Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
Proposed Policy Change Would Weaken Sewage Treatment
By JOAN LOWY
Scripps Howard News Service
December 01, 2004
- The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to make a final decision
next month on whether cities should be allowed to release partially treated
sewage during heavy rainfalls despite concerns the policy would increase the
incidence of waterborne disease.
The policy change, called "sewage blending," was proposed by EPA more than a
year ago and has attracted nearly 100,000 written comments from industry, state
and local officials, interest groups and the public.
Local sewerage agencies have lobbied heavily for the change, saying they need an
affordable solution to the problem of treatment plants that become overwhelmed
by heavy flows during rainstorms and snowmelts.
The alternatives, sewage treatment operators say, is to either release the
excess sewage entirely untreated or spend billions of dollars upgrading
treatment plants and sewerage systems across the country.
"What we are fighting for is to preserve what we view as a management practice
to (achieve) as much treatment as possible in an extreme wet weather event,"
said Alexandra Dunn, general counsel for the Association of Metropolitan
Sewerage Agencies.
The policy change is also expected to benefit builders and developers, allowing
local governments in fast growing areas to lower impact fees or to lift
moratoriums on new sewer hookups.
However, environmentalists, scientists and some states have criticized the
proposal as a rollback of environmental and public health protections.
"We think EPA should enforce the law to protect public health, not change the
law to protect the poor practices that are threatening public health," said
Nancy Stoner, an expert on water policy with the Natural Resources Defense
Council.
"If this policy is finalized, more Americans will get sick from waterborne
diseases, which are life threatening for small children, the elderly, cancer
patients, and others who are already weakened by illness," Stoner said.
The Washington State Department of Ecology called the proposed policy change
"environmental backsliding" in comments filed with EPA. The Florida Department
of Environmental Protection said the policy will undermine the state's efforts
to get waste treatment operators to upgrade their facilities and may not provide
"sufficient protection against discharges of pathogenic organisms."
The Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association predicted the proposed policy
would "result in devastating consequences to shellfish farmers."
"While we appreciate the challenges faced by municipalities, it must be realized
that their failure to protect water quality leads to a 'taking' of our growers'
property when degraded water quality leads to closures on shellfish harvests,"
the association wrote EPA.
Under the proposed policy, sewage would receive the first stage of treatment in
which solids are removed, but treatment plants could skip the second stage in
which biological processes are used to kill bacteria, viruses and other
pathogens. The partially treated sewage would then be blended with fully treated
effluent and released into waterways.
Some treatment processes include a third stage in which chlorine is used to
disinfect effluent, but EPA data shows a quarter to half of treatment plants do
not disinfect, Stoner said. Disinfection does nothing to kill viruses and many
other pathogens, she said.
Current regulations allow treatment plants to blend partially treated sewage
during extreme events like hurricanes when full treatment isn't feasible, but
the proposed policy would allow routine use of the practice, critics said.
"I don't want the community or the public to have a false sense of security that
blending is providing a large safety net with regard to pathogenic
microorganisms discharged (from treatment plants) because it's not," said Joan
Rose, a water pollution microbiologist at Michigan State University.
Rose recently mapped out the path of wastewater discharges from treatment plants
in Michigan, showing that the effluent ultimately ends up in Lake Michigan.
"Eventually, all that discharged effluent ends up in waterways we use for
drinking," Rose said.
EPA has warned for years that construction and repair of sewer systems and
treatment plants has not kept pace with population growth. The U.S. population
has risen from 205 million people in 1970 to 294 million people today.
At the same time, global warming has increased annual rainfall in the
continental United States on average about 10 percent over the past century and
"extreme precipitation events" have increased nearly 20 percent, with most of
the increase occurring since 1970, according to the National Climatic Data
Center.
The increased sewage and storm water going into sewer systems has put greater
pressure on treatment plants and aging pipes.
EPA estimates that more than 850 billion gallons of completely untreated sewage
escapes from aging and inadequate sewage pipes every year before it reaches
treatment plants.
A study by scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that
the majority of illnesses from waterborne pathogens coincide with heavy
rainstorms.
"EPA has been very outspoken in recognizing the need for the country as a whole
to pay much more attention to wastewater management, but the types of resources
needed to fill the gap haven't been there," EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn said.
EPA has estimated the cost of fixing sewage systems to eliminate most sewer
overflows and the need for blending at about $130 billion. EPA has not made a
separate estimate on the cost of addressing blending alone, but it would
probably be considerably lower, Stoner said.
Earlier this year, Bush proposed cutting nearly $500 million from the government
fund that makes low interest loans to improve sewer systems. About half the
money was restored by the Senate.