Urban runoff named primary NY water pollution source, 1 day after NRDC sues to clean it up
Posted June 29, 2010 in Curbing Pollution
EPA today announced that it has finalized New York State’s 2010 list of polluted rivers, lakes, streams and coastal waters – identifying urban stormwater runoff as their most common source of pollution. These are bodies of water where pollution levels actually violate state standards established to protect healthy fishing, swimming, shellfish harvesting and other uses. In today’s announcement, EPA pledged to “work with state and local governments to ensure that impaired waters are cleaned up."
EPA’s pledge couldn’t come at a better time. It’s just a day after NRDC, joined by a coalition of New York-based environmental groups, filed suit against the state for failing to take the steps required by state and federal law to clean up... you guessed it, urban runoff. Earlier this year, the state re-issued its “general permit” for municipal stormwater discharges, without including legally mandated provisions to achieve state water quality standards and reduce runoff pollution “to the maximum extent practicable.” NRDC’s suit seeks to remedy that.
As summer starts, New Yorkers are heading to the beach, getting in kayaks and breaking out their fishing poles – but, as our suit and the new “impaired waters” list shows, many of New York’s waterways are suffering from urban runoff pollution.
NRDC will continue its efforts to get the state to do what’s needed to clean up these waters. And let’s hope EPA backs up its words with action and provides the necessary support – and the necessary oversight – to the state and local governments, to ensure the Clean Water Act’s goal of “fishable / swimmable” waters is achieved throughout New York.
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Comments
Peter Maier — Jun 29 2010 10:41 PM
Enforcing laws that are incorrectly implemented is extremely difficult, especially if the agencies refuse to acknowledge that mistakes were made. The mistake made in implementing the Clean Water Act was and still is the incorrect use of an essential pollution test EPA used as the backbone of its regulations. This has resulted in the fact that water pollution caused by nitrogenous (urine and protein) waste in sewage was ignored. This waste besides exerting an oxygen demand, just like fecal waste, is also in all its forms a fertilizer for algae and thus contributes to eutrophication, often resulting in red tides and dead zones. (www.petermaier.net)
By ignoring this waste in municipal sewage, it is very difficult to address the same type of waste caused by non-point sources, like runoffs from farms and storm water from cities. In addition, without correct testing, we still do not know how sewage treatment plants treat their sewage and what their effluent waste loadings are on receiving water bodies, while there also is a real possibility that multi million dollar sewage treatment plants are designed to treat the wrong waste.
Correcting this test and the regulations, according to the EPA of the record in 1987, is impossible as it would require a re-education and re-tooling of an entire industry, which obviously prefer the status quo. Sadly nobody seems to be willing to hold EPA or State agencies accountable.