Grantee Research Project Results
2016 Progress Report: Water, Our Voice to the Future: Climate change adaptation and waterborne disease prevention on the Crow Reservation
EPA Grant Number: R835594Title: Water, Our Voice to the Future: Climate change adaptation and waterborne disease prevention on the Crow Reservation
Investigators: Doyle, John , Camper, Anne
Current Investigators: Doyle, John , Eggers, Margaret J.
Institution: Little Big Horn College , Montana State University
EPA Project Officer: Hahn, Intaek
Project Period: August 1, 2014 through July 31, 2017 (Extended to July 31, 2019)
Project Period Covered by this Report: August 1, 2015 through July 31,2016
Project Amount: $914,466
RFA: Science for Sustainable and Healthy Tribes (2013) RFA Text | Recipients Lists
Research Category: Tribal Environmental Health Research , Human Health
Objective:
Integrate traditional ecological and community knowledge, scientific data and climate models to produce a cohesive document that describes existing and projected local climate, hydrologic and microbial water quality changes and their impacts on resources, Crow traditions, ecosystems and community health.
- Hypothesis I: Traditional ecological and community knowledge of Tribal Elders, scientific data and modeling will effectively complement one another, to produce a more comprehensive assessment of existing and projected climate, hydrologic and microbial water quality changes and their impacts on resources, Crow traditions, ecosystems and community health.
- Hypothesis II: Future climate change impacts will be profound in the Northern Plains Crow Reservation, with climate and hydrologic changes exceeding current and historical observations.
- Hypothesis III: Local microbial water quality is influenced by climate-driven spring flooding and late summer drought.
Progress Summary:
Objective 1: Research
- Community interviews (Doyle, McCleary, Hiza)
John Doyle has completed 16 interviews to date. He spent January-August 2016 focusing primarily on completing the recruitment, well testing and surveying of 200 families on home wells, and follow-up with these families in September 2016. With this done, he is again setting up interviews with Elders for this fall and will be focusing his efforts on this objective over the winter.
- Western science knowledge of local climate change (Eggers, Whitlock)
Historical data for Big Horn County (roughly coterminous with the Crow Reservation) and for the region—Montana Climate District 5 (MCD5)—have been compared to modelled forecasts for the County and for MCD5. Historic and project trends for warming summer and winter temperatures and decreasing snowfall are in agreement, except that the rate of warming is projected to accelerate. Over the past 80 years for MCD5, temperatures have increased for the month of March by 2.22°C, and for September by 0.89°C; over the next 80 years the increase is projected to be 3.89°C (for March) and 4.33°C (for September).
Figure 1. USGS projected climate change anomalies for Big Horn County, MT.The projection for increasing annual precipitation, however, conflicts with the documented trend of declining annual precipitation in MCD5. This discrepancy makes the U.S. Geological Survey data on the discharge in the Little Big Horn River a critical resource for the Crow Tribe (Figure 1). There is a USGS gaging station on the River at the base of the mountains, above any irrigation withdrawals. The discharge data for this site show a trend towards earlier and lower peak spring runoff in the Little Big Horn River, a pattern being seen elsewhere in the Rocky Mountain West. Milder winters with earlier snowmelt and earlier peak runoff could be contributing to the unusually severe spring floods of 2007 and 2011. Due to a long history of using the rivers for a drinking water source, Crow settlements in the past, and homes today, are primarily located very close to the rivers. Many homes are, therefore, in flood zones, and there was widespread inundation and hence contamination of home wells in the 2007 and especially the 2011 floods.
As this river is the source water for the water treatment plant for the town of Crow Agency, the largest community on the Reservation, including the Indian Health Service Hospital, its flow is critical to community health. Historically, river discharge at Crow Agency has been lowest in August, and in 2016, the flow rate was lower than any time residents can remember. This could be due to a combination of reduced river discharge and increased upstream withdrawals for irrigation as summer heat increases. It is very clear that Crow Agency is in danger of losing its drinking water source in late summer in future years.
The projection for decreasing average soil moisture corresponds to anectodal evidence that this trend is already occurring, at least in Crow Agency in the center of the Reservation, where excavators have been seeing the water table fall over the past 10 or so years. However, there is no historical or current directly measured soil moisture data available for the Crow Reservation.
These factors combined have led Project staff to prioritize the following climate adaptation measures for the Reservation:
- Purchase and install sanitary (i.e., watertight) well caps for project participants with unprotected well heads.
- Demonstrate how to shock chlorinate wells.
- Investigate an alternate groundwater source for the municipal water supply for the town of Crow Agency. There is a deep, decommissioned well in Crow Agency that could serve as this source. If the water quality is acceptable, the AWWA can look into the legal and financial requirements for using this well as an alternate municipal water source.
- Investigate whether the wastewater generated by the Crow Agency treatment plant is legally available, of suitable quality and sufficiently socially acceptable to market it to local users. Legal, water quality and social acceptability questions need to be addressed. We have found collaborators and some of the funding to address these questions, and are continuing to work on it.
- Understand and communicate to Tribal members how spring runoff affects metals contamination of home wells: retesting of participants’ home wells for this purpose is planned for May and June 2017, as described in our grant proposal and below under plans for Year 3.
- Re-instate at least one weather station for the Reservation, located in Crow Agency, so that the Tribe has data on which to base adaptation planning.
