From the Chickens to the Crabs - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 71

But the poultry industry strenuously denies that Roxarsone is responsible for fish
kills. The Poultry & Egg Institute says “the benefits of Roxarsone … far outweigh the
concerns.” Hobey Bauhan , of the Virginia Poultry Federation, said that arsenic levels
from chicken litter (11.7 parts per million) fall well below the EPA's standard for land-
applied biosolids (75 parts per million). And Richard Morris , who uses poultry litter
to fertilize his fields about a mile west of the Shenandoah River, told BlueRidgeOut-
doorsmagazine that while the litter washes into his pond, it supports plenty of twenty-
inch bass. Kelble counters that farm ponds hold largemouth bass, which are resilient;
the Shenandoah's smallmouth bass, however, have been dying in large numbers. Speak-
ing for many farmers, Morris said of the fish kills: “If someone proves it's poultry litter,
which I doubt will happen, then [farmers] and [integrators] will do everything they can
to stop it.”
Kelble isn't persuaded: “This is a business that's electing to continue introducing a
known carcinogen and toxic substance onto the land, and it gets into the water. That is
a problem. We need to stand up for the river.”
The Shenandoah feeds into the Potomac—“the Nation's River”—which wends for 383
miles, from the Appalachian Mountains, through Washington, DC, to Point Lookout,
Maryland, where it empties into Chesapeake Bay. Some 5.24 million people live in the
Potomac watershed , a number expected to grow another 20 percent, to 6.25 million,
by 2020. Intensive development around Washington has led to impermeable roads and
buildings, which create “a waterslide for pollutants” into the bay.
he 2002 National Water Quality Inventory noted that of the approximately ten
thousand stream miles in the Potomac watershed, more than thirty-eight hundred miles
were deemed “threatened” or “impaired.” In 2007, the Potomac Conservancy, noting the
persistence of these “disturbing trends,” gave the river a D+ for cleanliness. By 2010, the
grade had improved to a C, which represents “moderate ecosystem health.”
Much of the river's pollution originated with human sewage, and cleaning the Po-
tomac required expensive upgrades to water treatment plants such as the Blue Plains
Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, just south of the capital. Blue Plains is a massive
plant, capable of treating some 370 million to 1.076 billion gallons of sewage a day for
the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia. In 1979, Blue Plains un-
derwent a $1 billion upgrade, which added new technologies such as BNR, or biological
nutrient removal, which uses bacteria and other organisms to consume sewage. (It was
such a success that over a hundred other treatment plants around the bay were also up-
graded.)
The clean water laws of the 1970s had clearly defined criteria, with deadlines and
enforcement penalties spelled out. But in 1981, Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of