got killed by ten million pounds of sludge from new york and new jersey
A short piece I wrote last night for TNS that didn't make the news-in-brief section of their site:
****
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) backpedaled Thursday morning on a plan to allow waste treatment plants to regularly discharge partially treated sewage into nearby bodies of water.
According to Jim Hanlon, Director of the EPA’s Office of Water’s wastewater management division, the office’s assistant administrator Ben Grumbles presented a letter to the heads of the House appropriation committees stating the agency would not pursue the controversial policy - otherwise known as "blending" - as they had originally planned.
At present, blending is only allowed following major storms, when treatment plants are literally choked with water. Citing complaints from sewage plant managers they lacked funds to refurbish or replace aging infrastructure, the Bush Administration decided in late 2003 to allow treatment plants to "blend."
However, critics of the proposed policy - among them, Clean Water Action, American Rivers, and the National Resources Defense Council - point out that blended sewage has higher levels of pollutants and harmful bacteria, posing a significant health threat.
Hanlon stressed that the blending policy would’ve only been permitted on a case-by-case basis and after certain criteria had been met, namely those specified under the Clean Water Act of the mid 1970s.
However, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that rather than the conditions water treatment processes are held to, the benchmarks regularly blended effluent would have to meet would be considerably lower, or "end of pipe." This, says the NRDC, would essentially make consistent blending illegal under the guidelines laid out under the Clean Water Act.
Though Hanlon said the agency had decided against blending sometime ago, the announcement on the day the House was prepared to vote on an amendment sponsored by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak that would effectively block blending. Stupak, along with Florida Republican Clay Shaw, had been cobbling together bi-partisan support for H.R. 1126 since the EPA made the annoucement.
The bill, H.R. 1126, or the Save Our Waters from Sewage Act, was adopted for consideration as an amendment to the Interior, Environment, and Related Appropriations bill now winding its way through the House.
Stupak said in a May 18 statement that "The problem is that there is no funding available to invest in infrastructure improvements. Instead of working with Congress to implement the necessary upgrades, the EPA is ignoring the problem completely by allowing more dumping to occur."
Though the EPA says economic concerns drove them to consider the rule change, the relaxation on blending policy is another one of many the Bush Administration has either strong-armed federal agencies into accepting or championed outright. These include lowering standards for coal-burning power plants, encouraging more logging under the rubric of fire safety, and shelving controls over a dangerous rocket fuel additive, to name just a few.
****
<< Home