A three-year, more than $1 million study of the Ogeechee River, funded by Milliken & Co. as a result of the 2011 fish kill downstream from King America Finishing, produced a "dashboard" of data researchers say can help provide early warnings of future trouble.

"If somebody goes out and samples and takes similar data, they can come to this model and see where their values fall to kind of visually and quickly assess whether the river would be experiencing increasing risk," said Professor Stephen Vives, Ph.D., chair of Georgia Southern University's biology department.

Right now, the river is apparently relatively healthy, with "fair" being the adjective researchers used to describe certain indicators. However, since data collection for the study ended, the river is no longer subject to the continuous, real-time monitoring that occurred during the study.

Those outcomes did not satisfy some Ogeechee watershed residents who heard the results in a 

March 26 presentation by researchers from Georgia Southern's biology department, its geology and geography department and the Phinizy Center for Water Sciences. The local folks who spoke up wanted to hear a cause of the fish kill.

But a dashboard of stressors for life in the river was in fact what the researchers said they would deliver when they launched the research in 2014. The dashboard, or data matrix, brings together 13 variables.

Never like 2011

One limitation, repeated by more than one of the researchers, was that the river never fell as low during the 2014–2017 study as it had in 2011.

"We kind of view this dashboard as incomplete because we did not in our study period see flows as low as occurred in 2011, and not that we want those low flows to return, but kind of as scientists we do, so that we can create a better model of risk to the river," Vives confessed.

Included in the study's executive summary, a chart of flows recorded at U.S. Geological Survey river gauges shows that 2011's seven-day minimum flow, 0.6 cubic meters per second at Rocky Ford, 0.5 at Oliver and 0.7 at Eden, was the lowest for any year from 2009 through 2017.

In comparison, for 2017, the seven-day minimum flows at these three gauges were, respectively, 3.5, 4.0 and 5.0 cubic meters per second. The researchers did not attribute the record fish die-off to 2011's low water, but they noted that drought and heat are two factors than can stress fish, making them more susceptible to pollution or disease.

An estimated 38,000 fish died downriver from the King America Finishing plant in May 2011. After buying the textile finishing plant, which is in Screven County, Milliken provided the research funding under King America's 2013 consent decree with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, or EPD.

Almost $1.1M

Now that it is done, the study has an exact price tag, $1,067,491, Vives said after the presentation.

A large portion of the money that Georgia Southern received went to assistantships for graduate students and wages for undergraduate students employed to work on the study outside of their classes, Vives said. In all, 38 undergraduate and 33 graduate students participated in research projects and nine graduate students worked in assistantships for the faculty researchers.

Ten Georgia Southern faculty members, all with doctoral degrees, and one researcher from the Phinizy Center, an independent nonprofit organization based in Augusta, led the research.

During the project, the Phinizy Center conducted continuous water monitoring at five sites from river mile 27 to river mile 162 and live-streamed these. The monitoring included temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen and specific conductance. The center also did separate water sampling from six sites on the river, three upstream and three downstream from the King Finishing plant.

Meanwhile, the GS biology team sampled six sites, also three upstream and three downstream, quarterly.

"Macroinvertebrate and fish communities were rated as 'fair' using the Georgia Wadeable Stream rating system," the study's executive summary notes.

Vives led the portion of the research that used a shock boat, equipped to electrically stun fish, so that samples of the species found could be counted, weighed and measured.

Other researchers used zebrafish, a species of nonnative minnow, for growth and reproductive studies in a lab with water from the six river locations and in constructed artificial streams.

The executive summary stated: "Zebrafish embryo toxicity studies showed unexplained patterns of high mortality and malformations. That is, there were no clear patterns related to site or time of year. Further research will be needed to explain these results."

But overall, the zebrafish exposed to Ogeechee water were "doing fine," said Vinoth Sittaramane, Ph.D., another GS biology professor.

THPC testing

Zebrafish larvae were also used to determine a lethal dose — lethal to 50 percent of the fish being the standard — for a flame retardant chemical called THPC used at the King America Finishing plant.

But researchers did not actually find THPC in the river.

About 40 people, including the presenters, attended the March 26 presentation in Georgia Southern's Biological Sciences Building.

Unanswered question

Roy Thompson, chairman of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners, thanked all of the researchers but had a question.

"Umm, what killed the fish?" Thompson asked.

"Well, sir, that happened three years before we started our project, and so whatever it was, it was not present when we started," Vives said.

Ruth Green, Ph.D., a retired university dance director who often speaks out on topics of public concern, had the same question.

"It seems to me you have a plethora of data that is mostly common sense, that people that live on the river and people that use the river have known for ever and ever and ever and ever," Greene said to the scientists. "You have no data from 2011, and it seems like most of the data you have presented to us tonight is from 2015, '16 or '17 and six or seven years after they have quit putting stuff in the river, the river has cleared itself."

She later added words of appreciation for all of the data collected and the researchers' work.

Damon Mullis, executive director of Ogeechee Riverkeeper, said the data are important but that the dashboard of indicators will only work if regular monitoring of the river resumes.

"This project and all this money is not going to fulfill its mission or purpose if we're not out there monitoring the river and we can kind of see exactly these critical parameters, when they start getting into that range," Mullis said. "If nobody's watching, it's not useful."

The EPD still does quarterly monitoring, but had provided its equipment for continuous monitoring to the researchers during the project and had not resumed continuous monitoring. Mullis was talking to EPD officials about resuming the data collection, possibly with help from the Phinizy Center.

For the complete study report, see https://cosm.georgiasouthern.edu/biology/ogeechee.

Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.