The return of the mighty chestnut

Unfortunately, many of our readers have never seen an American chestnut. So, for those who are wondering, here's what they look like:

Source: Wikimedia Commons, Author: Jaknouse (I swear that's how it's listed).

The reason most of you have probably never seen a chestnut in real life (I've only seen seedlings) is because they all died. Well, okay, not all, but "virtually eliminated" is pretty close. At our tree planting with the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI) at Caracassonne in March, we planted forty-three American chestnuts, gifts from the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF). At our survivability survey in September, we spotted several of them, which gives us hope that they'll survive in the short term. I don't know, however, whether they'll survive in the long run, because of the chestnut blight. While we believe that our chestnuts are bred for blight resistance, we can't be sure until they grow and we see whether they get infected.

Just in case you don't want to read the Wikipedia article, here's the least you need to know:

• American chestnuts were once believed to be 25% of American forests, with up to three billion trees on the North American continent.
• The blight is a fungus that was brought over on Asian chestnuts, which have evolved a resistance to the blight. American chestnuts, which had no resistance, were easy prey for the blight.
• It's believed that there are fewer than 100 mature specimens of American chestnuts left east of the Mississippi.
• While chestnuts do grow back, due to their root systems having resistance, they rarely reproduce.

But there is good news to be had. The process of developing a blight-resistant American chestnut appears to be bearing fruit (pun oh so very intended). Twelve hundred chestnut saplings have been planted by ACF in conjunction with the National Park Service and the University of Tennessee (I know, it's Tennessee, but bear with me). Thus far, the saplings have survived one year. Everybody cross your fingers and hope. If this works, we may be able to restore the Appalachian forests to what they once were 110 years ago.

If this is something that matters to you, you can contact Headwaters at 606-634-8669, or at letcherwater@gmail.com, and ask how you can get involved in restoring the American Chestnut.

We were on the radio!

Okay, so you kind of missed it. That's our fault. We totally should have let you know about it before, rather than after. Sorry. But yesterday Regina Donour, Headwaters president, and I were on WMMT's "Mountain Talk," with Mia Frederick of the Letcher County Emergency Response Network, Paul Miles of the Letcher County Emergency Management Department, and Stan Osborne with a whole bunch of his friends (okay, colleagues) from the Pine Mountain Search and Rescue Squad.

We talked about emergency preparedness and water safety, and because I was the last to speak on any given issue, people stole my talking points a lot. But that's okay - as long as the point was made, it didn't matter who made it. Anyway, Mia promised to put up the recording of the show as a podcast today. And here it is!

So anyway, we hope you listen, learn, and like.

The 303(d) list: a primer.

I was asked recently by our board to prepare a discussion on the processes in various states for developing the EPA's 303(d) list of impaired waters. In attempting to do that, I discovered that I do not, in fact, understand the process, and I had to educate myself as to what the process is. I figured that a lot of you might also be confused, or not even know what the 303(d) list is (I didn't), so I wanted to give you the same information I had.

Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act orders states to prepare lists of streams that are, in the terms of the act, "impaired." What that means is that the stream cannot be used for any of a particular set of designated uses, which can vary from state to state. The designated uses for Kentucky can be found here (pp. 592-604). Now, if you tried to read that and went cross-eyed, don't worry (so did I, the first time). Kentucky has three designated uses for bodies of water: aquatic life habitat, secondary recreation, and domestic supply. They're just what they sound like: places for water critters to live, places for people to do stuff that's not drinking, and drinking water (technically, I believe "potable water," but drinking is good enough). Every body of water is rated on these three uses as "not supporting," "partially supporting," and "supporting." The Kentucky Division of Water (the organization responsible for developing the list) is not clear on how many data samples (water samples) from a given stretch of water to be able to make a determination as to its quality, but they do provide standards for determining when a stretch of river is supporting, partially supporting, or not supporting a given use. Here's what you need to know:

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Sampling is done quarterly (every three months) in some places, every month in others.
Kentucky Division of Water (KDOW) tests for the following:

