Investigative Case: The Nancy Creek Challenge

State environmental officials said Monday that chlorine was the contaminant that killed up to 15,000 fish last week in the Nancy Creek watershed.

Although state Environmental Protection Division administrators won't be able to conclusively identify where the chlorine came from until later this week, they said it is possible that the chemical may have originated from two different sources.

"We're in the process of figuring out where the discharge came from," said Vince Dollard, an EPD spokesman. "This was a serious fish kill."

Thousands of dead fish were found last week along the 18-mile length of Nancy Creek, which stretches from the Chamblee-Dunwoody area in DeKalb County to the Chattahoochee River in Fulton County.

State environmental authorities said enforcement action is likely once they determine the source of the chlorine, which they suspect was discharged from DeKalb's water plant on Winters Chapel Road in Doraville and a nearby swimming pool.

DeKalb officials have denied that their treatment plant released the large levels of chlorine that would lead to the fish kill. They point to environmental tests they conducted in the days after the fish kill that found only a trace of chlorine.

State environmental officials are trying to determine what caused a catastrophic fish kill this week in the Nancy Creek watershed.

In what experts are calling one of the worst kills in metro Atlanta history, thousands of dead fish have been spotted along the 18-mile length of the creek from where it begins in the Chamblee/Dunwoody area in DeKalb County down to where it joins the Chattahoochee River in Fulton County.

Officials of the state Environment Protection Division said Friday that they have detected unusually large levels of chlorine in Nancy Creek, but they declined to say where the chemical may have come from, citing the ongoing investigation.

If it is determined that a chlorine discharge is to blame, the source of the contaminant could be facing several thousand dollars in fines and a review of any operating permits.

"This is a significant incident if it is attributed to chlorine," said Sally Bethea, executive director of the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, an environmental activist group.

State officials have reported several other disastrous spills in recent years. Two years ago, Georgia Power Co. agreed to pay a $215,000 fine for discharging superheated water from one of its generating plants into Lake Sinclair near Milledgeville, killing up to 20,000 fish.

In February, a kaolin processing plant in Twiggs County in Middle Georgia released a chemical in Big Sandy Creek, killing about 11,000 fish.

The scope of this week's incident along the Nancy Creek is still being tabulated, but it will rank as one of the worst considering that dead fish, including sunfish, bass, catfish and darters, have been found along the entire length of the tributary.

"We found high levels of chlorine," said Lisa Klein a fisheries biologist for the state Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Resources Division.

Margo Howse, deputy director of the DeKalb Water and Sewer Department, denied that chlorine from the county's water plant on Winters Chapel Road in Doraville was the source of the spill.

"The chlorine residue was very slight and a very long distance from where the dead fish were," she said, adding that county tests detected only traces of chlorine.

Howse said state officials have told the county that the fish kill resulted from "weather stress," a natural phenomenon in which summer heat affects the water's oxygen. The same phenomenon is blamed for killing thousands of freshwater clams in the Ogeechee River in Bulloch County.

Klein said, however, the Nancy Creek kill is related to a chemical contaminant. "There had to be some type of toxin," she said.