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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Environment - Berne targets septic systems, and more

Septic tanks. J. Swygart of the Decatur Daily Democrat reports today:

Shannon Smitley, planning department inspector for the city of Berne, has been going door-to-door at homes along Nussbaum Street, Center Street and Gay Drive in an attempt to locate septic tank systems that are contributing to combined sewer overflow violations in the city.

Smitley reported his progress to Berne City Council on Monday evening.

"We've started to make appointments with homeowners for us to come in and do dye tests. We did 10 homes last week and found four septic tanks," Smitley said. "There are 13 homes left to check, and I'm pretty sure there are at least two more septic tanks that flow into our combined sewer."

The city of Berne has been ordered by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) to eliminate combined sewers throughout the municipality. Legislation adopted by the city has mandated the removal of all septic systems.

"We've got a lot of work to do yet," Smitley told council, "but we're going to try and get finished by next month. We're finding that most people didn't even know they were hooked into a septic system."

Katrina. "Polluted Waters Drown Environmental Efforts: Drainage laden with bacteria and chemicals is flowing into Lake Pontchartrain, and raw sewage is being released into the Mississippi." That is the headline to this story today in the LA Times. Some quotes:
NEW ORLEANS — The high-stakes effort to bail out New Orleans is sending plumes of contaminated, brown, stinking water into Lake Pontchartrain, setting back years of effort to restore the environmentally sensitive home of Gulf Coast marine life.

After festering for two weeks in neighborhoods, commercial districts and industrial zones, the water is laden with bacteria, silt, petroleum products and possibly toxic substances.

City officials confirmed Tuesday that they were also releasing untreated sewage into the Mississippi River from one of two treatment plants operated by the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board. * * *

Al Naomi, senior project engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, agreed. "It will take years to clean up our estuaries. The lake was coming back with manatees and fish. Twenty years of effort has been wiped out in an afternoon storm surge."

Although few experts criticize the extreme measures being taken to save New Orleans, the practices are believed to violate federal laws in normal times.

"We have multiple disasters in Hurricane Katrina," said William R. Freudenburg, a professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. "Much of the disaster was caused by the initial decision of where to put the city's levees. It was turned into a human disaster by the worst response I have ever seen by the government. Now we have a disaster on one of the most environmentally sensitive and valuable wetlands in America."

Much of the nation's seafood catch spends some portion of its life in the marshes of Louisiana, areas that were damaged by the storm surge. On the east flank of New Orleans, marshlands have been stripped clean of vegetation. "It looks like the surface of the moon," Wagenaar said.

Mercury. The NY Times reports today:
The Senate narrowly defeated a resolution on Tuesday that would have called on the Environmental Protection Agency to rewrite rules for mercury emissions from power plants. Health and environmental groups say the present rules are too weak.

The vote was 51 to 47, largely along party lines. The resolution was brought up for a vote through a rarely used and rarely successful procedure, the Congressional Review Act. It allows lawmakers to challenge regulatory decisions.

Even if the Senate had passed the resolution, it had little chance to go further. Such challenges require approval of the House, which was unlikely to act, as well as the president's signature. * * *

The vote, in which 6 Democrats joined 45 Republicans for a majority, was widely viewed as a victory for power plant operators and other industry groups.

They generally prefer the current rule, the first to regulate mercury emissions from power plants. It is supposed to reduce emissions 70 percent by 2018.

The rule is based on system called cap and trade that allows a plant to exceed its permitted level of emissions by buying credits from a plant in the same region whose emissions are below what is allowed. * * *

Sponsors of the resolution to strengthen the rule argued that it would require all plants to upgrade with the best available pollution-control technologies and would achieve a greater reduction of emissions, up to 90 percent, in fewer years, creating substantial health benefits for people most vulnerable to mercury poisoning, including pregnant women and children. * * *

Opponents of the current rule say it fundamentally violates the Clean Air Act, which requires the best available technology to drive down all polluting emissions.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 14, 2005 08:32 AM
Posted to Environment