West Virginia's Triennial Review - Changing WV's Water Quality Standards

Every three years states are required to review their water quality standards.  West Virginia's next review formally kicks off in June of 2013, when changes will be officially  proposed, but  Kevin Coyne, Manager  of the WV Water Quality Standards program under Division of Water and Waste Management  Director Scott Mandirola, invited interested parties to get a head start and identify the issues that they believe should be considered  in the coming year.

Some of the better comments were provided by the West Virginia Coal Association. Twenty years ago, NPDES permit for coal mines were pretty simple - there were iron and pH limits, and not much else.  Industrial facilities received the tougher scrutiny,but that's no longer the case.   Manganese limits were added to mining NPDES permits (ironically, manganese was being used for water treatment), then selenium became an issue, and now conductivity.    Citizen suits and objections by EPA to mining permits have focused on these and other water quality concerns in order to force additional treatment that provides questionable environmental improvement.

Two issues addressed by the WVCA bear particular mention.  The first is the designation of all state streams as drinking water supplies.  The state maintains the fiction that all streams should be treated as if they are drinking water supplies, even though that is not required by the Clean Water Act, is completely impossible to achieve, and results in unnecessarily stringent permit limits that do not benefit anyone. The fact is, anywhere a public water supply is installed, all other dischargers have to protect it, and NPDES permit  limits would be imposed to do so.  Until there is a drinking water use, though, those protections are meaningless to everyone except the discharger that spends millions to protect a use that does not exist.  The WVCA comments provide  a good history of how we got to this point, and we can hope they will make correcting those historical mistakes a key feature of their efforts next year.

The other comment worth looking at is the suggestion that the DEP reconsider its application of the narrative criteria and  use of the  West Virginia Stream Condition Index.  The WVSCI is a guidance, not a rule, but it has frequently been applied as if it were a rule. Developing a new means of measuring compliance with the narrative water quality standards would be a welcome change.