Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Hampering E.P.A.

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

“This is a huge deal,” James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. “There are whole watersheds that feed into New York’s drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected.”

The court rulings causing these problems focused on language in the Clean Water Act that limited it to “the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters” of the United States. For decades, “navigable waters” was broadly interpreted by regulators to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers.

But the two decisions suggested that waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water.

more from the NY Times

Reserves 'win–win' for fish and fishermen

Although fisherman routinely fight bans on fishing, studies indicate that the creation of protected marine reserves in key areas can both raise the profits of fishermen and boost fish populations. Researchers presented evidence of these dual benefits in several sessions over the past week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, and in a suite of papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marine reserves could help to make nearby fisheries profitable by acting as nurseries for fish larvae that are later spread by ocean currents, for example. "Reserves allow a win–win situation — better conservation and higher profitability for fishing," says Christopher Costello, a resource economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His group's modelling study of southern Californian waters suggests that fishing profits are maximized when significant areas are closed to fishing1.

Steven Gaines, a UCSB marine ecologist who organized an AAAS symposium on marine reserves, adds that his own team's research with ocean circulation models shows that protected areas do not need to be extensive. Strategic positioning of smaller reserves in a network can create pathways for fish outside protected zones, which can boost the yields of fishermen.

Research on one of the world's largest marine conservation efforts, along Australia's Great Barrier Reef, shows how quickly such efforts can make a difference. Nearly one-third of the 2,000-kilometre-long reef off Queensland is set aside as 'no-take' zones, after stringent controls were put in place in 2004.

Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, Queensland, said at the symposium that his team's reef research2 found that, in the no-take zones he studied, overall fish densities have doubled since they were created. On some reefs, the population of certain species, such as grouper, doubled within just two years of fishing closures. "The reef generates far more economic benefit to Australia than the cost of protecting it," he adds, estimating that the costs are less than 1% of annual revenue generated from other reef activities, such as tourism.

The experience of the Great Barrier Reef could inform an ongoing debate in California. The state is involved in a contentious process to create networks of reserves that could eventually encompass 10–20% of the state's coastline and stretch up to 5 kilometres from shore.

The Marine Life Protection Act was approved by Californian voters in 1999, but attempts to establish the reserves it mandated have been delayed by strong resistance. The battle between marine conservationists and fishermen has become so bitter that armed game wardens now attend public hearings about the plan. Fist fights have broken out at some meetings and, at one, Paul Dayton, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, was spat at by a fisherman.

A reserve system has so far been adopted for two regions along the central coast; a plan for a southern coastal region is under review; and plans are to be developed for the final two areas by the end of 2011.

Many complain that the scheme is too costly, and argue that there is little evidence that reserves successfully protect marine wildlife. But marine biologist Jennifer Caselle at the UCSB and her colleagues have put paid to this claim3.

ADVERTISEMENT

Her team studied ten no-take and two fishing-restricted zones created in 2003 within the 100-kilometre-long Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off Santa Barbara. The scientists found that the number and size of the fish targeted for protection was greater in the reserve than outside. They also found that the ecosystem was healthier overall, with more predators such as spiny lobster and California sheephead helping to keep sea urchins under control. Because the urchins graze on kelp — an important habitat for many fish species — Caselle says that "the increased abundance of predators may help to prevent the transition of productive kelp forests into unproductive urchin barrens".

The research was greeted cautiously by Norman de Vall, president of Redwood Coast Watersheds Alliance in Elk, California, where reserve planning is now under way. Even if reserves produce larvae that move into unprotected areas, that may not be enough to help fishermen, says de Vall, a former commercial fisherman. What is needed, he said, is smarter management of fishing stocks overall and "less fishing everywhere".

from Nature

Water Uses by Industry Revealed

Water might be locally renewable, but it is also a globally finite resource with shifting availability. Industry accounts for most of the water used in the U.S., yet industry-specific estimates of that consumption—last tallied by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1982—are outdated. That is a problem because industrial sectors need to budget water uses correctly for effective planning.

