Virginia added about 1,100 miles to its list of polluted rivers and streams in the past two years,bringing the total to 10,604 miles, according to a report Monday from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
“We have a polluted river from Richmond to California and back — twice,” said Mike Gerel, staff scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for the nation’s largest estuary. “The more we look, the more pollution we find.”
A body of water is considered impaired when it does not support one or more of its designated uses: aquatic life, fish consumption, public water supplies, shellfish consumption, swimming and wildlife.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality said that although the results were not encouraging, they were not surprising.
“Nothing was really surprising in this report. It does show the problems that we’ve had the past few years are still there,” said spokesman Bill Hayden.
The amount of polluted water has increased largely because the department has examined new waters over the past two years, according to department Director David K. Paylor.
Gerel said he was disappointed with the report’s “trying to shrug [the pollution] off as if it’s just more data, better data. This report should be another call to action on how to attack the big cleanup.”
The environmental agency has 12 years to formulate a cleanup plan once a stream is put on the list of impaired waters, Hayden said.
About 94,000 acres of lakes and reservoirs and 2,200 square miles of estuaries were also classified as impaired in the report. The area of impaired lakes decreased by about 15,000 acres since 2006, and the area of impaired estuaries decreased by about 20 square miles since 2006.
The increased pollution in the state’s rivers and streams is contributing to the well-documented plunge in the state’s crab and oyster populations and industries, said Joe Tannery, Virginia deputy director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
“People are losing their livelihoods, and a lot of that can be attributed to poor water quality,” he said.
“We get frustrated when the message is, ‘We’re looking at it,’ ” Gerel said.
A public meeting on the report will be held at the agency’s Richmond office at 7 p.m. on June 24.
