Before state wastewater standards went into effect in the 1960s, raw sewage could flow directly to a stream without treatment. Despite the standards, this continues in many areas today. In areas called “unsewered communities,” outdated or poorly functioning septic tanks still allow untreated wastewater into our waters. The Iowa DNR works with these communities to find funding sources and alternative treatment systems and to allow adequate time to upgrade the systems.
The Governor has announced that additional funding through the infrastructure bill that will be available to help unsewered communities upgrade their systems. Could this make a big difference for water quality in Iowa? Statewide, I’m not sure, but I’ve taken a closer look at the Iowa River Basin upstream of Marshalltown, where we know of 11 unsewered communities. Based on my first look at the data, it appears that these communities have little influence on E. coli in the Iowa River itself, but could make a difference for water quality in tributary streams like Beaver Creek in Hardin County.
There are 11 unsewered communities in the upper part of the Iowa River Basin, marked here with yellow circles with an X.
A Water Quality Improvement Plan for E. coli bacteria in the Iowa River Basin was released by Iowa DNR in 2017. As required by the Clean Water Act, these kinds of plans include a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) of pollutants that a water body could handle and still meet water quality standards. Author James Hallmark compares this pollution budget to a family budget: regulated point sources are your fixed bills, non-point sources are your variable expenses, and the margin of safety is your emergency fund. I like this analogy and would add that without some understanding of where your discretionary spending is going, and a realistic strategy to reign it in, you’re probably not going to achieve your goals.
The Water Quality Improvement Plan includes a comprehensive list of E. coli sources but doesn’t single any of them out as being particularly important. It includes a list of potential solutions, but it doesn’t identify which of those would make the most difference. That’s a job for a Watershed Management Plan written with stakeholder input, apparently. However, the document is chock-full of load-duration curves, which I wrote about previously. We can use the information in these charts and tables to take the next step and begin to narrow down where and when the pollution is most serious!
In this article, I won’t pay much attention to “High Flows” and “Low Flows” because there wouldn’t be much recreational use under these conditions. I also don’t look at “mid-range” flows because there’s a bigger mix of sources influencing water quality in these conditions. A closer look at the other two categories is revealing.
If houses are discharging raw sewage directly into a stream, we’d expect to see the highest E. coli concentrations when the stream is running lower than normal, and there’s less dilution. This is indeed what we see in Beaver Creek in Hardin County, which is downstream from the unsewered community of Owasa. Beaver Creek would need a 79% reduction in E. coli load to meet the primary contact recreation standard during “Dry Conditions” and a 38% reduction during “Wet Conditions”.
If not fully treated, sewage could be a major contributor to E. coli in some tributaries of the Iowa River.
Treated sewage also has the biggest influence when streams are lower than usual. The upper reaches of the South Fork receive effluent from the small towns of Williams and Alden, which have waste stabilization lagoons. It’s likely that some bacteria makes it through the treatment process, and this would explain why E. coli is higher during “Dry Conditions” (needing a 73% reduction) than during “Wet Conditions” (needing a 30% reduction). When their permits come up for renewal, Iowa DNR could require a UV disinfection system to ensure that E. coli in effluent is no greater than 126 colonies/100mL.
The blue line is the wasteload allocation–the regulated part of the pollution budget. Even with the best available treatment, wastewater from two towns has a big influence on the South Fork during dry conditions.
In a watershed with few people and many hogs, we’d expect to see the highest E. coli concentrations when the streams are running high and runoff from fields that receive manure application is more likely. This is indeed what we see in Tipton Creek in Hardin County, a watershed containing 47(!) CAFOs, but the levels are not especially high compared to other sites in the Iowa River basin. The recreation standard is met during “Dry Conditions” and would need a 36% reduction during “Wet Conditions.” Handled correctly (applied to flat ground at the right time, and preferably incorporated into the soil), manure and the microbes it contains can be kept out of streams. Preventing loss of the nutrients in manure is a more difficult challenge—nitrate concentrations in Tipton Creek often exceed 20 mg/L!
Despite there being a lot of hogs in the Tipton Creek watershed, E. coli levels are not especially high, relative to downstream locations.
It’s not clear to me whether primary contact recreational use of these streams is a relevant or attainable goal, or whether we should be calibrating our level of concern to the secondary contact recreation criteria. Unless there’s a permit holder affected, IDNR doesn’t investigate whether there’s enough water for kayaking in Tipton Creek, or whether children play in Beaver Creek, so the designated use is presumptive and tells me nothing.
E. coli and recreation on the Iowa River is not as big a concern at Crystal Lake as it is at Steamboat Rock. Photo Credits: Ryan Adams, photojournalist
To protect fishing, paddling, and children’s play on the Iowa River itself, where and when should we focus? The Iowa River at Marshalltown needs a 60% reduction in bacteria load to meet the recreation standard during “Wet Conditions” (10-40% flow exceedance). However, it actually meets the primary contact recreation standard during “Dry Conditions” (60-90% flow exceedance). Focusing on unsewered communities in the watershed would NOT be an effective way to address this impairment.
Beaver Creek (left) has worse E. coli when it’s dry. The Iowa River near Marshalltown (right) has worse E. coli when it’s wet. If the green line is above the red line, that indicates that the E. coli geometric mean for that range of flows exceeds the standard.
Galls Creek in Hancock County has some of the worst E. coli levels measured in the basin, and would have a larger per-acre benefit to the Iowa River if standards could be met. Galls Creek has no unsewered communities but at least 20 farmsteads located along the creek that could have issues with septic systems overflowing under wet weather. The watershed has little woodland and no pasture, so land application of manure from the several CAFOs in the watershed would be most likely animal source of E. coli.
