Report: Watershed needs to be protected

A report released Monday calls on the Forest Service to play a greater role in watershed protection of the George Washington National Forest.

Wild Virginia, based in Charlottesville, said the George Washington Forest Plan offers no special protection for the 22 localities in western Virginia, including Staunton, that obtain – directly or indirectly – a portion of their drinking water from the surface waters of the forest.

The forest covers 1 million acres in West Virginia and Virginia, including Augusta County, with 44 percent of the forest draining directly into the drinking water supplies of 13 towns and cities, including Staunton.

The report notes that in 2006, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality found a large presence of impaired waters within the forest, and that the George Washington Forest Plan offers no special protection for the long-term safety of water supplies.

“It’s just missing in the old plan,” said David Hannah, Wild Virginia’s conservation director and author of the report. “Now that the plan is being revised, this is the perfect time to discuss how we can strengthen water quality in the George Washington National Forest.”

The report makes several recommendations:

* calling on the Forest Service to identify all drinking watersheds in the forest and outline them in the forest plan;

* making impaired streams, reservoirs and their watersheds a priority;

* increasing water quality monitoring in the forest;

* improving communication between the Forest Service and the communities that get drinking water from it;

* protecting and managing drinking watersheds.

Hannah said the old Forest Plan had little to no focus on drinking water, and while it did identify the reservoirs in the forest, it did not note other water sources.

“That was sort of a missing data gap, so we used a GIS [geographic information system] to identify the intake points,” Hannah said.

Ken Landgraf, planning staff officer with the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest, said the Forest Service already protects drinking watersheds. Various animal and plant species in the forest do not have the ability to treat water, so the Forest Service has to make sure that the water quality in the forest is already high.

“We will take all of this into consideration,” Landgraf said. He also said the Forest Service would consider identifying watersheds used for drinking water supplies.

There had been no central place for forest watershed information until the report, Hannah said.

The amount of impaired waters in the forest caught Hannah’s attention.

“I think we just assumed that water coming off the George Washington National Forest is clean,” Hannah said.

He was neither trying to beat up nor blame the Forest Service for the watershed issues.

“We’re not trying to say that the Forest Service is doing a bad job,” Hannah said. “We’re just saying that we need to do more than what we’ve been doing.”

Landgraf said its hydrologist and fisheries biologist are reviewing the report.

“We view this as input to help us identify what to modify in the plan,” Landgraf said.

The Forest Service plans two more meetings on the plan – Jan. 29 in Lexington and another tentatively scheduled for Feb. 5 in Woodstock. It will review potential changes in the plan, produce a draft plan in April or May and hold more public meetings before initiating a formal, 90-day comment period.

Landgraf said the plan should be finalized “hopefully by the end of 2009.”

On the Web

* Wild Virginia: http://www.wildvirginia.org