State environmental officials are preparing to issue a 2004 assessment of water quality in Delaware water bodies and then hear comment on what will amount to a blanket advisory to limit consumption of fish taken from any fresh or brackish water body in the state.

The notice was sent Aug. 20 regarding Delaware’s section 303(d) list for 2004. That section of the federal Clean Water Act mandates each state to identify and prioritize water quality limited segments still requiring Waste Load Allocations (WLAs) and Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) within its boundaries.

A water quality limited segment is a water body or portion of a water body - a length of a river, an area of an estuary, a pond or a wetland - in which water quality does not meet applicable quality standards and is not expected to meet those standards even after the application of technology-based effluent reductions required by the Clean Water Act.

The state’s recent 303(d) list is based on information compiled in previous watershed assessment reports and other assessments performed for National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) discharges. These latest assessments also depend on data from other sources judged to be reliable.

Although this current assessment does not address the more technical issues of WLAs and TMDLs, those will also be made available for public review and comment under a separate public notice.

“This notice is done every two years to inform the public of water quality,” explained David Wolanski, of DNREC’s water resources division. “There have been some improvements since we began this in 1970. Overall, we’ve made some progress in correcting water contamination problems. But it took a long time for us to get to this point, and it will take a long time to make the water right again.”

Wolanski said that every fish the state agents test costs $2,000. the process of testing water body segments for pollution also takes a lot of time, he said.

“We still have the same old problems of high bacteria levels, nutrient overloading and low dissolved oxygen,” he said. “We also have problems from mercury contamination of fish and from other persistent biocumulative toxins like PCB dioxin and pesticides. We’ve noticed things have leveled off lately, either too high or too low. We still burn too much coal and emit too much mercury. People still apply too much fertilizer to their lawns and it runs off into the nearest water bodies. We still have more work to do.”

EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt said recently that one third of the nation’s lakes and almost a quarter of its rivers contain fish that may be contaminated with mercury, dioxin, PCB and pesticide pollution. He emphasized that monitoring by state officials is increasing while pollution levels, especially with mercury, are decreasing.

In 2003, 44 states had a fish advisory for mercury. The EPA national list for 2003 lists 48 states that have issued 3,094 advisories because of polluted fish. Montana and Alaska had no monitoring program in place.
“It’s basically a blanket advisory,” said Wolanski. “In terms of 1970 as a baseline, we’ve made progress in cleaning up our waters from industrial and nonpoint pollution. But these latest rounds of fish sampling show there is much more to do.”

To review the DNREC Watershed Assessment Reports, visit www.dnrec.state.de.us/water2000/2004303dDraft.zip. To comment by Sept. 20, write Wolanski at the Division of Water Resources, Watershed Assessment Section, Silver Lake Plaza-Suite 220, 820 Silver Lake boulevard, Dover 19904-2464.