Irene: Flood-borne toxins contaminate watershed

PHOTOGRAPHER: Sara Foss

John McKeeby walks along the Schoharie Creek, picking his way through a nature preserve once covered with ferns and poison ivy but now a landscape of gray sand and sticky mud.

He points to his neighbors’ possessions.

A yellow wall ripped from a house half a mile down the road is tangled in uprooted trees and limbs. Electrical outlets and plumbing fixtures poke through the wreckage; underwear, jackets and shirts dangle from branches. Two oil tanks rest on the battered shore.

McKeeby, 51, is the executive director of the Schoharie River Center, a nonprofit organization in the hard-hit Montgomery County community of Burtonsville that monitors the water quality of the Schoharie Creek and provides educational and cultural programming.

The center’s modest headquarters emerged from Hurricane Irene unscathed, but the storm left its mark on the organization’s 20-acre nature preserve, which borders the Schoharie Creek. Piles of debris stretch for about 500 feet, and many of these piles are between 10 and 15 feet tall; jagged scraps of roofs and walls trapped high in trees provide startling evidence of just how high the flood waters rose.

By midweek the creek had receded, though its oceanic roar could still be heard from a short distance away and its waters remained the color of chocolate milk. The smell was also unusual: a musty mix of raw sewage and oil that served as an unpleasant reminder of the pollution caused by last week’s ferocious flooding.

“When there’s a flood like this, everything washes in — soil, fertilizers, waste, heating oil,” McKeeby said. “In Schoharie County, we’ve had houses picked up and washed into the river. We’ve seen heating oil tanks and cars in the river. In terms of pollution issues, all that stuff is washed down into the watershed.” The larger debris washed up on shore, where it could cause problems by leaking and contaminating the soil, McKeeby said.

John Sheehan, a spokesman for the environmental organization the Adirondack Council, said, “All sorts of things are getting into the water.”

Runoff as a result of the storm is a big concern; last week the Schenectady County Public Health Services urged all residents to use caution when dealing with floodwaters, saying that “floodwaters may be contaminated with infectious disease agents and chemicals.” But officials also said that the pollution would likely dissipate quickly, because of the large volume of water and the speed with which it was moving downstream.

Sewage overflow

Katherine Nadeau, the water and natural resources program director for Environmental Advocates of New York, said that raw sewage in local rivers is a major issue; when heavy rains overburden aging sewer systems, the excess — a combination of untreated stormwater and effluent from homes and businesses — is discharged directly into the river, in what is known as a combined sewer overflow event.

Right now local waterways are highly turbid — muddy as a result of having sediment or foreign particles stirred up or suspended. This discoloration includes dirt, silt and sewage.

“We would expect the bacterial standards to be elevated,” said Joe DiMura, director of the Bureau of Water Compliance for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “The river is still running high and muddy.”

He said that the storm overwhelmed wastewater treatment plants, and that although most plants are operating normally once again, some, particularly those in the Catskills, are still experiencing difficulties.

“Right now we’re trying to home in on which plants were damaged,” DiMura said. He said that combined sewer overflows would subside when the runoff does. “I can’t really tell you when I expect to return to normal,” he said. “Creeks are still running high, and they’re carrying agricultural runoff.” That runoff includes waste from both farms and septic systems.

Nadeau predicted that it would be a while before water quality returned to an acceptable level. “We still have more water than usual running into the system,” she said. “It’s going to take a long time for the waterways to recover.”

Dangerous scene

John Lipscomb saw the debris in the rivers first hand.

He serves as captain of the 36-foot-long patrol boat used to monitor water quality by Riverkeeper, an environmental organization that works to protect the Hudson River, and he found himself dodging trees, picnic tables and litter as he traveled downstate from Coxsackie Island on Monday morning.

“There were big rafts of water chestnuts working their way downriver,” Lipscomb said. “There were little islands of green.”

Lipscomb said he didn’t test for water quality after the storm, because it would skew the test results for August. But he said that up until the storm, August was a fairly average month in terms of water quality. Wetter months tend to be worse: In July, only six of 75 sites showed elevated microbial counts, while in May, 80 percent did. He said that it would be “very interesting” to see what September’s testing revealed about the Hudson River in the aftermath of the storm.

“Not much is known about the degree of sewage contamination or its longevity,” Lipscomb said. “If the water is still turbid, we’re likely to get a high count.”

The flooding will impact some rivers and streams by causing a wholesale physical transformation and temporarily altering their ecology, according to Craig Milewski, an associate professor of fisheries biology at Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks. Some stream channels likely shifted as a result of the flood, and it’s possible that new channels have been created and old ones left behind. It’s also possible that the basic structure of rivers and streams changed, and that deep pools and rapids are now located in new places.

Milewski said the food supply would be disrupted for a while, because the invertebrates at the bottom of the food chain were completely uprooted and swept away by the storm. Those invertebrates would recolonize their old habitat in about a year, and it would take a few years for some of the fish that were pushed downstream to return. The high silt content of the water, he said, could make it harder for fish to breathe.

“The general effect of the storm was like a reset button,” Milewski said. “In terms of their biological life, streams will recover, but it will take time. But rivers are all about change.”

Milewski said the rivers also contain a large amount of “woody debris” — trees and branches — but that woody debris can be good, because it can help stabilize streams.

For years, the Schoharie River Center operated out of the historic Burtonsville Methodist Church, a plain white building with a simple altar and rows of hard wooden pews. But the building lacked heat and water, and in July the nonprofit organization officially celebrated the opening of a new facility, located a short distance down the road.

At the Schoharie River Center, the flood wiped out nature trails and tossed an Adirondack lean-to recently constructed for an Eagle Scout project into a stand of trees. The storm flattened trees and grasses and left dead fish grounded.

Fragments of memory

During a tour of the site, McKeeby occasionally stooped to pluck dirt-encrusted photographs off the ground. So far, he estimates that he has collected about 200 photographs — a mix of school pictures, vacation shots and casual portraits. He brings these pictures to the Burtonsville Fire Department, where he is a volunteer firefighter, so that flood victims can look at them and take what’s theirs. McKeeby knows many of the people in these photographs, but not all of them. A picture labeled “Courtney or Elizabeth Pooler 1991” that depicts a small girl in a dress skipping through the grass is a mystery — he doesn’t know where it came from.

As he walks, McKeeby recognizes parts of houses belonging to neighbors, but the origin of other debris is unknown.

“That gray siding, I don’t recognize it,” McKeeby said. “It’s not from Burtonsville.”

Like many, McKeeby had never seen anything like the storm that devastated his community.

“Everybody said it would be a big storm, that we would get a lot of rain,” he said. “But I don’t think people expected it to be as big as it was.”