Des Moines Register. June 16, 2024.
Editorial: Disastrous figures show the poverty of Iowa’s water quality approach
No accident, no matter how awful, can compete with the relentless day-to-day flood of nitrate pollution from countless sources throughout Iowa.
The news so far in 2024 has punctured any drought-fed illusion that Iowa is making meaningful progress on keeping water clean.
Enforcement, incentives, individual effort, political will — it’s clear that none of the systems that might mitigate the fouling of our water has been adequate to the task. The first step in changing that reality is being clear-headed about the scope and seriousness of the problem.
In that vein, the numbers alone from NEW Cooperative’s March fertilizer spill in southwest Iowa are head-spinning. It injected over 200,000 gallons of nitrogen fertilizer into the East Nishnabotna River at Red Oak — that would fill almost half an Olympic swimming pool. About 750,000 fish suffocated in over 50 miles of the river system.
The cooperative attributes the fiasco to a cascade of mundane errors and horrible happenstance. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which cannot penalize polluters more than $10,000 through its administrative authority, has received approval for the attorney general’s office to take over the matter.
The real pollution catastrophe happens on a near-daily basis all over Iowa
It would be nice to think that a headline-making fine and an announcement about new procedures or technologies to prevent similar accidents would eventually help us Iowans feel better about our water and other resources. But even with a mass fish kill in the Nishnabotna becoming the latest poster child for water pollution in Iowa, we’d barely be better off if it had never happened.
Runoff and soil erosion continually pour dangerous chemicals into bodies of water statewide. The pollution starves fish of oxygen. It causes organic material to grow that threatens to sicken humans unless drinking water providers spend huge sums on decontamination. It similarly makes water unsafe for recreation. This spring’s heavy rainfall ended years of drought — and it also, as predicted, led to levels of nitrates in rivers above or near the highest on record.
Put another way, over a decade into the state’s Nutrient Reduction Strategy, which relies on voluntary action to make a collective difference for water quality, bottom-line measures of the program’s efficacy have been worse than ever this spring.
We’re lucky to even be aware of the figures, after Republican lawmakers in 2023 slashed funding for the state-run network of water-quality sensors. University researchers that year scrambled to redistribute their budgets to keep the sensors operational.
Nobody with influence seems inclined to put water quality above other interests
In general, though, water-quality policy cannot be reduced to a dynamic of Democrats favoring regulation and mitigation while Republicans resist it in favor of enabling agriculture profits at any cost. Iowa’s problems have worsened under Republican and Democratic governors and under Republican and Democratic-controlled legislatures over the years. In Minnesota, where Democrats control the government and have aggressively installed progressive policies, environmental groups on Monday petitioned for public hearings on how state government isn’t fulfilling its responsibility to protect the environment.
In Iowa, aghast at the weakness of the DNR’s proposals for battling animal excrement-related nitrate contamination in northeast Iowa’s waters, the Iowa Environmental Council led other groups this spring in petitioning the federal Environmental Protection Agency for help under a law that could allow those federal regulators to step in.
The NEW Cooperative spill illustrates the low priority environmental protection generally receives from regulators. NEW says a valve was left open on a Friday afternoon before a clogged line cleared itself, allowing fertilizer to pour out and eventually reach the river until workers showed up again to work Monday morning. Weekends aren’t staffed before the growing season, an attorney for NEW told the state Environmental Protection Commission. It makes for a good story about a perfect storm of circumstances. But, with the benefit of hindsight, what justifies allowing fertilizer tanks that can produce such a disastrous spill to go 60 or so hours without any personal or automated monitoring for problems? If we all really wanted clean water, spending to reduce or eliminate even a small chance of catastrophe would make more sense than saving farmers a little money on equipment or staffing.
After the fact, the DNR had little choice but to seek the attorney general’s help to impose a heftier penalty — and, in the absence of adequate preventive regulation, a large penalty might be the only hope to deter future giant spills.
What we are doing is not working
Again, though, no accident can compete with the relentless day-to-day flood of nitrate pollution from countless sources throughout Iowa.
Looking at aggregate effects on drinking water, beaches or the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone” can also obscure more confined but still important effects. For instance, central Iowa researchers told Polk County supervisors this month that, for almost half of the people they surveyed fishing at Des Moines’ Scott Avenue and Center Street dams, the fishers’ catch was “an important food source for their family.”
Agriculture-related pollution is not getting better in Iowa. Water quality is not getting better in Iowa. What we are doing is not working. Policymakers and ag groups need to start over to find an approach that does more than shrug at the depressing data.
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