WASHINGTON, DC, January 21, 2009 (ENS) – In one of the final acts of the Bush administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will set “water quality standards for nutrients” for all Florida surface waters. The standards will apply to concentrations of the agricultural nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus in state waters.

The EPA has issued a formal determination under the Clean Water Act that “numeric” nutrient water quality criteria are necessary in Florida.

“We are taking the significant step today of requiring numeric nutrient standards for water quality,” said Benjamin Grumbles, EPA’s assistant administrator for water, making the announcement on Friday. “We look forward to working closely with the state to develop improved standards that will accelerate the protection and restoration of Florida’s waters.”

Grumbles said numeric nutrient criteria will improve Florida’s ability to address nutrient pollution in a timely and effective manner.

Excess nitrogen and phosphorus levels, known as nutrient pollution, in waterbodies can cause harm to aquatic ecosystems and threaten public health.

Nutrient pollution can lead to water quality problems such as harmful algal blooms, low-oxygen dead zones in water bodies such as the Gulf of Mexico and declines in wildlife and wildlife habitat.

Florida’s 2008 Integrated Water Quality Assessment shows that 1,000 miles of rivers and streams, 350,000 acres of lakes, and 900 square miles of estuaries are impaired by nutrients. The actual numbers are likely higher, as many waters that have yet to be assessed may also be impaired.

Black algae bloom and sewage in Florida’s St. Lucie River, April 2008 (Photo by William Djubin)

While recognizing that local governments in Florida have improved wastewater treatment and stormwater management and some growers have implemented best management practices for nutrient control, the EPA’s January 14, 2009 determination letter states that poor water quality in Florida is “likely to worsen” without federal action.

In the determination letter, the EPA notes that the Florida Department of Environment Protection has spent “over $20 million in collecting and analyzing data” but has yet to develop numeric standards.

The EPA letter states that it “expects to propose numeric nutrient criteria for lakes and flowing waters within 12 months, and for estuaries and coastal waters, within 24 months.” This timeline hands these tasks on to the incoming Obama administration.

Since 1998, the EPA has been encouraging states to adopt their own numeric and narrative water quality criteria for nutrients, which EPA would then either approve or send back for revision.

“EPA recognizes Florida as a national leader in managing nutrient pollution but more needs to be done,” said Grumbles.

Mike Sole, secretary of the Florida Department of Environment Protection said he accepts that Florida has not adequately controlled the runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus into state waters.

“The State of Florida recognizes that more needs to be done to address nutrient pollution in our rivers, streams, lakes and estuaries, and these actions will help our state and all of our stakeholders prevent and better manage sources of nitrogen and phosphorus from entering our waters,” said Sole.

EPA published recommended nutrient criteria for most streams and lakes across the country in 2001. A combined strategy of EPA, state, territorial, and tribal partnership supported by technical assistance was intended to jumpstart progress on what the EPA calls “a difficult and challenging problem.”

Some states and territories have established numeric standards for priority waterbodies. Others are in the process of collecting data and preparing to develop them. Still others are in the earlier stages of planning and deciding which standards development approach will work best for them

In 1998, only 13 states had any numeric standards at all, either for selected, high priority waterbodies or for entire waterbody types.

As of December 2008, 25 states have developed some numeric standards, but the other 25 states still have no numeric standards at all for nutrient pollution.

Grumbles said the EPA explects Florida to accelerate its efforts to adopt numeric nutrient criteria into state regulations.

The EPA itself is under court order to improve the state nutrient pollution program.

The federal agency has been subject to a series of adverse court decisions ruling that it has been derelict in protecting Florida’s water quality, particularly as it affects the Everglades.

The most recent court decision takes EPA to task for violating the same Clean Water Act that it is supposed to administer.

On July 29, 2008, Miami U.S. District Judge Alan Gold found that the federal agency had shirked its duty to enforce basic water quality standards and, in so doing, “violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades” and “acted arbitrarily and capriciously.”

In July 2008, five environmental groups filed a lawsuit to compel the EPA and the state of Florida to set numeric limits on the excess nutrients.

“Unfortunately, it is common knowledge in South Florida that EPA regional managers will do everything possible to accommodate the state and the only way to get them to enforce the Clean Water Act is to sue them, which is a very sad commentary,” said Ann Hauck of the Council of Civic Associations, based in Lee County, Florida.

“The bottom line is that the Everglades continues to deteriorate,” said Hauck immediately following Judge Gold’s ruling. “According to EPA Region 4’s own recently released Everglades Assessment Report, the area of the Everglades negatively impacted by discharges from the Everglades Agricultural Area has increased under the current Region 4 management.”

Click here [www.ens-newswire.com] to see previous ENS coverage of this issue.

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MANHATTAN, Kansas, November 24, 2008 (ENS) – The pollution of fresh water by agricultural nutrients costs government agencies, drinking water facilities and individual Americans at least $4.3 billion a year in total, finds new research from Kansas State University.

Biology professor Walter Dodds, who led the study, says the researchers calculated that $44 million a year is spent just protecting aquatic species from nutrient pollution.

