North Carolina People; Hugh Morton & Robert Bruck, Acid Rain

Production of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from WA Kovio bank a symbol of strength stability and service for over a century. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. If you've been reading the newspapers in the

last several weeks you've seen some stories coming out of Hilton Head South Carolina that dealt with the subject of acid rain. You've seen the controversy among scientists is due to this particular subject but in North Carolina there is sufficient advance warning that puts us all on notice that we do have a problem that we need to be talking about and that what we want to do this evening on North Carolina people. We have some fail some pictures and some individuals who help us all better understand this phenomenon that I think we all need to be worrying about a bit. First though to get us started I want to have you listen to Mr. beyond Dall who is the chief forester of all the national forests in our state who has something to say about this subject and particularly as it relates to his native Norway. Most of all I'm a native of Norway and last year I had the opportunity to go home and visit my family there. In Norway I noticed that they were facing many of the

same environmental issues that we are here in the United States. The lakes that I used to fish as a boy are now acid dead and void of fish. The seepage from lakes in the rivers and streams have it decreased the productivity for spawning habitat for salmon cod and halibut in our fjords for a thousand years my family have fished and farmed. Today it's a tragic situation when there are no more fish. I believe here in the United States where we can control our destiny we need to take action on this very important environmental issue. Well there it is ladies and gentlemen. A thousand years of tradition and employment and nature with Dr. Dahl says is in real jeopardy in his native ball way in the fields of that great country. We're here to talk with me this evening is North Carolina's man of the mountains Mr. Hugh Morton who's been following this subject for many many months. And Dr. Robert Bruck who is. Professor of plant pathology at nc state forestry

expert and a man who's been conducting some very important scientific research on this subject with you. You feel like Mr. Doll is there. Is there trouble afoot out there in the hills. Well I see things happening right before my eyes every day bill that that bothers me and I don't know as much about it I'm not the scientist that Dr. Brock is but I know that something is wrong. Dr. Brock What is it that is wrong then what are we seeing out there. Well I'll tell you Bill the entire subject of acid rain and air pollution is a tremendous challenge to the scientific community. As you mentioned before at Hilton Head there was a synopsis that was put together of 10 years of research and in fact after 10 years in many ways we quote no less now than we did before. We used to think that just the simple deposition of sulphate and nitrate and hydrogen ions was the cause of many of the problems. Now we find that there's a vegetable soup of air pollutants of all different causes and which acid rain is but one. So we're

seeing a tremendous amount of controversy within this area but in fact when we look at the data and particularly the data that we're talking about in the mountains here in this great state we see things that frighten us. We see numbers that show that there is from 10 to 50 times the amount of air pollution that we would expect in a normal pristine ecosystem. So right now as you mentioned I think that we're looking at the early warnings of what already has become manifest throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Who is this a problem of contaminating the trees and water and just about everything gets in its way. Well what's happening in Eastern Europe which we know more about now that the wall has come down over there and what's happening in Canada. These things tell us what can happen to us. The thing that I'm hopeful is that we will be smart enough to do something about it before we have the real severe damage that other people have already

had before us. Well as you and Bob and I know the ex-Navy are a producer director and said it's a Monet have got some film that shows some testimony of some North Carolinians we all know about this subject and then you to tell us about some slides so why don't we look at the monitor now and get this get this information before us. Acid rain cause Charlotte Motor Speedway about two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year needed maintenance costs. It's almost like this track is 20 miles from the ocean instead of 200 miles. We need to do something about this in the state of North Carolina because it's costing everybody a lot of money. No acid rain is not just a mountain problem it's a problem for all of North Carolina. In fact in 1988 the Environmental Defense Fund released a report which showed that the nitrogen from acid rain was a major source of nutrient pollution in our sound's an estuary. This nutrient pollution is causing massive algae blooms which strangle our coastal waters and are causing huge fish kills every year.

Bill House is having a considerable amount of difficulty in preserving statues and other outdoor artwork against the ravages of acid rain and other pollutants. Christmas tree plantations that we have sampled over a five year period of time at elevations of 2000 to 4000 feet above sea level have received the equivalent of 40 to 60 pounds per acre per year. And this is two to three times what we think that Mother Nature can accommodate over longer periods of time. With it Israel executive director of western North Carolina tomorrow and I have just been discussing the fact that the board unanimously adopted the battle against acid rain as its priority project with a commitment to call public attention to the serious threat that acid rain

presents. Sports fishermen know about it are deeply concerned by the EPA report that 300 plus streams in the southern Blue Ridge Mountains will eventually die unless acid rain pollution is turned around. Grandfather Mountain Lake where my wife to you Morton and I live is thirty nine hundred feet above sea level. We understand that all lakes in the Adirondacks in New York State are dead above twenty five hundred feet. If acid rain kills lakes in North Carolina How is maybe one of the first to go. High elevation streams like Wilson creek and Lyndall river will also be among the first to go. The wildlife that we trace here will likely be adversely affected. The high elevations spruce fir ecosystem of North Carolina and Tennessee is in fact one of the most unique ecosystems in eastern North America.

