Natural solutions, voluntary, incentivize — these are some of the ways suggested by a stakeholder workgroup to enhance and protect North Carolina’s coastal waters.

In all, 10 recommendations in Appendix A from the workgroup have been tacked on to the Coastal Habitat Protection Plan approved for public review by the three regulatory commissions with oversight on coastal issues.

“The goal was to identify and make recommendations on actionable nonregulatory strategies for improving and protecting water quality to safeguard fishery habitats,” said Leda Cunningham, The Pew Charitable Trusts officer.

The proposal of a workgroup was born out of the Jan. 21 meeting of the CHPP Steering Committee when committee chair Martin Posey raised the idea to form a group that would come up with recommendations with a focus on water quality-related issues that could quickly be accomplished, according to the minutes of that meeting.

Pew and the North Carolina Coastal Federation stepped up to the offer, assembling a group of nine stakeholders with expertise in farming, fishing, wetland and water quality mitigation practices, land development, local governments, environmental programs, laws and regulations, environmental engineering and management, and property management. The federation publishes Coastal Review.

“My input was not necessarily technical in nature, but my input to it was that I like the nature-based approach rather than the heavy-handed regulatory approach,” said Pine Knoll Shores Town Manager Brian Kramer, one of the nine stakeholders in the workgroup. “There’s solutions that aren’t necessarily simply regulatory-based. What that means to me is that there may be solutions that are presented right now in terms of infiltration or in terms of simple design changes that’s not necessarily anti-development, but pro-nature. If you can find a way to take advantage of what we already have to protect the water quality and such then those options should be explored.”

The Bogue Banks town in Carteret County recently completed an innovative stormwater project using recommendations from the Coastal Federation, using infiltration methods in more heavily flooded areas of town.

There’s also discussion among members of the town board about putting out public education initiatives on downspout management.

“What’s interesting to me is the degree to which everything ties together as far as impacts of man on nature,” Kramer said, adding that he both fishes and duck hunts. “When you lose (seagrass) you lose fish, you lose the things that grow and nurture, and that impacts wildlife.”

The workgroup’s meetings included North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality staff working on the CHPP, and three scientists whose expertise is in water quality and seagrass, Cunningham said.

The CHPP was first adopted in late 2004 by the state’s three regulatory commissions with oversight on coastal issues: the Environmental Management Commission, Coastal Resources Commission and Marine Fisheries Commission.

The goal of the plan is to protect, restore and conserve coastal habitats that sustain coastal fisheries. It identifies six coastal habitat types: wetlands, submerged aquatic vegetation, marshes, soft bottom, shell bottom and water column, which is the space between the water’s surface and the bottom.

The plan is reviewed every five years by environmental officials within DEQ, the divisions of which must work together to implement the recommendations set forth in the CHPP.

This year, the focus is on specific issues, identifying concerns related to those issues, researching ways to mitigate the impacts of those issues on coastal habitats, and using that research to implement rules and regulations to reduce those impacts.

The end result is an amendment to the CHPP that includes a series of issue papers addressing submerged aquatic vegetation, wetland protection and restoration through nature-based solutions, environmental rule compliance, wastewater infrastructure solutions for water quality improvement and coastal habitat mapping and monitoring.

“The group recognized that in several of the priority issue papers that were in the CHPP that water quality was kind of a cross-cutting theme so the idea was to provide tangible, measurable things that this group of stakeholders could not only identify as strategies, but could also help implement,” Cunningham said.

The workgroup’s recommendations are designed to help expand and engage public participation in implementing the CHPP, she said.

Those recommendations include the following:

• The CHPP Steering Committee and DEQ form a public-private partnership working with stakeholders to further refine and implement the strategy in 2022, as well as evaluate and refine the strategy as it’s used.
• Ask the state’s governor to issue an executive order directing state agencies to work with the steering committee, DEQ, business, industry, agriculture, federal agencies, nongovernment organizations, universities, North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute, North Carolina Sea Grant, and local governments to implement water quality actions that control and reduce nutrient, sediment, pathogen, and other pollutant loadings in coastal estuaries and, when possible, align those actions with statewide climate resiliency strategies.
• Expand financial incentives and technical assistance to encourage communities to voluntarily create and routinely update local watershed management plans.
• Focus and prioritize General Assembly-funded plans and stormwater retrofits to ensure the protection and restoration of coastal fish habitats.
• Support and promote financial incentives program encouraging public and private waterfront property owners to install living shorelines to mitigate shoreline erosion and naturally treat and reduce runoff.
• Promote the use of nature-based stormwater practices through state-funded construction in coastal counties and river basins that flow to coastal habitats.
• Create and implement a voluntary submerged aquatic vegetation protection and restoration plan for Bogue Sound.
• Encourage the state Department of Transportation and municipal transportation agencies to adopt nature-based stormwater strategies for the highways the build, design and maintain.
• Expand access to financial and technical cost-share assistance and incentives that help landowners, farmers, foresters, U.S. Department of Defense, and other property owners to protect coastal fishery habitats.
• Prioritize nutrient management as a coastal habitat protection strategy to protect and restore the health and productivity of coastal estuaries.

