Record rainfall turns White River brown

MUNCIE – It's called the White River, but record rainfall has kept the waterway muddy brown for most of the summer of 2015.

So what does this mean for the fish, our drinking water and recreation?

The stormy weather has dumped tons of eroded soil and debris from the surrounding landscape into the river, concealing food from bass and requiring more chemicals to treat the water for drinking purposes — in addition to discharging six times the volume of sewage into the river compared to last summer.

"The state considers this recreation season," said John Barlow, superintendent of the Muncie Sanitary District's Water Pollution Control Facility.

But the district repeatedly has been issuing CSO (combined sewer overflow) notices to inform the public of the potential dangers associated with sewage in the river.

The volume of Muncie's CSO discharges in June of 2014 totaled 35 million gallons. This June the volume reached 200 million gallons.

"When I say 200 million gallons, that's not 200 million gallons of raw sewage," Barlow said. "It's greatly diluted. It's mostly storm water. But it does contain E. coli (bacteria)."

Barlow suspects the muddy water has been more challenging to Indiana-American Water Co., which relies on White River for Muncie's drinking water.

"They're pulling water from the river and filtering and disinfecting it before sending it out for all of us to use at our homes," Barlow said. "They have to use it as their product. We don't take anything from the river; we just discharge to it."

Water company spokesman Joe Loughmiller said: "Obviously, we are having to add more chemicals to treat the water when it's muddy like that — chlorine for disinfection and coagulant that makes the solids in the water ... come together so we can filter it out. Those are the two chemicals typically impacted when we have muddy water or riled up water like this with lots of sediment."

Some sources say Native Americans called the White River the Wapahani River, a reference to its formerly sandy white bottom and sandy white banks.

But according to Christopher Flook, a Ball State University telecommunications instructor and documentary film maker, the original name for the river here is Waapikaminki, a Miami name that means white water.

The French also called the river la Riviére Blanche (the river white), he said.

The word Wapahani means nothing and perhaps is a weird misunderstanding of Waapikaminki, Flook said.

"This is likely a very physically stressful time for local aquatic life, and the longer it continues, the greater the likelihood that there will be a noticeable ... impact on aquatic communities, possibly for the next few years," says Rick Conrad, director of the city sanitary district's Bureau of Water Qualty.

The river has been too high and turbid for the bureau's biologists to do much sampling.

Though aquatic life is typically resilient in dealing with natural stressors like heavy rains, the question is, "at what point does this become an unnaturally frequent or persistent high-flow event?" Conrad said. "Elevated concentrations of suspended solids, for example, can reduce the availability of aquatic insects for fish to feed upon. It can reduce the survival of eggs. It can inhibit the ability of sight-feeding fish like bass to catch prey, and it can even directly lead to an increase in the incidence of disease by impacting the sensitive gills of fish."

Soil erosion from overland flow, including farmed areas, especially idle acreage that has been too soggy to plant, is one reason the river has turned muddy, says Colby Gray, coordinator of the White River Watershed Project.

"But what we have discovered through a lot of research over the years in Delaware County on the White River and Buck Creek is by far the single-greatest source of sediment comes from inside the (waterway) channels themselves through bank erosion," he told The Star Press.

Long ago, formerly naturally meandering rivers, streams and channels were straightened, widened and deepened, and tile was installed, to improve drainage, he said.

But during major storms, those waterways now carry so much water so violently that it destroys past efforts to make them unnatural, leading to erosion that dwarfs overland erosion.

While the solution includes continuing no-till farming and winter cover crops, it also will require planting prairie plants and other vegetation on stream banks and along streams, he said.

"The more vegetation, the more cover, the more stable it's going to be," Gray said.

Contact Seth Slabaugh at (765) 213-5834.