But Alegria says that they will do their part to address this urgent issue. Today he outlined the short term and long-term solutions the DOE has for restoring the rank, rotten New River.

Martin Alegria, Chief Environmental Officer - DOE
"Yesterday I think I mentioned that we had prioritized that issue to the extent that this week we are doing some desktop exercise, gathering funding to address the immediate issues. One of them is the cleaning up of those dead fish smelling that's causing the stench. That's the first action. That should begin today or so through private sector assistance, but we have the funds for that. Then we are doing hopefully by Friday desktop exercise using Google Earth and so on to see where the key areas point sources to look at and then approach them in order for them to be part of the solution and of course we have the long term component. The long term, meaning next year, 2 years, 5 years from now. We need to have an action plan related specifically to the New River with all players; agricultural sector, tourism sector, local government town board and government entities so that we all have a common program which we are planning to develop and then having a financial sustainability plan to implement so that what happened this year, does not repeat itself, because we might be prepared as such in terms of preventing the amount going into the river in the case of summer time when the temperature are the hottest."

"What we have seen this year has been occurring over the past 10-15 years. It's just that because of the heat, drought and the temperature of the water just exasperated it."

Reporter
"Why wasn't anything done throughout all those years?"

Martin Alegria, Chief Environmental Officer - DOE
"We have been doing over the past 10-15 years. We have been working with key entities. People like to target BSI, but that is one of the companies we have been working over 10 years to minimize the potential damage to the river in that section and so for the past 3 years we have an action plan for the next 5 years. So two and a half years have gone where they have reducing their outflow in terms of concentrations and so on. They have built ponds, treatment systems, they have address the water temperature from their boilers. What is there the results right now last month is pollution that has been there for 40-50 years. So what and how we address that pollution that is there for decades now, how we minimize the continuation of the inflow - it will take a lot of time and money to deal with what is out there the pollutant that is already in the system."

We will keep following this story.