This particular forest is a remnant of the recession of the last glacier. And as we now know it was exposed to approximately 10 times the amount of sulphate and nitrate than we would we would expect in a low elevation ecosystems such as this which remains healthy and vigorous. Where it does not receive this air pollution exposure rime ice during the winter time can have a PH as low as the mid to some 1000 times more acidic than normal clean rainwater using apparatus like this we are able to exclude air pollution from experimental trees and see the effects of carbon filtered air on the mitigation of air pollution effects. Here on Richmond's balsam we are looking at an area on the Blue Ridge Parkway that is classified as being over 70 percent dead by the United States Forest Service. Most of this deterioration has taken place over the past decade. We know that

the adulthood is part of the problem on the Fraser fir but red spruce such as this area on Clemens dome in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is only affected by the natural entities that exist here on Roan Mountain. A beautiful bald top mountain with its rhododendron the spruce fir forest is in a state of severe decline as well as the beautiful spruce fir ecosystem on Grandfather Mountain which is showing severe deterioration over the past 10 years. On the left we see red spruce and on the right Frazier fir. The two major constituents of our high elevation forests potato knob at the end of the Mt Mitchell chain the Black Mountains composed solely of red spruce is an indicator that spruce as well as fur is declining. Canada reports extensive acid rain damage and they believe much of the pollution is coming from the United States. Canada's international nickel company smelter in Sudbury Ontario was one of the big polluters but it is

now eliminated 90 percent of the missions that left the landscape looking like the surface of the moon. There are 12000 dead lakes in Ontario and 30000 dead lakes in the province of Quebec. This Canadian lab is studying acid rain affects all their lakes Soffer dioxide emission from North America. The left is almost the same as Europe on the right. Canada published a map showing much of their pollution coming from the Ohio Valley and Tennessee. The next day if the wind blows from the north west North Carolina could be downwind from the same sources of air pollution. The arrows would be coming to North Carolina then Ohio is identified by a companion chart as the largest single emitter of sulfur dioxide in the U.S. and Canada but only 23 percent of Ohio's emissions going to Canada. That leaves 77 percent polluting the United States.

Duke Power Company has a chart showing the 10 largest U.S. power companies that generate electricity with coal. The red columns saw for emissions in 1987 and the blue is the requirement that the Clean Air Act passes. TVA is one of the 10 largest companies as is Duke. Duke has already done a lot of cleanup and so is the PNL but TVA is faced with a massive cleanup. Utilities originate 74 percent of the software dioxide emissions in the eastern United States. Transportation is 2 percent. The National acid deposition program has been measuring the acidity of rainfall in the eastern United States for 10 years. North Carolina receives receives 10 times the acidity of normal rainwater. My fellow townsmen from Wilmington David Brinkley told me of his friend who has a generating process from Finland doing an address of the Archer Daniels

Midland company generates electricity using high software code yet with no harmful emissions. Canadians say acid rain is killing many of their maples. We have many many maples in North Carolina. I hope we never lose them. Will you let us hope that we don't lose our North Carolina may post but our friend Bob has brought along some satellite imagery here and I want to get before so we'll have all the photographic knowledge and hand you what is out of it. That picture there. Well Bill this is a Landsat 5 image and there's a thematic map or image taken from 500 miles in space and this is actually a production of the computer graphics Center doctors laboratory at NC State. We're looking at is the entire black mountain range here Mt. Mitchell being right here this is a combination image looking at the reflectance of light from the entire spruce for ecosystem shown in the green and the orange here the orange being those trees that in fact are dead or dying showing the tremendous

amount of damage along this ecosystem stratified by altitude the higher we go the more damage we have. Now this was corroborated by work done at the United States Forest Service in Atlanta Georgia where they did a 100 percent aerial survey of the again the black mountain range this J shape what we see here is from this survey they were able to calculate that in the red. We're looking at from 70 to 100 percent dead trees. The blue from 40 to 70 percent dead trees and less than 40 percent in the green. Unfortunately when I ask a question here Hugh that slide that you showed him up at the tower at Mount Mitchell. Where there were just nothing but the trunk of the tree standing there that's in that dark brown face that's what's YOUR clear they are that photograph we'd seen. Exactly. So what we're seeing here is that approximately 40 percent of the entire ecosystem is dead or damaged at the present time and our data indicates that it continues to this day. All right now Bob what would be the concentration of acid that would be falling on

