BY TRAVIS GRAVES, LOWER NEUSE RIVERKEEPER
The Lower Neuse basin and estuary are no strangers to fish kills. The summer of 2016 was a reminder of the bad old days, back in the mid-1990s, when the Neuse garnered national news as hundreds of millions of fish died along the river. Scientists, activists, and regulators scrambled to find the cause and implement strategies to reverse the degrading conditions. What they found was not what we would have expected. It wasn’t toxic chemical pollution from a villainous industrial giant, but something much more insidious. The culprit was simple nutrients – nitrogen and phosphorus – the same nutrients on our lawns and gardens to make our tomatoes fat and our grasses green. Too much of a good thing was, it turned out, deadly.
Nutrients were overwhelming the waters of eastern North Carolina, growing dangerous algae blooms on a scale large enough to impact property values, scare away valuable tourist dollars, and decimate the local commercial fishing industry. So scientists, advocates, and legislators developed a plan to reduce nutrient pollution, specifically nitrogen, by thirty percent. This would require municipalities, industry leaders, and other discharge permit holders to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul their water treatment systems. They did just that, with many achieving reductions greater than the targets. Yet, somehow, levels of nitrogen in the Neuse continued to increase.
This led to scrutiny of other nutrient sources in the basin – industrial meat facilities, chemical fertilizers and storm water management systems. In 1998, the Neuse Nutrient Strategy was made law after years of research. The plan set the reduction goals, instituted riparian buffer protections and set guidelines for wastewater treatment facilities and storm water management. It worked, with many facilities beating their reduction targets.
In the past several years, we started to see nitrogen levels begin to level off and the number of dead fish on our banks drop. Unfortunately, as fish kills continued in the summer of 2016, that perceived success was thwarted when the legislature attempted to roll back protections that had been in place since the 1990s Now is not the time to coast on the hard work done over the last twenty years.
Now is the time to ensure the success of that work. We didn’t rescue our water ecosystems from the brink of collapse just so housing developers and industrial meat facilities could continue polluting. We did it so our families and future generations would be able to live, work and play free of concerns about the safety of their drinking water, free of massive fish kills, and free of toxic algae blooms.