Cunningham and others praise the proposed CHPP amendment.

“What we do to help water quality has positive benefits and positive impacts on habitat as well,” Cunningham said. “Because severe weather, rising sea levels, and increased human use of resources, it really is more important than ever to pursue durable strategies that ensure their long-term health and sustainability. Not only does North Carolina have really special places on the coast, we have really incredible opportunities for people that want to protect and restore those places to work together and the CHPP is really the blueprint that pulls it all together.”

Next month is expected to kick off a series of meetings to accept public comment.

The meetings, which will be held by web conference, will be scheduled in conjunction with five Marine Fisheries Commission advisory committee meetings. The dates and times of those meetings, links to the web conference, as well as an online survey will be announced in a news release in the next couple of weeks, according to a N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries spokesperson.

Once public comment period ends for the draft CHPP amendment, the plan will go back to the three commissions in November for final approval. If approved, the CHPP will then go to the Joint Legislative Committee on Governmental Operations.

The amendment may be adopted by year’s end or early next year.

This is the fourth in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality. Read more.

An amendment to North Carolina’s Coastal Habitat Protection Plan is now approved for public review, and thrust into the forefront of proposed modifications to the long-standing document are ways to mitigate the impacts of climate change and unregulated sources of stormwater runoff to those habitats.

“This year we’re doing something a little differently in that we’re doing an amendment rather than a revision to the source document,” said Jimmy Johnson, coastal habitats coordinator with the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership. “We were comfortable with the source document as it was written in 2016. We wanted to specifically focus on some other issues that we felt needed to be made a priority and so we decided to do an amendment rather than revising the source document.”

The Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, often referred to as CHPP and pronounced “chip,” was born out of the 1997 Fisheries Reform Act, a comprehensive management plan for fish and shell species. The goal of the plan is to protect, restore and conserve coastal habitats that sustain coastal fisheries.

The Coastal Resources Commission voted Wednesday to approve public review of the amendment and a related appendix with input received during an early public comment period facilitated by the North Carolina Coastal Federation and The Pew Charitable Trusts with the Coastal Habitat Steering Committee’s approval.

Pew Charitable Trusts Officer Leda Cunningham said Pew encourages the public to support the plan during the comment period and learn how they can contribute to conservation efforts.

“North Carolina is a special place in terms of coastal habitat and the CHPP is a really solid plan that prioritizes collaboration for protecting and restoring that habitat,” she said. “It’s going to take many of us pulling together to achieve common goals of sustainability and resiliency.”

The CHPP officially began in 2005, shortly after it was first adopted in late 2004 by the state’s three regulatory commissions with oversight on coastal issues: Environmental Management Commission, Coastal Resources Commission and Marine Fisheries Commission.

The Marine Fisheries and Environmental Management commissions approved the amendment for public review during their respective meetings earlier this summer.

The plan is reviewed every five years by environmental officials within the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, the divisions of which must work together to implement the recommendations set forth in the CHPP. It identifies six coastal habitat types: wetlands, submerged aquatic vegetation, marshes, soft bottom, shell bottom and water column, which is the space between the water’s surface and the bottom.

Casey Knight, a coastal habitats biologist with the state Division of Marine Fisheries, explained how, this time around, officials are focusing on specific issues, identifying concerns related to those issues, researching ways to mitigate the impacts of those issues on coastal habitats, and using that research to implement rules and regulations to reduce those impacts.

