Clean Water In the News

By Ad Crable

LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - Five municipal sewage treatment plants in Lancaster County and two businesses violated state permits and polluted local waterways at least once during an 18-month period in 2003 and 2004, a state environmental group says.

PennEnvironment charged in a report released today that 57 percent of 383 major industrial and municipal facilities across Pennsylvania exceeded discharge limits at least once from July 2003 to December 2004.

The report, “Troubled Waters: An analysis of Clean Water Act compliance,” criticizes the Bush administration for multiple attempts to weaken the federal Clean Water Act.

As for Pennsylvania, “officials must hold polluters accountable for their contamination of America’s waterways,” said Stephen Rogness of the Harrisburg-based PennEnvironment.

Higher-than-allowable discharges of sewage or chemicals were found at sewage-treatment plants in Lancaster City (four times), Elizabethtown (six times) New Holland (once), Mount Joy (once) and Manheim Borough (once).

Violations were also found at the former Wyeth Pharmaceuticals plant in Marietta twice during the period and once at Burle Business Park on New Holland Avenue in Lancaster City.

The city’s four violations came during construction of a $2 million project to boost the amount of nutrients taken out of treated sewage, Charlotte Katzenmoyer, the city’s public works director, said this morning.

“Those exceedences are not something normal for us,” she said. “We took the aeration tanks out of service when we were retrofitting them.”

She said that to her knowledge the city plant has not exceeded its permit once since the four violations.

Mount Joy Borough officials this morning strongly disputed the findings that its sewage treatment plant had any violations during the 18-month period in the report.

A review of its own records submitted to the state Department of Environmental Protection shows no exceedences, said Terry Kauffman, borough manager.

On two days, wastewater coming into the plant from industrial sources had spikes, but the water was treated and discharges into Little Chickies Creek were always within limits, Kauffman said.

Wyeth, which closed its doors in 2004, had been named in 2001 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a significant noncomplier of its water-discharge permit.

But a DEP spokeswoman in 2002 said a $4 million wastewater treatment plant had largely corrected problems.

Kurt Knaus, a DEP spokesman, said today that the agency treats facilities with violations on a case-by-case basis.

“Our real goal is to ensure compliance. That is our first priority,” Knaus said.

“If a sewage facility has a violation, or repeated violations, you simply can’t halt operations.”

If a discharger has a chronic problem in exceeding limits, there would be inspections and steps taken to become compliant, Knaus said. Facilities could be fined after repeated violations.

PennEnvironment said the 1972 Clean Water Act has failed in its goal of eliminating discharges of pollutants into waterways by 1985 and making all U.S. waters safe for swimming and fishing by 1983.

In Pennsylvania today, there are more than 10,000 miles of streams, rivers and other waterways still impaired.