The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Water monitoring program limited in testing capacity
Connecticut has 2,267 lakes and ponds that measure more than 10 acres, but a state water monitoring program is only able to sample around 20 annually for the overall health of the water body, according to the Department of Energy & Environmental protection.
What the DEEP gathers at those 20 lakes a year is data that informs its Integrated Water Quality Report, or IWQR, released every two years, which department officials say indicates whether Connecticut waters meet the standards of the Clean Water Act.
While sparse resources contribute to limited testing, the full picture is more complicated, according to Philip Trowbridge, assistant director of the DEEP’s water planning and assessment division, who said staff turnover in academic research projects, challenges inherent to monitoring and a prio
ritization of faster-changing bodies of water also account for the lack of data.
The DEEP also draws from data collected through other programs, such as university initiatives and lake associations, the department’s website indicates.
While the slow testing frequency affects ecological assessments, it does not necessarily mean public health is at risk : the Department of Public Health administers drinking water regulations, per the state website, and the DPH, DEEP and local health departments test for bacteria at beaches, according to a document outlining the DEEP’s water monitoring strategy.
But because the DEEP is implementing a project to keep its data in one place, it would take several months to compile information on the most recent testing dates for each lake in the IWQR, agency spokesman Will Healey said.
The report
The 2020 IWQR, available online in its draft form, indicates that 789 water body “segments” are impaired in some way, a number that not only includes lakes, but also rivers, estuaries and portions of Long Island Sound.
Of those, 322 require an action plan to be put in place, per the report.
“In spite of tremendous progress in water quality, there are still gains to be made particularly in the area of nonpoint source (NPS) stormwater management, and infrastructure maintenance and improvements,” the draft report says.
For lakes, ponds and reservoirs, general IWQR assessments indicate whether the body of water is eutrophic, meaning it has excess nutrients that can result in algal blooms and deoxygenation, Trowbridge said.
Those conditions can hinder both aquatic life and recreation, he said, as low oxygen levels limit fish life, and “if there’s a lot of algae, no one wants to swim there.”
The draft 2020 IWQR tracks 182 lakes, ponds and reservoirs, the area of which total around 30,437 acres, according to the report, which indicates whether they are “supporting” or “not supporting” aquatic life and recreation, or whether there is insufficient data to make a determination.
In terms of acreage, the lakes tracked in the report represent nearly half of the state’s 64,973 acres of lakes, a number that does not include Connecticut’s smaller lakes, Healey, the DEEP spokesman, said.
Of the tracked lakes, the DEEP did not have enough data to assess more than 5,740 acres of waters, the report indicates. It also shows that nearly 23,540 acres of lakes are supporting aquatic life, while just less than 1,160 acres are not supporting it.
For recreation, the numbers are a little different; more than 7,440 acres went unassessed — because there was either insufficient or no data, according to the report — and some 6,710 acres were designated not supporting. That leaves around 16,280 acres of lakes the DEEP found to be fully supporting recreational uses.
If a lake is “not supporting” aquatic life or recreation, it does not mean there is no swimming or fishing, said Oswald Inglese, director of the DEEP’s Water Permitting and Enforcement Bureau.
Instead, a listed impairment means the DEEP wants to restore the lake to a certain level of quality, Inglese said, adding that “it’s talking about where we would like the waterbody to be.”
The 12-part report also provides assessments on estuaries, rivers and streams, and lists fish consumption advisories and pollution control measures, among other items.
Since rivers change daily, the state tests them more frequently, according to Trowbridge, who added that extensive resources also go into monitoring Long Island Sound.
“You have to recognize that lakes don’t change very rapidly,” he said. “You kind of test at the frequency you need to test.”
Testing challenges
In general, water quality monitoring programs work with “bare bones” resources, said Trowbridge, who has worked in two other states.
And funding generally doesn’t increase with inflation, he said.
“We could definitely do a better job with more resources,” Trowbridge said. But, he added later, “the resources is just part of it.”
To get a sense of a lake’s health, there needs to be a data set that shows how a body of water changes over time, according to Trowbridge.
Long-term data sets can be tough to maintain, especially as monitoring methods change constantly – and switching methods can disrupt data sets, Trowbridge said.