The priority issues include the following:

1. Submerged aquatic vegetation, protection and restoration through water quality improvements.
2. Wetland protection and restoration through nature-based solutions. This one tackles the development of living shorelines over hardened structures and, as Johnson puts it, letting “nature be nature” by leaving natural wetlands undisturbed.
3. Environmental rule compliance to protect coastal habitats. This issue addresses the need for additional field representatives to routinely conduct compliance checks and issue notices of violations. “We just don’t have enough of those positions to do the work and so that is just trying to get the existing rules we have on the books enforced better and complies with better,” Knight said.
4. Wastewater infrastructure solutions for water quality improvement. Wastewater and stormwater underground collection systems are old and in need of repair throughout the state. But, the situation in the coastal region is exacerbated by the threat of sea level rise. “It’s fairly frequent that we read about spills and pipes rupturing and spilling wastewater into the estuaries and streams and creeks,” Johnson said. “It’s an expensive proposition and the problem in eastern North Carolina is so many of these smaller communities just don’t have the money to be able to retrofit or to repair their infrastructure and so we’re calling attention to that.”
5. Coastal habitat mapping and monitoring to assess status and trends. Mapping and monitoring the work currently being done to protect coastal habitats will help officials make more educated decisions on how to carry forth protection and restoration efforts. “Without the proper amount of monitoring and assessing of things that are already being done on the ground now we need to be able to know in which direction to move in the future and the only way to do that is map and monitor the work that’s being done now,” Johnson said. 

Issue papers have been created to address each of these priorities. And, though they’re specific issues, they’re all tied in two common denominators – water quality and climate change.

“One thing we did see with the source document is that it did not really cover climate change in the aspects of coastal resiliency in the manner that we speak of it today,” Knight said.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper issued Executive Order 80, a commitment to tackle climate change and build the state’s green energy economy, in October 2018, two years after the CHPP’s was last updated.

The order led to DEQ’s creation of the North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, a climate adaptation plan released in June 2020. Through the development of that plan, the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, a research institute of the University of North Carolina system, created the North Carolina Climate Science Report.

“We’ve taken a lot of that information, specifically coastal information, and created another chapter that will be part of this amendment called climate change and resiliency and that speaks to a lot of compounding issues that go along with sea level rise,” Knight said.

More frequent, heavier rain events associated with climate change and rising sea levels are exacerbating issues relating to water quality issues, with wide-ranging impacts across all coastal habitats.

During heavy rain events, rainwater gets sucked into underground wastewater pipes, overflowing systems. Heavy, frequent rainfall creates more unregulated stormwater runoff, which makes its way into coastal habitats. This runoff equates to higher levels of nitrogen in those habitats.

“We’ve done a decent job of dealing with point source pollution, but now we’ve realized that some of those gains are being outweighed by all of this nonpoint,” Knight said. “By creating and looking further into water quality standards for some of these nutrient indicators we will be able to definitively say the water quality standard here is not being met and what actions can we start taking to make sure that those standards are met.”

An overabundance of nitrogen in water causes eutrophication, a process where rapid algae growth depletes oxygen levels in the water.

Algae growth blocks the light submerged aquatic vegetation needs to survive and grow. SAV provides food and shelter for coastal fish.

“We also acknowledge that water quality improvements for SAV are going to be beneficial to most other habitats and the animals that use them,” Knight said. “Through that issue paper we are hopefully looking at developing additional water quality standards around some of these nutrient indicators or factors that could be actionable and see hopefully a difference within the next period of the CHPP review in the next five years.”

The wetlands issue paper includes ongoing research on how to help marshes keep up with the pace of sea level rise.

“If we can’t keep the marshes keeping up with sea level rise then we’ll lose the marshes altogether and that’s the last thing we need,” she said. “So, we need to plan for the migration of those marshes inland. We need to protect the areas that these marshes are potentially going to migrate to as sea level rises.”

One way to do this is potentially through a method called thin layer deposition.

Thin layer deposition takes material dredged from coastal waterways that is not suitable to be placed on an ocean shoreline and sprayed, in a thin layer, onto a marsh, giving the marsh “a little more meat at their roots,” Knight explained.

“As the tide comes in and washes over it should be bringing more sediment to them so they need that sediment to survive, which is a double-edged sword when we talk about sediment in other ways as far as water quality concerns,” she said. “We don’t like the ideas of sediment, but we’re talking about that nearshore kind of over wash during that tide change that they need just to kind of push that extra layer of sediment onto their bank just to make sure that they continue to rise as the sea level comes up and that tide pushes in farther. There’s a lot of permitting issues involved in that too that we’re going to hopefully work through. We need to be able to have the research that proves that it’s viable and feasible and then we can start moving toward some of the permitting barriers that we have there.”

Research is ongoing as to how much is the right amount to spray onto marshes.

The benefits of living shorelines and their adaptation to sea level rise as compared to hardened shoreline structures are continuing to be researched as well.

The discussion is now turning from whether they are a better shoreline protection alternative to bulkheads to how the state can incentivize property owners and companies to choose living shorelines over bulkheads.

“Leaving those big wetland buffers and creating things like living shorelines instead of bulkheads that have lawns right up to the edges of the waterway, that’s going to be key in helping kind of buffer those floodwaters both coming from hurricanes when they’re pushing water in, or these heavy rain events when they do occur,” Knight said.

