November 22, 2002 Feature
Story
How
Clean Is Your Drinking Water?
Utah State University Scientist
is Finding Out
 This
month a Utah County city sued an industry for polluting its
municipal water supply. The ooze is now leaching toward the
two remaining wells that serve the city. When it reaches them
— if it reaches them — residents will be without
drinking water.
The problem is the city of Mapleton needs scientific tools to
determine how much contamination is acceptable and how safe
their water supply is.
And they’re not alone.
In the save-the-earth fervor of the 1970s, the U.S. Congress
amended the Clean Water Act, which required the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to work with states to restore and protect
the quality of the nation’s waters. Twenty-five years
later, states and regulatory agencies are still trying to figure
out exactly what "clean water" means.
They’re getting help in their quest from Chuck Hawkins,
a biologist with Utah State University’s College of Natural
Resources. Hawkins is trying to establish quantitative methods
to measure whether a river, lake or watershed is healthy.
"We determine what biological organisms would occur in
the absence of human disturbance, to establish a baseline reference
for comparison purposes," said Hawkins. "In other
words, a healthy ecosystem must be defined before one can determine
what an unhealthy ecosystem looks like. We need to determine
what lakes and rivers looked like historically, before people
came on the scene."
 "Ideally,
the reference sites we look at would be pristine," he said.
"Unfortunately, there are no pristine sites left. Anywhere.
So we’ll have to settle for 'pretty good.'"
"Pretty good" is what several field crews have been
looking for, exploring 13 Western states for more than five
years. They’ve sampled over 1,100 streams and rivers so
far, funded by four grants from the EPA and two from the Forest
Service.
That’s good news for Western cities and states, which
are required by law to meet federal water standards. It’s
good news for biological systems — home to fish, amphibians
and insects. And it’s good news for anyone who drinks
water in states ranging from Washington to North Dakota to New
Mexico, including Utah.
"Hawkins is developing tools sophisticated enough to measure
incredibly complex systems in the real world, while simultaneously
generating data that water managers, politicians and the public
can easily understand and put to use," said Chris Luecke,
head of the new Aquatic, Watershed, and Earth Resources Department.
"The tools have to be somewhat intuitive so the interpretation
and application don’t get buried in complex statistics,"
said Hawkins.
"The big challenge is to figure out ways to use the information
we collect from reference sites to predict what conditions should
exist in potentially polluted streams and rivers," he continued.
"Because the biological systems of rivers and lakes are
complex, we can’t easily predict what a healthy stream
should look like at a specific location. We therefore have to
develop statistical models that make specific predictions based
on conditions that exist at particular locations."
 "If
a local river was severely polluted, we could walk along its
banks and see algae blooms and smell odors," Hawkins said.
"We would know it was sick because we would mentally compare
it to healthy streams in similar locations. Using data from
a large number of reference streams allows us to quantify the
condition of a river relative to that expected at healthy ones."
"The limiting factor for municipalities and regulatory
agencies is generally money," Hawkins said, "and because
there is not enough money to measure everything that occurs
in a stream, we need to determine the measurements that are
most critical."
"When you go to the doctor, he or she doesn’t measure
everything," he said. "During a routine physical examination,
you don’t get an EKG or have lots of blood chemistry tests.
It’s too expensive. Instead, the doctor looks at indicators
of health such as your blood pressure, heart rate and temperature,
and compares them to the range of normal variation in humans
to determine whether there is evidence that you might be sick.
"We’re trying to identify the most useful indicators
of ecosystem health."
Invertebrates — the insects, crustaceans, mollusks and
worms that live in aquatic systems, are often good indicators,
he said.
"They contain a lot of ecological information," he
said "in that some species are sensitive to certain pollutants
and some to other pollutants. These species only occur in clean
water. Others are insensitive and tend to be the dominant species
in highly polluted water. Because invertebrates are easy to
sample, we can collect a lot of information quickly and cheaply.
"We can collect 100,000 bugs from the Logan River in an
hour," Hawkins said. "Most states are now using invertebrate
samples to determine the health of rivers and lakes."
One of the challenges Hawkins faces is the variability of Western
ecosystems. Pointing to the bumps and ridges that form that
backbone of Western mountain ranges on a U.S. map, he said,
"I work in the wrinkled area. Eastern scientists have more
homogenous systems. If you start walking east from Logan, through
the Bear River wetlands and then on up to the mountain streams,
you’ll see a great deal of variety.
"We deal with the variety by classifying reference sites
into different types of streams, from which we can then extrapolate
expectations about other sites."
In classifying those sites, Hawkins is developing benchmarks
that will serve as tools to indicate healthy or unhealthy systems
and ultimately, protect biological systems and watersheds throughout
the West.
"Several Western states are now using or evaluating Hawkins’
techniques for implementing aspects of the Clean Water Act,"
said Luecke.
To facilitate progress across the West, Hawkins is hoping to
see more collaboration between state and federal agencies, less
duplication of effort and the development of more efficient
tools for measuring and protecting water.
"If we have biologically healthy streams, we are protecting
water quality for human consumption," Hawkins said. "Invertebrates
that live in rivers are like the canaries in coal mines —
they are indicators of potential problems. If the right ones
occur in our rivers and lakes, the water is probably safe to
drink and use for other human needs."
The work Hawkins has conducted in the West is also moving east.
Hawkins is currently involved in a unique collaboration with
scientists from Proctor & Gamble and the Dutch equivalent
of our EPA to determine if the methods he is working on can
be combined with classic measures of toxicity to provide industry
and states more robust assessments of the biological health
of aquatic ecosystems. Initial results of that work will be
reported at this week’s meeting of the Society for Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry, which is being held in Salt Lake City.
Writer: Nadene Steinhoff, 435-797-1429; nadene.steinhoff@usu.edu
Contact: Chuck Hawkins, 435-797-2280; Hawkins@cc.usu.edu
River photos by Nancy Williams
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