As the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency celebrates its 40th anniversary, Southeast Ohio organizations are praising the agency’s positive effects on the region’s water through regulations and grants.
The successful revitalization of the Hocking River is the biggest accomplishment of the Ohio EPA in the area since the organization’s inception, said Erin Strouse, spokeswoman for the agency.
When the Hocking River was assessed in the 1980s, only 38 percent of the river met the Ohio EPA’s aquatic standards, Strouse said. Today, the river has completely recovered.
“Our more recent assessment of 1,197 square miles of the river shows us that 100 percent of the Hocking is actually meeting (aquatic standards),” Strouse said.
Drinking-water in Athens County comes from an aquifer that is fed by the Hocking River, said John Rauch, state director of the Ohio Rural Community Assistance Program, which partners with the Ohio EPA.
The Ohio Rural Community Assistance Program provides technical services and training to wastewater-treatment plant operators in small communities in rural Ohio, including many in Athens County, Rauch said.
Although he does not know the exact dollar amount, Rauch said the Ohio EPA provides a significant amount of funding to rural communities in Southeast Ohio because there is not a lot of groundwater available in the area.
The Ohio EPA is responsible for regulating and enforcing aquatic standards in rivers as well as at wastewater-treatment plants, which help maintain clean drinking water.
“The Ohio EPA has financed a lot of expansions and water system improvements in the area,” Rauch said. “They’re out (in the field) quite often making sure that (wastewater) systems are financed and being run properly.”
Financially, the Ohio EPA is extremely important to Southeast Ohio and Athens County because they provide grants for research and education.
“We’re really big on environmental education,” Strouse said. “We give out millions of dollars a year in educational grants. There have been quite a few in the Athens area.”
The agency awarded a $3,500 environmental education mini grant to the Ohio River Basin Consortium for Research and Education in Athens County, according to an Ohio EPA news release from May. The release said the grant would pay for educating a number of local high-school teachers, including some from Athens High School, about water quality research.
“With that money, we took high-school teachers out to the Ohio River to do some water sampling, which they’ll be able to teach their students about,” said Tiao Chang, executive director of the Ohio River Basin Consortium for Research and Education.
Without the funding from the Ohio EPA, that project would not have been possible, he said.
Rauch said the Ohio EPA recently paid for the Ohio Rural Community Assistance Program to develop an online training system for local officials and employees involved in water and wastewater treatment.
In addition, the Ohio EPA covers the cost of almost half of Rauch’s 10-person staff serving small communities in Southeast Ohio.
“Ohio EPA is a key component to bringing clean water to people’s homes,” Rauch said. “They do a lot of good.”
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