Clean Water In the News

More than half of the major industrial and municipal water treatment facilities in Pennsylvania have exceeded their water pollution permit limits, and the number doing so in Allegheny County ranked among the worst in the nation, according to a report by PennEnvironment.

The report released yesterday by the environmental advocacy group said Allegheny County had 18 facilities that exceeded their Clean Water Act discharge limits in 2005 -- the sixth most violators for any county in the country. Harris County, Texas, near Houston, had the most violators, with 96. Los Angeles was next, with 22.

Pennsylvania's 1,516 discharge permit exceedances from 198 facilities -- indicating numerous repeat offenders -- were the second most in the nation behind only Ohio, which recorded 1,797 exceedances at 217 facilities in 2005, the latest year for which records were available.

"With so many facilities dumping so much pollution, no one should be surprised that nearly half of America's waterways -- and more than 14,000 miles of rivers and streams in Pennsylvania -- are unsafe for swimming and fishing. But we should be outraged," said David Masur, PennEnvironment director.

Among the facilities in Allegheny County with multiple violations of their discharge permits according to the report were Shenango Inc., Hussey Copper Ltd, U.S. Steel Corp., Neville Chemical Co., Allegheny Ludlum Corp., the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, Moon Township Municipal Authority, and Plum Borough Municipal Authority.

Beaver and Westmoreland counties in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and Bucks and Montgomery in the Philadelphia area, also ranked among the worst in the nation for the number of facilities exceeding their discharge permits.

Neil Weaver, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, which enforces water pollution laws in the state, said the department is reviewing the report's data and disagrees with its conclusions that enforcement is lax in the state.

"In Pennsylvania we do not tolerate repeat violators and pursue swift action against them," Mr. Weaver said.

The report, which used data obtained by PennEnvironment through a Freedom of Information Act request, was released a week before the 35th anniversary of the federal Clean Water Act. The act requires states to determine which water bodies don't meet federal water quality standards and limit pollution by establishing "total maximum daily loads" for each facility discharging into those waterways.

The report highlights areas where the act has fallen short of its goal to make all of the nation's waters "fishable and swimable" by 1985. It criticizes the Bush administration for weakening the act and failing to enforce it, putting thousands of miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands at risk from pollution and development.

PennEnvironment called on Congress to pass the Clean Water Authority Restoration Act, which reestablishes protections for wetlands and tributary streams that were removed by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions limiting the scope of the 1972 law.