Driftless Water Defenders’ Letter to the EPA

June 4, 2024

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DWD President Chris Jones Sends Letter to the EPA

On June 4, 2024, Chris Jones, in his capacity as President of Driftless Water Defenders (“DWD”), sent a letter to Michael S. Regan and Meg McCollister, at the national and regional offices of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) respectively, in support of a Petition earlier filed by the Iowa Environmental Council (“IEC”), in association with other environmental groups, with those federal offices. 

Driftless Water Defenders is an Iowa-based non-profit membership organization dedicated to protecting the waters of the Driftless Area in northeast Iowa. Jones, recently-retired as a water quality expert, is the author of The Swine Republic, a book that analyzes Iowa’s water quality problems and which has been selected as the State of Iowa’s “Great Reads from Great Places” book to be featured in the 2024 National Book Festival hosted by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, in Washington, D.C., in August.

The IEC’s earlier-filed document, captioned, “Petition for Emergency Action Pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act, 42 U.S.C. § 300i, to Protect the Citizens of the Karst Region of Iowa from Imminent and Substantial Endangerment to Public Health Caused by Nitrate Contamination of Underground Sources of Drinking Water” (“the IEC petition”), seeks increased enforcement of federal and state clean water laws as applied to the Driftless Area of Iowa in response to testing indicating heightened levels of nitrate water pollution in that region. Nitrate pollution in drinking water, as documented in the IEC Petition, has been linked to rising cancer rates in humans and blue baby syndrome.

According to Jones’s letter, a copy of which is attached, DWD supports the relief requested in the IEC Petition but, in addition, places an emphasis on two particularly important modes of relief: 1) mandating that Iowa’s Manure Management Plans (“MMPs”) adhere to the more accurate nitrate usage model put forth by Iowa State University (“ISU”); and 2) issuing a moratorium on the construction of new Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (“CAFOs”) and the expansion of existing ones.

In the letter, Jones warns that nitrate levels in “groundwater springs” in Driftless Area communities, including “Decorah, Elkader (Big Spring) and Manchester . . . rarely go below 10 mg/L,” that is, the limit beyond which drinking water is considered unsafe. Therefore, Jones urges, “[h]igher standards are necessary for Manure Management Plans and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations both in general and because of the higher risk they impose on the region’s water supplies.”

 The current Iowa regulations on MMPs depend on an outdated theory, Jones describes to the EPA offices, which ignores evidence and provides no safeguards to prevent application of excess fertilizer. A model developed at ISU, according to Jones, if used by the governmental regulatory agencies, would “cut fertilizer application rates in half in many circumstances,” reducing the consequent nitrate pollution in drinking water.

Requiring a moratorium is a commonsense approach which allows for the most accurate testing, and it stops the problem from getting worse, according to Jones. He asks in the letter: “No doctor would treat a leg crushed by a car without making sure the car is first removed, so why would we attempt to treat our water pollution without first mitigating the source of the pollution?”