Excrement from industrial livestock operations is poisoning Virginia’s Shenandoah River and putting people at risk for E. coli poisoning, says a report by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Around 176 million animals are raised along the forked river, including 160 million chickens, 16 million turkeys and half a million cows, says The Washington Post. Together their waste amounts to about 410,000 pounds of poultry litter and a billion pounds of liquid manure annually, according to data from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
The nutrient overload from their waste causes widespread algae blooms, killing fish and other aquatic species, as well as leaving swimmers and boaters at risk of contamination. Ingesting E. coli-ridden water can lead to severe diarrhea and vomiting.
“The state issues advisories to beach-goers to stay out of the ocean when bacteria levels do not meet the recreational standard,” the EIP report says. “But the state provides no such notice when the Shenandoah Valley and other rivers and streams are contaminated, even when E. coli levels are more than 100 times the recreational limit.”
In fact, the state only tests the Shenandoah Valley River and its tributaries two times a year. “Nearly all the stations where the water is monitored were above the threshold 10 percent of the time, and about 20 of the stations exceeded it ‘at least half of the time,’ the Environmental Integrity Project found,” says the Post.