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Catoctin Creek finishes five-year cleanup to mixed reviews
Five years ago, the county and state, with some money from the federal government, set out to improve water quality in Catoctin Creek. The plan was to help landowners fence livestock away from streams and to help residents install or improve their on-site septic systems.
Last week, the scientists and landowners who worked to make that happen got together to assess the project.
“We have done a lot of conservation,” said Chris Van Vlack, the Catoctin Creek Total Maximum Daily Load Project leader at the Loudoun County Soil and Water Conservation District at the July 27 meeting at Ida Lee Park in Leesburg. “But a lot of challenges remain.”
The incentive money from the government does not remain.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has been measuring bacteria in Catoctin Creek since 1973. In 1998, that testing put the entire creek, its north and south forks and the main channel from Waterford to the Potomac River, on the impaired list.
In the last five years, Van Vlack said, the TMDL Implementation project he was hired to oversee – its goal is to lower the bacteria levels to the point that the stream is no longer considered impaired – has contracted with landowners to help share the cost of putting in 22,000 linear feet of fencing to keep livestock out of streams, and to create 17 acres of buffer areas along streams. In addition, the program has partnered with landowners to put in 331 acres of cover crops and to install 14 water troughs to bring water to the livestock.
Another 17,210 feet of fencing and 11 water troughs are under contract and will be finished by the end of the year. Van Vlack has money in hand to help pay for any qualifying project that can be completed by Dec. 31.
Bacteria in the waterways can be traced to livestock, pets, wildlife and people – some older residences in the rural reaches of the county still rely on outhouses or pipe human waste directly into creeks. The county’s Health Department distributed cost-share money to install on-site septic fields, and to upgrade older, failing systems.
As farms give way to subdivisions, the bacteria problem lessens, Van Vlack said, but runoff from hard roofs and paved surfaces increases the sediment load in the streams, killing off the aquatic life that keeps the stream healthy, and eroding the banks.
Stormwater management wasn’t even done 50 years ago, Van Vlack said. Now it is routine and wastewater treatment plants are vastly more effective, “but all these advances really only hold the line because there are so many more people. We can reduce the impact per person, but there are 10 times more people.”
Over the five years of the program, said David Ward, who worked on the project with the Department of Building and Development and also as a volunteer with Loudoun Watershed Watch, bacteria levels dropped at eight of the monitoring stations, and went up at three. The project seems to underline the fact that “reducing bacteria levels is a complex and a difficult task,” Ward said.
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