So can staff turnover. The DEEP often works with academic programs that conduct data collection, but the staff in these programs often leave after a decade or so – which Trowbridge said is just when a data set begins to gain value.
Given the challenges to long-term water monitoring, data sets that span 30 or 40 years are “like gold,” Trowbridge said.
“You do everything you can to preserve that,” he said.
“I think Connecticut is in a common situation as other states,” Trowbridge said, adding that he thinks the state does quite well with its water monitoring program, especially in assessing Long Island Sound.
Gaps in data
In one example in the state, infrequent sampling has led to gaps in data for a North Branford lake that has raised particular concern among residents over the past year.
The draft of the 2020 IWQR says Cedar Lake, also called Cedar Pond, which sits south of Route 80 near its intersection with Route 22, is “not supporting” aquatic life or recreation, and the finalized 2018 IWQR said the same.
But most of the data informing that assessment is from 1996, Trowbridge said, noting that some of it comes from 2004.
The department bases its current assessment of the lake on whether it has reason to believe the condition has changed, but it is not able to know whether the lake is better or worse off than it was 15 years ago, according to Trowbridge.
Residents who live in the neighborhood surrounding Cedar Lake disagree on whether it should be considered “polluted.”
While Cedar Pond is not currently on the DEEP’s list of impaired water bodies, the DEEP released an analysis of Cedar Pond in 2005, reporting that increased phosphorus from human sources, including “stormwater runoff, construction activities, quarry activities, use of fertilizers, waterfowl, and to a lesser extent failed or improperly functioning septic systems,” had contributed to the lake’s eutrophication.
Eutrophic conditions at Cedar Pond included “nonalgal turbidity in response to inclement weather” and “algal blooms under lowflow conditions,” according to the report.
As a result of the analysis, the DEEP implemented a “Total Maximum Daily Load,” which requires both municipal sources and Tilcon, which discharges water toward the lake from a nearby quarry, to come up with a plan to limit the phosphorus entering Cedar Lake, according to Karen Allen, of DEEP, who handles stormwater permitting.
Allen said the phosphorus levels in Tilcon’s discharge are low; the company is permitted to releaseup to 2 million gallons a day, per a permit issued in 2018.
Concerns over the lake’s health bubbled up late last year at a local meeting of the town’s Inland Wetlands & Watercourses Association, footage available on Totoket TV’s YouTube channel shows.
Residents at the meeting worried about signs of flooding at the lake, which receives water from a variety of upstream sources but does not drain properly.
A couple of residents also raised another concern: whether water from upstream was polluting the lake.
In December interviews with a reporter, other residents from the lake’s surrounding neighborhood argued the opposite, noting that people use the lake for recreation.
It is also home to diverse wildlife, some said.
The Cedar Lake Association, which consists of residents with access to the lake’s beach, has its own water testing results from December and May available on its website, neither of which flagged phosphorus levels as a concern.
The DEEP’s ability to use lake association data depends on a number of factors, such as how parameters are measured and quality assurance procedures, Trowbridge said. He could not immediately comment on the data’s significance, which require research, he said.
Looking ahead
Officials takes public input seriously when completing the IWQR, according to Trowbridge.
When it comes to Cedar Pond, he said, “If someone did want us to put this as a higher priority they could give us a comment like that,” adding, “if there’s interest from people in that area who would like us to come back and sample it a little bit sooner we’d be open to that.”
In addition to public input, the department uses several factors to determine which lakes it tests and includes in the IWQR.
They consider which waterbodies have known concerns and where data already exists, Trowbridge said, adding that the DEEP also selects some lakes randomly in a method called “probabilistic monitoring.”
The DEEP conducts probabilistic monitoring, where it chooses a random sample of waters to monitor, under the rationale that the sample should paint a picture of the overall health of Connecticut’s waters, according to a document laying out the DEEP’s water quality monitoring strategy.
The document recognizes that “the resources are lacking to sample ‘everywhere all the time.’”
But the department has several projects in the works to help fill in the gaps, according to Trowbridge.
One is a program that will help lake associations like the one in North Branford upload results into a federal database, allowing the DEEP “to more efficiently use data from lake associations,” he said.
Another is a $3 million modeling project, which will help the DEEP predict trends in the health of a body of water, filling in the blanks where testing data is not available, according to Trowbridge.