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ECU students to study effects of new water-processing plant
By JEFFREY S. HAMPTON, The Virginian-Pilot
© July 17, 2005
Kelly Register, an East Carolina University biology student, jumped overboard into the murky water of the Pasquotank River on Tuesday and disappeared briefly until her feet poked from the surface as though her head was stuck in the sand.
She was upside down pushing as hard as she could on the ponar grab, a rusty contraption used to take a bite out of the river bottom where clams, plankton and other organisms live. It doesn’t work well unless somebody pushes really hard on it.
Register and other students, led by ECU biology professor Roger Rulifson, are surveying the water and the river bottom near the salty discharge of the Camden reverse osmosis plant. The results could determine how reverse osmosis plants planned for Currituck and Pasquotank counties will operate.
The study, to be done over three years at a cost of about $870,000, is the first of its kind in North Carolina and could become a guide for permitting reverse osmosis water plants in the future, Rulifson said.
Until now, the state has issued permits for these types of water plants one by one. But the study could push officials to base permitting on cumulative effects as more and more reverse osmosis plants go up around the Albemarle Sound and its tributaries.
All 17 reverse osmosis plants in North Carolina are located in northeastern North Carolina, according to a list provided by Don Reuter, spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources. There were eight three years ago.
The southernmost plant is in Belhaven. Two discharge into the Atlantic Ocean, the rest into inland waters. Counties and towns farther inland have better and more plentiful sources of fresh water, said John Morris, director of the North Carolina Division of Water Resources.
From local fishermen to top environmental scientists, there are concerns over how all these plants will affect local waters. At the same time, development pressures officials to provide ample water.
Reverse osmosis plants draw from larger, deeper wells of brackish water, where the primary impurity is salt. Fine membranes separate the salt from the water. Reverse osmosis plants typically convert about 75 percent of the well water into drinkable water. The rest becomes a briny discharge.
Tuesday, Rulifson and the ECU biology students were in a boat near the discharge site of the Camden water plant on Chantilly Road about 800 feet offshore. The water was choppy, pushing the boat around a little as the group carried out its tasks.
Register’s feet kicked above the surface as she pushed on the ponar grab below. After a few seconds, her feet disappeared and her head popped back up.
“OK, bring it up,” she told fellow students Curtis Hodges and Katie Kleber.
Hodges engaged the winch, and soon the dripping ponar grab rose from the water, but with no muck in its 9-inch-by-9-inch jaws.
“Kelly, stay in the water,” Kleber said. “We didn’t get anything. You’re going to need to stand on it.”
“I didn’t push hard enough? Oops,” Register said just keeping her head out of the 6-foot-deep water.
“That’s OK,” Kleber said. “It happens.”
Another try worked. A new stainless steel ponar grab is supposed to be arriving at the ECU lab soon and will make this job much easier. The muck and its contents were dumped onto homemade screens that serve as filters. Among the contents were two small live clams and a handful of half shells.
Within an hour on the site, the group had fished a gill net that caught a handful of adult crabs and a few fish – including striped bass – taken water samples, scooped from the upper surface of the bottom and stuffed a tube about a foot into the bottom for a deeper soil sample.
While the others collected muck, student Chad Smith sat quietly in the front of the boat recording water sample results. Measurements of oxygen, acidity, salinity and temperature raised no red flags, he said.
The students will study the collections in the ECU laboratory on days when they are not on the water.
The group is also taking samples at the two sites where Currituck and Pasquotank plan to discharge before the plants are built. Early signs are good that Camden’s discharge isn’t disturbing the river. It took Rulifson’s group three days to find the end of the discharge pipe. Expected changes in water temperature and salt content were limited to a small area near the opening, he said.
Later phases of the study will measure water quality and organism health after the plants are built in Currituck and Pasquotank.
Currituck and Pasquotank counties plan to build plants that each will produce 5 million gallons per day and discharge about 1.6 million gallons of briny solution into the Albemarle Sound. Currituck’s discharge will go into the sound near Powells Point, some 19 miles from the plant in Maple.
Pasquotank’s discharge will flow into the sound at the mouth of the Little River, also about 19 miles from its proposed plant on Okisko Road. The two counties are splitting the costs of the study.
“It’s a good scientific study, and it’s been well put together,” Morris said.
Reach Jeffrey Hampton at (252) 338-0159 or jeff.hampton@pilotonline.com.
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