The state is expected to take public comments on the proposed amendments in October.  

Coastal Resources Commissioner Larry Baldwin noted on Wednesday the months of work and stakeholder efforts to address particular water quality concerns that produced the amendment.

“I think we got it about as good as we can. I like it because it’s not heavy regulatory. It’s trying to coordinate many different groups and funding to be able to improve water quality, which I think is a good thing, Baldwin said.

Johnson said the hope is that an updated CHPP will be adopted by the end of this year or early 2022.

“We have tried to incorporate all of those main issues into what we’re trying to do,” he said. “We’ve pulled in a lot of information from other plans and the document that we have, it’s a pretty remarkable amendment that we have come up with. We just need to realize that we need to keep on the land the things that were intended to be on the land and not let them get into the water. That’s the best that we can possibly do and if it’s buffers or wetlands or whatever to make that happen then we need to do all we can to enforce that.”

This is the third in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality. Read more.

Assaults on the environment may be imperceptible for a period of time, but eventually natural imbalances will become evident.

In the quiet fresh waters of the Chowan River basin, its unhealthy water quality is illustrated all too well during the summer by blue-green algal blooms, whether creeping along the shoreline or exploding shore to shore. 

“They were really bad in 2015,” said Colleen Karl, chair of the Chowan Edenton Environmental Group, or CEEG. “It started in Edenton Bay. The water was turquoise.”

Algae, which are photosynthetic microorganisms, are natural inhabitants of waterways. But when conditions are off-balance, they can quickly multiply to harmful algal blooms.

Until six years ago, the Chowan basin’s river and creeks had not had any significant blooms since the 1970s, which were linked to discharges from a paper manufacturer. The problem with algal blooms this time has persisted, but no one is sure what exactly is triggering them, beyond unhealthy amounts of nutrients.

“We know the nitrogen levels are very high,” Karl said. “The big question now is we don’t know enough because these are fueled by so many different things.”

And blooms are now starting to pop up in new spots in the Little, Perquimans and Pasquotank rivers and their tributaries.

Some culprits could be leaking septic systems, fertilizer or animal feed, Karl said, but whatever the source, the problem is exacerbated by warmer waters and rising seas due to climate change.

“There seems to be more blooms after rain events,” she said. “But the stuff is here. The biomass is here. It doesn’t take much for these to explode.”

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality issued an advisory Aug. 2 warning the public to avoid contact with blue or green water at Arrowhead Beach to Rockyhock in Chowan County and Colerain in Bertie County.

The state determined that the bloom was dominated by cyanobacteria, which is known as blue-green algae that can contain toxins and create health hazards in humans and animals, including liver damage. Not only is swimming and boating hazardous, health officials say, any exposure to skin should be rinsed with soap and water as soon as possible.

Karl said more than once she has observed people kayaking and canoeing through waterways thick with algae.

A recent bloom at Bennett’s Millpond formed green mats of algae that coated the surface. 

“Be aware that this body of water is full of blue-green algae that may or may not be toxic,” Karl posted Sept. 1 on the CEEG Facebook page. “The smell of degrading algae was strong even though we all were wearing N95 masks. It is heartbreaking to see our beautiful waterways in this condition.”

Risks to human health

Health effects of blooms are not fully understood, including the short-term and long-term dangers of certain levels of exposure to certain toxins in the algae. For example, an algal bloom was cited as one possible cause for the recent mysterious deaths near Yosemite National Park of a family of hikers and their dog.

Little is known about the health effects of breathing airborne cyanobacteria toxins, Haley Plaas, a doctoral student in environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, said in a recent interview.

Plaas, who has been researching the aerosol effects since 2020, said that Karl and other community scientists with CEEG have helped with providing study sites and water samples of blooms. In fact, she said she had visited Bennett’s Millpond in late August to take water and air samples.

New equipment, an odd-looking 4½-foot-tall steel body with a mushroom-shaped head, has been deployed on private property to collect aerosol particles. In addition to her writing a manuscript about her work in a peer-reviewed journal, Plaas said that the data will be analyzed to determine details such as the identity and concentration of the toxins, and what environmental factors may have contributed to its presence. Also, the raw data will be released to an open source database.

All sorts of different kinds of algae are known to create toxins, she said, or harnful algal blooms, although not every algal bloom is toxic. Because the data only go back 30 years, Plaas said, it’s not yet known whether algal blooms are becoming more toxic.

In general, blooms are increasing worldwide not only because of warming associated with climate change, but also because there is more nutrient pollution. Researchers hypothesize that one reason for the Chowan’s blooms could be linked to changes in land use that reduced swampland and wetlands — riparian buffers — that would otherwise be there to suck up excess nutrients.

