River Rescue

On a rainy morning in late April, Ashley Gibbon kicked rocks that lay on the bottom of the Swannanoa River near the campus of Warren Wilson College. Just downstream, Art Mandler used a net to catch any aquatic invertebrates she’d dislodged. A minute later, they carried the net to a camp table on the bank, where they started picking out the insects with large tweezers and dropping them into ice trays full of water.

Gibbon, who studied entomology at Virginia Tech University 25 years ago, and Mandler, a self-described “naturalist geek,” were collecting data for the Stream Monitoring Information Exchange, which surveys the aquatic invertebrate population of certain rivers twice a year as a measure of their health. Because they have limited mobility, specific habitat requirements, and distinct pollution tolerance levels, these tiny creatures are the canaries in the coal mine for how well a river is faring.

“I find it fascinating that eight or 12 square feet of riverbed can be home to so many little critters,” said Mandler. “There are millions of creatures going about their lives all around us.”

The Environmental Quality Institute, a nonprofit organization that monitors water quality in streams and lakes in Western North Carolina, created the exchange in 2004 to supplement the work done by state biologists. While Gibbon and Mandler were counting spiny crawlers and hellgrammites, the institute’s executive director Ann Marie Traylor was busy collecting handfuls of decomposed leaves from the water and scouring them for more aquatic insects.

That Traylor was working alongside two volunteers gives a sense of the organization’s scrappy nature. Despite the importance of its mission, the institute has dealt with budgetary constraints since it began in a research lab at UNC Asheville in 1990. It survived on a shoestring budget until 2008, when cuts mandated by the N.C. General Assembly forced the university to shutter the operation. 

Traylor, the head chemist at the time, resurrected it as a nonprofit the next year. She is only one of two full-time staff, forcing it to depend on college and AmeriCorps interns and a roster of around 100 volunteers.

“It’s nice to hang out in beautiful places,” said Mandler, who has volunteered for four years. “My dad taught me to fly fish and he used to say, ‘Trout don’t like ugly places.’ I feel the same way about collecting macroinvertebrates. It gets me in touch with something, this bubbling of life, that is hopeful, meaningful, and uplifting.”

Even so, the efforts of volunteers like Gibbon and Mandler have started to feel more mandatory than voluntary in recent years, as government water-monitoring jobs disappear or go unfilled. Between 2008 and 2018, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality lost 34 percent (adjusted for inflation) of its pollution-control funding and saw its staff reduced by a third, according to a 2019 report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit that advocates for more effective enforcement of environmental laws. As of October 2023, 256 out of 1,797 positions in the department were vacant.

“Their biggest problem right now is hiring,” said Bill Kreutzberger, a retired water quality specialist who worked for a previous iteration of DEQ from 1981 to 1989. 

He said he’d attended a Water Resources Research Institute advisory committee meeting in May, where Karen Higgins, the state’s Water Planning Section Chief, voiced her frustration about the vacancies.

Kreutzberger, who worked for the engineering company CH2M after leaving his government job, also noted that the biggest cities and counties—as well as many companies in the private sector—pay better and provide better benefits than the state.

Dave Penrose, who worked as an aquatic entomologist with the state for 28 years and helped develop the classification criteria used for sampling aquatic invertebrates, has observed the perennial need for more money firsthand. “Funding has always been tight in regulatory circles,” he said. He pointed out that DEQ only has seven biologists in its Biological Assessment Branch, who are responsible for monitoring the entire state. “So they’re very limited in what they can do.”

Penrose said he can pinpoint when water quality monitoring started to decline: 1990. That’s when the state adopted “a watershed-based approach” that sampled aquatic macroinvertebrates on a five-year rotation. The reasoning for the change was sound. The Clean Water Act requires DEQ to issue permits for wastewater discharges to surface waters, and the new approach would mirror the permits’ five-year life cycle. 

Penrose pointed out the system’s biggest flaw. “There’s 17 river basins in the state,” he said, “but only two or three per year are studied intensely—so there’s four years where, unless there’s an emergency, nothing is done, nothing’s collected, data aren’t analyzed, and lots of bad things can happen.”

Nonprofits like the Environmental Quality Institute, which conducts monitoring twice a year in seven river basins, and MountainTrue, which does the same in Henderson, Polk, and Cleveland counties, have helped fill the void.

The importance of their work was never more apparent than in the fall of 2022 when testing at the Pigeon River in Canton revealed only a handful of bugs. “And they weren’t the good ones,” said Traylor. Alarmed, she contacted DEQ; state biologists soon discovered an oil leak at the former Pactiv Evergreen paper mill.

Ideally, state biologists would have discovered the leak themselves. But according to a public hearing concerning the removal of a variance from the mill’s wastewater permit, the Department of Water Resources had only sampled for insects at its downstream monitoring site 15 times from 1987 to 2021, or less than once every two years.

