The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: April 9, 2008

Those sporting souls venturing into the South River next weekend for the city's annual fly fishing tournament will not be alone in the cool, murky water, and that has nothing whatever to do with trout. Swimming in the signature waterway that flows - or maybe trudges would be the more apropos term - along Waynesboro's eastern border are masses of bacteria, including the ever popular and resilient E. coli.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality reports that a recent test registered a bacteria rate almost five times the state standard. Slipping into the South long has been an inadvisable endeavor, but now carries with it a more definitive hazard, at least in the sense that what many have experienced ad nauseum has now been officially delineated by the DEQ: a dose of water from the polluted river in the eyes, nose, mouth or an open wound can lead to gastrointestinal illness.

As reassurances go, the one offered by DEQ official Robert Brent allayed in a manner comparable to screeching sirens and shouts of "Fire!" in crowded theaters. "It doesn't mean that if you touch the water you'll get sick, but there's a chance."

Well, all right, then.

DEQ officials have begun a study to determine, as Brent explains it, "the complete role of pollutants in the watershed" in addition to the cause and possible remedies to the problem.

This much is known: The bacteria are from human and animal waste, some of it likely emanating from farms along the river. The affected area covers the length of the South, stretching 25 miles to the headwaters of the Shenandoah River in Rockingham County.

Mercury is the South's best-known malady, largely the product of DuPont discharging the stuff into the river for decades after the company opened its Waynesboro plant in 1929, according to the DEQ. In those days, of course, the DEQ did not exist. Nor did disposal and storage regulations. DuPont paid a $1 million penalty after environmental regulators discovered the contamination in the 1970s, and the textiles maker was directed to clean up the river.

Yet the mercury remains, along with the legacy of a company that once pumped lifeblood into Waynesboro. DuPont now is facing a lawsuit filed by Invista, the Koch Industries subsidiary that bought the DuPont plant on the South River in 2004. The charge- DuPont sold Invista 14 factories - the Waynesboro site among them - that violated environmental and safety regulations.

Assuredly, DuPont cannot be blamed for bacteria levels in the South River, nor is there an evident connection between the Invista lawsuit and pollution in the waterway. But as the DEQ digs deeper into the environmental woes plaguing the South, it is difficult to ignore the enduring impact of DuPont's stay in Waynesboro.

Because of the extraordinary complexity involved in tackling the mercury problem -- it would require dredging the river along with adjacent floodplains, and there's no guarantee even that effort would work -- it's one that appears likely to be with us in perpetuity. The same might well apply, at least to some extent, to bacteria, since there appear on the surface to be few ready options to halting pollutants carried through rainwater runoff for farms.

Hopefully, the DEQ's research will unearth solutions along with more information about the problem. Identifying the former so far has proved far more elusive than detailing the latter.