American Citizens Are Left to Swim in Government Cesspool

INSIGHT magazine ^ | August 5, 2002 | Steve Seachman

[Stand Watch Listen]

Chances are, at this very moment, a family is arriving at some U.S. shoreline ready to spend a week relaxing at the beach. But before mom, dad and the kids can get their feet warm in the sand, a sign confronts them: "Beach closed. No swimming allowed." As the children slouch back to the car, a parent tries to console them. "At least the hotel has a swimming pool, and there's always next year." And so it goes.

Similar routines are played out for real thousands of times each year in this country. And the culprits — those who dump veritable rivers of untreated toilet water and city-street runoff into the nearest ditch or bay —aren't some gang of industrial ogres. They happen to be your local government sewer-system operators.

This is not supposed to be happening. Not in America, at least. Not after Congress passed the expansive Clean Water Act that predicted water pollution would be entirely "eliminated by 1985." Yet it does happen, and quite often. And federal officials don't just know about it; they are actively rewarding the worst offenders with more tax dollars.

Apparently, official Washington doesn't even think that citizens need to be informed about this matter. Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently shield these government polluters from the popular "Right to Know" program of annual emission reporting to which industry is subject.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which reviewed surveys from 2,251 ocean and lake beaches, the nation had at least 11,270 combined days of beach closings and advisories against swimming during 2000. The group's annual Testing the Waters report notes there were an additional 98 extended closings and advisories that persisted for at least six weeks.

This problem has lurked beneath the surface for years. Since 1989 (when less data were available) there have been at least 1,000 days reported annually in which swimming was restricted. From 1997 to 1999 there were more than 17,500 such days. And public officials usually don't close popular bath-ing areas unless waters are pretty disgusting — where one exposure to the bacteria- and virus-laden swill could give you nausea, skin rash, diarrhea or worse.

The June 12, 2000, issue of U.S. News and World Report mentioned a preliminary study done for the EPA that estimated more than 1 million Americans get sick each year from sanitary-sewage overflows. (The draft version of this report was completed in October 2000, but the EPA still is keeping mum.) In a previous brief disclosure, the EPA pitched similar figures — strictly as an opportunity, though, not a problem. Buried in a 1999 report to Congress, the EPA claimed that "up to 500,000 cases of illness will be avoided annually" just by "reducing" storm-water pollution with its programs.

After years of public authorities keeping this issue mostly to themselves, NRDC's Testing the Waters series finally prompted federal regulators into action. In 1998, seven years after NRDC issued its premier edition, the EPA produced its first volume on the subject. But the federal beach reports couldn't be more bland. For example, the EPA's finding that 24 percent of reporting beaches in 1999 "were affected by an advisory or closure" is about as hyper as the normally ferocious agency ever gets. The EPA provides no comment to its assessment that "34 percent of beaches were monitored less than once per week." So, if the beach you're swimming in was just flooded with raw sewage yesterday, look out!

Since the EPA and the states don't track beach closures in any remotely consistent manner, it is hard to determine any trend. But it's clear that a significant problem has existed for some time. And it remains a nuisance today. But lacking a predictable corporate scapegoat, this widespread situation has received little attention.

The leading cause of U.S. beach closings, according to NRDC and the EPA, is mismanagement of sewage-handling systems and urban storm-water runoff. Both utilities almost always are run by local governments, with partial funding and sporadic oversight typically kicked in from the state and federal levels. State and local agencies also manage beach functions in most cases. So in the end, there is no one left to be an independent watchdog.

Based on the limited data available on the topic, St. Louis appears to be at rock bottom, spilling an average of 26 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water during 106 "overflow" events each year. Portland, Ore., is a close second with 100 discharges but only 3.4 billion gallons of annual pollution. Chicago, Pittsburgh, Boston, Indianapolis and Cleveland typically experience from 10 to 70 untreated bypasses, according to an April 2000 study by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District. (All of these cities have some sort of abatement plan in the works and claim that dumping will diminish — in 10 or 20 years.) But as of today, citizens from San Diego to Buffalo to Miami and many other communities face thousands of smaller but still putrid events each year. And these polluters rarely even get a slap on the wrist.

Public officials in Washington admit to discharging raw sewage 60 to 70 times a year into the Potomac River and its tributaries. Although city leaders have had decades to fix the problems, the EPA offers nothing but praise. An EPA senior official, Lee Murphy, told a civil-engineering trade magazine in July 2001 that "D.C. is moving aggressively to address the issue." The Engineering News-Record reported that city managers could begin construction on a remedy as early as 2005.

