ROANOKE (AP) | About 1,100 miles of Virginia’s rivers and streams have been added to a list of polluted waters in the past two years, bringing the total to 10,600 miles, state environmental regulators said Monday.
The state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) released its water quality report for this, which listed about 40 percent of the state’s waters as polluted. All the major rivers, as well as the Chesapeake Bay, had “some impairment,” DEQ spokesman Bill Hayden said.
“That number keeps getting larger, mainly because as we look around the state more thoroughly we find more,” he said.
About one-third of the state’s watersheds are assessed every two years. The agency has analyzed 95 percent of them.
“We’ve now got polluted rivers that go from here to California and back twice,” said Mike Gerel, a scientist in the Virginia office of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
The state’s polluted waters - which include rivers, lakes and estuaries - require a total of 1,677 cleanup plans, the agency said. Only a couple of hundred have been developed, Mr. Hayden said.
“We’re very, very far behind in writing these reports,” Mr. Gerel said.
The DEQ also added 3,300 acres of lakes to the impaired list, bringing the total in that category to 94,000 acres. In addition, 2,200 square miles of estuaries are listed as impaired.
More than half of the new listings were polluted by excess bacteria. Low oxygen levels accounted for 18 percent of the listings, the DEQ said.
Mr. Hayden said 105 waters were removed in this year’s assessment, all of them streams that feed into major rivers including the James, Potomac, Shenandoah, Rappahannock and Roanoke.
In some cases, streams were removed because conditions such as low oxygen were found to be their normal state rather than the result of pollution. Cleanup plans accounted for other removals, Mr. Hayden said.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation called for measures to reduce farm runoff, curb pollution from storm-water runoff and continue reductions in pollution from wastewater treatment plants. The cost of preventing the pollution is much lower than the cleanup cost, Mr. Gerel said.
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