1. Dissolved oxygen (fish breathe oxygen through their gills, so a certain amount of dissolved oxygen is necessary).
2. Un-ionized ammonia (I'm not sure why they test for this as opposed to anything else, but do you want ammonia in your water?)
3. Temperature and pH (some types of water life can only live in very narrow temperature ranges, or only if the water is very close to neutral [pH is a scale that measures "acidity or basicity;" while these are two different things, for those who don't know, at the extreme ends of the pH scale, the question is basically "how long will it take this solution to dissolve human flesh?" and the answer is "not long"])
4. The following heavy metals are also tested: mercury, cadmium, copper, iron, lead, and zinc.
5. Finally, the state tests for fecal coliform (poo, or more accurately, bacteria that live in poo).
   

A stream is listed as "partially supporting" aquatic wildlife habitat use if it exceeds the standards for any of the non-heavy metal indicators in between 11-25% of the samples collected. It is listed as "not supporting" that use if those indicators are exceeded more than 25% of the time. With heavy metals, impairment is indicated if the standard is exceeded more than 10% of the time, with partial support indicated if it's exceeded more than once, but less than 10% of the time. (All of these are over three years.) Fecal coliform is generally used for human use standards.

What does all that mean? Basically, KDOW is going to have at least 12 and in some cases 36 samples when they evaluate a given stretch of river. That may not seem like much, but if KDOW knows about all the "point sources," or places where pollution enters the river, then they can divide the river by point-source sites, and an entire stretch from point source to point source need only be sampled once. This could be a few hundred feet, or several miles. So they sample once a quarter or possibly once a month, and once they have three years of samples, then they can evaluate it. I should note for you that the aquatic wildlife habitat is the least demanding of the three standards (we want cleaner water for human use than for animal use), so if it doesn't meet that standard it certainly won't meet the other two.

If they find that the water is either partially supporting or not supporting its designated use, then it has to be listed on the 303(d) list. (I bet you were wondering if we were ever coming back to that.) At that point, the state has to compute a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for that stretch of river. For every pollutant that the state finds, a TMDL must be calculated. A TMDL is the amount of the pollutant that is permitted to pass through that stretch of river per day. Basically, it is my understanding that a TMDL is the maximum amount of that pollutant that is permitted, as measured by sampling, multiplied by the amount of samples that flow through the river per day. That TMDL is then allocated to point sources along the stretch of river (these are called "Wasteload Allocations" or WLAs) and to non-point sources (which is any source that can't be specifically identified with a single polluter; think roads, parking lots, and other large sources of "public" pollution; these allocations are called "Load Allocations" or LAs). Any point source that exceeds its WLA can be fined, and non-point sources that exceed their LAs are eligible for EPA grants to help correct the issue.

Once a TMDL has been calculated and implemented (meaning that the levels of pollutants have dropped to TMDL levels), then the state can ask EPA for permission to "de-list" a stream, which just means it drops off the 303(d) list. And that is how the list is supposed to work. But it may not always work that way.

It has been alleged that the state is not adding streams to the 303(d) list that need to be added. We're not sure how that would work, since the standards seem pretty clear, but we're not taking any chances. What we intend to do is ask the state for, basically, all of its data on water quality in Letcher County. Then we'll crowd-source it.

That's where you come in. The way crowd-sourcing works is you get a whole bunch of people, and a whole bunch of data, and have each person look at a little bit of data (just a little bit, I promise!). Then you compile each person's summary of what they looked at, and try and piece together a story from all that data. So if you want to get involved, contact Headwaters at letcherwater@gmail.com, headwatersvista@gmail.com, or 606-634-8669 and talk to us about how to get involved in The Great Letcher Water Crowd-Source!

It came from the glacier: the return of banned pollutants

First of all, let me thank Reuben, Evan, Sam, chemlady, Jamie, and everybody who's ever read this blog for helping to make it a success. I'm Reid, the new OSM/VISTA assigned to Headwaters, and I wanted to start by talking about an issue that doesn't effect Letcher County specifically, but that plays a role in water quality more generally.

You may or may not be aware that the 1970's were the single most important decade in the United States for making inroads in preventing deadly pollution. We passed the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency Authorization Act, started wearing sweaters in the White House, and most important to us here in Letcher County, passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. The point is that we successfully made a lot of progress in working toward a cleaner America and world.

