THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 1996 TAG: 9610160410
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 81 lines
Oops.
A computer mistake is to blame for six waterways in Hampton Roads being listed as clean and healthy when, in fact, they harbor levels of bacteria that are unsafe for swimming and water sports, state officials acknowledged Tuesday.
Among the mislabeled: the Pagan River, a tributary of the James River that has suffered for decades from hog wastes and sewage from meat-packing giant Smithfield Foods Inc.
The clean bill of health for the Pagan, much of which has been closed to shellfish harvesting since 1970 because of heavy bacteria, was one reason environmental groups for months have questioned the veracity of the state's list of impaired waters.
Other area streams that were inadvertently left off the list in the spring: sections of Thalia Creek and London Bridge Creek in Virginia Beach, Broad Creek in Norfolk and New Market Creek and the Poquoson River on the Peninsula, officials said.
A seventh waterway, Mattox Creek in northwest Virginia, also was left off the list.
``Our reaction was, `Oh my gosh, there was a glitch,' '' said Chuck Epes, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which spent two years and $8 million monitoring nearly 30,000 miles of rivers and streams across the state.
``We feel chagrined a bit,'' Epes added. ``But the mistakes were so minuscule'' considering the scope of the inventory, which federal law mandates every two years.
This is the second time Virginia has undertaken the massive study, which measured pollutants at 1,100 monitoring stations on roughly half the 49,220 miles of freshwater streams and 2,500 square miles of state estuaries.
The environmental department still stands by its overall conclusion - that about 95 percent of the public waterways surveyed since 1994 meet cleanliness standards.
The computer error, explained Ron Gregory, technical services coordinator, left off about 20 miles of unhealthy streams, almost all of which are in Hampton Roads. Those will now be added to the other 1,436 miles of public waters across Virginia that have been listed as ``impaired.''
The survey defines impaired waters as those that fail to meet state health standards for human contact, such as swimming or water skiing. Fishing can still be allowed, Gregory said.
Because of the error, the state will immediately notify local health departments that the six waterways in Hampton Roads should be identified as unsafe, said Bob Burnley, state director of environmental program support and evaluation.
Whether warning signs will be placed along affected waters is up to local health authorities, Burnley said.
The state computer program mistakenly threw out extremely high counts of fecal coliform, a bacteria associated with animal waste that can carry disease, presuming that they were anomalies, Gregory said.
``For some reason, it ignored those numbers,'' he said.
The inventory was due to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on April 1. The EPA still has not signed off on Virginia's survey, which was re-written this spring because of complaints from environmental groups that it was incomprehensible.
When a second version was released in mid-April, a state environmental engineer, Charles Martin, said that the Pagan River was left off the list because shellfish still could be harvested from certain sections of the river.
But officials said Tuesday that after further review, the Pagan showed excessive levels of fecal coliform at four monitoring stations within its boundary. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
ADDED TO THE LIST
The Pagan River
Thalia Creek
London Bridge Creek
Broad Creek
New Market Creek
Poquoson River
Mattox Creek
KEYWORDS: WATER POLLUTION WATERWAYS VIRGINIA HAMPTON ROADS
COMPUTER ERROR by CNB