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Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News

EPA To OK Sewage Treatment Exemptions

By John Heilprin, Associated Press Writer, 11/3/2003

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it will formalize a policy allowing sewage treatment plants to skip a process for killing some pathogens after heavy rains or snow melts.

The agency now requires a three-step process for treating sewage in normal conditions, but it has routinely allowed plants to discharge a blend of fully and partially treated sewage during peak flows from storms.

However, the agency was asked by the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies to spell out its policy after some regional EPA officials maintained that all three steps -- removing solids, oxidizing pollutants and disinfecting the wastes -- had to be carried out regardless of conditions.

By not requiring the oxidation of pollutants in the wastes after heavy rains -- a process of allowing microbes to feed on organic materials, removing viruses and parasites -- sewage plants around the country will be able to avoid $90 billion or more in facility upgrades, according to EPA officials, trade group representatives and environmentalists.

EPA described its new draft policy as help for public sewage treatment plants in handling the huge volume of waste water that storms bring. G. Tracy Mehan III, head of EPA's Office of Water, called it "a consistent set of principles ... in managing wet-weather events."

The agency said water quality will improve because high water flows can damage sensitive parts of treatment plants and increase pollution in rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

After solids are removed from it, the remaining waste water can be diverted and blended with fully treated wastewater, EPA said. The blended flows are disinfected and discharged.

Adam Krantz, government affairs director for the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, representing about 300 public treatment plants, said EPA was clarifying long-standing policy.

He said industry wanted that because EPA's Mid-Atlantic and Southern regional offices sometimes had stricter requirements than elsewhere nationally.

"We have been pushing for the need for national conformity," he said. "Plants were not designed to treat every drop of water in the universe."

The trade group estimates plants would have to spend $90 billion to $190 billion to fully treat all storm water.

But the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said there were other costs to consider from EPA's new policy: the threat to public health from letting treatment plants dump partially treated sewage in waterways, spreading more viruses and parasites into drinking and swimming water.

"More Americans would get sick from waterborne illnesses because of this indefensible -- and illegal -- policy change," said Nancy Stoner, director of NRDC's Clean Water Project. She said the government should require treatment plants to upgrade aging sewer systems and help them out with more federal funding.

Aging sewer systems designed to overflow from rain discharge more than a trillion gallons of untreated sewage into waterways each year, increasing the chance of waterborne disease outbreaks, EPA told Congress last year, and only about a third of 772 communities with older systems comply with minimum federal standards. EPA owes Congress an update in December.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said two years ago that more than half the waterborne disease outbreaks in the U.S. during the last half-century followed a period of extreme rainfall.