In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, which dumped as much as 13 inches of rain in some parts of the Tidewater area last weekend, the Virginia Department of Health has ordered the emergency closure of thousands of acres of shellfish harvesting waters to avoid potential contamination from flooding and sewage spills “likely containing pathogenic bacteria and viruses.”
The closures, effective until the end of the month, include 1,900 acres of oyster grounds in the Back River between Poquoson and Hampton; 13,000 acres along the northern bank of the James River near Newport News; 1,822 acres on the Nansemond River near Suffolk; and 1,885 acres in Lynnhaven, Broad and Linkhorn bays in Virginia Beach.
“The biggest risk that we’re concerned with is virus,” said Keith Skiles, director of the Department of Health’s Shellfish Sanitation Program. “Generally by about three weeks, there’s no longer a risk of virus. ... We will be out doing sampling and, if they meet our standard, we may be able to open sooner.”
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An additional roughly 80,000 acres of oyster grounds are in a “restricted status,” Skiles said, meaning harvesting is subject to rainfall and monitoring results because of potential pollution.
Virginia’s coastal waters include a total of about 426,000 acres of public and privately leased oyster grounds, according to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.
“Nobody in the shellfish industry wants to make anyone sick. So these closures by the Health Department are precautionary in terms of making sure that the product that we harvest and sell is of the highest quality possible,” said Mike Oesterling, executive director of the Shellfish Growers of Virginia, a trade association for the $50 million a year industry.
Though the closures can be disruptive, the industry sees the state program, which Skiles says dates to the 1920s, as a bulwark against illness that could damage the reputation of Virginia’s oysters.
“We’re very proud of our Shellfish Sanitation Program and the record the industry has in working with them to provide a good quality product,” Oesterling said. “If you look when we have our closures, they’re usually after some major storm event.
“The routine handling of the waste is much better than it used to be. ... We’re much happier to be safe than sorry, because an illness caused by a polluted oyster affects not just the area the oyster came from, but it will affect the whole oyster industry in the state of Virginia.”
The risk of high levels of bacteria and viruses can be triggered by sanitary sewer line leaks or breaks but also can occur as a result of water infiltration of sewage systems, which can overwhelm treatment plants and result in the discharge of untreated or minimally treated sewage. Floodwaters also can carry contamination from private septic systems and animal waste.
A sewer line break in Virginia Beach was partly to blame for the closure of the Lynnhaven Bay area, Skiles said.
Ted Henifin, general manager of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, which serves 17 cities and counties in southeastern Virginia and a population of 1.7 million people, said the pipe break near Laskin and Red Robin roads spilled about 2 million gallons of sewage before it could be secured and rerouted.
As part of a 2010 consent decree with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the sanitation district — which manages 500 miles of pipe, more than 100 pump stations, nine major plants and four smaller ones — is putting together a plan due next year that will map out an estimated $2 billion to upgrade infrastructure and capacity over the next two to three decades.
Still, even with that spending, major storms and coastal flooding, including the effects of climate change and sea level rise, will still trigger occasional sewage overflows.
“Ours is a very complex system. We’re so big and low and flat that most of our system is pressurized pipe,” said Henifin, drawing a distinction with systems that largely use gravity-based collection pipe networks. That makes predicting weaknesses and areas vulnerable to storms tricky, he said.
“It’s been a very complex modeling analysis and condition-assessment program to really get to the point where we know where we need to improve our system in response to storms,” Henifin said. The sanitation district has joined the state on shellfish testing programs and is conducting pathogen testing in stormwater to try to identify sources of bacterial and viral pollution from waste.
“Things are much better even in the last 10 years,” he said. “It’s not eliminated, and it never will be as an issue. But I would say we’re doing a lot more as an industry to minimize the possibility of overflows.”
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Henifin said he was not aware of any Hampton Roads treatment plants overwhelmed by Matthew and forced to discharge untreated or minimally treated sewage into waterways, with the exception of one in Norfolk, though that was unrelated to the shellfish closures.
An overflow at the Suffolk plant several weeks ago did result in the closure of the grounds in the Nansemond River.
The state Department of Environmental Quality requires sewer treatment plants to report sanitary sewer overflows, including the extent, the cause and what measures they will take to address the overflow.
“We work with the individual facilities that have a higher degree of problems with that, those sanitary overflows, and require them to upgrade their collection systems to reduce the amount of inflow and infiltration,” said Fred Cunningham, director of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Water Permitting.
“The agency has been working and continues to work on these overflows. ... The facilities recognize that it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Part of it is just associated with the age of the systems and maintenance of these systems over time,” he said. “It’s not something necessarily that you fix one time and it’s taken care of, it’s something that you have to continually work on.”
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Richmond is too far upriver to affect oyster grounds near the mouth of the James River, said Bob Steidel, the city’s public utilities director. But as one of three cities in Virginia with a combined sewer system — where stormwater and sewage use the same, often very old pipes that bring waste and rainwater to treatment plants that can be overwhelmed in storms — the city has spent decades separating its system and upgrading the treatment plant.
Since 1991, about $284 million has been spent to that end, 63 percent of which was paid by city utility customers, with the rest coming from state and federal loans or grants.
“We are in the process of completing our last project to separate sewers but, because of the way the city is built, we can’t separate them all,” Steidel said.
The percentage of the miles of the James River that meet state water-quality standards has steadily climbed, but there’s still more work to do, he added.
Last year, the city recorded nearly 2.7 billion gallons of combined sewer overflow into the James.
Over the next 2½ years, with the help of a $40 million state grant, the city plans to roughly double the capacity at the treatment plant to 140 million gallons.