Saturday, February 25, 2012

Fighitng Crappy Regulations

Every once in a while we ask some of you to "sign-on" to comments about various proposed laws or regulation changes.  These "sign-on" letters can be complex and nuanced things, but one of my fellow Waterkeepers provided what I think is an exceptional sign-on document for a rule change that the EPA is considering to alter the way the public is notified about bacteria levels at swimming beaches.  Diana Muller, our South Riverkeeper, provided an excellent argument for her case, presented it clearly, and tackled the issue straight on.  For those of you wondering what kinds of things Waterkeepers do... yes, we are out there in our boats, and in the courtrooms defending our waters, but a lot of effort goes in to the less glorious, but very important work of defending our waters from being sacrificed to special interest influences in governing bodies at all levels.
Politicians and regulators don't often go out looking for ways to weaken the legal protections of our waterways.  There's usually someone asking for a loosening of regulation to make their business more profitable.  In this case that business may even be the government itself as municipalities struggle to process growing streams of wastewater while keeping taxes and fees as low as they can.  As America continues to move toward the water we will all have to pay the price for overdeveloping our coastlines.  The question is, do you want to pay with a check, or by risking the health of your friends and family every time they go to the beach or hop on a boat?

Copied below is the core of this one issue as laid out by our South Riverkeeper.  There are hundreds of rule change battles like this fought around the country every year by Waterkeepers to achieve the goal of making all our waters swimmable, fishable, and drinkable as promised in the Clean Water Act.


TELL EPA NO TO “PLAYING CRAPS” WITH SWIMMERS’ HEALTH AND WELFARE!!
Unbelievably, EPA has proposed further weakening of already far too weak water quality criteria (WQC) aimed at waterborne pathogens at swimming beaches.  That’s correct—rather than fixing its 1986 bacterial criteria for water contact recreation waters, EPA wants to let states make them even less protective.  
Here are the facts:
The existing 25 year old criteria are based on the flawed belief that the public thinks that running at least a 1 in 28 chance of getting sick due to a day of beach swimming is acceptable.
n  A family of 4 would have a minimum of a 1 in 7 risk of someone contracting vomiting and or diarrhea after a day of swimming in water with an average concentration equal to that specified by the WQC
n  And, this EPA estimate does NOT include the additional risk of other common waterborne maladies, such as earache and skin rash
n  Of course, each person’s risk of illness would increase with each additional day of swimming
Even worse:
States following EPA’s current, already-weak approach do not close, or often, even post,  beaches unless a concentration of bacteria 3-times higher than that named in the average-concentration (GM, for “geometric mean”)  WQC has been found in a sample of beach water.  (EPA refers to these higher concentrations as SSMs, for “single sample maximums”.) 
But that’s not all of what’s seriously wrong with EPA’s existing bacterial WQC, which most states have adopted in one form or another. 
·      Despite the fact that the epidemiological studies upon which EPA claims it’s 1986 WQC were based involved people who went swimming on one—or at most, two—days, and the estimated illness rates for marine waters were derived by plotting daily average bacterial concentrations against illness rates among swimmers on a given day,  EPA expressed the WQC as acceptable 30-day average (GM) concentrations, without adjusting the concentrations downward to account for the much longer indicated duration of exposure.

·      EPA justifies such an absurdly long averaging period, in part, by saying the GM WQC are based on the assumption of “steady state conditions” -- which is not borne out by data from any real-world beach water monitoring.   In fact, concentrations of indicator bacteria fluctuate widely over time and space, often by orders of magnitude.
The consequence of allowing averaging of levels of bacteria over an entire month is at any given moment, people could be swimming in water with bacterial levels that are hundreds, even thousands of times higher than the concentrations of the GM criteria.    (You can “do the math” on what this might mean in terms of the risk of getting sick.) 
“But”, you say, “That’s not a realistic scenario because the beach will be closed, or at least posted, if indicator bacterial levels go above 3-times that associated with a minimum of a 1 in 28 risk of illness.”  WRONG!!   Why?  Because, few, if any beaches are monitored hourly, or even daily.   In fact, EPA recommends that water at heavily-used coastal beaches be monitored once a week.  The vast majority of surface waters that are used for swimming don’t even get monitored once a month.

THAT’S WHERE THINGS CURRENTLY STAND.  HERE’S WHAT EPA IS NOW PROPOSING…
Increasing the allowed duration/averaging period for the GM WQC from 30 days to 90 days
·      With no corresponding decrease in the concentration
·      Weakening beach warning/closing policy  
This will also de-list already impaired waters on the 303d list, or with a TMDL.  The statistical manipulation of data will allow the waterways to still be contaminated by bacteria even though they will become de-listed.