Mercury in the Ohio River: To mix or not to mix

Across a small lake in the flood plain of the Ohio River, fish jump from the water on a gorgeous, late-summer morning.

A fisherman casts into the blue waters of one of several lakes on a 2,500-acre preserve straddling the Indiana-Ohio border, at a place known as Oxbow. The lakes are full of fish and the fisherman has a good chance at a crop of crappie, blue gill and bass.

But he’ll want to throw all but one back.

The Ohio River Fish Consumption Advisories urge him and others not to eat more than one fish per month from the river – including these wetlands, which flood at least three times a year.

Why? Mercury and other chemicals, byproducts of industry, that build up in fish over time create potential health risks.

“When the river floods, we get everything and the heavy metals accumulate and stay,” said Jon Seymour, a leader of Oxbow Inc, a Lawrenceburg-based group that protects and preserves the site.

For this and other reasons, Oxbow and a chorus of local environmental organizations, natural resources groups, scientists and others are waiting anxiously for a decision coming out of a Thursday meeting in Buffalo, New York.

It is there that the board of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission (ORSANCO) will decide whether to enact a new rule on the river that would ban “mixing zones.” The commission currently allows companies to discharge mercury and other chemicals into the river at levels above the legal standard, as long as the level is safe away from these “hot spots.”

ORSANCO, headquartered in the Cincinnati neighborhood of California, monitors the health of the entire river and sets pollution control standards.

The commission decided on this ban 2003, asking companies to end the practice by 2013. But before the deadline companies asked for an extension. It was granted and the ban is set to go into effect Oct. 16.

Companies have again been asking for variances, providing reasons they cannot comply in time, said commission spokeswoman Lisa Cochran.

The commission’s technical committee has recommended that the board change the rule to end the use of mixing zones "as soon as practicable and allow individual states the ability to create their own timelines for the dischargers,” Cochran said.

“A number of mercury dischargers on the Ohio River have spent the past 12 years taking little or no action to identify and implement effective mercury controls,” Madeline Fleisher, staff attorney for the Environmental Law & Policy Center wrote to members of U.S. Congress in August. “The variance procedure proposed by the commission would allow these polluters to further delay effective implementation of mercury standards to protect human health, with no end in sight.”

Industries using this practice include factories and coal plants.

Recent reports by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory and the commission show that the Ohio River continues to be the nation’s most polluted waterway.

Annual mercury discharges into the Ohio River rose by nearly 50 percent from 2007 to 2013, according to a report issued in March by the commission. The commission's sampling showed an increase of 92 to 132 pounds of mercury. In a move that made environmental advocates mistrustful, ORSANCO released updated data in June that showed there was less mercury in the water than the earlier report found and the new level met mercury standards.

The people coming to the group meeting on Thursday morning come from all eight states that border the Ohio River. There are three from each state. One is automatically that state’s representative to the Environmental Protection Agency or its equivalent. The other two are appointed by the state’s governor.

Ohio’s members are Craig Butler, director of the Ohio EPA, and governor appointee Stuart F. Bruny. Ohio’s third member retired in June and Gov. John Kasich has yet to appoint a replacement, Cochran said.

Public meetings and hearings have been held on the topic and public comments were collected for several months.

The meeting is being held in New York at the request of board chairman and New York representative Douglas E. Conroe, Cochran said.

In an opinion piece sent to The Enquirer, Michael C. Miller, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati, encouraged the commissioners to put the ban in place.

“Now is a crucial time to get this issue right,” Miller wrote. “In past years, power plants burning coal – one of the largest sources of mercury pollution – emitted mercury through their smokestacks. Pending restrictions of these emissions under the Clean Air Act mean a higher risk that the same mercury will soon be released into the water instead.”

Miller, Fleisher: Keep mercury out of the Ohio River

Part of the problem is that the commission monitors the river, Cochran said, but doesn’t have the expertise or staffing to enforce a ban or understand the intricacies of the industries that are discharging into the Ohio River.

Letting the states decide (and enforce the guidelines through their own environmental agencies) should allow the regulations to be relatively quickly written in to the various states' permitting processes, Cochran said.

The commission more than 17,000 emails from the general public, 15,000 of which were third party emails through the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund.

All but one asked the commission not to change directions with the ban.