Recreation reclassification: EPA wants Mississippi River designated as safe for swimmers

Whenever Huck Finn wanted to cool off on a hot summer day, his creator, Mark Twain, would write the boy into a swimming session in the Mississippi River. The EPA wants real people today to be able to swim in the river as well.

In a recent letter to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for the Clean Water Program, told the department to take another look at its recreation-use designation for the Mississippi River from the Meramec River to the Ohio River. Grumbles reminded Missouri's pollution police agency that the federal Clean Water Act presumes that rivers, streams and lakes should be clean enough for swimming. If the water is not safe, the law allows the state agency to show why it is not possible to make the water clean.

And on Jan. 7, DNR staff will recommend the state Clean Water Commission change the Mississippi's designation from secondary-contact recreation, a standard that covers boating, fishing and wading, to whole-body contact. The result could mean new requirements for expensive upgrades at sewage treatment plants along the river, including the Cape Girardeau plant.

The Mississippi River is one of the most studied rivers in the world. At the Open River Field Station in Jackson, the Missouri Department of Conservation monitors several factors related to water quality, including indicators of fertilizer pollution, the acidity of the water and how much dirt and sand is in the water.

But the key measure for human contact with the water is the level of E. coli, a bacteria present in human and animal waste that reaches the river in the discharge from sewage treatment plants and in the runoff from open land where livestock and wildlife graze.

"When you are swimming, you are probably never going to swallow enough water" to have health problems caused by fertilizer or chemical pollutants, said John Ford, an environmental specialist with DNR's Water Pollution Program. "The only risk you have from swallowing a small amount of water is bacteria and protozoans."

In recent years, the DNR has reviewed the classifications for 3,600 stream segments and 400 lakes and designated the water for whole-body contact. The DNR passed on classifying 142 other bodies of water, and the EPA made determinations of a whole-body contact designation for 141. The remaining unclassified water was the Mississippi River from Dam 27 north of St. Louis to the Ohio River.

Of that 195.5-mile stretch, the EPA is seeking a whole-body contact designation on 1.3 miles from Dam 27 to North Riverfront Park in St. Louis, and 164.7 miles from the Meramec to the Ohio. The approximately 30 miles of river remaining, mainly along the St. Louis riverfront, will retain a designation that swimming is not recommended.

"The Clean Water Act sets out that recreation shall be available in and on the waters of the United States," said John DeLashmit of the EPA's Region 7 office in Kansas City. "The rebuttable presumption is that unless we are shown otherwise that United States waters are safe for swimming and other aquatic recreation. The DNR did not submit anything showing that is not attainable on the Mississippi River."

Data collected at Thebes, Ill., by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency shows that the E. coli levels in the river fluctuate widely. At times, the bacteria is almost nonexistent. At others, especially in periods immediately after heavy rains, the level spikes to counts that are as much as seven times the proposed maximum level for whole-body contact.

The mathematical model for analyzing the data, however, shows bacteria counts are generally below the strictest current standard for whole-body contact. But because that Class A designation is usually used for lakes and streams that have heavy swimming use at places such as swimming beaches, the DNR is asking that the Mississippi be placed in the Class B category. That category recognizes that people do swim in the river but that it is not a primary swimming destination, so the allowable bacteria counts are higher.

The counts are based on readings taken between April 1 and Oct. 31, the defined recreation season, Ford said.

Along with the designation for whole-body contact, the DNR must also determine whether the water is ready for the named use or if it is impaired and in need of a cleanup plan, said DeLashmit. If the river is impaired, he said, the DNR will write an improvement plan that could include recommendations on controlling livestock runoff, for example.

Regardless of whether the river is listed as impaired, the designation for whole-body contact means sewage treatment plants along the river will have to make improvements. Because the river is not designated for full contact now, said John Hoke, an environmental specialist and use attainability coordinator for the DNR, no plant discharging into the river is required to disinfect its effluent.

When a plant dumps into a river or lake that is designated for swimming, it must disinfect the effluent. The limits on the discharge are a mean reading of 400 colonies of fecal coliform per 100 milliliters, with a daily maximum reading of 1,000 colonies per 100 milliliters.

"What it means practically in terms of wastewater treatment plants is that they would be required to disinfect," Hoke said. The disinfection requirement would be put in place when a plant's permit is renewed.

Cape Girardeau discharges an average of 5.5 million gallons of treated sewage daily into the Mississippi from the wastewater treatment plant at 429 Cooper St., said Dennis Hale, plant manager. The city does not disinfect the wastewater.

The two common disinfecting methods are chlorination and ultraviolet light, Hale said. Installing disinfecting equipment would be the first major upgrade to the plant since it was constructed in the 1970s, Hale said.

"As far as what it would cost, I would hate to guess," Hale said. "Either one would be pretty expensive."

The whole-body contact designation would be an invitation to the public to take a new look at the river. Many people have a mistaken impression that the river is far too polluted for swimming, several sources said.

"There is a big plus to getting people back on the Mississippi River," Ford said. "The resource is there to be used, and there are some really interesting places on the river."

rkeller@semissourian.com

388-3642

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