Table by Prairie Rivers of Iowa, using information from the Water Quality Improvement Plan for the Iowa River Basin
This is just a partial review of one of three HUC8s in the Iowa River Basin. There is much more to learn from further discussion with people who know the area well, or from on-site investigation. However, I hope I’ve demonstrated how we might squeeze some more insight out of the data we have, in order to make smart investments in water quality.
Water quality in the South Skunk River is still poor but has gotten better in the last five years. One reason for improvement is a new disinfection system at the Ames wastewater treatment plant.
Dr. Chris Jones recently shared a water quality index he developed for Iowa rivers, combining five important water quality metrics. Of the 45 sites in the Iowa DNR’s ambient monitoring network, the South Skunk River near Cambridge scored “poor” and ranked 34th overall. This site also has the 3rd highest phosphorus and the 5th highest E. coli levels.
A follow-up article looked whether the current (2016-2020) water quality index has changed from previous decades. Most rivers have stayed the same or gotten worse, but the South Skunk had a better score. Three of the metrics (total phosphorus, total nitrogen, and E. coli bacteria) improved, while one (turbidity, a measure of sediment in the water) got worse.
Phosphorus and muddy water usually go together, so this odd pattern demanded some explanation. I did my own analysis of the data, curious if the changes were happening under drier conditions (when wastewater has a bigger influence), wetter conditions (when agricultural runoff has a bigger influence) or both.
See last week’s post for an explanation of the flow categories I’m using. I use a lot of boxplots, which show both the central tendency and the spread of the data. The lower end, middle, and upper ends of the box are the 25th, 50th (median) and 75th percentiles. The “whiskers” show the maximum and minimum, unless they’re really far out there, in which case the “outliers” represented by dots. Water quality data never fits a bell curve, so lopsided boxes and outliers are to be expected.
It turns out that the river didn’t get any muddier (it got less muddy) when you compare wet conditions to wet conditions and mid-range conditions to mid-range conditions.
It’s just that the past five years were a little wetter and so a larger share (43% vs 29%) of the samples were collected during wet conditions when the river was moving swiftly and carrying more sediment. A smaller share (25% vs 42%) of the samples were collected during dry and low-flow conditions when the water is usually clear. That made the average sediment concentration increase.
Weather also can explain trends in phosphorus. In the past five years, a smaller share of the samples were collected during dry and low-flow conditions when phosphorus concentrations are especially high. That made the average phosphorus concentration decrease.
Why is phosphorus so high when it’s dry? The monitoring site in question is just below the outfall of Ames Water Pollution Control Facility on 280th St, about 4 miles north of Cambridge. This facility discharges over 6 million gallons a day of treated wastewater. When conditions are dry, the effluent is less diluted, and so phosphorus in the stream approaches phosphorus levels in the effluent (which averages 3.8 mg/L), as shown in the graph below. This year we’ve also monitored West Indian Creek below the Nevada wastewater treatment plant and have seen the same pattern.
Wastewater treatment plants are regulated to minimize the impact on receiving waters and the Ames WPC Facility has one of the best compliance records in the nation. However, while the treatment process is very good at removing ammonia, solids, and oxygen-depleting substances, the process is not that effective for removing nutrients.
The Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy is not voluntary for wastewater treatment plants. The Ames Water and Pollution Control Department commissioned a feasibility study as a condition of its permit, which determined that the facility could achieve a 67% reduction in total nitrogen and a 75% reduction in total phosphorus by replacing its trickling filters with an activated sludge treatment system. This new system will be phased in as the filters reach the end of their useful life (starting in 2027) and will cost $39.6 million.
In the last five years we have not seen any reduction in phosphorus during dry and low-flow conditions when wastewater treatment systems have the biggest influence. However, there was a reduction in phosphorus* under mid-range and high flow conditions! This is really interesting–I’ll have to look at some other data sets to see whether it holds up and whether we can link it to conservation practices in the watershed.
For E. coli, we see improvement across all conditions, with the largest improvement during low-flow conditions* when wastewater has the biggest influence.
The effluent discharged to the river has gotten a lot cleaner since the Ames Water Pollution Control Facility built $2 million disinfection system using ultra-violet (UV) light. The system was completed in March of 2015. During the recreational season (March 15-Nov 15), treated effluent passes through two banks of lights that kill microbes. Prior to this, some E. coli and pathogens could make it through the system and end up in the river. Chlorination, a good solution for disinfecting drinking water and swimming pools, is not ideal for wastewater because it can harm fish.
Kris Evans, an environmental engineer for the City of Ames and the project manager, said this about the system:
“By using UV we continue to be “chemical free” for treatment of the wastewater and it’s much safer for staff since they don’t have to chlorinate and dechlorinate. When flow is low at the plant, we are able to lower the intensity of the bulbs to save energy and still meet permit limits; as flow increases so does the UV light intensity. The City started design of the UV system before it was mandated in a permit; we knew it was coming, but wanted to be proactive in the treatment of water, making it safer for those who recreated in the river. It was also the first project the department funded through an State Revolving Fund (SRF) loan.”
We still see high E. coli levels in other streams that receive effluent, but smaller wastewater treatment systems are also making the switch to comply with new permit requirements. In Story County, Gilbert added a UV disinfection system in 2019, the Squaw Valley HOA completed theirs in 2020, and Nevada will build a new wastewater treatment plant in 2022 that includes UV disinfection.
* I’ve written before about the challenges of detecting water quality trends. I’m pleased to report that two of the trends discussed here (a reduction in phosphorus at mid-range flow conditions, and a reduction in E. coli in dry and low-flow conditions) were statistically significant at 90% confidence level, using a test of the difference between medians. The approach employed here (sorting by flow conditions) may be a good way to control for weather and reach more reliable conclusions. It’s exciting to have some good news that holds up to further analysis!
