At the present rate, it will take almost 200 years for Virginia officials to write plans to clean up the state's polluted waters.
Since 2001, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has completed 88 cleanup plans, an average of 11 per year, according to a June report by Secretary of Natural Resources L. Preston Bryant.
At that pace, it will take 176 years for the state to figure out how to clean up its remaining 1,937 polluted streams, lakes and estuaries.
The cleanups themselves could take even longer. The 88 plans already written have put into place about 30 projects to reduce pollution, a state official said.
The effort has reduced pollution in some waters. But only one three-quarter-mile-long section of one mountain creek has been cleaned up sufficiently to be removed from the state's long list of polluted waters, the Environmental Protection Agency says.
Cleaning up Virginia waters could cost $1 billion or more. But the state has no long-term funding plan, and money for the effort is often lacking in state budgets, said Gerald P. McCarthy, executive director of the Virginia Environmental Endowment.
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