By DAVID L. DEEN
By David L. Deen
The day after tropical storm Isaias did its thing in Vermont while walking over the stream that crosses our land, I noticed that despite Isaias’s thunderous rain the stream was flowing at nearly the same low level it was before the storm. One might expect flood levels but on reflecting on how dry it has been around here, it seems the stream reacted to the rains with an early spike upwards in flow and then just as quickly returned to pre-rain low levels.
Our trees and fields are thirsty in this dry year and so promptly drank up Isaias’s rainfall and this small stream’s flow levels exactly reflected the drought conditions so far in the summer of 2020. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrographs for tributary river basins in the Lake Champlain, Connecticut River, Lake Memphremagog and the Hudson watersheds showed the same reactions statewide, quick rise and then a quick return to mean or below mean flows.
While periods of drought increase and seasonal and regional weather patterns grow more erratic, demands for surface water from industrial, agricultural, and municipal users are growing. This growing use of surface water and the increasing unpredictable supply puts the health of Vermont’s surface waters and any activities reliant on surface water at risk. The risk is magnified by a lack of clear public policy about the use of surface waters in Vermont, especially the cumulative use in any one watershed.
Historically we have left water quality problems unaddressed, much to our detriment. We knew nutrient loading hurt our waterways decades ago. Left unaddressed, we now have blue green algae poisoning our beaches and an estimated cleanup bill for Lake Champlain alone of 10 million dollars a year over 20 years. We knew about combined sewer overflows (CSOs) decades ago. Left unaddressed, we have millions of gallons of untreated sewage discharged into our waterways yearly after practically every rainstorm or quick snow melt. The estimated costs for cleaning up CSOs are staggering.
We knew for decades our wastewater/drinking water treatment facilities needed upgrades and that the facilities themselves would hit a cost wall when their useful engineered life was up. Left unaddressed, we now have municipalities that cannot afford to meet river and lake healthy phosphorous and nitrogen discharge limits nor can businesses and farms meet new stormwater discharge prevention standards.
To this litany of unaddressed problems we find ourselves facing water insecurity. Will there be enough water when and where we, the people, businesses, and farms need it? We were always secure about how much water we had but no longer.
Unregulated water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have been a simmering issue for a while, exacerbated by increasing weather anomalies of not enough or too much water at the wrong time or in the wrong places. People are surprised when they discover that regulators do not pay any attention to, nor even record the water withdrawals occurring all over VT. Consequentially, nobody knows how many withdrawals there are in Vermont nor how much water they cumulatively pull out of the rivers and lakes.
An environmental coalition including Trout Unlimited, the Connecticut River Conservancy, the Vermont Natural Resources Council, and National Wildlife Federation Northeast assisted by the Vermont Law School Environmental Advocacy Clinic have endorsed enacting an ounce of prevention so that unlike other water problems, Vermont might get a head start in addressing any shortage of clean healthy surface water. That ounce takes the form of House bill H 833 introduced and passed in the Vermont House in June of this year that now awaits action in the Senate.
H.833 establishes a Surface Water Withdrawal and Transfer Working Group to investigate the environmental, economic, and recreational impacts of current surface water withdrawals in the state. If the working group is successful, we might actually know for the first time how much of our surface waters are taken from our rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds. This would be a first in Vermont.
For example, a state permit recently allowed a first-time-ever transfer of water from one watershed basin to another with no authorization in law or regulation and the only reason we even know about this withdrawal and watershed transfer is that the water is for a snow making operation and they alone under our water protection laws must account for their water use. Other major water users should be as accountable for their withdrawals.
As we enter an era of new weather patterns and increasing water use, H 833 creates a working group tasked with ensuring environmental resilience of Vermont’s watersheds against climate change and accelerating demands. The working group is tasked with giving the aquatic environment a voice at the negotiating table it does not have presently, when people propose multiple uses of the same surface waters. It is time to get ahead of an incipient water quality problem for a change. It is called an ounce of prevention.
River Currents is written by David L. Deen who is a former legislator, an honorary trustee of the Connecticut River Conservancy, and a board member of the Trout Unlimited Connecticut River Valley chapter.
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