Objective 2: Community adaptation
- Well water testing
Nearly 200 wells have been tested to date for microbial and inorganic contamination, and well owners have completed the corresponding survey. The first 140 of these participants have received the results of their well water testing, an explanation of any health risks; if their well water was unsafe for consumption, they also received a water cooler as compensation for their time and effort in participating in the project. The last 60 samples were shipped to a collaborator at another university for metals analysis because that university had received other funding and would be able to do those analyses at no cost to our project. Delays in refining and getting approval for their Quality Assurance Project Plan, however, resulted in those analyses being delayed. At our request, they have shipped those samples back to our long-standing contractor, Energy Laboratories in Billings, Montana, for analysis. We expect to be able to send out results to these more recent participants by the end of October. Compilation of these data is underway. Re-testing of as many of these wells as possible during spring runoff 2017 is planned.
- Outreach
The Crow Environmental Health Committee met almost every month this fiscal year. Investigators visited with well owners in every District of the Reservation during the extended January-July 2016 water sampling and survey work. They now have a much better understanding of residents’ concerns and frustrations.
Project Coordinator Martin opened a Facebook page titled Crow Water Quality Project. The aim of this Facebook page is to increase current information on water that is available for drinking and domestic uses, impacts of climate change on those resources and associated health risks. General information is provided on the different types of local groundwater contaminants found in well water and the health risks associated with having high levels of those contaminants. There are links to videos to show how to protect home well water and maintain wells. We hope to strengthen the Crow community’s general knowledge of the importance of having a healthy relationship with clean water for drinking, domestic use and personal health, and an awareness of how climate change has been affecting and is projected to impact local water resources and hence community health.
We have learned that it is repeated contact and availability that builds trust—we have to be a resource to the community, and open to discussions about water and health at any time or place we meet folks. Second, for this project to be sustainable, we have to continue to build community capacity, including Crow students, to create a network of people who will sustain one another in this ongoing work.
Objective 3: Disseminate project results (all staff)
Local dissemination is ongoing, as described above under Objective 2. An overview of our results to date also was presented and discussed at our annual External Advisory Committee (EAC) meeting to both EAC and Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee members in October 2016.
Future Activities:
Objective 1: Research
Interviews.
Investigators are continuing with the interviews and are planning on conducting two to three interviews/month. Depending on interviewee preferences, the interviewer may audio record (only) rather than videotape interviews.
Western science knowledge of local climate change.
Investigators have been able to compare historical with project climate changes for the Reservation and for the Montana Climate District the Reservation is in. Investigating the data available online from the Montana Climate Office (MCO) only turns up averages (over the past ~30 years), not trends over time. We plan to contact MCO climatologists to determine whether they are available to analyze and provide trend data. We will continue to seek out additional relevant sources of climate data. If it is permissible within our budget, the next step will be to work with the MCO statewide network to purchase, install and monitor data from a weather station on the Reservation.
Objective 2: Community adaptation
Well water testing.
As 200 wells have been sampled to date, we are not actively recruiting for new participants, but we are testing wells and collecting surveys from Tribal members who ask to have their wells sampled and have not previously participated in the project.
Winter snowpack and spring runoff has been moderate these past two seasons; hence, we have waited on the spring re-testing, hoping for a wetter year. As this is now the third year of the grant, everyone’s wells will be resampled during May and June 2016 and results analyzed against results from the prevalent drier conditions.
We are in the process of compiling well water and location (latitude/longitude) data into one spreadsheet, and will be entering it into a GIS for the Reservation. We have updated our version of ArcMap to 10.3.1, so it will take some time and work to recreate our previous GIS in this new version of ArcMap. We will be producing contaminant maps for local dissemination and distribution. Geomasking will be used to slightly shift well locations in any nationally published versions of our maps, to protect the identities of well owners. We will continue to collaborate with GIS expert Dr. Hoover in spatial analysis of these data.
There has been so much interest from well owners in learning how to shock chlorinate their wells—and so many coliform contaminated wells—that we realized we could not possibly have a plumber work with every well owner individually. Shock chlorination, however, is a critical adaptation skill as so many homes (and hence wells) are in flood zones along the rivers. Hence, we are working with a bilingual Tribal well owner, a plumber and a cameraman to prepare a bilingual video (in Crow and English) demonstrating and explaining how to shock chlorinate a well. The video will be posted on our Facebook page, with links from the Little Big Horn College website and Crow Tribal Facebook page. We are considering whether it would be cost effective to also do a hands-on demonstration at one home in each community.
We also will be working on compiling and analyzing survey data from the 200 participating families.
Outreach work in the Crow Reservation community.
The Crow Environmental Health Steering Committee will continue to meet almost every month, and in-person outreach work in the community continues. The project’s External Advisory Committee will meet again during the summer of 2017. We will continue to maintain and expand the Crow Water Quality Facebook page, and will explore additional venues for local outreach. We plan to have two, possibly three, field crews working on well water sampling during the May/June period.
Adaptations to projected climate changes.
We are continuing work on a number of adaptation measures as described above and elsewhere, including the deeper well in Crow Agency as a possible alternate source for municipal drinking water, the potential re-use of Crow Agency wastewater and the possibility of re-instating a weather station in Crow Agency, Montana, in the center of the Reservation.
Objective 3: Disseminate project results
Local dissemination efforts are described above. We plan to attend the NIEHS Environmental Health Fest in December 2016, to network with colleagues, learn from others and disseminate project publications as appropriate. We are searching for an appropriate venue for national dissemination of our work for fall 2017.
Journal Articles:
No journal articles submitted with this report: View all 53 publications for this projectRelevant Websites:
Crow Water Quality Project Exit
Progress and Final Reports:
Original AbstractThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.