Virginia’s governor has promised up to $150,000 in emergency environmental funds to study a series of devastating fish kills on the Shenandoah River.
The phenomenon has claimed an estimated 80 percent of smallmouth bass and sunfish along the forked Shenandoah Valley waterway in the past three years, and scientists have yet to determine a cause.
“There is progress in that area,” said Don Kain, co-chairman of the state’s Shenandoah River Fish Kill Task Force. “But there is nothing that has come out of our data from 2006 and shown a smoking gun.”
The funds, taken from the Virginia Environmental Emergency Response Fund, would supplement the $200,000 the General Assembly committed this year. Gov. Tim Kaine announced the funding Tuesday afternoon from Shenandoah River State Park in rural Warren County.
Fish kills received regionwide publicity after thousands of dead fish washed up on the shores of the lower Potomac this summer. Though the Shenandoah River flows into the Potomac, scientists have not drawn a definitive link between the two kills, Kain said.
“It’s too hard to tell because we haven’t pinpointed a specific cause on the Shenandoah,” he said.
Still, the trends have environmental groups worried about Virginia waters, especially coupled with a strange “intersex” phenomenon found on both rivers, in which male fish are found with eggs in their testes.
Ed Merrifield, executive director of the conservation group Potomac Riverkeeper, said he believes the two kills are connected, and caused by some form of pollutant. He said the issues all flow back to polluters ignoring the Clean Water Act, which was intended to eliminate new water pollution years ago.
“It’s important to know what is in the water now so we can get it out,” he said. “If they can’t tell us what’s causing the problem in the fish, how can they tell us that it’s not going into our drinking water?”
