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Clean water advocates could hit mother lode with mine ruling
Water demands may leave rivers high and dry
Most streams, many wetlands could lose protection
When the creeks that surround Roger Buyrn’s farm developed a pollution problem, the bad news came knocking on his door, almost literally. The Virginia Division of Shellfish Sanitation warned him that the clam beds in those areas were close to being condemned.
Buyrn was shocked. The creeks drained a sparsely populated portion of Virginia’s Eastern Shore that was home to only a few dozen people. There were no obvious sources of pollution.
But the threat of closing the shellfish beds was real — and urgent. Buyrn’s 1,200-acre farm is bounded by more than 6 miles of creeks, marshes and rivers. The land is used for crops, the waterways for growing clams. Both are critical to the farm’s survival.
“It was life or death,” Buyrn said. “I’ve got a couple of million dollar’s worth of clams growing out here, and there’s 15 people counting on the clams to make a living, both employees and partners.”
Buyrn was determined to clean up the problem in Cherrystone Inlet and its tributaries – as soon as he could figure out what it was.
For help, he turned to George Simmons, alumni distinguished professor of biology with Virginia Tech who for years had studied groundwater movement at Buyrn’s farm.
For more than two years, Simmons and Buyrn would hunt down the mysterious source of contamination. Their ultimate findings challenged traditional thinking about what causes some pollution problems.
But in the process, they also helped to explain a dramatic increase in the amount of condemned shellfish grounds in recent years, much of it in rural areas where pollution sources were not evident. In Virginia, the acreage of condemned shellfish beds increased from 62,272 acres in 1972 to 94,143 this year. While much of that stems from chemical contamination in urban areas, there are also widespread closures along rural streams and shorelines.
The prime reason for condemnations in those areas is elevated levels of Escherichia coli in the water. E. coli, a bacteria, indicates the presence of fecal coliform, or wastes from warm-blooded animals, which may present a health risk. When E. coli levels rise, shellfish beds are closed because filter feeders such as clams accumulate contaminants in their bodies as they feed.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that shellfish bed contamination in rural areas was related to nonpoint pollution, probably from broken septic systems.
Buyrn was frustrated because his clam beds were on the verge of being condemned and no one could tell him for certain what needed to be done to save them.
So he worked with his neighbors, many of whom had a similar stake in the water quality, and raised $4,000. He matched that with grants from other organizations and state funds, and ultimately put together $20,000 to fund Simmons and Virginia Tech to find the root cause of the problem.
“We weren’t talking about just cleaning up this creek,” Buyrn said. “We were talking about finding the origin of fecal coliforms – why an area was condemned. There is no state or federal entity that will investigate. They just condemn and enforce condemnation.”
He circulated a petition among residents and got 98 percent to support the project. He hosted a dinner that brought together residents, scientists and representatives from state and federal agencies. The idea Buyrn said, was to have everyone in agreement at the beginning so there would be consensus to find and resolve the problem, no matter who was responsible.
“We just think, like everybody thinks, – if it’s pollution, it’s manmade, because nature doesn’t pollute,” Buyrn said. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”
Indeed, both Simmons and Buyrn assumed that the problem stemmed from old septic systems. And that quickly appeared to be the case. An examination of the system at Buyrn’s home revealed an unknown line that ran straight to the creek – a practice that it turned out was standard procedure in past decades.
The problem was quickly fixed. Unfortunately, the water quality problem wasn’t. Although the E. coli counts dropped at the end of the pipe, the overall levels remained high.
Simmons began working his way up the creek, examining other septic systems. Residents even worked to secure a grant to fix a water pollution problem at the local laundromat, the only business in the watershed.
But in the coming weeks, few additional septic system problems were found. “We addressed the human problems that we found,” Simmons said, “and the counts did not go down.” In some cases, water quality was even getting worse. One tributary to Cherrystone Inlet was closed to shellfish harvest.
Simmons stepped up his monitoring efforts. It began to look as though the contamination was coming not from homes, but from the marshes. That must mean, the scientist reasoned, that some decades-old, forgotten septic line must run into the marsh. As marshes were once viewed largely as wastelands, such a scenario appeared likely.
