Voice of America recently launched a five part series on their website about the state of the Chesapeake Bay. Their reporter, Rosanne Skirble, assigned to cover the recent Obama Executive Order to get the Bay cleaned up.
The full report is interesting to watch, but what caught my attention was the part about municipal wastewater and our waterways.
In her special report segment on urban pollution, Snow Hill, MD Mayor Stephen Matthews talked about the problems with the town’s ancient combined sewer/stormwater wastewater treatment plant and admitted to Skirble and the entire world that every time it rains hard in Snow Hill they have no choice but to open the ‘flood gates’ and let raw, untreated sewage flow into the Pocomoke River.
If this horrifies you, welcome to the club. This is something we’ve been aware of for quite some time and now it’s time for more people to know.
Human waste, unlike farm animal waste, by law must be treated before it can be discharged into our waterways or applied to the land. This law also requires that those who do the discharging or application must have a federal permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.)
In Maryland, this federal program is administered by the Maryland Department of the Environment. Twenty years ago MDE entered into an agreement with the EPA to issue/renew the permits in Maryland, inspect the permit holder facilities, and enforce any violations of the permit through fines or legal actions.
But if you read between the lines of this VOA report, you quickly realize that Maryland has done little to force Snow Hill or Worcester County to stop polluting the Pocomoke River.
You'll especially like the part where Skirble & Matthews reveal a little known secret about the Snow Hill treatment plant - Worcester County actually pays Snow Hill tens of thousands of dollars a year to 'treat' waste runoff water that accumulates at the County land fill - a watery goo of landfill toxins and heavy metals that the Snow Hill wastewater treatment plant does not have the capacity to treat or filter, so it all goes into the river.
And where is MDE in all of this? The NPDES wastewater permit the State has issued to Snow Hill is expired. The State has given the County/Town extensions so the plant can continue to operate. The NPDES wastewater permit issued by the State does not cover the pollutants coming from the landfill waste.
This is one of the many reasons Waterkeepers Chesapeake, today December 7, is asking the EPA to look into Maryland's failure to adequately oversee the permitting program entrusted to it by EPA.
Read more about Waterkeepers' 58 page Citizen De-Delegation Petition, which outlines hundreds of examples of poor oversight by MDE, on the Assateague Coastal Trust website....http://www.actforbays.org/
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