Of course, Appalachia got pretty much left behind by those efforts, but we'll have plenty of time to go into that in more detail. For now, let's talk about how those successes are being undone. Unfortunately, many substances that were banned from being dumped into rivers and lakes (or, in the terms of the law, "discharged") don't just go away. They have to be physically removed from the water, and one of the most efficient ways to do this is to simply freeze the water containing them. When that happens, the non-polluted water that isn't frozen goes on its merry way, and the frozen polluted water stays put.

Make sense so far? Good. Now, when that frozen polluted water melts, then there's an old problem. All those banned pollutants come flowing downstream again. Oops. Now what do you do? It would have been simpler to keep things frozen, or to remove the polluted ice. So why wasn't that done?

Well, glaciers aren't very easy to remove. When pollutants are frozen in glaciers, they don't go anywhere. That's the point I made above. The problem is that glaciers can't be removed very easily, and so that polluted glacier just hangs around, waiting for something to cause it to start to melt.

The National Park Service states that "if the current warming trend continues in Glacier National Park, there will be no glaciers left [there] in the year 2020." Which is a fair hedge. But what's apparent from the Discovery News article above is that when glaciers melt, they re-introduce pollutants that we thought were being controlled - and that's a new problem.

Do we have the specific problem here in Letcher County? No. There's no glaciers, for one thing (I should hedge my bets like the Park Service here and note that there's no glaciers as far as I know). But we do have the problem of persistent pollutants that we are not yet able to remove from our water. Heavy metals leached from abandoned mines deposit themselves on streambeds or are carried into our water supply. Even worse, we sit and do nothing except complain when some event occurs to render our water unusable.

So, if you think it's shameful that other places are having a new problem, when our old problem still hasn't been fixed, maybe it's time to do something about that. Contact Headwaters at 606-634-8669, or e-mail me at headwatersvista@gmail.com to find out how you can get involved.

Tree Planting this weekend

On Saturday (the 21st), in conjunction with the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team (ACCWT) and the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI), we are coordinating a large tree-planting event. We will be planting roughly 2800 trees on 5 acres. We will be meeting at the Campbell's Branch Community Center at 8:00 in the morning to begin transporting the volunteers to the site.

Here are the directions from Highway 15:

From Highway 15 North, enter Isom & take a left onto KY 7
Stay on KY 7 for 13 miles
then turn left onto KY1103
Stay on KY 1103 for 3.1 miles, The Campbells Branch Community Center (which looks like an old brick school) is on the right.

We will also have some entertainment (Lee Sexton) Saturday evening at the Community Center after the planting (around 6:30). If you have any questions please call or email me.

phone: 606-634-8669
email: letcherwater@gmail.com

Test Results

In response to the petroleum spill and water advisory that began on Monday (February 16th) in Letcher County, The Head of Three Rivers Project conducted several independent tests of both the stream and tap water. These test results can be found on our data/reports page here. These samples were collected on Thursday (February 19th).

Projects Update

There are a few Headwaters events coming up this month.

March 14th:

We are having a water-testing training workshop for volunteers this Saturday. We are meeting at 9:00 in the morning in front of the Harry Caudill Library in Whitesburg. This training is required for volunteers to participate in water-testing events with The Head of Three Rivers Project. Please register at www.krww.org and click on the "register for volunteer training here" link.

March 21st:

The Head of Three Rivers Project, in conjunction with the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative, is organizing a large tree-planting project on top of an abandoned strip mine on March 21st. This event is a pilot project that showcases reforestation techniques that could be used on the 741,000 acres of similar land across Appalachia. We will be meeting in the morning at the Campbell's Branch Community Center (where out-of-town volunteers will be able to stay). This will be an all-day event in which food will be provided. More details will be provided soon.

March 28th:

There will be a Carcassonne Arbor Day Celebration on the same site as the tree-planting. There will be an exciting line-up of speakers from several different organizations including the American Chestnut Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme. More details on this event will also be provided soon.

If you have any questions about any of these events, please call (606-634-8669) or email me (letcherwater@gmail.com).