Displaying vials of phosphorous-containing water from the Fox River, a group of environmentalists Wednesday charged that elevated levels of the pollutant could one day threaten the health of the river and those who depend on it.
If nothing is done, said the Sierra Club’s Eugene McArdle, a retired professor of ecology and zoology at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, the river could return to the dangerous pollution levels of decades ago that left fish dead by its banks and recreational users fewer places to go.
Activists charged during a news conference along the banks of the river in St. Charles that the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is dragging its feet in improving pollution controls and enforcing the federal Clean Water Act, passed in 1972.
Although there is no immediate danger to underground aquifers or to most life forms, activists said the state EPA is turning a blind eye toward a potentially vexing problem.
“Do we want another fish kill before we get worried?” asked Fran Caffee, a self-described “river rat” and member of the Fox Valley branch of the Sierra Club. “The question is, Will we do something now or will we wait until we have a serious problem, then say, `Oh, it’s too late’?”
For 13 months ending in November, volunteers took samples from a stretch of the 120-mile-long river from Elgin to Yorkville. Although contaminant levels varied, the volunteers consistently found amounts of phosphorous in the water many times higher than U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards. The principal sources of the phosphorous, they said, are sewage-treatment plants, farms and suburban development.
In small doses, phosphorous is a useful mineral, said McArdle, who lives near the river in Wayne. But high doses promote algae growth that turns the water a putrid green and sucks up oxygen.
Federal requirements “set minimums, but if we want to do better than that, it’s up to the state,” said Jack Darin, state field representative for the Sierra Club, which claims about 20,000 members in Illinois, including 600 in the Fox Valley. “Illinois seems content with the status quo, but if the IEPA doesn’t act, we could be back to the problems of 20 years ago.”
Darin said the state must vigorously regulate the region’s major sewage-treatment plants that discharge into the river. The rapidly growing Fox Valley is expected to generate 50 percent more discharge in 2010 than in 1990, he said.
“If we don’t make treatment plants better, we’re going to lose our clean river,” Darin said.
Joel Cross of the IEPA’s Bureau of Water said phosphorous levels through Kane and Kendall Counties are only marginally higher than those at the Wisconsin border.
“We have to look at all the issues before we go regulating,” Cross said. “We’re trying to look at it on a watershed basis, to look at all impacts before we make a decision on a particular action on one particular source.”
The IEPA, Darin said, also should reduce polluted runoff from such sources as farm fields, subdivisions and parking lots. And it should add the Fox River to its proposed river cleanup plan, which includes 336 of the state’s other waterways, he said.
“Because the Fox River technically meets water quality standards, they say it doesn’t need it,” Darin said. “But they have no standard for phosphorous in rivers.”
Cross said the IEPA recently completed an intensive survey of the Fox River and its tributaries but the information may not yet be available for listing.
Caffee said volunteers soon will begin testing for levels of other potential contaminants in the water.
