EPA: Cleanup of Ohio streams, tributaries lags

COLUMBUS (AP) — State officials say Ohio’s small streams and tributaries are slowly becoming clean and healthy for fish and wildlife, but despite increased efforts they do not expect to meet an ambitious cleanup goal set by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA had hoped to be able to declare 80 percent of Ohio’s streams safe enough to support aquatic wildlife by 2010.

But a new agency report shows with two years to go, only 55 percent of the 3,000 named streams in the state are free of enough pollution to meet the standard.

Stream pollution is primarily caused by run-off from farms and homes, raw sewage overflow from cities and towns during periods of high rainfall and erosion caused by new homes and construction sites, according to the report.

Efforts to combat the pollution have included voluntary programs that encourage the use of less fertilizer and mandatory upgrades of sewer-treatment plants, said George Elmaraghy, chief of the Ohio EPA’s surface-water program. Still, there’s a long way to go, he said.

The state measures the health of a stream by how many species of fish, mussels and insects live in it, and then uses that measure to guide further cleanup efforts.

A move to reduce pollution at sewage-treatment plants helped the Scioto go from only 11 percent clean and safe to nearly 90 percent clean in just a few years, according to EPA figures.