Va. Dept. Of Wildlife Resources Proposes Reducing Protections For Fish At Water Intakes

By Evan Visconti, Virginia Mercury

December 17, 2025

A newly proposed guidance document from the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) would impact how Virginia’s leading wildlife conservation agency advises the state on the best practices to protect animal populations and habitats from the impacts of withdrawing surface water. The plan has ruffled feathers among researchers and Chesapeake Bay area conservationists.

DWR’s public information officer, Shelby Crouch, stated in an email that the proposal was developed in response to concerns that “Virginia specific data to support previous guidance was incomplete and that more research is needed to support that earlier guidance and the resulting costs.”

A Virginia Office of Regulatory Management review form for the guidance change also cited lower costs to current and potential water intake operators as a benefit, stating that “the updated parameters are consistent with requirements of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a relaxation of prior DWR guidance to permitting agencies and applicants.”

The agency is now accepting public comments on the proposal, which Crouch said are also “more in line with the standards of many nearby states.”

Dec. 17 is the last day to submit public comments on the proposal before the agency decides whether or not to adopt the changes.

Charles Gowan, professor of environmental studies at Randolph-Macon College, was the lead author of the 1999 report that is now under scrutiny.

Gowan said nothing has changed to warrant the new proposal over the 25-plus years that DWR has utilized the report in its guidance for surface water intakes.

In a written public comment submitted to DWR, Gowan stated the proposal relaxes existing standards “to the point that almost no protection will be afforded to fish encountering water withdrawal facilities in Virginia.”

But Crouch said that “While these newly drafted standards may not be as stringent as previous guidance, they are generally accepted as appropriately protective and minimize economic burden on those who rely upon surface water to generate energy, operate commercial industry, and provide water to their citizens.”

Daniel Royster, a North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) resource specialist, commented on DWR’s guidance proposal stating that the decision will have impacts that stretch beyond Virginia’s waterways: “These species do not respect political boundaries.”

Despite DWR’s claim that the change is being proposed to align more closely with nearby states, Royster argued on behalf of DMF in favor of keeping the existing protections due to a lack of evidence demonstrating “… mortality risk does not increase when comparing the current and proposed guidelines.”

Filtering out wildlife

DWR’s new guidance proposal recommends doubling the size of the screen openings that filter out organisms before they get pulled into surface water intakes. It also recommends doubling the approach velocity, or the speed at which intakes can suck in water and organisms.

A depiction of various surface water intake screen openings used to protect fish. (Photo courtesy of Gowan, Garman and Shuart/Virginia Mercury

Surface water intakes can be especially harmful to fish eggs and larvae, which are “essentially neutrally buoyant particles, kind of bouncing along with the flow,” Gowan said in an interview this week.

The eggs and larvae can be killed by water intakes in two ways. They can get sucked into the underwater intake pipe, a term called entrainment, or they can become physically trapped against the filter of the intake, called impingement.

The size of the screen openings that filter out organisms before entering an intake and the velocity of the water being sucked past it are the two key protective measures that are used to protect vulnerable species.

Researchers believe protections at water intakes are critically important in the Chesapeake Bay watershed because it is used as a nursery ground, or spawning ground, for such a wide range of aquatic animals.

“Aquatic fauna use the water column to grow and mature, and when they’re very small, they’re very vulnerable,” said Lyle Varnell, associate director for advisory services at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). Varnell also submitted comments to DWR on behalf of VIMS urging against the adoption of the proposed guidance and reminding the public that VIMS will continue recommending the more stringent standards.

Many of Virginia’s most threatened fish species, like river herring, American shad, Atlantic sturgeon and striped bass, have “incredibly small eggs and larvae,” and the larvae are “very weak-swimming,” said Gowan, adding that he is not aware of any new information that indicates the fish are bigger or faster than researchers thought they were in 1999.

The eggs and larvae are often so small that even the current one millimeter screen openings that DWR is now proposing to double in size allow a large percentage of eggs and larvae of different species to still pass through it, Gowan said.

The current recommendation of a 0.25 foot per second intake velocity is also faster than most of the larvae of concern in Virginia’s tidal waters can swim. “So again the recommendations were based on the limits of technology at the time,” said Gowan.

“We were hopeful that over the last 25 years or so that some better technology would come along and the criteria could be strengthened,” Gowan said. “That didn’t happen, so I’m really perplexed, concerned that they’re actually relaxing the criteria.”

A growing reliance on surface water

The demand for surface water, or water that is not trapped underground, is rising in Virginia as municipalities struggle to meet growing water demands amidst drying aquifers.

A surface water withdrawal from the Rappahannock River in Caroline County of 1.8 million gallons per year was recently approved as part of the state’s broader Coastal Plain Groundwater Initiative. The plan is to reduce permitted withdrawals of the Coastal Plain’s “over-allocated“ aquifer system, according to the water protection permit issued for the project by DEQ.

The new Caroline County surface water withdrawal, which will be used for municipal public water supply, was approved using the current smaller guidelines for screen openings and slower maximum velocities for intake. An evaluation of aquatic life submitted as part of the permitting process for the project states: “Potential impacts of the intake on fish eggs and larvae are determined by the size of the openings in the intake screen and the velocity of the intake.”

But the project adds to a long, largely unregulated list of withdrawal structures hidden beneath the depths of Virginia’s tidal waterways.

Approximately 77% of surface water withdrawn in Virginia during 2017 was found to be excluded from permitting requirements because of a rule that grandfathered in withdrawals that were in place before 1989, according to a 2024 surface water supply report.

These underwater intakes, out of sight from the human eye, pump water from tidal rivers for consumptive uses like drinking water and irrigation or for temporary uses in pass-through systems for cooling and power generation, which return much of the water back into the ecosystem.

Intakes for large pass-through systems like power plants can have the staggering ability to suck in the majority of water flowing through a river depending on the time of year, said Gowan.

When the Surry Nuclear Power Station is operating at full power, eight pumps intake over 1.6 million gallons of water per minute from the James River and later output it approximately six miles upriver, according to a 2001 environmental report.

A study at the smaller Chesterfield Power Station on the James River, which intakes about 12% of the total water volume in the vicinity of the station, estimated that its water intakes resulted in the annual total entrainment of approximately 1.3 billion fin fish and 86 million shell fish between 2016-2020. The majority of fin fish entrained were from the herring and shad family.

The American shad recovery plan for the James River highlighted that there are more than 20 water intakes in the portions of the river identified as the peak spawning grounds for American shad.

“In light of the fact that such a great proportion of these surface water intakes already are unregulated, and it’s not clear what if any protections for these fish there are in place, it is astounding to me that we’re proposing making them less protective right now,” said Tom Dunlap, the James River Association’s riverkeeper.

Researchers are still looking into the cumulative impacts of multiple water intakes on tidal rivers that naturally sweep organisms back and forth “like a washing machine cycle,” said Gowan.

According to Varnell, water supply will be a running issue in Virginia’s portion of Chesapeake Bay for years to come.

Gowan agreed that “water management is a huge issue” but views protecting fish at water withdrawals as a separate problem.

“If we are going to take this water out, how can we protect aquatic resources?” Gowan asked.

This story was originally published by the Virginia Mercury. For more stories from the Virginia Mercury, visit VirginiaMercury.com.