Sources of the nutrients can be hard to pinpoint, much less control, Plaas said, and there also is a lack of epidemiological research on the harm of toxic algal blooms, in part because it so difficult to do.

“Basically, you can be exposed to these toxins by swimming in the water, or eating food (such as fish), or drinking the water, or inhaling it,” she said. “People in North Carolina are most likely exposed in recreational activities.”

But the symptoms — nausea, vomiting, rashes — overlap with symptoms associated with numerous other maladies.

“By the time someone got sick, it may be two or three days after the exposure. Then it can seven days after exposure when a doctor rules out other causes,” she said. Then there’s the complication of collecting the sample and testing it. Since blooms can not only move, they can come and go before anyone has a chance to take a sample, and there aren’t staff available to sample and test every bloom in a state as large as North Carolina.

Research is underway to develop a real-time sensor, she said. But meanwhile, there is a networking system in place that includes cell phone apps and community scientists who report blooms and take samples when possible. There are also existing digital tracking and mapping tools for harmful algal blooms.

With algal blooms becoming more of a concern globally, the recurrent blooms in the Chowan River have spurred more attention from the scientific community.

A part of the Albemarle-Pamlico Estuarine system, the nation’s second largest behind the Chesapeake, the Chowan basin’s waters are designated as Nutrient Sensitive Waters, due to the way they flush and drain.

The 2021 Chowan River Basin Water Resources Plan was approved in March by the state Environmental Management Commission. Basin plans are required by state law and approved every 10 years by the commission. Among the priorities for the plan is management and/or reduction of recurring algal blooms in region, which will require more data collection and review, said Division of Water Quality spokesperson Anna Gurney, responding to Coastal Review.

Implementation of the plan will involve interstate cooperation and best management practices to reduce the amount of nutrients entering the system, such as from wastewater and stormwater. Another important component of the plan is public engagement.

“Communicating the science will create interest and action to protect water resources,” Gurney wrote, adding that several basin stakeholders are already involved in the effort.

“Northeastern North Carolina, like many other parts of the State, are working with limited resources; however, the people are passionate!” DEQ/DWR Basin Planner Forest Shepherd said in an email. “The citizens are concerned about their waters and expressed it through the multiple public comment letters we received during the development of the Chowan and Pasquotank River Basin Water Resources Plans. These plans are tools to assist with public education, outreach, and engagement; which is vital to successful protection of these water resources.”

Karl, who has a background in science, said she sees a need for much more communication with the public, as evidenced by the folks she saw fishing and boating in Bennett’s Millpond.

“Literally, the water was pea green,” she said. “Where were the signs? Not a lot of people are aware of what these toxins can do.”

The county didn’t post any warning about the bloom on its website, Karl said, and the water resources press release has limited reach.

“Who sees that?” she asked. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any way to get the word out.”

Although she credited the progress of North Carolina’s researchers and officials, Karl said that everyone is spread thin and under-resourced. New York is an example of a state that does a better job of networking and reporting blooms, as well as using citizen scientists, she said.

“They seem to be able to get the word out wider,” Karl said. “It takes people. It takes money.”                                               

This is the second in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality. Read more.

Human and swine feces polluted eastern North Carolina waters sampled after Hurricane Florence’s historic flooding of the Coastal Plain.

In all, 48 sites in the Neuse, Cape Fear, Lumber and Waccamaw River watersheds were sampled as part of a study investigating microbial contamination in surface waters following the storm, which dumped up to 25-35 inches of rain in some areas of the eastern part of the state after making landfall in mid-September 2018.

In addition to human and swine feces contamination, the recently published study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University also found a high prevalence of a little-known foodborne pathogen known as arcobacter, which has been classified as a serious threat to human health, in some of the water types sampled, including flood plains, channels and isolated waters.

“What was somewhat striking to us was that we did see both human and swine markers, but that there was an association that if a human marker was detected you were more likely to detect a swine marker as well than if you didn’t detect a human marker,” said Angela Harris, an assistant professor at N.C. State who led the study. “That just kind of highlighted to us that some of these sites were experiencing this double burden of contamination.”

The results of the study arguably underscore wastewater infrastructure issues in storm-prone areas that are anticipated to grow more vulnerable in a changing climate, one in which is expected to bring more frequent, large rainfall-producing storms.

The study notes that while the total discharges from swine lagoons during the hurricane are unknown, 29.1 million gallons was discharged from municipal wastewater facilities and more than 6,000 gallons from industrial facilities.

