Budget squeeze keeping DEQ from testing river fish for chemicals

Fish sitting in a Richmond-area laboratory freezer are yet another sign of state budget cuts, this time impacting the Department of Environmental Quality.

The fish, which were collected from the New, Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, were supposed to be tested for PCBs — polychlorinated biphenyls, which are known to cause cancer and other health impacts — but the agency suspended that program to save nearly $370,000, spokesman Bill Hayden said. The agency had to cut about $5 million from its overall budget.

“The PCBs testing was something that wasn’t required, so it looked like something we could have to do without for hopefully just a temporary period,” he said. Through the program, fish were collected from all major river basins throughout the state on a rotating basis and their tissue analyzed for the chemicals at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

Two years ago, the agency suspended testing river sediment for the chemicals.

While the frozen fish aren’t from Central Virginia, the routine testing over the years helped identify problems throughout the Staunton and upper James rivers that led to the state health department to issue consumption advisories. DEQ staff recently submitted a complex plan to the Environmental Protection Agency detailing how to reduce the amount of PCBs in the Staunton River.

One of the reasons the fish tissue program was chosen for suspension, Hayden said, is because extensive sampling already has identified where the problem areas are.

“The numbers for the James River over the years have shown us where the major places of concern are and we’ve pretty much identified the stretches of the river,” Hayden said. “The Staunton’s probably the same.”

Suspending the fish program won’t have any impact on that plan because it’s still under federal review, said Greg Anderson, a water monitoring specialist with the Blue Ridge Regional Office.

The plan calls for a 96 percent reduction in how much of the chemical washes into the Staunton River each year. The goal of the plan is to reduce the total amount of PCBs in the river so that game fish species, including striped bass and flathead catfish, no longer contain amounts that exceed health standards.

PCBs are odorless and tasteless chemicals that were extensively used in manufacturing because they could withstand high heat and would not break down. The U.S. government banned production in the late 1970s, but the chemicals have persisted throughout the environment because they take a long time to degrade. The chemicals bind to sediment and accumulate in fatty tissues.

Various industries along the Staunton River, particularly in the Altavista area, were a significant source of the chemicals, with some sites still showing high levels in soil. Since the chemicals were discovered in high amounts in fish from the Staunton and upper Roanoke rivers in the 1990s, the levels have gradually declined, though some still contain at least five times the state limit.

“I understand that with tough times financially, they had to find things to cut and it’s hard for me to say whether all their choices are good or bad. Less PCBs monitoring than we’ve been doing wouldn’t have been my first choice for something to cut,” said David Sligh, who is the Upper James Riverkeeper for the James River Association. “One of the reasons we do widespread sampling is to pick up what might appear. When we’ve found those kinds of chemicals, in the past we didn’t expect to find them.”