its normal levels due to wet and wetter conditions in December 2015.
For most of our area floodplains, this was their time to show off what they do. That is, as stream channels get filled to capacity and overflow, floodplains fill and function to slow the velocity of water, reduce its stress on eroding stream banks, and infiltrate flood waters back into the soil.
It’s not always a quick process, either. Low down in the watershed near Kinston, the Neuse River can flood its banks and have its floodplains inundated for weeks. Closer to the headwaters of the Neuse, Rocky Branch at NC State’s campus can overtop its banks and have its flows return to its banks within hours after a heavy storm.
Whether it’s in the lower or upper watershed, having a stream that is able to access its floodplain is a natural process and helpful in reducing downstream flooding, replenishing groundwater, and improving water quality.
No Difference
Year 1 results are in and the Solar Bee circulators have made no statistical difference in improving water quality in Jordan Lake. That’s the state’s finding in a report they presented to the legislature in October. The circulators were pitched as a low cost solution to cleaning Jordan lake back in 2013. Deployed in the summer of 2014, they’ve had a year to prove they can make a difference. In that time, however, the Division of Water Resources reports that the data basically looks the same with them as it does without them. More critically, the lake’s impairment has not improved.
What needs to be done? For starters, the legislature should stop expecting Solar Bees to be the magic pill to curing pollution in the lake. They should reinstate the Division of Water Resources rules which they have delayed until 2020 so that they can study these circulators. Measurable improvement depends on actions aimed at keeping out polluted runoff and municipal waste, not on spinning it around.
Rub a Dub
Faced with challenging requirements to reduce nutrients in Falls Lake by 40 and 77% TN and TP, respectively, the City of Durham is pulling out all the stops. In the effort to find cost effective solutions to reducing their nutrient footprint, they’re testing algal turf scrubbers, a technology they describe in the following video:
2015 Nutrient Epilogue
Midway through fall, the conditions conducive to algal blooms in our state has wound down. These blooms occur during warmer temperatures and benefit from longer daylight, more stagnant waters, and where nutrient concentrations are high.
In North Carolina, there were nasty algal blooms in several areas in the State as noted in a Department of Environmental Quality press release. Sound Rivers documented a particularly nasty bloom in the Chowan. Algal levels in Jordan Lake, a regional drinking water supply for several Triangle communities also violated federal water quality standards in spite of Solar Bees, an experimental technology funded by the legislature to reduce the levels of algae in the water supply.
Outside the State, scientist monitoring the Gulf of Mexico reported that polluted runoff helped to increase that waterbody’s dead zone to nearly 6500 square miles, its largest area since 2002 and roughly equivalent to the combined areas of Connecticut and Rhode Island.
On the West Coast, “The Blob”, made its presence known as it wreaked havoc by closing coastal shellfish beds and disrupting marine life.
Finally, on Lake Eerie, NOAA reports that blooms were more severe this year than they were in 2014 when harmful algae in the Lake led Toledo Ohio to advise residents to stop drinking their tap water.
The nation and our state are continuing to wrestle with the problems associated with excess nutrients in the environment. Recent NC legislative efforts to delay actions aimed at addressing the source of the problem, nutrient runoff, isn’t getting us closer to solving this problem and making cost-effective solutions harder to find.
Toxic Algae and More
The following are two update to items I recently covered.
First, regarding algae in the Chowan River, the State’s newly renamed Department of Environmental Quality (goodbye Natural Resources) monitoring has identified harmful algae in the Chowan River. A Department news release “encourages the public to avoid contact with large accumulations of the algae and prevent children and pets from swimming or ingesting water in an algal bloom”. While it has received some attention in the media, it’s largely the actions of Sound Rivers who raised attention to this problem intersecting health, safety and the environment. We owe a thanks for their efforts.
Second, the recently passed State budget extends the Solar Bee experiment in Jordan Lake to 2018. As reported in the news, an additional $1.5 million was budgeted to keep these mixers in the lake while delaying rules passed in 2009 that keep pollution out of the lake. Preliminary indications are that these devices offer little promise for helping improve water quality in the lake mainly because they don’t keep pollution from reaching the lake. To keep the pollution flowing, Session Law 2015-246 was passed to prohibit local governments from early adoption of measures intended to clean the Jordan. Instead local governments in the Jordan Watershed must wait until August 2020 to require developers meet the Jordan clean-up measures. This portends a more degraded lake that’s been listed as impaired since 2002 and serves as a drinking water source for 300,000 people in the triangle.
Mixer’s Questionable Benefit
In 2013, NC’s legislature ordered an experiment to try and improve water quality impairments in Jordan Lake. Detailed in past posts, the study’s goal is to see whether solar powered mixers are a way of helping improve water quality in the Jordan Lake and reducing algae levels, a condition which has landed the lake on the state’s list of impaired waters for over a decade.
A year after the mixers were installed, NC DENR has released a “preliminary” report analyzing this experiment. This summary looks at 6 monitoring stations before and after the installation of solar powered mixers.
While labeled as preliminary, the summary shows questionable benefit of the mixers at the analyzed stations. Half the stations analyzed in the report showed declines in water quality while half showed improvement. Further, no stations improved to the point where they were no longer considered impaired by NC DENR.
Are Solar Bees the sole approach to protect the drinking water for over 300,000 residents in the triangle? Preliminary data and admissions from the expert representing the manufacturer suggest that it is not. At this point, action from the legislature should aim at shoring up the strategy to pursue a more balanced approach aimed at cleaning a protecting this important water supply for growing triangle communities
