Credit: (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

WASHINGTON — New water quality standards to protect a stretch of the Delaware River and the wildlife that call it home, including an endangered sturgeon unique to the region, will be enacted in two months, federal authorities said.

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday unveiled final standards to improve the water quality and raise oxygen levels of the river in the 38-mile stretch between Philadelphia and Camden south to Wilmington, Delaware.

“By improving water quality in the Delaware River, EPA’s final rule will help protect this vital water resource while supporting fish populations and strengthening economic opportunity for Americans living and working in the mid-Atlantic,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement.

The standards will be effective in 60 days, the agency said in a memo. The EPA will enforce the rules by issuing permits for facilities, like wastewater treatment plants, that use the Delaware River.

Impact on the river

The EPA was forced to implement the standards after environmental groups sued under the Clean Water Act, a bedrock federal water law enacted in 1972, demanding the agency protect fish life, including the Atlantic sturgeon. That law requires the U.S. to protect water quality for purposes of the public good, including by considering the “propagation of fish and wildlife.”

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“In the final analysis, EPA put in place solid standards guided by the science,” Maya K. van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “We’re going to have a healthier river with healthier fish and potentially be in a better position to save the sturgeon from extinction.”

Van Rossum’s group, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, was the lead plaintiff in the case, filed last year, that prompted the standards.

In the late 1800s, 300,000 of the fish, a scaly, boney creature that can grow up to 16 feet long, live decades and expand to 800 pounds or more, swam in the river.

Now teetering on the edge of extinction, the Atlantic sturgeon was fished nearly out of existence, pursued for their eggs. Pollution in the river and vessel strikes hammered the species further.

Ammonia discharges from wastewater treatment sites harm the fish today.

“The Atlantic sturgeon are being slammed on all sides,” van Rossum said.

Credit: (Mauro Orlando from Flickr; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

According to a U.S. Geological Survey study, fewer than 250 breeding adults return to the Delaware annually.

The Delaware is a vital resource for animals, plants and humans in the region, supplying water to 16 million people across four states as it meanders 330 miles from its headwaters south.

In 2023, the EPA proposed strengthening the standards for oxygen levels in the Camden-to-Wilmington section of the river from 3.5 milligrams per liter to 5.4 milligrams per liter. The present standard of 3.5 milligrams has not changed since it was established in 1967.

Fish need oxygen to survive and as oxygen supplies in bodies of water diminish, spots called “dead zones” — places where marine life has died or left — can emerge.

Impact on land

The Philadelphia Water Department, which treats wastewater for the city, has been the most vocal critic of raising oxygen standards for the river.

The department did not respond to questions about its use of the river and the new standards.

But in written comments filed with the EPA in 2024, the department said “iconic native species” like striped bass, American shad and the sturgeon spawn in urban portions of the river.

Higher oxygen standards would pass costs to the utility and in turn the public, the agency’s water commissioner, Randy Hayman, said.

Raising oxygen standards to the “highest levels possibly attainable will impose burdensome costs on ratepayers with highly uncertain additional benefits to fish populations,” Hayman wrote in January 2024.

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The agency encouraged people to write to the EPA against the proposed standards before they were final.

While the Philadelphia Water Department estimated that complying with the new standards could cost customers more than $265 more a year, a University of Delaware study in 2021 put that cost at about $20 per person in most cases.

Further help from federal authorities could lower that cost more.

Economic benefits from tighter standards could lead to $350 million in annual benefits, through better fishing, boasting, recreation, birding, property values, navigation and more, researchers found.

“Given how perilously close the Delaware River Atlantic Sturgeon are to extinction – less than 250 spawning adults returning each year – and the increasing pressures climate change, industry and wastewater operations place on the sturgeon, it is essential that this basic need for high levels of oxygen year round is provided for,” Stephanie Kroll, a watershed scientist based in Philadelphia, told EPA officials last year.

Van Rossum was blunt about what’s at stake for the scaly river behemoth: “If it goes extinct, it will be wiped off the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.”