4/16/2018
By Olivia Green
Storm and wastewater issues have traditionally been addressed via technical and engineering solutions, as illustrated by these archival images of the construction of the Harbor Brook Intercepting Sewer in Syracuse, NY. But what happens when the engineering solutions have been largely exhausted, and our creeks are still dirty? We need policy solutions to fit our wicked water quality problems.
Like much of the country, we are facing a wicked problem here in Onondaga County, New York. In 1988, confronted with heavily polluted waters and a county wastewater treatment plant that was the largest single contributor to the problem, Atlantic States Legal Foundation (ASLF) led the charge to force the County to clean up its act. For the past 30 years, ASLF has been working with the County and state regulators to set and meet stringent pollution reduction goals. We’ve now done everything we thought would be required to clean up our local water bodies, but, it turns out, that wasn’t enough. So, how do we continue to make progress on a problem the law never foresaw?
In addition to limits on direct discharges from the wastewater treatment plant, the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the Amended Consent Judgment (ACJ), a court-ordered long-term control plan, imposed stringent requirements for mitigating combined sewer overflows (CSOs). These arduous CSO standards, which took decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete, fell under two broad goals, one pertaining to water quantity and another to water quality.
The deadline for accomplishing both of these goals is 2018. The difficulty of the first goal should not be downplayed, but it is largely a technical and engineering problem with a technical and engineering solution. Although not necessarily easy or cheap to solve, it is solvable with existing tools and dedicated municipal leaders. The County has made tremendous progress toward this first goal by closing CSOs, redirecting wastewater, and creating green infrastructure to manage stormwater outside the sewer system.
But the second goal is tricky. In Syracuse, CSOs discharge into Harbor Brook and Onondaga Creek, two urban streams that often fail to meet water quality standards, especially for fecal coliform and turbidity. Unsurprisingly, fecal coliform levels often spike when sewage is discharged into a stream. In wet weather, the remaining CSOs are likely to carry some sewage and therefore be partly responsible for fecal coliform levels in these streams. But, the creeks already have elevated fecal coliform levels upstream of the CSOs, even in dry weather. As a result, any CSO discharges into these streams – no matter how minor – will always “contribute” to the nonattainment of water quality standards and result in a violation of the second goal. The County is stuck between an infeasible zero-discharge standard and perpetual violations.
As a plaintiff in this case and tireless advocate of sensible solutions for a cleaner environment, ASLF is committed finding a just and practicable solution to this problem. The people of Onondaga County have already spent $700 million in public funds to meet the required 95% reduction. Getting to 100% isn’t as simple as capturing an additional 5%. It would require a complete separation of our storm-sewer system or construction of monstrous storage facilities capable of storing and treating every drop of rain that falls in the CSO basin. Both of these solutions would be hugely expensive and disruptive. But even more importantly, neither would bring the creeks into compliance; they would simply take CSOs out of the contamination equation.
ASLF would much rather find a solution that not only ensures continued improvement of our stormwater and wastewater infrastructure, but also puts the major financial investments where we’ll see the greatest environmental returns. That likely means addressing urban and rural nonpoint source pollution despite the absence of a strict regulatory mechanism to do so. We must also engage other point source dischargers, such as the urban and suburban stormwater sewer systems (MS4s), to minimize their environmental impact.
Though our circumstances are specific to Onondaga County, we are not alone in facing this problem. Contaminated runoff—nonpoint source pollution—is the largest source of contamination to our nation’s waterways, and the primary tool for regulating water quality, the Clean Water Act, is largely silent on how to address these dispersed sources. Much like the drafters of our ACJ assumed that capturing 95% of CSO volume would clean up our urban streams, the original CWA assumed that regulating all point sources (generally, pipes that discharge contaminated water) would “restore the biological integrity” of our nation’s streams. ASLF moves beyond these flawed assumptions to develop innovative policy tools and practical technical solutions to today’s water pollution problems.
Please consider supporting ASLF as we work to clean up this messy problem via a donation or by becoming an Associate Member. Let us know how your community addresses nonpoint source pollution. Or, if your community needs help with similar problems, contact us to see if we can work together to find sensible solutions. Contact us today!