Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
EPA To Ease Wastewater Rules In Storms
By John Heilprin
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday 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.
Under the policy, after solids are removed from the wastewater, it can be
diverted and blended with fully treated wastewater, disinfected and discharged.
EPA described its new draft policy as help for public sewage-treatment plants in
handling the huge volume of wastewater 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."
"We have been pushing for the need for national conformity," said Adam Krantz,
government-affairs director for the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage
Agencies, which represents about 300 public treatment plants. "Plants were not
designed to treat every drop of water in the universe."
But the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the
policy poses a threat to public health from letting treatment plants dump
partially treated sewage in waterways, spreading viruses and parasites.
"More Americans would get sick from waterborne illnesses because of this
indefensible — and illegal — policy change," said Nancy Stoner, director of the
group's Clean Water Project. She said the government should require treatment
plants to upgrade aging sewer systems and help them with more federal funding.
Aging sewer systems overflow from heavy rain and discharge more than a trillion
gallons of untreated sewage into waterways each year, increasing the chance of
waterborne disease outbreaks, the EPA told Congress last year.