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Virginia making little progress in effort to clean up polluted waters Date published: 9/7/2008
BY FRANK DELANO At the present rate, it will take almost 200 years for Virginia officials to write plans to clean up the state's polluted waters. Since 2001, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has completed 88 cleanup plans, an average of 11 per year, according to a June report by Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant. At that pace, it will take 176 years for the state to figure out how to clean up its remaining 1,937 polluted streams, lakes and estuaries. The cleanups themselves could take even longer. The 88 plans already written have put into place about 30 projects to reduce pollution, a state official said. The effort has reduced pollution in some waters. But only one three-quarter-mile-long section of one mountain creek has been cleaned up sufficiently to be removed from the state's long list of polluted waters, the Environmental Protection Agency says. Cleaning up Virginia waters could cost $1 billion or more. But the state has no long-term funding plan, and money for the effort is often lacking in state budgets, said Gerald P. McCarthy, executive director of the Virginia Environmental Endowment. "The state has spent about $300 million to improve wastewater-treatment plants, but it has never spent enough to clean up non-point sour-ces of pollution," said former Secretary of Natural Resources W. Tayloe Murphy Jr. of Westmoreland County. "Among many other adverse consequences, this lack of commitment and funding to clean up the water has resulted in the death of the Chesapeake Bay seafood industry and the loss of jobs and the way of life of thousands of people," Murphy said. Virginia has 10,604 miles of polluted streams, 94,039 acres of polluted lakes and 2,185 square miles of polluted estuaries. High bacteria levels are the major pollutant in the rivers. Low dissolved oxygen and high PCB levels are the primary problems in the lakes and tidal waters. But few environmentalists or state officials support the lengthy, expensive process of documenting pollution stream by stream.
Date published: 9/7/2008
This is one of the better efforts from FLS in explaining the basic issues.
One of the biggest issues with regard to cleanup of the Rappahannock and
Chesapeake Bay is that the public simply does not understand the extent of
the problem nor who or what to advocate for to start us on the road to fixing
it.
good articles like this are a big help IMHO.
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