Who Hates Trout Rivers?

Dr. Charles Heartwell — a commercial fly tier for the past half-century and, until his retirement in 1996, the state's hatchery supervisor — developed most of his famous patterns on the Elk after he'd conducted a three-year study of the aquatic insects of central West Virginia. I asked him how much raw sewage it would take to extirpate the Elk's wild trout.

"You'd have to get a pencil and paper," he replied. "You'd have to figure what you're bringing in — the heat, the oxygen deficit — and you'd have to know how much the flow can stand. It probably wouldn't take much. The stream is still one of my favorites, and the fishery has held up very well. But the system is way over-silted from all the development at Snowshoe; and there are flow problems from all the physical damage to the watershed up there and the timbering [of the ski trails on Cheat Mountain]. A sewage plant in this watershed is kind of like a nuclear-power plant; it would only take one leak. Can you safeguard against that one catastrophe? I doubt it."

Heartwell's analogy takes us most of the way; but it's not entirely apt unless we're talking about a mid-20th Century Soviet Union nuclear-power plant. While major leaks and overflows are not a routine part of nuclear-power production, the same cannot be said of the sewage-treatment business. Even at the most modern facilities built on solid, dry ground it's not a question of if, but when.

Another avid Elk River angler is chemical engineer George Phillips, president of Eight Rivers Safe Development, Inc. — the citizen's group working full time to save the upper Elk. Eight Rivers has taken the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to court for its slovenly and unlawful environmental assessment (EA) of the treatment plant and attendant "finding of no significant impact" (FONSI).

The 23-page document contains 11 brief sentences (but no relevant information) on karst, caves and springs. The single correct statement in those 11 sentences is that investigators failed to find "voids [caves] under any proposed structures." This is because they didn't look.

"A sewage spill in karst caves isn't like a surface spill," observes Phillips. "In a surface stream, you have impermeable rock as well as sunlight to break down organics. You're going to kill fish, but the stream will eventually recover. It's different with an underground spill. There are reaches of the caves that don't always get water. Sewage would fester in there for years, continually contaminating the stream. We think DEP glossed over this in their environmental assessment and that it didn't understand the geology and hydrology of the area."

A study by Evan Hansen, president of the respected environmental consulting firm Downstream Strategies, found the following violations by DEP of the National Environmental Policy Act, which was adopted as state law by the West Virginia legislature: "1. A premature decision was made to issue this FONSI, even before the EA was completed; 2. The EA is flawed because it does not conform to state rules and federal regulations; 3. According to the regulations, DEP cannot issue a FONSI and must prepare an environmental impact statement; 4. No public meeting was held when alternatives had been developed, but before an alternative had been selected, to discuss all alternatives . . . . 5. No public hearing was held prior to formal adoption of a facilities plan."

Matching DEP's ineptitude and deference to the appetites of industry was the Army Corps of Engineers, which wrongly decreed that the proposed construction site — pocked as it is with sinkholes, springs, and "boil holes" (where water boils up out of the ground) — wasn't in Big Spring Fork's floodplain. It made this determination indoors, by looking at a topo map.