that area. Well what we're looking at now is that our high elevation areas Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences has been conducting monitoring now for four years from these elevations we see that there are numerous events of cloud deposition this is when the cloud itself bumps into the mountain and the acids and all the other cum compounds in that water rain out through the trees. When this happens we are looking at a cities that very very frequently are below three point in PH this being over five hundred times more acidic than what we consider to be normal clean or pristine rainwater. So you're literally poisoning the tree. Well we are receiving a tremendous amount of sulfate nitrate double the amount of ozone that at lower elevations organic carbon compounds in many ways these trees act as the vacuum cleaners of our atmosphere as these clouds pass from west to east through our mountains.

What does it do to the headwaters of downstream consumption that we every city we have in North Carolina depends on river flow. Some extent is this killing fish but it's not killing fish yet at least not the fin fish. Yeah there is suspicions on the part of our biologists with the Wildlife Commission that possibly some of the little shellfish which are the most sensitive that they may be affected but they haven't got the proof yet but they suspect it. But we're getting all sorts of advance warnings as you said earlier that we are in for trouble unless something is done and I just hope this Clean Air Act passes because right now some body that runs a plant in Ohio that's putting out a lot of saw for he could say to North Carolina well I'm so sorry that I've killed a lot of your trees at the higher elevations but. It's just going to cost me too much to clean up so I'm going to have to kill the rest up. Well

we don't want that we want a law passed that will make them have to clean up. You use the expression ecosystem. What actually happens when that cloud rolls over Grandfather Mountain. And then we destroy the root system of the trains do we destroy the natives. Do they drain into the water basin. Is this saying that kind of cycle. Well the fact is we call this bio geochemistry it is the cycles that take place in nature and part of our greatest challenge is to be able to measure these cycles and to figure out what's going on from Mount Mitchell to just use an example. We have done experiments empirical experiments up there to show that these acids will road and fuse the waxes and the cuticles on the needles of these trees during a few separate events we actually had burning of young needles during these cloud events as they are called. We also in some of our open top chamber experiments eliminated ozone from these chambers by using carbon filtration by doing that we were able to almost double

the growth of the seedlings that were planted within these chambers versus the natural or ambient air in the system. In addition all this works into the soil at some point in time as it drips through the trees. So when it reaches the soil the acidity in particular we often have aluminum leeching from the soil this is not aluminum from the sky but rather the natural aluminum in the soil. The bonds are broken between the aluminum and the silica and aluminum can be taken up by the root system causing toxicity. So in reality virtually every phase of an ecosystem can be affected from the deposition of these manmade pollutants. Then then this is the layman questioning you but is it literally possible then that we kill all plant life. The high velocity winds come through that we just have a granite shaft sitting there. Well you know this is a question that's often asked as to how fast or rapidly or how severe things are happening. It's a very difficult question to answer. We do know some horror stories for example Western Czechoslovakia and we're just learning these things now as you

said as the wall comes down. The fact is that here in areas that are receiving about 10 times more pollution than we even receive which is just unfathomable. They have virtually sterilized many of their ecosystems where there are rolling hills fading away from East and West Germany that are virtually devoid of plant life. BROWN No we are not at that stage yet in the United States we hope we never get there. It would have to be much much more contamination. But I think the key question that we have to deal with right now is this esoteric how much is enough. Before we start wondering and doing something about this particular problem you our mutual friend Bill sessile and Humpy Wheeler down there at the Charlotte Speedway and those clips we so this shows it it it gets to things other than trees and and plants and other ecosystems affecting the whole state. Its not as dramatic as the top of Mount Mitchell in some of the high peaks but

its affecting the whole state. And as Steve Levitt us said its affecting the coastal fisheries as well. So its a problem for the whole state thing that bothers me is that we weve got two real good corporate citizens in North Carolina and Carolina Power and Light and Duke Power. They've been cleaning up for a decade. Some of these. People outside the state where their pollution is blowing into a state they have done a thing. And yet Duke Power and Caroline apparent light may be charged with some of the expense of these other people's cleanup. Now I'm afraid that maybe some of our congressmen will vote against it because they don't want North Carolina to pay any of that expense. And yet that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. If we still have the pollution coming in from other states and so I hope that that will