There are many ways in which human feces can get into the environment, Harris said.

“Things like leaky septic systems, leaky sewer pipes, these can all potentially introduce human fecal matter into the environment and when we think about flooding, a lot of our infrastructure, it’s really not designed to necessarily handle the type of flooding that we’re now experiencing. So, there is effort to think about how can we make our infrastructure more resilient to these types of events that will likely be more frequent due to our changing climate,” she said.

Wastewater infrastructure is a focus of one of the proposed revisions to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Coastal Habitat Protection Plan, or CHPP, pronounced “chip.”

The plan, which is designed to protect and restore waters associated with coastal fish habitat, is reviewed every five years.

State environmental officials have included a proposed revision that calls attention to the fact that small, rural communities in eastern North Carolina generally do not have the funding to cover the high costs of retrofits and repairs to wastewater infrastructure systems.

The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill recently passed by the Senate and now awaiting approval from the House includes funding for climate resilience initiatives.

The bill is a step in the right direction, Harris said, but she thinks there are things that can be done better now in how we manage waste from humans and hogs.

It’s something she encourages her students to think about.

“We want students to realize that there is a lot of room for innovation in this space for infrastructure,” Harris said.

There’s also a need for more routine monitoring to help researchers understand how wastewater systems are impacted by different rainfall events and how various sources of contamination respond to rain events, she said.

For this study, researchers collected samples one to two weeks after Hurricane Florence and then one month after that.

The first round of samples showed similar contamination levels at some of the different types of waters included in the study.

“We did start to see some differences (in October) where the channel sites were more contaminated on average than the flood plain sites,” Harris said. “We don’t know for sure, but there are some hypotheses on why that might be the case. There might be some new fecal inputs during that time into the channels. Maybe because of the flooding some of the lagoons might have been quite full and so they might have been able to release some of that.”

Contamination levels could have been down in the flood plains, where water does not move at the pace it does in a channel, which may have allowed microbial contaminants to decay in sunlight.

Contamination levels remained the same in the channels between the first and second round of sampling.

Researchers went back out a year after the initial samples were collected to gather more samples, which are currently being analyzed.

Harris is working in several other sites in the eastern part of the state, including the Newport River near Beaufort, in an effort to get better measurements before another hurricane hits the area.

“Sometimes whenever you find contamination, I don’t want to just describe all the risks, I also want to be forward thinking and think about the solutions,” she said. “There’s room for innovation on how systems are managing waste, but there are a lot of designs and techniques that we do know of even now that can address some of these issues.”

Mahmoud Sharara, an N.C. State assistant professor, was part of the study. His expertise includes animal agriculture operations.

He said a lot of animal farm operators in eastern North Carolina recognize extreme weather events are becoming the norm. Those include operators who employ either wet-waste systems, such as hog lagoons, or dry-waste systems used by poultry farmers.

“Those get equally affected in different ways, but extreme weather events affect them both,” Sharara said.

Many large hog farm operations located in flood plains in eastern North Carolina have been bought out through various programs, he said, which has helped curtail the risks of hog lagoon spills during major rain events.

To avoid similar issues with the growing poultry industry, agriculture officials are working with poultry producers to ensure poultry houses are not being built in flood-prone areas and that chicken waste is not stored in places where it is likely to wash away.

“In this case having nutrients that are, say, poultry litter after cleaning a poultry house stacked outside without having a covering for even a week can release a significant amount of nutrients in runoff,” Sharara said. “Being aware that weather and planning around weather is very critical when we talk about these nutrients.”

To help with the economic challenges farmers face with costs associated with wastewater treatment, researchers have created a concept that takes a cluster of farms in an area and processes waste from those farms at a centrally located composting facility or solar drying complex. This would generate enough composted product to sell, ultimately helping to offset the costs to the farm operators.

Work is underway to implement other runoff mitigation control measures on farms, both animal and crop, including no-till systems to reduce soil erosion, adding buffers at the ends of fields, creating tidal drainage and treating drain waters, and covering hog lagoons to reduce nitrogen emissions.

Sharara said there is no one silver bullet in reducing the agriculture-generated nutrients that make into stormwater runoff.

“We’re trying to look for all the different mechanisms we can put together to capture the nutrients and export them en masse in a valued product,” he said. “Agriculture is one of the industries where the nutrients can move at large scale. Unlike point sources where there’s a discharge pipe where you know the nutrients are leaving a factory or facility, on a farm the boundary of the field can potentially be a source, the ground underneath can potentially be a source or an avenue for nutrients to migrate from. We know that nonpoint source is going to increase with increases in rainfall and with extreme weather events. Our challenge is getting greater now to make sure that there’s less likelihood of nutrients leaving ag systems to estuaries or water systems.”

