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A Step in the Right Direction

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Photo by Jim Block.

Good news stories about the environment can seem hard to find these days, which makes it nice to report that power plants across the country have collectively decreased emissions of acid-rain-causing pollutants ahead of schedule.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, national sulfur dioxide pollution fell from 7.60 million tons in 2008 to 5.75 million tons in 2009. At the same time, nitrogen oxide pollution fell by 1 million tons, or more than 30 percent, to 2 million tons.

The results of these reductions are clearly being seen in the water quality of lakes and streams in the Northeast. In the Adirondack Mountains, where the chemistry of 52 lakes has been analyzed every month since 1992 by the Adirondack Lakes Survey Corp., the trends are going in the right direction.

“There has been some level of improvement in all of the lakes. Overall, pollutants are declining and, in many cases, measurements of pH and acid neutralizing capacity are improving,” said Karen Roy, a research scientist with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which is a partner in the Adirondack Lakes Survey Corporation. “Trends for sulfate concentrations are declining in all lakes, but the nitrate picture is less consistent, and in some lakes it’s not changing. But all lakes are unique; their chemistry and biota all behave and respond differently.”

Acid deposition is caused by air pollutants, mostly from coal burning power plants, mixing with water in the atmosphere and falling as acidic rain, snow, or fog. When deposited on land, acid deposition changes the chemistry of the soil, causing naturally occurring aluminum to become soluble and toxic. In acidic lakes, toxic forms of mercury become more available to organisms. The effects of acid deposition are especially severe in mountainous areas of the Northeast, where the soils (naturally somewhat acidic) cannot neutralize the additional acid.

While most of the Adirondack lakes that have been surveyed show significant improvements in water quality, the fish populations in those lakes haven’t necessarily responded in kind.

“Our concerns continue about whether the biota are responding to the improvements in water chemistry and whether the improvements are adequate,” Roy said. “We do some fish surveys, and we’ve seen some improvements in some fish communities, but it hasn’t been impressive.

In some places, it’s hard to tell whether there have been any improvements at all.. . . Overall we’ve seen a signal that there is a potential response in fish communities, but it’s varied and small.”

Nonetheless, Roy is excited about the progress that has been made.

“It took a long time to determine whether acid in the lakes was connected to acidic deposition and whether rain impurities were connected to emissions,” she said. “After years of emissions control, we’re seeing the evidence that when you clean up the air, you clean up the rain, and the lakes respond.

“When you think about the lakes in the Adirondacks or in Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire, the fact that you can reverse the chemistry enough to begin to recover the natural buffering, that’s pretty amazing. You begin to see signals that the biological communities that you’ve lost or stressed are coming back. And that’s great to see.”

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