The James River’s health has improved slightly in recent years – but continued pollution and climate change are making it more difficult to keep progressing, according to the latest State of the James report.
The nonprofit James River Association gave the waterway an overall B grade this week in its biennial assessment. That’s about five percentage points higher than the last report in 2021, which gave the river a B-minus.
The river’s current state is a far cry from a half-century ago, when it was notoriously polluted by sewage and industrial pesticides, said Bill Street, association president and CEO. He estimated the James would’ve earned a D-minus back then.
The new score “demonstrates the remarkable progress that's been made over the past 45 years,” he said. “The James in general for so long was considered a polluted, unsafe place. And so turning that perception around has been really difficult in some ways.”
The James River is the Chesapeake Bay’s largest tributary. It flows nearly 350 miles from the Appalachian Mountains to Hampton Roads and provides drinking water for 2.7 million people.
Street noted the river has repeatedly been called the bay’s healthiest major tributary. But it has a long way to go to achieve the scores the association wants to see.
The overall pace of progress to clean up the river has slowed, officials said, partly because it is still recovering from record rainy seasons in 2018 and 2020.
Rainfall — which is expected to further increase from climate change — washes polluted water from farms, wastewater plants and urban areas into the river.
Water clarity in the James hovers around 3% of the association’s goals, said Shawn Ralston, vice president of programs.
One of their most pressing concerns is the fate of American shad, often called America’s “founding fish” because of its connection to the Jamestown area.
The species’ population value is now at an all-time low: zero percent.
“For centuries, shad have played an integral role in our history, our culture and our economy in addition to the river ecosystem,” Street said. “To have such an iconic species decline to this level is truly alarming.”
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science is working on a shad recovery plan that it will turn into the General Assembly later this fall. State lawmakers allocated $290,000 for the plan in last year’s budget.
In the 1960s and ‘70s, chemical companies around Hopewell dumped a pesticide called Kepone into the James River. The state shut down much of the river to fishing for more than a decade.
Some toxic chemicals — a class called PCBs that were common in industrial and household products — remain in the water. But these days, pollution in the James mostly comes from runoff containing nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.
There is some good news. Underwater grasess are up significantly since the last report, mostly around the middle James west of Williamsburg. That and a few other improved markers indicate slow progress in reducing pollution.
Down on the Southside, the Elizabeth River Project also recently put out its own scorecard grading the health of the Elizabeth, which picks up in the bay about where the James leaves off.
The nonprofit gave the river a C grade, which is the same as its last report in 2020. The Lafayette branch of the river, however, accounted for a slight improvement.
VIMS recently conducted a fish survey of the Elizabeth for the first time. The Elizabeth River Project said officials discovered the presence of species they found surprising, such as blueback herring.
Climate change threatens to stall progress in both the James and Elizabeth rivers, officials say, including through saltwater intruding into freshwater areas and warmer temperatures that decrease oxygen in the water that marine life needs to survive.