This is the first in a multipart special reporting series on coastal water quality.

It’s a windy day in October, warm enough for just a T-shirt, and the Neuse River shimmers in the sunlight. As Katy Hunt approaches the bank, however, a foul smell hits her nostrils. And from the dock, she can see the cause: thousands upon thousands of dead, rotting fish.

A fish kill occurs when algae bloom and then die. The decomposition of the algae depletes oxygen levels in the water. Fish suffocate in their own habitat, and some will jump onto riverbanks in one last futile attempt to breathe. Most fish kills in the Neuse River last a few days at most. But October 2020 saw the area’s longest fish kill in decades, lasting an entire five weeks. For Hunt, the Lower Neuse Riverkeeper for Sound Rivers, the sight was disheartening. Every few days she’d walk out onto the dock to check. From there she saw thousands of pale fish floating by like a funeral procession.

“You’ll see lots of little whitish-silver things floating along the surface and washing up by the shores,” Hunt said.

The large algal blooms that cause these massive fish kills are a result of nutrient pollution. The pollution, said Hunt, is directly attributable to human activity.

Fish kills in the Neuse River are essentially an annual event. But waterways across the entire state are grappling with the consequences of excessive nutrient inputs. As North Carolina accommodates a growing population, the state’s waters are paying the price. North Carolina stands at a crossroads between finding ways to mitigate nutrient pollution damage, or seeing it get worse and worse.

‘Too much of a good thing’

The presence of nutrients in the water isn’t inherently bad. In fact, nutrient cycling is a normal part of ecosystem function. Nitrogen and phosphorus are essential contributors to plant growth and the entire food chain depends on these nutrients. But the Earth supplies its own nitrogen. Human activity has doubled the amount of usable nitrogen in the world, and this excess can wreak havoc on ecosystems.

“It sounds so strange, because nutrients are a good thing,” Hunt said. “Except we all know the old adage that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And that’s very much the case for the Neuse River.”

Often, we see the results of this nutrient excess in the form of an algal bloom.

How many nutrients is too many? That, said Dr. Nathan Hall of the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences based in Morehead City, depends on what the water is used for.

“The cutoff point really depends on what you’re worried about,” Hall said. For example, seagrasses are especially sensitive to nutrient levels because the resulting algae will block their access to light. Without light, seagrass cannot grow. By contrast, recreational swimmers aren’t as sensitive to higher nutrient levels. “We’re not squeamish about swimming around in some water that’s a little bit green or brown — up to a point,” Hall said.

North Carolina does not have an official threshold for what constitutes too many nutrients. There is, however, a limit on how much chlorophyll-a is in the water. Chlorophyll-a is the pigment that gives algae its green color. Chlorophyll-a is essentially a measure of how much algae is in the water, which by extension, says something about nutrient levels in the water. The official level for North Carolina’s slow-moving waters like sounds and estuaries is 40 micrograms per liter.

“Forty is about where you can really start to notice the water’s green,” Hall said.

Waterways that contain more chlorophyll-a than this get placed on the state’s 303(d) list — the official record of all imperiled waters in the state. Once a body of water makes it onto this list, it sometimes stays there for decades.

Nutrient inputs into waterways, or “nutrient loading,” is regulated for waters that are considered nutrient-sensitive. Sensitivity is defined as being highly reactive to nutrient inputs. In other words, the physical conditions of the water facilitate a nice habitat for algae — things like slow water turnover and shallow depths. For example, the Neuse River is considered nutrient sensitive.

But where do the excess nutrients come from? In short, human activity. These inputs come from the fertilizer that people put on their lawns, as well as large-scale agricultural operations. They come from wastewater and sewage. A lot of these pollutants are carried into the watershed by stormwater runoff. That is, when it rains, the water washes pollutants across impervious surfaces and into watersheds. The ground is usually very good at filtering nutrients out of the water, but developed areas include high levels of impervious pavement, which don’t allow water to penetrate the ground. Impervious surfaces are things like roads, driveways and sidewalks. 

All of this is compounded by climate change. When storms get worse and rainfall increases, more nutrients are flushed into the watershed. If storms are followed by dry periods, water flow slows down and allows algae to prosper. Due to the influence of stormwater runoff on nutrient transport, nutrient pollution can be exacerbated by the number of people living in the watershed.

North Carolina’s total population has been increasing for decades. In 1990, the state population was 6.65 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2020, that number had climbed to 10.44 million. When compared to the rest of the country, North Carolina is the state with the ninth highest population.