Dodds and the K-State researchers based their conclusions on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data on nitrogen and phosphorous levels in bodies of water throughout the country.

The damaging chemicals – phosphorous and nitrogen – enter the environment from nonpoint sources rather than flowing into a lake or stream from one pipe.

Kansas stream loaded with sediment and
agricultural runoff (Photo courtesy USGS
Kansas Water Science Center)

They enter the water from various points, such as runoff from row crop agriculture across the surrounding lands, said Dodd.

The researchers calculated the money lost from that pollution by looking at factors like decreasing lakefront property values, the cost of treating drinking water and the revenue lost when fewer people take part in recreational activities like fishing or boating.

“We are providing underestimates,” Dodds said. “Although our accounting of the degree of nutrient pollution in the nation is fairly accurate, the true costs of pollution are probably much greater than $4.3 billion.”

High levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in waters can produce harmful algal blooms. In turn, these blooms can produce “dead zones” in water bodies where dissolved oxygen levels are so low that most aquatic life cannot survive, according to the EPA.

“Excesses have been linked to higher amounts of chemicals that make people sick,” the agency says on its website.

Dodds said he anticipates the K-State research will be used by policymakers because it documents the extent of the nutrient pollution problem in the United States and one facet of why it matters.

“Monetary damages put environmental problems in terms that make policymakers and the public take notice,” he said. “Putting environmental problems in terms of dollars allows people to account for the actual costs of pollution.”

The study appears in the November 12 online issue of the journal “Environmental Science and Technology.”

Contributors to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution include:

* Overusing fertilizer – both residential and agricultural usage
* Rainfall flowing over cropland, Animal Feeding Operations and pastures, picking up animal waste and depositing it in water bodies
* Rainfall flowing over urban and suburban areas where stormwater management is not required, such as parking lots, lawns, rooftops, roads
* Discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater treatment plants
* Overflow from septic systems

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GLOUCESTER POINT, Virginia, August 15, 2008 (ENS) – Around 1910, when scientists began studying the marine areas of low oxygen known as dead zones, there were only four of them worldwide.

Now, there are 405 dead zones in the world’s coastal waters, covering a total area of 95,000 square miles, according to the latest research published today in the journal “Science.”

A global study led by Virginia Institute of Marine Science Professor Robert Diaz shows that the number of dead zones has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007.

“Dead zones were once rare. Now they’re commonplace. There are more of them in more places,” Diaz says. Worldwide, the number of dead zones has roughly doubled each decade since the 1960s, his research shows.

Diaz and collaborator Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden say that dead zones are now “the key stressor on marine ecosystems” and “rank with over-fishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems.”

Dead zones occur when excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, enter coastal waters and help fertilize blooms of algae. When these microscopic plants die and sink to the bottom, they provide a rich food source for bacteria, which in the act of decomposition consume dissolved oxygen from surrounding waters.

Major nutrient sources include agricultural fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels.

Florida red tide bloom of toxic
Karenia brevis (Photo courtesy NOAA)

Diaz and Rosenberg write, “There’s no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time as dissolved oxygen.”

The largest dead zone in the United States today, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, covers more than 8,500 square miles, an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

A dead zone also underlies much of the main channel of Chesapeake Bay, each summer occupying about 40 percent of its area and up to five percent of its volume.

Geologic evidence shows that dead zones were not “a naturally recurring event” in Chesapeake Bay or most other estuarine ecosystems, says Diaz. The first dead zone in Chesapeake Bay was reported in the 1930s.

Scientists refer to water with too little oxygen for fish and other active organisms as “hypoxic.” Diaz says that many ecosystems experience a progression in which periodic hypoxic events become seasonal and then, if nutrient inputs continue to increase, persistent.

Earth’s largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, is hypoxic year-round.

Chesapeake Bay experiences seasonal, summertime hypoxia through much of its main channel.

Diaz and Rosenberg note that hypoxia tends to be overlooked until it starts to affect organisms that people eat. A possible indicator of hypoxia’s adverse effects on an economically important finfish species in Chesapeake Bay is the link between oxygen-poor bottom waters and a chronic outbreak of a bacterial disease among striped bass.

Several Chesapeake Bay researchers, including VIMS fish pathologist Wolfgang Vogelbein, believe that the high prevalence of mycobacteriosis, found in more than 75 percent of the Bay stripers, occurs because they are weakened by the stress of encountering the Bay’s summertime dead zone.

When the dead zone forms, it forces the stripers from the cooler bottom waters they prefer into warmer waters near the surface.

Diaz and Rosenberg say an even more fundamental effect of hypoxia is the loss of energy from the Bay’s food chain.

Without bottom-dwellers such as clams and worms, their predators lose an important source of nutrition.

Diaz and VIMS colleague Linda Schaffner estimate that Chesapeake Bay now loses about five percent of the Bay’s total production of food energy to hypoxia each year.

The Baltic Sea has lost about 30 percent of its food energy, which contributes to the decline in its fisheries yields.