An Army of Volunteers

The institute’s longest-serving volunteer, Jim DeGrave, has picked up and dropped off water sampling bottles at the Kounty Line convenience store in Fletcher since 1995—long enough to see the restaurant next door reinvent itself three times. DeGrave is part of the Volunteer Water Information Network, the Environmental Quality Institute’s other signature program, which monitors water quality via chemical testing.

After picking up two wooden crates full of plastic bottles from the store’s walk-in cooler, he drives 10 minutes to Bent Creek River Park and takes samples from Site 12A, where Bent Creek flows into the French Broad River, and Site 12B, where the French Broad passes under the Blue Ridge Parkway. Rick Maas, an environmental studies professor at UNC Asheville, created the volunteer network in 1990 to increase water quality data in Buncombe County. The program now monitors more than 200 sites in 13 Western North Carolina counties.

DeGrave joined in 1992, after reading an article in the Asheville Citizen-Times about the need for volunteers. His motivation sprung from a determination to protect the environment that had awakened in him during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, when he was a high school freshman.

In the early days, he often brought his newborn son with him in a baby carrier. Of his approximately 280 outings, those are his favorites. Another memorable one: Several years ago, he interrupted a couple getting intimate in a hammock beside his designated monitoring site on the French Broad.

The process of chemical testing is simple. On the first Saturday of every month, volunteers fill five small plastic bottles with water from their appointed site, then drop them off at the same location where they picked up the empties. Traylor, assistant director Madelyn Hollifield, or an intern then delivers the full bottles to the institute’s lab in an industrial office park in Black Mountain.

The network allows them to test at more sites in Western North Carolina more often than the state can. The Department of Environmental Quality’s water resources division relies on a patchwork monitoring system with several different branches. Its Ambient Monitoring System has more than 300 stations throughout the state, but some are monitored monthly, some quarterly, and others, according to public information officer Laura Oleniacz, “when appropriate resources are in place.” 

Oleniacz said via email that some sites get more attention than others because they “have been prioritized due to staffing restraints.”

Three other state programs monitor even more sporadically. The Random Ambient Monitoring System tests water quality in 30 arbitrarily selected streams once a month for two years. The Ambient Lakes Monitoring program surveys 160 bodies of water on a five-year rotating cycle, with only a portion of those lakes being actively observed in any given year. The Monitoring Coalition Program, which consists largely of wastewater facilities, also provides data—but only for four river basins currently.

“The Department of Environmental Quality has always been spread thin,” said Traylor. “We’re able to fill in a lot of gaps.”

One example is the French Broad River basin, which attracts 6.9 million outdoor enthusiasts who spend $3.8 billion in Western North Carolina annually. As important as this river basin is to the region, the state only has 15 chemical testing sites in it, which it monitors intermittently, while the Environmental Quality Institute has 122, whose volunteers check it monthly.

Despite this collaborative effort, in 2022 the Environmental Protection Agency placed a 19-mile stretch of the French Broad that runs through Asheville on its list of most impaired and threatened waters—“the worst of the worst,” as Penrose put it.

Hartwell Carson, MountainTrue’s French Broad Riverkeeper, says DEQ’s high vacancy rates contributed to this problem. The regional office of the Division of Energy, Mineral, and Land Resources in Asheville only has seven field inspection staff responsible for erosion control for all of Western North Carolina. Sediment is one of the French Broad’s biggest sources of pollution.

Carson praised the Division of Water Resources’ Asheville branch. “They’ve done a bunch of above-and-beyond projects,” he said. “They’ve also partnered with us on the real-time monitoring site that we have at Pearson Bridge, which is one of only a few in the country. And they have a whole team for recreational monitoring. DWR is doing more in Asheville than they’re doing anywhere in the state.”

Besides sediment, Carson identified sewer, septic, agriculture, and stormwater as the biggest sources of pollution in the French Broad and pointed to how MountainTrue and DEQ had improved the first three. The last one, however, remains a problem, and he blamed Asheville for it. 

“About four years ago we developed a stormwater task force, and we created a series of recommendations to improve water quality in the French Broad and its tributaries from stormwater runoff,” he said. “We have tried repeatedly to get the city to adopt some portion of those recommendations, and they’ve refused almost across the board. Asheville should be a leader on environmental issues, and they really aren’t.”

The Limits of Citizen Science

DeGrave became an institute board member in 2017, a testament to the importance it places on volunteers. Two years later, Robert Zinna, an associate professor of biology at Mars Hill University, joined him on the board and created the protocols that currently guide the biologic monitoring program. 

Volunteers must attend an intensive one-day training workshop before sampling streams for aquatic insects, and the group leaders who oversee them are stringently vetted: They must achieve an 85 percent identification accuracy score before they’re allowed to work with volunteers in the field.

The protocols ensure that the data produced by the institute’s volunteers is reliable. “We do quality control where we send samples to our professional entomologists to re-identify, and then we compare the identifications of the volunteer versus the professional entomologist, and they’re 86 percent similar,” said Zinna.

Still, Traylor understands that there’s a cap on how data from citizen scientists should be used, as compared to data from actual scientists. “I wouldn’t make regulatory decisions based on them,” she said, “but they’re great to have for grant proposals. And we’ve definitely sent data to the state biologist and said, ‘This site is usually pretty good and now it’s poor.’”

