"The act created for the first time a national mandate to protect and restore all waters to be safely swimmable and fishable, with waters so designated to be safe for drinking as well."

Wrong. The act applied to "navigable" waters, not "all" waters. And the Clean Water Act does not require those navigable waters to be drinkable. Drinking water is regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

It is hard to believe "good science" will be brought to the arena when the participants - evident by the three authors - have adopted an ends justify the means sanctimony.

It appears “Blue Light” is attempting to cast some doubt on applying the Clean Water Act to sewage overflows? This is of course nonsense, since it is well established that sewage overflows are in fact tightly regulated by the Clean Water Act, the EPA and our delegated state authority. The city and county would not be on the verge of signing consent decrees with the EPA if this were not the case. Also, if you read the article you will see that we were clear to define drinking water protections as for “waters so designated”. Yes, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act are intertwined in these cases.

At the very beginning of the Clean Water Act, it defines its scope as applying to all of the “Nation’s Waters” which is synonymous with “Navigable Waters” in the Definitions section.

All Seattle and King County CSOs discharge to “Navigable Waters” and must comply with water quality standards to protect aquatic life and human health.

This is a very good thing for the people of our region and around the country!

From the Clean Water Act (via EPA web page):

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled,

TITLE I—RESEARCH AND RELATED PROGRAMS
DECLARATION OF GOALS AND POLICY
SEC. 101. (a) The objective of this Act is to restore and maintain
the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s
waters. In order to achieve this objective it is hereby declared that,
consistent with the provisions of this Act—
(1) it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants
into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985;
(2) it is the national goal that wherever attainable, an interim
goal of water quality which provides for the protection
and propagation of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and provides for
recreation in and on the water be achieved by July 1, 1983;
(3) it is the national policy that the discharge of toxic pollutants
in toxic amounts be prohibited;

Thanks for that additional information, and thanks to BlueLight for asking for the clarification.

A consent decree. Whereby Federal, State and Local bureaucrats (do they all belong to the same union?) agree to support each other's program, relevance and - especially - budget. The federal agencies point to the locals when lobbying for congressional appropriations. The locals get to point to the Feds to justify increased taxes and fees. And, always, there is the supporting army of non-profits; circling the kill like cape dogs and gore crows, snatching scraps.

This article doesn't mention rain gardens, which are a viable alternative to CSOs. Companies like ABSMaterials in Ohio are finding ways to utilize rain gardens to capture rain water and reduce contaminants without grey infrastructure.

Green stormwater management can be the solution to sustainable and effective management of runoff water treatment.

Thanks drb-

Rain gardens and other green stormwater technologies are indeed an important strategy to controlling sewer overflows in a combined system because they reduce the amount of inflow into the system thereby decreasing the capacity needs to prevent an overflow. The plans under consideration by the city and county both incorporate green stormwater infrastructure.

If you read the piece again I think you will see that we did include this very important strategy.

"Green Infrastructure like rain gardens, bioswales, porous pavement, and green roofs is a key part of the solutions and is promoted by the EPA-Ecology-City Decree, reflecting the leadership of the Pacific Northwest in this area. These features in the urban core of our city allow for reducing both the flow of stormwater and also the load of water in the combined sewer pipes, thus reducing the chances of an overflow during big storms. Where possible, it is ultimately far cheaper and more effective to filter the water on-site."

This article begins closer inspection of that "where possible" and "ultimately." Maybe.

The shared growth focus of the 1990s Growth Management Act has been bent, slowly, but surely, into development-oriented Smart Growth. In doing so, the Act's initial conflicts have been greatly increased. The human displacement and ecological degradation that results has so far been dismissed by cheerleaders' rationalization and lip-service from those in charge.

Both sets of consequences have followed a similar circuitous course coinciding with Deregulation, just now coming to terms. Here's a mini-history of the degradation "reasoning":
1) In lobbying for planet-saving urban upzoning, development industry oversells high-tech replacements for nature's "low tech" stormwater infiltration, aka the water cycle,
2) industry thereafter asserts legislatively and project by project that:
a) the high-tech replacements are too expensive and untested (risky),
b) increasing the number of site-consuming urban buildings even when tight-lined to existing CSOs saves the planet,
c) saving the planet outweighs the obvious—reducing local degradation by conserving/adapting urban open space and private yards so as to maximize proven, low maintenance, low cost natural infiltration.