Diaz and Rosenberg say the key to reducing dead zones is “to keep fertilizers on the land and out of the sea.”

Farmers concerned with the high cost of buying and applying nitrogen to their crops share that goal.

“They certainly don’t want to see their dollars flowing off their fields into the Bay,” says Diaz. “Scientists and farmers need to continue working together to develop farming methods that minimize the transfer of nutrients from land to sea.”

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WASHINGTON, DC, August 6, 2008 (ENS) – A report on ways to minimize the impacts of harmful algal blooms in freshwaters across the United States presented by federal government agencies on Monday offers few solutions and relies heavily on future research to develop responses to the noxious and often toxic plants.

These algae can form unsightly and foul-smelling mats, localized areas of low oxygen in the water, and clogged water intakes.

Impacts include foul taste and odor problems in drinking water sources and farm-raised fish, domestic and wild animal deaths, and reduced recreational opportunities due to noxious or toxic blooms. Human illness has been associated with large toxic blooms in recreational waters.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science and Technology Council released the interagency report, which draws on the expertise of scientists in dozens of government agencies.

It emphasizes the importance of developing methods for detecting the cells and toxins of these harmful algal blooms in fresh water and understanding how the toxins are taken up and how they affect humans and animals.

“Freshwater HABs pose serious threats to human and ecological health,” said NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher. “This report assesses the state of knowledge about freshwater HABs in the U.S. and sets research priorities to improve our ability to minimize or even prevent impacts of these events.”

CyanoHAB on an Oregon lake
(Photo by Stephen Hager)

A majority of states have now experienced these freshwater blooms. Human activities, such as nutrient pollution, alteration of water flow, and introduction of invasive species, are thought to contribute to them.

Progress to date on research and response has been made mostly through research at the individual project level with larger federal research and response efforts concentrated on the Great Lakes region.

“The central importance of this report is that this is the first comprehensive look at harmful algal blooms in U.S. fresh waters,” says Paul Sandifer, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative and co-chair of the Interagency Working Group on Harmful Algal Blooms, Hypoxia and Human Health that produced the report.

“Freshwater algal blooms are equally as important and problematic as those found in marine waters,” said Sandifer, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. “They can affect drinking water for the millions of people across the country who rely on surface fresh water supplies such as the Great Lakes.”

The report, “Scientific Assessment of Freshwater Harmful Algal Blooms,” presents a plan to minimize health and economic impacts of freshwater HABs but a great deal of research will be required to ensure the resilience of the nation’s freshwater ecosystems.

Priorities include understanding causes in order to better predict blooms, improving environmental monitoring for early warning, improving risk assessments for humans and the environment, developing bloom prevention and control methods, and finally supporting HAB research and response infrastructure.

Scientists at the National Exposure Research Laboratory are exploring the use of titanium dioxide, an emerging “green” technology, for the treatment of microcystins in drinking water. They also are developing techniques for separation, detection, identification and quantitative measurement of six cyanobacterial toxins.

Across the Midwest, some states are already monitoring for HABs. In Indiana, the Department of Environmental Management, along with Soil and Water Conservation Districts, conducts sampling.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources and Iowa State University monitor 132 lakes for cyanobacteria and associated toxins.

In Nebraska many agencies are involved. The Nebraska Natural Resource Districts, Public Power District, Game and Parks Commission, and Department of Environmental Quality, in collaboration with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, monitor CyanoHABs in lakes and inform the public online.

Michigan and Minnesota each provide monitoring. In Wisconsin, the Department of Natural Resources maintains general CyanoHAB information on the internet, while the Division of Public Health provides a fact sheet on cyanobacteria, their toxins, and health impacts.

The report recommends creation a national agreement on monitoring strategy, including federal guidelines to determine when beach closings and health advisories are needed.

But it’s not enough to monitor for algae. The report says that outreach to the public can lessen HAB impacts by promoting awareness of potential threats, by sharing accurate perceptions of drinking water, recreational water, and the safety of freshwater fish and crustaceans, and by fostering community participation in HAB prediction and response efforts.

The report recommends that scientists develop effective HAB control methods that have minimal impacts on the environment.

Potential control techniques to investigate further include increasing flushing rates, ultrasound, electrocoagulation, new and existing coagulants, and new algicidal or algistatic compounds.

Scientists are seeking effective treatment technologies to remove cyanotoxins from drinking water. Investigations of enhanced coagulation technology, filtration effectiveness, and disinfectant by-products are important, the report says. Microcystins, cylindrospermopsin, and anatoxin-A are the primary algal toxins of concern for regulation under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

Researchers are combining ground-based measurements and satellite image data to characterize bloom dynamics and inform development of future bloom forecasting tools.

For dealing with HABs this season, some help is available at the Harmful Algal Bloom Event Response website [www.glerl.noaa.gov] developed by NOAA’s Center of Excellence for Great Lakes and Human Health.

Never drink untreated surface water, whether or not algal blooms are present, warns the Wisconsin Division of Public Health in the report. Boiling the water will not remove toxins.

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