The Puget sound is unique in that it is the ONLY large bay where the 3-mile rule applied. All other bays (Chesapeake, San Fransisco, etc.) are considered inland waters, and all discharge of untreated waste is banned, whether 3 miles from shore or not. But the Puget sound is shared with Canada and is thus not the inland waters of the US.
Because the navigable waters are regulated by the federal government, the state has no authority to regulate discharges from boats, OTHER than requesting NDZ status from the EPA, which is quite easy, so the Washington state EPA had only one option; NDZ status.
NDZs began with the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972. They are often seen as political statements.
I'm not seeing a correlation with presidential party affiliations. There was a predictable burst when the law passed, no interest nearly a decade, and then a pretty steady rate since. The last Bush administration implemented 4 more NDZs than the Obama administration. If there are politics, they are local in nature and consistent.
Perhaps the rate is now declining, as the map gets filled in.
Interestingly, the Friends of the Earth petitioned the EPA in 2010 to allow several popular high-efficiency treatment systems, arguing they were better for the environment than a ban. How about them apples? It seems they believe that good treatment is better than the cheating that otherwise takes place. Rather like ethanol gas, the full cost of the regulation and the unintended consequences are not always considered. In this case, however, I think it is more a matter of the convoluted nature of regulations; the Washington EPA saw NDZ as the only available option.
Sadly, I don't think the effectiveness of treatment systems, such as the Rairitan Electroscan, is well understood.
Before I begin, let me state that Eolian has always been a NDZ boat - we have a holding tank and we use it. And in fact, all the recreational boaters that I know have holding tanks and use them. I think this is a great idea.
ReplyDeleteBut.
But the dripping sickly sweet sanctimony offends me to the core.
What am I talking about? Well, here is an example. I happen to know of a large cruise ship that last summer put in a first class sewage treatment system - one that is better than the one that the city of Seattle uses. This system is now useless and the ship is trying to hold things together with a small 400 gallon holding tank.
But wait... why is this bad?
Well, now the sewage from all boats on Puget Sound is being collected and the bulk of it is being offloaded into the City of Seattle's sewage treatment system. Good, right?
Not so much.
See, the City of Seattle has what is called a "Combined Sewage Outflow" system. That means that storm water and sewage are combined and treated together. Well, that's even better, right? All that leaked oil from cars, etc is going to the sewage treatment plants right?
Yes. Except when it rains. Something we all know is a rare event in the Pacific Northwest. Then the system is overwhelmed and the sewage is dumped, raw, into Puget Sound.
Oh, but that's a rare event, right? No. Not even close. Here is an article detailing that in 2013, in only one of Seattle's neighborhoods (Ballard), Seattle dumped 57,000,000 gallons of raw sewage into Salmon Bay in 89 incidents.
Were there fines? No, of course not. "We're doing the best we can to correct the situation."
In the meantime, I gag on the sanctimony.