The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $349,484 to Research Triangle Institute to continue water-quality work in the U.S. Virgin Islands, including scientific studies used to establish pollution limits for impaired coastal waters.
The contract was awarded September 24 and disclosed publicly by EPA on October 5. It supports the territory’s Basic Water Quality Monitoring Program and continues work already being performed by Research Triangle Institute.
EPA says the work is technically complex, can take several years to complete and must continue without interruption because some of the projects are being carried out under a court-mandated schedule. The agency warned that changing contractors at this stage could delay the work and put federal deadlines at risk.
At the center of the contract are studies known federally as Total Maximum Daily Loads, or TMDLs. In practical terms, a TMDL determines how much of a particular pollutant a body of water can receive and still remain clean enough to meet federal and territorial water-quality standards.
These studies are required for waters that have been identified as polluted or otherwise impaired under the Clean Water Act.
EPA records show that the Virgin Islands has numerous coastal waters requiring that kind of assessment. In the territory’s most recently approved impaired-waters list, EPA identified 250 waterbody-and-pollutant combinations requiring further attention, including 99 that were newly added during that review cycle.
Those listings cover waters around St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John and include concerns involving nitrogen, bacteria, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, phosphorus and other water-quality measures.
Among the areas EPA and the V.I. Department of Planning and Natural Resources have identified as high priorities are portions of the St. Thomas East End Reserves and the St. Croix East End Marine Park.
EPA’s 2022 review identified 21 assessment areas within those two protected marine zones as high priorities for development of pollution limits. Federal records say those locations include ecologically important mangroves, coral reefs, seagrass beds, fisheries habitat and heavily used coastal waters.
The federal records do not make clear which specific Virgin Islands bays or coastal areas are covered by the newly awarded $349,484 contract, or which pollutants are currently the focus of the contractor’s work.
They also do not identify the court case or judicial order behind the schedule EPA says it must meet.
That makes the reference to a court-mandated timetable one of the more significant unanswered questions surrounding the new contract.
EPA says Research Triangle Institute was selected without a new competition because the company was already performing related work under an earlier competitively awarded contract. The agency said keeping the same contractor would allow the work to continue without the additional planning and transition time that would come with changing firms.
EPA also said the existing contractor already possesses the technical knowledge required for the projects, which involve extensive scientific analysis, Clean Water Act requirements, preparation of reports and, before pollution limits can be formally adopted, public comment periods and hearings.
The contract runs through September 2027.
Federal water-quality records show that monitoring in the Virgin Islands has historically included dozens of sampling locations around the territory. EPA’s review of the 2022 impaired-waters list said quarterly monitoring had included 36 sites around St. Croix and 58 around St. Thomas and St. John.
The monitoring data are used to determine whether territorial waters are meeting standards established for activities such as swimming, fishing, marine habitat protection and other designated uses.
When a water body fails those standards because of pollution, federal law generally requires the territory to identify the pollutant responsible and establish a plan for reducing it to acceptable levels.
The new EPA contract is intended to continue that technical work.