Not every county in the state has experienced growth — some counties bear the increase in population more than others. For example, the five-weeklong fish kill in the Neuse River last October occurred just outside of New Bern in Craven County. The population of Craven County was 82,096 in 1990, and in 2020 it reached 101,233. That’s an increase of nearly 20,000 people.

And while not every coastal county experienced growth in the past three decades, Craven County wasn’t the only one to grow substantially. New Hanover County, for example, has increased by 115,649 people in 30 years, nearly doubling its population.

This information comes from Carolina Demography, an organization nested within the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. According to Melody Kramer, director of communications and business development, it’s hard to make predictions about the future of the state’s population. But projections from the department indicate that the state will gain about a million new residents every 10 years for the next few decades.

This could spell trouble when it comes to nutrient pollution.

“The more people you pack into a watershed, the more nutrients you release, and particularly for nitrogen that’s true,” said Dr. Hans Paerl of UNC IMS. “But depending on how aggressive management of those issues is, it can be attenuated.”

As North Carolina continues to see population increases and development, Paerl said that there is an opportunity to build in an effective way as opposed to a harmful way. It’s imperative to the health of the water, especially considering that many of the state’s waterways have seen aggressive nutrient inputs for several decades.

“Now, the thing to keep in mind about all aquatic ecosystems is that they don’t improve overnight,” Paerl said. “So the sooner we have an aggressive nutrient reduction management strategy the better.”

Paerl points to Lake Washington in Seattle as an example of how aggressive, proactive nutrient management plans can work. In the 1940s-1960s, Lake Washington began receiving increased amounts of secondary treated sewage as Seattle and its surrounding areas grew in population. This led to unprecedented levels of the nutrient phosphorus — 70 parts per billion in the 1960s.  And while phosphorus levels are impossible to see with the naked eye, the resulting eutrophication (algae blooms) were evidence of impending catastrophe.

Seattle began an aggressive plan to divert sewage away from the lake and through treatment plants. It was superbly expensive ($140 million in the 1960s) but also incredibly effective. The program was able to get phosphorus levels down to 16 parts per billion. Today, Lake Washington has infrequent problems with eutrophication, and water quality and clarity are high considering that the lake rests in the middle of the largest city in the Pacific Northwest.

Change has also shown itself to be possible in North Carolina. Last year’s five-week fish kill in the Neuse River was the longest one in decades. In the 1990s, however, there were a few of comparable length. This and other indicators of eutrophication alerted state officials to the need to decrease the levels of nutrient pollution into the river.

The Neuse Nutrient Strategy went into effect in 1997. It set up special rules and regulations to target nutrient sources like wastewater and agricultural runoff. This mandate was effective in decreasing the amount of inorganic nitrogen in the Neuse River.

“It has led to a reduction in nitrogen inputs from certain sources,” Paerl said. “But we’ve also seen changes in the watershed due to development and changes in agricultural activities and practices, urbanization, etc., that has led to an increase in organic nitrogen loading.”

While these regulations have made enormous strides in targeting some sources of nutrient pollution, there is still more work ahead.

“There’s still a lot of science that needs to be done in terms of understanding the linkage between where it’s coming from, and how reactive it is in our receiving waters,” Paerl said.

Paerl’s lab at UNC IMS operates the Neuse River Estuary Modeling and Monitoring Project, or MODMON, in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. 

MODMON has been recording water quality data in the Neuse River since 1994. One of the things MODMON seeks to monitor is the total maximum daily load, or TMDL, of nutrients in the Neuse River. The TMDL is equal to the level of nutrients the river can accommodate while still meeting water quality standards.

According to Dr. Dean Carpenter, program scientist for the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership, or APNEP, long-term water quality data sets are crucial for evaluating management decisions going forward. APNEP works with community partners to determine indicators of water quality within the river basins that feed into the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system, including the Neuse River.

“I talk often about monitoring and assessment: two pieces of the puzzle,” Carpenter said. Monitoring data creates a baseline that helps evaluate the effectiveness of management strategies, and points the way toward optimal solutions for the future.

“When you’re instituting management actions to support a healthier, in our case, estuarine system, you want to be able to track the condition of that resource,” Carpenter said.

‘In our hands’

So far, there have been no reported fish kills in the Neuse River this year. But, said Katy Hunt, the season of vulnerability is still young. Last year’s five-week kill ran through October, and it’s only August. While Hunt is no longer surprised by fish kills and other harmful effects of algal blooms, she hesitates to call them inevitable. Humans cause them, and therefore they are in our hands.

“I think it is a kind of an unfortunate fact of life,” Hunt said. “But at the same time, we made it a fact. And we can change it.”