EPA mulls 'sewage blending'

Should Seattle and other large cities be allowed to skip part of the sewage-treatment process when heavy rains threaten to overwhelm their sewage systems?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to decide this closely watched issue soon.

The policy change, called "sewage blending," was proposed by the EPA more than a year ago and has attracted nearly 100,000 written comments from industry, state and local officials, interest groups and the public.

Washington's Ecology Department and Health Department both came out against the proposal, as did West Coast oyster growers.

Local sewage treatment agencies have lobbied heavily for the change, saying they need an affordable solution to the problem of treatment plants that become overwhelmed by heavy flows during rainstorms and snowmelts.

The alternative, sewage treatment operators say, is to either release the excess sewage entirely untreated or spend billions of dollars upgrading treatment plants and sewer systems across the country.

"What we are fighting for is to preserve what we view as a management practice to (achieve) as much treatment as possible in an extreme wet weather event," said Alexandra Dunn, general counsel for the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies.

The policy change also is expected to benefit builders and developers, allowing local governments in fast-growing areas to lower impact fees or to lift moratoriums on new sewer hookups.

However, environmentalists, scientists and some states have criticized the proposal as a rollback of environmental and public health protections.

"We think EPA should enforce the law to protect public health, not change the law to protect the poor practices that are threatening public health," said Nancy Stoner, an expert on water policy with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"If this policy is finalized, more Americans will get sick from waterborne diseases, which are life-threatening for small children, the elderly, cancer patients and others who are already weakened by illness," Stoner said.

The state Ecology Department called the proposed policy change "environmental backsliding" in comments filed with the EPA.

The practice should not become routine, said Don Theiler, director of the King County wastewater treatment division.

During heavy rainfalls, the county does sewage blending for some of the waste at its West Point facility in Magnolia without any apparent harm, he said.

The sewage still undergoes three out of four stages of treatment, including disinfection to kill pathogens, he said. The skipped step involves bacteria gobbling up some of the waste material.

"We would be in very bad shape if the EPA policy didn't allow us to do that," Theiler said. The bacteria would be washed away, affecting treatment for weeks to come as their population rebuilt.

The real problem with sewage blending, Theiler said, is when the practice is abused by sewage treatment facilities elsewhere in the country that have leaky pipes that take in more storm water than they can handle. Those leaks need to be fixed to reduce the need for blending.

"The devil in this policy is in the details," he said. "And how much the EPA requires these cities ... to fix their system rather than taking the easy way out."

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection said the policy will undermine the state's efforts to get waste treatment operators to upgrade their facilities and may not provide "sufficient protection against discharges of pathogenic organisms."

The Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association predicted the proposed policy would "result in devastating consequences to shellfish farmers."

"While we appreciate the challenges faced by municipalities, it must be realized that their failure to protect water quality leads to a 'taking' of our growers' property when degraded water quality leads to closures on shellfish harvests," the association wrote the EPA.

Not all of the sewage systems include the disinfection step that King County has, in which case the waste simply would be treated to remove solids, then mixed with fully treated water and released.

EPA data show a quarter to half of treatment plants do not disinfect, Stoner said. And disinfection doesn't necessarily kill viruses and many other pathogens, she said.

Current regulations allow treatment plants to blend partially treated sewage during extreme events such as hurricanes when full treatment isn't feasible, but the proposed policy would allow routine use of the practice, critics said.

"I don't want the community or the public to have a false sense of security that blending is providing a large safety net with regard to pathogenic microorganisms discharged (from treatment plants), because it's not," said Joan Rose, a water pollution microbiologist at Michigan State University.

Rose recently mapped out the path of wastewater discharges from treatment plants in Michigan, showing that the effluent ultimately ends up in Lake Michigan.

"Eventually, all that discharged effluent ends up in waterways we use for drinking," Rose said.

The EPA has warned for years that construction and repair of sewer systems and treatment plants has not kept pace with population growth. The U.S. population has risen from 205 million people in 1970 to 294 million people today.

At the same time, global warming has increased annual rainfall in the continental United States on average about 10 percent over the past century and "extreme precipitation events" have increased nearly 20 percent, with most of the increase occurring since 1970, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The increased sewage and storm water going into sewer systems has put greater pressure on treatment plants and aging pipes.

The EPA estimates more than 850 billion gallons of completely untreated sewage escapes from aging and inadequate sewage pipes every year before it reaches treatment plants.

A study by scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that the majority of illnesses from waterborne pathogens coincide with heavy rainstorms.

"EPA has been very outspoken in recognizing the need for the country as a whole to pay much more attention to wastewater management, but the types of resources needed to fill the gap haven't been there," EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn said.

EPA has estimated the cost of fixing sewage systems to eliminate most sewer overflows and the need for blending at about $130 billion. EPA has not made a separate estimate on the cost of addressing blending alone, but it would probably be considerably lower, Stoner said.

AMSA, representing the sewage plants, pegs the cost at $300 billion to $600 billion over the next 20 years and says a large federal trust fund needs to be created to deal with the projected funding shortfall.

Earlier this year, Bush proposed cutting nearly $500 million from the government fund that makes low interest loans to improve sewer systems. About half the money was restored by the Senate.

Theiler, of King County, said that if blending were completely eliminated, the West Point plant would have to be rebuilt to separate storm water from the sewage. As it functions now, the storm water -- which can carry pollutants from roadways, pet waste and landscaping -- is being treated along with the sewage. If separated, it could flow untreated into streams and Puget Sound.

P-I reporters Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure contributed to this Scripps Howard report.

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