not prevent us from supporting the Clean Air Act. What do you see now in the way of your own research. Where are you and I'm coming to the second question which is it seems to me that one of the great problems here is the awareness of the public. As to what is really happening here is that true. Well as I said before yes it is true. One of the things that scientists are confronted with is that we're always wearing two hats during these types of issues. As a scientists it's very important to be able to look objectively at these issues to be able to take our measurements to do the best job of interpretation that we possibly can to be able to be able to make recommendations to society the political sector the fact is as I mentioned before the more science we do in this issue the more complicated the entire scenario gets. Meaning that we're faced with a dilemma that being that the burden of proof that is so often talked about dealing with any environmental issue may never be met by the scientific

community the so-called smoking gun where we know that pollutant X causes damage. Why as we look up into our atmosphere we are finding greenhouse gases we are finding organic carbon compounds we are finding ozone depleting compounds. As I said before we live in a soup of manmade pollutants. And the challenge is to be able to do the best we can in the scientific community to provide the evidence to the public of what is needed. On the other hand putting on the other hat. We are then confronted with the reality of well sir how long does this take I am very often asked and of course we have learned not to answer that question because we don't know very often. We perhaps will never have perfect answers to these points. Therefore it becomes a question of political societal and economic assessment of what we are to do about this problem as it exists in the United States today. You to people act with surprise would you go out with your slide program.

As I have seen you do and start raising their level of understanding of this problem. I have shown my I guess shown a slight prob 50 times in the last 6 months and every time. People are really surprised that we have this much problem in North Carolina and that it is going to be even more serious if we don't do something about it. I have people asking me for videotapes of my program and of course I don't have them but I have to get a videotape of this program and hope that that will satisfy some of these needs. What about the Christmas tree industry you know you were talking of early on and that clip had some robbers that here's a hundred million dollar industry that's grown up upon a certain elevation in the mountains in the last 20 years. Well some of those farmers up there got as many as two million trees in the in the ground right now it's a tremendous thing. Just hundreds of families that are deeply involved with it and as Dr. Shelton

said from the state they're they're getting two to three times what nature can accommodate in the way of suffocates in those farms and they can correct with live in their fertilizer short term basis but long term it doesn't spell a very bright future for the Christmas tree industry. So there is no variety of far specie up there that is resistant to this can be. Well that's correct I mean there are certainly different tolerances between trees and as we've learned the spruce and fir really do act as the Canaries both in Europe and here in eastern North America. They seem to be very much more susceptible due to where they are being impacted with the high elevations. So we are confronted with a problem that is insidious and being able to measure to measure it to be able to quantify the damage presents a tremendous problem. Where have you seen in the example that. You can cite that would bring this right down to me in my drinking water and community purification is this going to be a

problem that is a tremendous problem Bill. I am often asked by officials of the Federal Government can you take me to a place to show me a dead lake or a dead tree and say this is acid rain that has killed this particular individual. The fact is we can't do it. We know that acid deposition is creating primary and or secondary effects in these ecosystems. But the word ecosystem by definition means that there are all sorts of compounding factors the climate when you have a drought there is stress there are insects and diseases that present problems particularly in our forces throughout the country. Also when we adults are just being one up on Mount Mitchell and elsewhere we have natural cycles of breakdown in the bio geochemical processes and hence to be able to definitively put your finger on it is not an easy thing to do. You are neighbor right across the ridge there the TVA. His comments make me think about this. Is there a problem there.

Well they they have not done any cleanup. As we mentioned earlier. Whereas our main power companies in this state have already been for a decade been cleaning out of a software burning system. In part and and they got stacks over there that are 2000 feet high. The object being to get the pollution up into the upper atmosphere so that it will come to North Carolina rather than land over there near them. And so it's something that we've got to do something about. No two ways about it and you you take up their account of where they got thirty thousand dead lakes in the province of Quebec 12000 more of the province of Ontario. I can't imagine North Carolina with a thousand dead lakes back in the either. But when you say Dead Lake you mean literally no fish. No they don't have a tadpole a salamander a piece of underwater grass a tribe nothing. Everything is dead.

Bob we've got about 30 seconds. Where is somebody doing something about this it's really encouraging. Well the fact is that the Central Europeans in particular are very much aware as well as the Scandinavian countries right now they have already enacted laws in order to mitigate pollution affects automobile traffic is now controlled in a very severe way is the burning of coal is controlled they seem to be very much aware of their relationship with the environment and the whole concept of Land Stewardship. I've got to stop us we've run out of time but keep up the good work is all I can say and. God speed it all you're doing. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. You're

a production of North Carolina people is made possible by a grant from WA Kovio bank a symbol of strength stability and service for over a century.