It’s a familiar Western New York story. A local waterway has been treated by its industrial neighbor as a convenient dumping ground. Cattaraugus County’s Ischua Creek, a popular fishing spot justly famous for its brown trout, is now a watery graveyard for thousands of dead fish and other wildlife, including aquatic insects and plants.
“The data suggests the creek downstream of the Great Lakes Cheese facility had low dissolved oxygen and high levels of nutrients in exceedance of state standards,” the DEC said in a news release Saturday evening.
Great Lakes Cheese, which operates a $700 million manufacturing plant near the Franklinville creek, has only been up and running since Nov. 24, but apparently that was enough time for the wastewater it has been discharging into Ischua to do considerable damage. The company has a permit from New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation to discharge 900,000 gallons per day of treated dairy processing wastewater into Upper Ischua Creek.
Whatever treatment it used doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Operations have been paused and the DEC has ordered improvements to the facility’s digester operations, as well as other measures – including requiring the cheese company to pay for the clean-up.
DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton on Saturday said her office will pursue damages to ensure the restoration of the Cattaraugus County creek, a popular fishing destination that now reeks with the stench of rotting fish.
Does this news provide assurance that the creek is safe from future danger? There’s reason for concern. The dairy wastewater was supposed to be monitored – that process broke down and could easily do so again. State officials need to keep a stricter eye on these permitted discharges. Private companies pay attention to environmental standards because they must, but agencies with the word “environment” in their name are expected to be ever-vigilant.
This is especially important at a time when the federal government seems intent on demolishing every bit of official evidence that pollution might be a problem and abandoning all efforts to combat it.
As reported by The News’ Mackenzie Shuman, the DEC reported “levels of nitrite and ammonia in the water that are toxic to fish and other aquatic life. Other water quality parameters which exceeded standards include manganese and total dissolved solids.”
Fortunately, drinking water in the vicinity does not seem to have been affected.
Fish and other aquatic creatures require oxygen to breathe, just as humans do. But in this case, such highly elevated levels of nutrients, including nitrite and ammonia, were released into the creek by the manufacturer that the creek’s mechanisms for breaking down organic matter simply couldn’t keep up.
According to Corey Krabbenhoft, an assistant professor in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Biological Sciences, that process sucked all the oxygen out of the water. As we’ve seen with algal blooms in Lake Erie, biological contaminants can be just as deadly as any others.
Western New York’s streams, creeks and rivers provide valuable habitat, supporting biodiversity that is essential to human existence. They also provide healthy, refreshing recreational opportunities and contribute a great deal to the region’s natural beauty. Those benefits have not always been recognized.
The Buffalo River was so contaminated by industry in the late 1800s through the 1950s that it was declared dead in 1967. Thanks to heroic efforts, it is now making a recovery. In Niagara Falls, Gill Creek had a similar history, but it also underwent a restoration project – by Buffalo Waterkeeper, among other partners.
It is so much harder to clean up the mistakes of the past than it is to prevent further mistakes in the present.
Let’s keep those bad old days where they belong – in the past, during a time when we didn’t understand how finite natural resources could become. Ischua Creek deserves better oversight, as do all of the region’s precious waterways.