Arkansasonline

Buffalo River protected, state agency says

No need to list feeders as polluted, lawmakers told; park official disagrees

By Emily Walkenhorst

Posted: March 30, 2016 at 3:10 a.m.

The Buffalo National River is in good health, Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality officials told the Agriculture, Forestry, and Economic Development Joint Interim Committee on Tuesday.

The standards for the river's tributaries are working to adequately protect the river from pollution, department Director Becky Keogh said, despite recent arguments from National Park Service officials concerned that three tributaries to the river are polluted because of E. coli and low oxygen levels.

National Park Service officials have asked the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality to list three tributaries to the Buffalo National River on the department's biennial list of polluted water bodies in Arkansas in light of data going back to 2013, but so far the department has declined, given the number of years over which the samples were collected.

The park service has asked to add Mill Creek, Bear Creek and Big Creek, but the department has argued that the data obtained during the "period of record" -- before April 1, 2015 -- don't show that the waterways are polluted.

A portion of Big Creek is where C&H Hog Farms is located. C&H Hog Farms, which is permitted to hold up to 2,503 sows and 4,000 piglets at a time, has been the target of many environmental advocates who believe that the farm has had a negative effect on the river and that the pig manure poses a threat to the water during flooding.

Instead of classifying the streams as polluted, Keogh said the tributaries should be placed on a middle-ground category that would say data is insufficient to classify the tributaries and would prompt the department to consult with other states over new ways of monitoring the tributaries and assessing the results.

"Our preliminary review indicates these three tributaries should be listed as category 3," said Julie Chapman, senior associate director of the department's office of law and policy.

Chapman said data from 2014 showed several times when water quality standards were exceeded but that water samples taken since have shown much better results, including 8 percent of samples showing E. coli issues in 2015, well below the threshold for action of 25 percent.

"It could be that 2014 was just a freaky year," she said.

Looking at the data over a span of five years would allow the department to account for statistical anomalies, she said.

Chuck Bitting, natural resource program manager for the National Park Service at the Buffalo National River, emphasized the number of times E. coli was detected at Big Creek in 2014, which according to the park service was 33 percent of the time.

At the same time, Bitting noted, more than 1.3 million people visited the Buffalo River in 2014 and spent about $56.5 million at area businesses.

"The National Park Service has an obligation to monitor the water quality in the park," he said, adding that the park service has supplied data to the department for decades.

The state has funded a five-year study by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture that research team leader Andrew Sharpley told legislators Tuesday did not yet show significant trends in its first 2½ years. Sharpley is a professor of soils and water quality at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

A five-year ban on new medium or large hog farms in the Buffalo River's watershed is in place until 2019, when the study will be finished. That ban was supported by environmental groups; Gov. Asa Hutchinson's office, which negotiated the temporary ban in lieu of a permanent ban; and legislators.

The department uses five years of data from in-house and several other sources to determine pollution or lack of pollution in water bodies in creating a list of polluted waters. The list is the 303(d) list, which is required under the federal Clean Water Act and is overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Placement on the list -- if the list is approved by the EPA -- can require studies to determine appropriate limits for cities, businesses or others seeking permits to discharge wastewater into a particular body of water.

The EPA has not approved an Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality list since 2008, citing disagreements with the department on how the department assesses water quality. But if the department recommended a stream be placed on the 2016 list and the EPA did not approve that list, the department could still require additional water monitoring on those waterways when issuing wastewater discharge permits to new facilities or renewing existing permits.

Several legislators expressed an interest in avoiding more regulation, if possible, and asked department officials if water quality standards generally can be achieved without extra regulation. Keogh and Arkansas Natural Resources Commission Executive Director Randy Young said they could. Young testified before the committee about water programs for farmers that have, among other things, reduced water runoff from farms.

In the future, Keogh said she hopes to work with the National Park Service and other agencies in Arkansas to develop the "Beautiful Buffalo Collaborative," which would establish methods of protecting the river and simultaneously help the department avoid going through the traditional, drawn-out process of creating a Total Maximum Daily Load study and enforcement process like it would with other streams placed on the list.

The collaborative would produce more of an Arkansas approach to the river than one that must go through the EPA, Keogh said.

"We want to see the river protected by all means necessary and whatever means are appropriate," Bitting said. "We're not here to shut agriculture down, and we're not here to shut industry down."

The National Park Service collected weekly water samples in Mill Creek, which is the largest tributary to the Buffalo River, for more than a year and has collected periodic samples for more than 30 years, Bitting has said. Based on the National Park Service's data from 2015, the creek has elevated levels of E. coli. The National Park Service has placed signs along Mill Creek and downstream on the Buffalo River warning people of elevated levels of E. coli.

Downstream of the Buffalo River where it meets Mill Creek is Big Creek at Carver, where the National Park Service used U.S. Geological Survey data to determine that the amount of dissolved oxygen in the stream is too low, leaving it less hospitable to aquatic species. The National Park Service has made a similar determination at Bear Creek near Silver Hill, which is the fourth-largest tributary of the Buffalo River and is downstream of where the Buffalo meets Big Creek.

Metro on 03/30/2016