Know
A wintry wind sweeps across the bare fields, whipping Dave Ratliff’s graying hair. As he stands on a muddy gravel road bridge, his gaze follows a small stream northeast where the city of Conroy stands atop a hill.
“The first time I got here, I knew what I’d found,” Ratliff said. “I walked the creek and for six miles from the outlet, which is one mile from the town, I would see human feces in the creek.”
Clear Creek is being polluted by 71 homes in the unincorporated town of Conroy that are dumping sewage into a common drainage pipe in town.
The pipe flows into Clear Creek, which is a few feet wide at the bridge. The creek drains more than 100 square miles as it meanders east through Oxford and Tiffin before emptying into the Iowa River in Coralville, four miles upstream from where The University of Iowa draws its drinking water.
The problems in Clear Creek are extreme, but not atypical. The Iowa River was named the third-most endangered river in the United States in 2007 by the nonprofit group American Rivers, based in Washington, D.C.
“The health of the Iowa River, emblematic of so many of the state’s rivers, is in serious jeopardy. It’s hard to imagine that residents of Iowa City would drink from or swim in the Iowa River if they had any choice in the matter,” the American Rivers report said.
Pollution from agricultural practices, outdated septic systems, and overloaded municipal wastewater treatment facilities put humans and wildlife at risk in Iowa.
The state of Iowa has been under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve water quality since the passage of the federal Clean Water Act 36 years ago.
“Unfortunately, the state of Iowa trails far behind the rest of the country in implementing and enforcing” the law, according to the American Rivers report.
Of Iowa’s 71,665 miles of streams and rivers, 245 river segments located in almost all of the state’s counties are defined as “impaired,” meaning they do not meet EPA standards for water quality. In February, the EPA approved new Iowa water quality standards as part of an effort to reduce and eliminate pollution discharged into state waterways.
Clear Creek, as well as portions of the Iowa River, are on the DNR’s list of impaired waterways. Testing in 2005 found bacteria levels at over 1 million colonies per hundred milliliters of water. The EPA standard is 235 colonies per hundred milliliters.
“We don’t allow this (creek) to be sampled with bare hands. You have to wear gloves,” Ratliff, a project leader of the Johnson and Iowa County Watershed Coalition and a volunteer for an Iowa statewide water quality monitoring program, said. “On a hot summer day, you can’t stand here, the odor is so bad.”
The Iowa County Soil and Water Conservation District used the coalition’s water sampling data to acquire three grants totaling $1.14 million to connect Conroy to new sewage lagoons. The newly dug lagoons sit downhill from the town. The black dirt of the former farm field has been stripped off and piled nearby. The project is to be completed later this spring.
“In May or June, for the first time in 150 years the headwaters of Clear Creek will run clear,” Ratliff said
Agricultural risks
Toxins, nitrates, phosphorus and untreated sewage containing viruses, bacteria and other pathogens accumulate in the Iowa River as it flows from its source in Hancock County’s Crystal Lake in north-central Iowa. A third of the 309-mile Iowa River is considered impaired, according to Susan Heathcote, water program director for the Iowa Environmental Council, based in Des Moines.
The entire length of the Iowa River in Johnson County, home to The University of Iowa, is listed as impaired because of high bacteria levels.
The river watershed is under increasing pressure because of what Rod Scott, director of the Iowa River Greenbelt Resource Trust in Iowa Falls, called the “ethanol gold rush,” with more acres devoted to growing corn as the crop increases in value.
“As long we’re under these pressure economics, we going to continue to put stresses on the waterways,” Scott said.
The environmental pressure from intensive farming practices is particularly severe in the South Fork watershed of the Iowa River, located mostly in Hardin and Hamilton counties.
In 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey selected the South Fork and six other areas in the nation for a special study of agricultural chemicals and water quality precisely because of this unfortunate status.
The 200-acre South Fork watershed has some of the highest phosphorus and nitrogen levels of any body of water in Iowa, and possibly the world, according to Scott and Heathcote.
“It’s probably one of the most intensively farmed areas in the whole world,” Scott said. “And it’s probably the most productive soil in the world.”
An estimated 5.5 million metric tons of nitrates from the watershed flow into the Iowa River each year, “The fields up there lose 22 pounds per acre in nitrogen,” Scott said. “If you compute the cost of nitrogen, which has gone up 30 percent to 40 percent, it’s an expensive loss.”