So Simmons and his graduate students watched as Buyrn, using a back hoe, dug a ditch between the house and a nearby marsh that was big enough to drive a school bus into. “People came from miles around to see Virginia Tech in action,” Simmons said. “We never found any more pipes.”
After months of work, Simmons summed up the situation to Buyrn. “I don’t know where they’re coming from, but the field is narrowing all the time,” he said. “I have ruled out outer space.”
Simmons was perplexed. “We would sit out there and try to figure out what was going on,” Simmons said. “I would stand out there in the marsh and look around and you wouldn’t see a house.”
But what Simmons began noticing was scat – animal wastes. And lots of it. For a while, he thought it might be related to the large number of geese that moved through the area, but his studies could not link goose wastes to high E. coli levels.
One day, the scientist was sitting on a dock chewing tobacco with some long-time watermen. One of them finally looked at Simmons and said, “there’s no mystery to what your problem is. There’s too many raccoons around.”
When he was a kid, the waterman said, he and others got their pocket money by trapping raccoons and other animals. Nobody did that anymore, and the animals were running rampant through the marshes.
Simmons began to see that the waterman was probably right. Whenever the tide came in, or there was a rainstorm, all the animal feces were washed out of the marsh and into the adjacent creek. “Every marsh was like that,” Simmons said.
Indeed, he made similar findings on another nearby creek, known as The Gulf. In that area, E. coli counts increased as one moved toward the headwaters. In fact, the shellfish closure signs began immediately upstream of the last house in the watershed. As was the case in Cherrystone Inlet, the highest fecal coliform densities were in the small rivulets draining out of marshes.
Back at Cherrystone, Simmons experimented with building fenced enclosures to keep wild animals out of those drainage areas. Soon, water coming out of the fenced sites was running clean.
In 1994, after nearly two years of work, Simmons sat down with Buyrn and showed him the data. “I think your problem is an overpopulation of wild animals,” Simmons said, “and particularly raccoons.”
The animals didn’t need to be eradicated, Simmons added, but their population had to be reduced if the clam beds were to be saved.
A trapper was hired; he removed 80 raccoons from a 50-acre area adjacent to the marsh. Another 100 raccoons were removed from an adjacent farm.
Soon, the creek that had been closed was reopened, and another creek that was moving toward closure began moving in the other direction. E. coli levels were dropping throughout the watershed.
The only thing that had changed, Simmons said, was the number of raccoons.
Farmers in the area have since hired a trapper to control the raccoon population – trappers do not have an incentive to trap on their own because the price of raccoon fur is too low. “If we could have a return of a demand for raccoons, it would be all in the world it would take to control the thing,” Buyrn said. “What we want to do is not eliminate the raccoons; we want to manage the raccoons.”
Simmons said the fact that a raccoon population could balloon to the point that it compromised water quality was an indicator of an ecosystem “out of kilter.” Over the centuries, raccoon predators had been removed either through hunting or lack of habitat. At the same time, land use practices concentrated raccoons into the marshes lining the streams. For a time, their population was kept in check by hunting and trapping, but that pressure ultimately subsided.
Raccoons had become so abundant they were, in fact, ruining the marshes, Simmons said. “They eat everything out there,” he said. “They eat all the oysters, they eat all the clams, they’ll eat all the crabs, they trample down the vegetation. The marsh looks like it’s been bombed into submission. It’s just been trashed out. When they took those raccoons off and got the density under control, I went out there the next summer and the marsh looked healthy. You could see all these little tiny baby clams that were growing. Oysters were up in the spartina. The marsh looked healthy.”
Still, he said, his findings do not exonerate humans altogether. “Because our water quality can be compromised by wild animals, that shows us how fragile these little tidal creeks and inlets are. That puts even more responsibility on us, as humans, to make sure that we’re not adding to the burden that’s already there.”
“The coliform burden is already there naturally. We cannot afford to add to it.”
