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EPA Allows Partial Treatment At Sewage Plants In Storms
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
By John Heilprin, Associated Press
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 (NRDC), 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 one-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.