In Iowa, an April 18 editorial in the Des Moines Register encouraged citizens to "use your own judgement," then dive head first into beaches soaked with human waste and farm leachate. It's a "reasonable risk," the paper adds. Under the state's new plan, if the waters are shown to have high bacteria counts for five samples in a 30-day period, warning signs of "Swimming Not Recommended" now will be posted in lieu of an all-out prohibition. Bathers at Iowa's 35 state beaches will be told to shower after swimming. And the state will avoid last year's embarrassment of frequent beach closures.

While similar affronts go on across the nation — right now, with direct adverse effects on the public — the environmental establishment is virtually silent. Green-lobby powerhouses such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the rest are preoccupied with futuristic doomsday theories on global warming or fighting against vague dangers of free-trade "globalization." The antisewage folks at the NRDC spend most of their time with these anti-industry efforts, as well.

Federal bungling on local sewage control goes back to the enshrined Clean Water Act of 1972, which laid a rather warped foundation. Prior to the early 1970s, it was common for cities and towns simply to dump raw sewage into the nearest waterway. Instead of simply establishing safe discharge limits for the EPA to enforce, the act's chief method of curbing this filthy habit was to shower local officials with free cash to upgrade their treatment systems or build new facilities altogether. The ongoing pork feast is up to $73 billion (not adjusted for inflation) to help reckless municipalities clean up their own messes. In return, federal officials get abundant opportunities for campaign kickbacks and patronage appointments.

Back when the grant program was created, at least the stated intentions were believed to be pointed in the right direction. In 1972, local governments discharged sewage that was completely untreated or had received only primary treatment (such as settling tanks) from 34 million residents. As of 1992, that figure had decreased to slightly more than 1 million.

That sounds great until you step back and consider how the sewage gets to a treatment facility in the first place: the sewer lines themselves. Many of these are rotting, if not ill-conceived from their beginning. About 880 communities serving more than 40 million people continue to rely on the pre-Civil War design of combining storm water and sanitary effluents in a single pipe. Whenever it rains a great deal, the double-duty conduits unload their mixed brew of waste via spill ports — called "combined sewer overflows" — into the closest body of water. The EPA figures that combined sewers discharge 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage and storm water each year — equivalent to 18 days of flow from Niagara Falls.

Systems with separate storm and sanitary lines aren't necessarily much better. Urban storm water is loaded with bacteria, metals, gasoline and other chemicals. Vast amounts of tainted runoff are dumped into U.S. waters each year with absolutely no treatment.

Because of poor construction methods, many of the nation's sanitary sewer lines, perhaps all of them, leak badly. After a downpour, the crumbling pipes swell with infiltration and deluge the receiving treatment plant. The EPA quietly estimates that sanitary sewers overflow at least 40,000 times a year.

While any private company likely would face a multimillion-dollar penalty and its officials possible jail time for even one similar stunt, public-sector pigs slop it up with full immunity. The worst punishment the EPA ever dishes out to government violators is to fine the innocent taxpayers and give the sewage dumpers a hefty raise. As for municipal sewer rot, the EPA and some politicians are pushing for anywhere from $57 billion to $130 billion in new federal spending allegedly to fix the problem this time. In modern eco-speak, this is called paying polluters to pollute, which in any other case the EPA rightly would condemn.

To escape this pattern of failure, the first task should be immediately to add sewage plants to EPA's "Right to Know" program of annual emission reporting. Thanks to the pressures of public disclosure, industrial releases fell by nearly 50 percent in the first 10 years of reporting, which began in 1987. Similar results likely could be achieved for government polluters — if they are ever led out of the closet.

Bold communities that prefer clean water and lower taxes should consider privatizing their wastewater systems. This means replacing municipal patronage dynasties with people accountable both to periodic competitive bidding and to oversight by independent regulators. Cities such as Milwaukee and Indianapolis have done it to various degrees, with much success.

Most importantly, towns and villages should stop looking to Washington for a handout. Polluting communities will have to decide for themselves if they would rather swim in their own sewage or do what it takes to fix their own problem.

Steve Seachman is an environmental engineer and free-lance writer from Buffalo, N.Y.

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Cities such as Milwaukee and Indianapolis have done it to various degrees, with much success.

I think this depends on how you define success