Despite Control Efforts, Acid-Rain Effects Continue to Worsen

LOON HOLLOW POND, N.Y. — Cotton-ball clouds shimmer in the ripples of this hidden lake, 23 miles from the nearest road, as the thwack-thwacking of an approaching helicopter disturbs its mirrored surface.

The helicopter touches down, and Dale Bath unlatches a door and steps onto a pontoon float, uncoiling a rope and lowering a plastic container into the crystal-clear water with the practiced choreography that comes with 14 years of testing Adirondack waters.

In two minutes, the water samples are collected, and Bath slams the door shut. The Bell 212 thwack-thwacks toward the next lake, and a curtain of silence again falls over Loon Hollow Pond. By all appearances, all signs of human presence vanish with the fading whine of the 30-year-old helicopter’s twin engines.

But in the remote high plateau of the southwestern Adirondack Mountains, appearances are misleading. The water samples Bath collected at Loon Hollow Pond show the lake’s pH level is an unnaturally low 4.77, about five times as acidic as clean water and too low for most fish to survive. A lake that is a day’s hike from any paved surface is all but dead, a victim of a type of pollution that many Americans don’t think about very much anymore: acid rain.

Almost halfway into a 20-year federal program to deeply cut emissions that cause acid rain, evidence is accumulating in places as diverse as the Adirondacks, Long Island Sound, New York City’s reservoirs and even the marble monuments of Washington, D.C., that the billions of dollars electric utilities and other large polluters are spending to comply with the 1990 federal law will not be enough to halt acid rain’s pervasive effects. “A lot of people think this problem is solved. Well, in reality, it’s not solved at all. In fact, it’s getting worse in many lakes,” said Walt Kretser of the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation, which runs a program that since 1983 has been measuring the consequences of acid rain in 52 Adirondack lakes, including Loon Hollow.

In an influential report issued last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency compiled a long list of acid rain effects from California to Maine and predicted that in some areas the environmental damage will get worse even after the current round of pollution cuts at coal-burning and oil-burning power plants is completed in 2010. By 2040, the report predicts, the number of acidified large lakes in the 6.5-million-acre Adirondack Park may rise to almost 300 from the current 130. Including small ponds, almost half of the 3,000 water bodies in the Adirondacks may be acidic within 40 years, according to the New York DEC.

“There’s enough data now to show that this isn’t working well enough in the Adirondacks and in other sensitive areas, and that we need to do more,” Kretser said.

Federal scientists agree. “There’s still a real level of concern, particularly in the Adirondacks, that we may not get the full recovery that had been predicted” by 2010, said Rona Birnbaum, a manager in the EPA’s acid-rain program.

In Washington, activists and members of Congress from the Northeast are using the EPA report to try to broaden support for a new round of emissions cuts. “The report shows this isn’t just a New York problem anymore, and that helps our cause enormously,” said Tony Bullock, chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), the prime Senate sponsor of a bill that would mandate deeper cuts in emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the two pollutants that are the most important sources of acid rain.

So far, however, there’s little indication that the bill’s advocates have attracted much political backing outside the Northeast and California, as the electric industry argues it would be unfair to mandate a new round of reductions until the current round is completed.

That frustrates scientists such as Kretser, who grew up in the Adirondacks in Blue Mountain Lake, near the source of the Hudson River, and now flies over half-dead lakes where he swam and fished as a child.

The problem, he and other researchers explain, is that the reductions Congress mandated when it amended the Clean Air Act in 1990 focused more on sulfur dioxide, which comes mostly from power plants, than on nitrogen oxides, which are much more difficult and expensive to control because they come from many sources, including cars and trucks.

So while sulfates in acid rain have begun to decline as utilities have installed scrubbers on their smokestacks or switched to cleaner-burning fuels, the overall acidity of rainfall has remained about the same because of increased emissions of nitrogen oxides, scientists say.

“We really haven’t seen any ecological improvements, and I don’t think we’re going to until we deal with the nitrogen problem,” said Eugene Likens, the best-known American acid-rain researcher and the director of the Institute of Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, N.Y.

Conditions are worsening in the lakes and forests of the Adirondacks and some other sensitive areas because the decades-long onslaught of acid rain is transforming the chemistry of the forest, robbing the soil and water of nutrients such as calcium and potassium and releasing toxic forms of aluminum and mercury that kill fish.

From the air, the degradation is hard to detect. On a recent four-hour sampling trip across the southwestern Adirondacks, the natural beauty of the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi was as obvious as ever. Glassy ponds--many of them without any docks, houses or other signs of human habitation--nestled in the valleys of gently sloping hills blanketed with tall pine and spruce trees. Beaver dams were visible on many lakes and streams, and a bear crouching in a clearing ducked into the forest as the helicopter approached.

But there are some clues to the ailing condition of the forest. The unnatural clarity of many of the ponds, for example, is in many cases a sign of acidification, Kretser said. Plus, there’s the outdated nomenclature of many of the lakes and ponds his team samples. Loons have long since deserted Loon Hollow Pond because the only “fish” that can survive there now are small crayfish. And it has been many years since any trout were caught in Brooktrout Lake, where fishermen “used to take them out in washtubs and wheelbarrows,” according to Bath.

Back in the state laboratory in the town of Ray Brook, where the water samples are analyzed, the environmental damage becomes as crystal-clear as the water. The sampling shows that even in mid-July, long past the spring snowmelt season when acidification is usually at its worst in Adirondack lakes, several of the ponds, including Loon Hollow, are still severely acidic, possibly because of a rainstorm two days before the samples were collected.

The laboratory’s measurements also show that levels of the nutrients that fish and plants need to survive are disappearing from the water. “I’ve seen the data for seven years now, and it just keeps going down and down,” said James Dukett, the lab manager.

Scientists who work for electric utilities say it isn’t clear that the Adirondack lakes are getting worse, and say the more than $3 billion the industry has spent so far to cut emissions is surely leading to some improvements.

“Yes, there are still some environmental impacts. But the system looks pretty healthy to me,” said John McManus, manager of environmental strategy for Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Corp., a giant utility that has already spent more than $600 million on acid rain controls. McManus, who was interviewed just after returning from an Adirondack vacation, argued that it’s still too early to gauge the environmental effects of pollution cuts that won’t be completed until 2010.

So far, the industry’s go-slow approach on additional reductions is carrying the day in Washington.

“The point is that we are implementing expensive, exhaustive controls on acid rain, and the EPA already has new rules and regulations regarding ozone and particulate matter and visibility that are going to require even greater reductions,” said John Kinsman, manager of atmospheric science at the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based trade association for electric utilities. “To worry about a new acid-rain program when all of these other reductions are going on is, frankly, a duplication--and a very expensive one.”

Five hundred miles from the political battles of Washington, Walt Kretser watches Loon Hollow Pond shrink to the size of a quarter as the state helicopter climbs over a ridge and speeds to the next lake.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to these lakes in the future. There are so many variables, so many factors, that it’s hard to predict,” he says. “But the bottom line is, things are not hunky-dory, and we need to focus on the fact that we still have a problem here.”