Taking action
Reducing manure and chemical runoff was the goal when farmers founded the Southfork Watershed Alliance. The group works with Iowa State University’s National Soil Tilth Laboratory and the Iowa Soybean Association to gather scientific data on soil type, tillage practices and timing of chemical applications. For example, local farmers collect corn stalk samples in the fall to help fine tune nitrogen applications.
Testing on the Iowa River over the next two years will reveal if the water is safe for swimmers, boaters and fishermen, with focused attention on a 50-mile stretch of river from Alden to Steamboat Rock.
“You can look at water and not tell what’s in it,” Scott said. “If we end up with high bacteria levels, we’re going to tell the public.”
The work of the South Fork farmers in conjunction with the Iowa River Greenbelt Resource Trust and the Iowa Department of Natural Resources may serve as a model for other watersheds in Iowa.
“The more data we have, the more education we do, the more we work in partnership with farmers to communicate, the more we can maybe start improving,” Scott said.
The EPA’s new water quality standards for Iowa add protection for recreational uses along 23,800 miles of streams and for aquatic life on 14,000 miles of streams, according to Adam Schnieders, environmental specialist in the state DNR’s Water Quality Bureau.
Under the new standards, all Iowa’s free-flowing year-round streams and rivers will now receive the highest level of protection, unless assessments show a stream does not need that level. The new classifications offer more protection for more streams Schnieders said.
“It's going to be an improvement in water quality,” he said. “It’s definitely a positive, but it's going to come at a cost.”
Hundreds of wastewater treatment plants in Iowa are affected by the new standards, which lower permissable pollution levels enforced by permit. Statewide, 334 municipal, semi-public and industrial wastewater treatment plants will have to conform to the new standards, according to a 2005 DNR study.
Improving municipal sewage treatment plants in Iowa may cost as much as $1 billion. Municipalities must replace equipment and systems to meet the new discharge standards for bacteria, ammonia and other pollutants.
“I don’t know if there’s anything been done like this since the introduction of the Clean Water Act and the initial flowing of grant money that built all the treatment plants in the first place,” Schnieders said.
Most towns will have to upgrade treatment plants, Schnieders said.
“There’s a lot of old outdated infrastructure across the state . . . This is going to come out of Iowans’ pockets, but it’s a positive for water quality,” he said. “We’re going to have better water coming out of these pipes.”
State officials were lax in the past when issuing permits; plant operators often argued there was no reason to disinfect discharged water, and state officials often agreed, Schnieders said.
“Obviously, the climate has changed and how we deal with water policy,” he said. “It’s swinging back the other way.”
Public pressure, results
Since September 2003, Ratliff and other members of the Johnson and Iowa County Watershed Coalition have conducted 14 scientific “snapshots” in which water samples are taken at intervals over a long period. Volunteers also have taken more than 2,200 streamside measurements and collected more than 500 samples in area watersheds feeding the Iowa River.
“This is all public awareness, get people involved,” Ratliff said. “They get a chance to see the water, to touch it and to get a better understanding of it.”
Increasingly, people make discoveries that lead to remedies. That’s what happened when complaints of odors from North Liberty’s Muddy Creek prompted a 2005 walk by volunteers to scrutinize the creek, which cuts through town on its way to the Iowa River below the Coralville Reservoir dam.
“We came up on some pools of black sludge,” Ratliff said.
Analysis by the University Hygienic Laboratory in Oakdale, the sludge had a bacteria count of 1.9 million colonies per 100 milliliters of water, well above the standard of 235 colonies.
The data and state interest prompted North Liberty to change operations at its wastewater treatment plant and spend $6.8 million on an expansion project, paid in part by a rate increase on taxpayers.
The town’s new membrane bioreactor employs the most advanced wastewater treatment process in the world, according to plant manager Dave Ramsey.
The city’s facility is the only MBR treatment plant in Iowa and one of only 400 in the world.
The first phase of the project will be completed this fall.
It puts out “crystal clear” discharged water, Ramsey said, adding that similar treatment plants in the southwestern U.S. spray the discharged water directly on golf courses.
“In a lot of cities, the council wouldn’t have seen fit to spend that kind of money,” Ramsey said.
“This city did. They were looking in the long run.”