Tim Fox, an environmental specialist at DEQ’s Asheville office, said the institute’s data should follow a state-approved quality assurance plan. “If they have that, then that data can be used for rewriting our basin plans,” he said. “If they don’t have that, we still look at that data, but we don’t use it for the planning process and enforcement.”

DEQ relies on a tiered system of quality and reliability to determine how to use certain water quality monitoring data. Most data from citizen scientists is placed in the first tier, disqualifying it from being used for regulatory purposes. That means troves of data from volunteer organizations remain vastly underutilized, even though several studies have found no statistical difference between volunteer and professional data.

Zinna, with Penrose’s assistance, conducted a similar study based on data gathered by the Environmental Quality Institute’s volunteers that found 95 percent accuracy, which they submitted to the peer-reviewed journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. “We found that we have really strong linear correlations between the professional entomologist and the volunteer-submitted samples across all three of our measures,” said Zinna.

Penrose believes that as strong as the volunteers’ data is, it shouldn’t be used the same way as data from scientists. “As much as I enjoy working with citizen scientists and teaching young people about biocriteria and identification, I would not want to go into court with data collected by a volunteer,” he said. “I would go into court if the data were collected by trained scientists.”

Its robust protocols, experienced staff, and access to the latest and greatest equipment ensure that the state’s data can be used for all three tiers. But the agencies still welcome data produced by volunteer-based organizations. 

Protecting North Carolina’s more than 40,000 miles of rivers and streams is such a massive undertaking it requires a collaborative effort, a view state agencies and volunteer organizations share. Traylor started the Environmental Quality Institute not to supplant but to support what the state was doing on its limited budget, but even if DEQ was fully funded and staffed, she believes the institute would still be needed.

“There’s still so much we’re not doing,” she said. “The focus tends to be on these larger, more charismatic rivers, but there are a lot of headwater streams and tributaries to those that aren’t being monitored at all. So, the more the merrier.”

Budget Impasse

Nearly every time Gov. Roy Cooper has asked for more money for DEQ to fund new positions, buy new equipment, and address water quality issues, he has been rebuffed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly.

This pattern began early in his first term when he asked legislators for $2.6 million in emergency funding to address the Cape Fear River’s water crisis in August 2017. For more than four decades DuPont and its spin-off Chemours had been dumping PFAS—manmade chemicals that are nearly ubiquitous, never break down, and cause a wide range of health problems—into the river, which supplies drinking water to Wilmington. Instead, lawmakers passed House Bill 56, which allocated $185,000 to Cape Fear Public Utility Authority and $250,000 to UNC Wilmington to study the problem but gave no money to DEQ to fix it.

The following year, Cooper proposed a $14.5 million increase in DEQ funding, $7 million of which would have gone toward water quality and sampling. Instead, state legislators reduced DEQ’s funding by $1.8 million. 

Cooper tried again the next year, asking for an additional $6.3 million. The General Assembly countered with $600,000 in new funding, a proposal Cooper vetoed over unrelated issues. The legislature eventually approved an additional $406,000 for DEQ but rejected Cooper’s request for $500,000 more to hire personnel to handle permitting backlogs.

The tension around environmental funding will be on full display during the upcoming gubernatorial election. Democratic candidate Josh Stein has a track record of fighting for environmental causes as attorney general, taking Chemours to court and forcing Duke Energy to clean up its coal ash pits. Meanwhile, Republican candidate and current Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has called climate change “junk science” and ridiculed renewable energy initiatives.

“Josh Stein has been to Asheville a number of times and has mentioned in his stump speeches environmental management,” said Penrose. “Water quality has his attention. Whereas the Republican candidate, Mark Robinson, is as far away from the environment as anyone can be.”

Penrose worries a Robinson win will mean more cuts to DEQ staff and programs. No matter which candidate wins, volunteers will continue to be essential in monitoring the state’s water quality.

“It’s definitely a group effort,” said Traylor. “I’ve got one coworker, so we wouldn’t be able to do it at the scale that we do without partner organizations and volunteers … There’s no way the two of us could sample 200 sites and do all the testing and reporting of that data.”

There is increasing evidence that citizen science not only helps overworked and underfunded scientists but also the volunteers themselves as they become more engaged and informed members of their communities. 

Longtime volunteer DeGrave understands his vital role, which he reflected on during a visit to his testing sites on the French Broad River last month. 

“Collecting these samples is easy to do, and I think it’s important,” he said. “The information is valuable. To have 30-plus years of data, that’s gold for anybody looking to see which direction our streams are going, and it’s not that big of an investment of time for something that has a huge return on investment. That’s what keeps me going.”

Storms Reback has written five nonfiction books, including Ship It Holla Ballas!: How a Bunch of 19-Year-Old College Dropouts Used the Internet to Become the Loudest, Craziest, and Richest Crew and In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. He lives in Durham with his wife and son.