In this issue of ES&T, Chris Hendrickson and colleagues address that shortage by estimating water withdrawals for more than 400 industry sectors (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, DOI 10.1021/es903147k). Their analysis accounts not just for direct uses—such as crop irrigation in agriculture—but also for indirect uses throughout a sector’s supply chain. For instance, irrigation water would be a direct use for agriculture but an indirect use for the grocery sector. “We’re trying to help industries track and make better management decisions about how they use water,” says Hendrickson, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. “If you’re trying to minimize environmental impacts, then you need to know about these upstream demands,” he adds.

Because reported consumption rates by sector are no longer available, Hendrickson and his colleagues had to estimate likely values and use them with a method called economic input−output life cycle analysis (EIO-LCA). By necessity, they had to combine disparate data sets for different sectors, gathered over varying time periods. Hendrickson acknowledges the results are subject to considerable uncertainty and variability. But Arpad Horvath, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, described the analysis as seminal. “It fills a very important gap,” he says. “The work comes nearly 30 years after the last reliable set of industrial water use data were made available. They used the best available data and methods and provided a practical piece of research that will be useful for a long time.”

Hendrickson and colleagues started with total water uses for six industry sectors defined by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). These “umbrella sectors” are extremely broad. For instance, the irrigation sector consumes 190 trillion liters (50 trillion gallons) a year, but USGS does not break that value out by crop. This is where Hendrickson’s analysis comes into the picture. He and his colleagues took each of 428 industrial “subsectors” defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and assigned them to their corresponding USGS sectors. They then used other relevant data to determine how much of the USGS water totals were consumed by these more narrowly defined categories. Crop-specific irrigation values, for instance, were estimated using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Likewise, “purchased” volumes consumed by sector were estimated based on how much money industries spend on water in a given year.

Michael Blackhurst, the first author of the paper and a Ph.D. candidate working under Hendrickson, says he was surprised that most water uses—60% on average—are indirect. “That turned out to be a significant finding,” he said. “A lot of that water consumption is hidden because companies don’t pay for all of it.” Indeed, among 96% of sectors evaluated, indirect uses exceeded direct uses throughout product supply chains.

more from EST News

Exposure on Tap: Drinking Water as an Overlooked Source of Lead

Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon, are two cities that by all accounts have well-run water utilities and health departments. Both have also had recurring problems with lead in tap water, yet both—according to some critics—have downplayed the potential importance of lead in tap water as a route of exposure. The experiences of these cities and others across the United States illustrate the difficulty not only of determining the causes behind specific cases of lead poisoning but also of ensuring that lead sources are eliminated.

Unlike most water contaminants, lead gets into water after it leaves a water treatment plant. Often this contamination is the result of water treatment changes meant to improve water quality that end up altering the water chemistry, destabilizing lead-bearing mineral scales that coat service lines and corroding lead solder, pipes, faucets, and fixtures. “Lead is a ‘close-to-home’ contaminant,” says Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “That makes it very difficult to regulate and monitor.”

Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 1991 Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), municipal water utilities must sample a small number of homes at high risk for elevated lead levels, such as those known to have lead plumbing components. The size of the water system determines how many samples must be collected in each sampling period (the maximum required is 100), and the sampling interval can vary from 6 months to 3 years, depending on past compliance. The law requires that samples be “first-flush” water that has stood in pipes for a minimum of 6 hours. This scenario represents high but routine exposures to lead in tap water, because the longer corrosive water sits in contact with lead parts, the more lead leaches out. In many households, this worst-case normal-use scenario happens twice daily Monday through Friday: in the morning when the residents awake, and in the afternoon when they return home from work and school.

Under the LCR, utilities are required to notify customers and take remedial action if more than 10% of the households sampled have tap water with lead levels exceeding 15 ppb. Remedial action might include changing chemical treatment methods to make the water less corrosive or, if treatment fails, to replace lead pipes that lie beneath publicly owned spaces such as streets and sidewalks. These provisions would seem to suggest that if a water utility is in compliance with the rule, then none of the dwellings served by the utility need worry about their tap water being a significant source of lead. Yet LCR compliance is based upon the results of sampling only a tiny percentage of the homes served. So even when a utility is entirely within LCR compliance, some consumers may unknowingly receive and consume water that contains lead levels much higher than 15 ppb.

“EPA as the regulator of lead in tap water and CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] with its concern for preventing lead poisoning in children should be working together to get on top of this problem,” says Edwards. “But in my experience this is not occurring to the extent it should.”

more from Environmental Health Perspectives