Potomac River Is Paying Price for Nation’s Chicken Appetite

Thirty years ago, acid runoff from West Virginia mines, raw sewage from Maryland and garbage from everywhere had turned the Potomac River, the nation’s river, into the nation’s sewer. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared it a national disgrace.

Over the next 20 years, $1 billion in government spending and tireless work repaired half a century or more of abuse. Swimming is still not advised. But the celebrated river that flows past Washington became clean enough for anglers to snare prize-winning bass.

But look now, 300 miles upstream. Along the shores of the Lost River, along Mill Creek and the other streams that feed the Potomac, along the South Branch of the Potomac itself, the nation’s growing appetite for poultry has hatched a massive surge in chicken farming.

In less than a decade, poultry production in the five West Virginia counties at the river’s headwaters has grown from 7 million birds a year to about 100 million--and with them comes enough manure to cover all 160 miles of Los Angeles freeways ankle deep.

Some of it--no one knows how much--finds its way into the Potomac, introducing bacteria, nitrogen and phosphorous, all threats to people, fish and plants downstream. The result: In a lesson on the need for perpetual vigilance, pollution is once again threatening the river--so much so that a national river conservation group, American Rivers Inc., on Wednesday placed it on a list of the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers.

“The Potomac, historically, has been a showcase of every threat to rivers,” said Beth Norcross, American Rivers’ director of government affairs. “We chose it . . . because it represents the threat not only to the Potomac itself but to rivers nationwide from industrial agriculture.”

The Potomac joins such other waterways on the list as California’s San Joaquin River, polluted by development and agriculture, the lower Colorado River, suffering from demands for water throughout the Southwest, and the PCB-contaminated upper Hudson River.

The state of West Virginia has issued an initial warning listing six Potomac tributary sites as agricultural pollution trouble spots reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. But a senior EPA official complained that senior West Virginia environmental officials have not “expressed a whole lot of interest” in finding a remedy.

A joint state-federal report on the Potomac headwaters last June found a correlation between the numbers of cattle feedlots and poultry houses and concentrations of fecal streptococci bacteria and fecal coliform--an indicator of cryptosporidium. The pathogen killed 100 people in Milwaukee in 1993.

The story of the threat to the Potomac begins in the valleys of northeastern West Virginia. At bend after bend as the river begins its eight-day trip to the nation’s capital, the landscape is dotted with small ranches, cattle feedlots and an estimated 1,000 chicken houses.

Some chicken sheds are nearly as long as two football fields and house 26,000 chicks apiece, some even more. The cycle of chick to chicken takes six weeks, and once the mature birds are shipped for slaughter, farmers like DelRay Wilkins clean the manure from the sheds before restarting the process.

That’s when the problems begin.

“We start at the center and push it and pile it right here,” he says, standing at the end of one of his five chicken houses. Using a small bulldozer, he moves the manure into a roofed bin several stories high.

The chickens of the five counties produce approximately 300 million pounds of manure a year. It is stored. It is sold as fertilizer. It is spread on fields where hay and corn are grown. Mixed with wood shavings, it is fed to cattle. It is piled on river banks. And a portion runs into waterways.

Some 80,000 head of cattle, many raised adjacent to the chicken houses to take advantage of the feed, produce more waste. And the approximately 2 million birds that die before slaughter are composted in manure-stocked bins, adding to the stew.

It is a subject as sensitive to economic and political debate as it is to the nose.

Poultry is a centerpiece of life in the struggling communities where trailer parks and unpainted shacks, cliches of Appalachian life, still pock the valleys and hills. The town council of Moorefield, where Wampler Foods Inc. operates a 265,000-square-foot slaughter and packing house, recently considered changing the town seal to show a chicken, a turkey and a chicken house.

Critics say the industry landed here in a big way in the early 1990s after nearby jurisdictions in Virginia tightened environmental regulations. But industry officials say they were drawn to West Virginia only by the opportunity to expand existing operations and by the ready rail lines and a supply of workers.

Almost overnight, old chicken coops gave way to the long metal sheds.

“This farm’s particularly nasty,” Margaret Janes, a veterinarian and member of Resource Alliance environmental group, said on a recent drive. Unprotected from the rain and wind, manure is piled within 100 yards of the South Branch of the Potomac.

Farther along, a field has been plowed almost to the river bank, leaving no protective barrier to keep manure on the field from running into the water. And downstream, algae has turned the water olive green.

Several miles away, Wilkins, trying to avoid such problems, built his manure shed several hundred yards from the water. Had he not taken such care, the chicken litter “would have been down in the city somewhere.” That city would be Washington.

Such diligence is rare. A federal-state report found that 75% of the area’s poultry operations have inadequate manure storage facilities. But so far, the chicken farms have not produced a noticed increase in water-borne bacteria or algae-feeding nutrients near the capital.

The large poultry companies say responsibility for protecting the river lies with individual farmers, whose contracts say they must follow environmentally sound practices.

“We require every producer to have nutrient management plans or we won’t place birds on their farms,” said Gail Price, communications director for WLR Foods Inc., parent company of Wampler Foods Inc., the largest poultry firm in the area.

But a report by a U.S. Department of Agriculture advisory committee said that “large-scale integrated producers could not compete if they had to pay for the social costs they generate. Neighbors, instead, must pay that cost. . . .”

The EPA says it has no authority over the pollution because it enters waterways from scattered, ill-defined sites rather than from specific points such as sewer pipes. Patrick Boyle, EPA spokesman in Philadelphia, said the agency can do little more than express its concern to the state of West Virginia.

Government officials in the headwaters area, however, do not see the runoff as “a red-flag situation,” said Moorefield town council member Larry Kuykendall. “My personal opinion is, that’s not one of our problems,” he said.