ABSMaterials CEO is a graduate of Mercer Island High School. His wife is a professor at a college in Ohio and the company started when another professor told him about a discovery he had made. Stephan was in Seattle this weekend for a wedding. The company has grown very quickly over the past two years since EPA approved the technology. The Port of Cleveland is using it and he has been asked to come to Japan and Korea. Since the CEO is my nephew, I wished him success. It would seem a chemistry professor in a small Ohio college has developed a process that solves a number of enviromental problems. Bill Stafford

"lead in wheel weights" ?

Really? It's a non point source of pollution that's harming our waterways?

I would have thought that dog & cat fecal matter were a worse issue.

It is difficult to decide where to reply, given the many comments here, so I decided to reply here.

Dog fecal matter is a huge pollutant not captured in any significant manner since it lays around waiting for the rain to wash it down the street or down the hillside directly into the Sound. Rivers emptying into the Sound are notorious for large amounts of dog fecal matter. And, it is only going to get worse.

Human fecal matter is another story. The CSO regulations are clearly unscientific and irrational, for reasons you may not have guessed. The writers of this article are adopting these unscientific principles because they are "desperate" for a solution. Here's how unscientific it is.

The "one-spill-per-year-per-CSO-outfall" rule is ridiculously unscientific. That one spill can be a 25 million gallon spill, dwarfing all the the other spills that were captured in a CSO holding tank (instead of being allowed to be dumped in the Sound) that particular year. Fact is, the CSO tanks being built are being vastly *underbuilt.* The reason for that is they have to squeeze these tanks into small neighborhoods along the Sound coastline. So, they try to compromise on tank size, etc., to reduce footprint.

Seattle Parks completely resists having any such tanks put underground in their parks, even if the tank might be located under a Seattle Parks parking lot. The weakest -- those without substantial lobbying leverage -- get the tank put in their neighborhood (dangerous, among other things and underbuilt). So, for instance, the Murray Pump Station CSO tank is clearly underbuilt and the forecasts for rain that KCWTD used were clearly under-estimated. They will be back to expand that facility, or to add another one in the next 20 years. Whoopy do!

The "no-spill-per-year-per-CSO-outfall-for-non-rain-events" -- electrial outages that shut down pumps and, thus, send non-rain-event sewage into the Sound because there is a lag-time of about 15-20 minutes while KCWTD brings in a mobile diesel electrical generator to fire-up the pumps until the regular electricity is back in service, is truly unscientific and backwards. Rarely does such an electrical outage take place during a rain event. Mostly, they happen about once every three years due to some windstorm or someone knocking down a telephone pole. The spills are very small.

But, guess what. *No* such spill is allowed, so King County is going about putting both above-ground and underground, on-site, automatically started, electrical diesel generators to reduce the lag time between electrical outage and electrical back-up to almost zero, so they conform to the truly unscientific priority of reducing these rare electrical outage, 15-20 minute spills of miniscule amounts of sewage.

The price of such construction per on-site diesel generator? Somewhere around $4 million, depending on site characteristics, etc. That $4 million could be utilized much more effectively for over-sizing CSO tanks, capturing more CSO, rather than so much effort and money being expended for such a little return. This is one of the legacies of the poor scientific thinking of the State Dept. of Ecology guidelines.

Bluelight was right on the button. Why solve the problem when they can continue to blame taxpayers that the sky is falling and call it a consent decree and they all kisskisshughug till the next time they need to save their job.

Government has monopolized stormwater to the point of no return. We will just keep paying these bureaucrats salary increases with still no tangible results to improve Puget Sound. That's the issue as I see it.

A solution is to retrofit catch basins with filters that remove tangible amounts of pollution. The benefit would be immediate both economically and environmentally.

I thought I remembered an alternative to treating everything at the sewage treatment plant. Your company makes catch basin filters and it would seem to me that installing them at the points where the overflows occur would do a lot to stop the pollution flowing into the waterways.

A consent decree is far more than a beaurocratic kumbahyah. It is essentially a federal court order that is agreed to in advance, and it is enforceable in federal court if one of the parties fails to comply.

Catch basin inserts can be effective at removing some pollutants from stormwater. However this article was about sewage overflows, which are essentially a problem of water volume - to the tune of a billion or more gallons a year in Seattle. This is what overwhelms the system and causes the overflows. Filtering stormwater before it enters the system will do very little to reduce the volume.

Improving the capacity of the system and reducing the inflow into the system is the task at hand. Wet weather treatment is also an important strategy to deal with emergency overflows in some locations.

Don't you think offsetting stormwater pollution prevention with CSO pollution makes more sense? since the major pollution source is stormwater?

The federolis sues the metropolis to get nothingness but increases in stormwater fees,,, mui bien