| Wastewater | Deer Island, Boston Harbor - Page 8 |
|
The Clean Air Act (officially, Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972) became law on October 18, 1972 when the U.S. House of Representatives overrode the veto of President Richard Nixon, 247 to 23. The U.S. Senate had voted to override the day before, 52 to 12. While it would take just over another 25 years before there would be a new sewage treatment plant started on Deer Island, it was the passage of the Clean Air Act (CWA) that would force its construction and define its functionality. In the 1960s there had been a growing awareness of the public to the dangers of environmental degradation. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962 highlighted the harm to wildlife from the indiscriminate use of pesticides. The wreck of the Torrey Canyon off the western coast of England in 1967, and the blow-out of a drilling platform in 1969 off Santa Barbara, Calif. both highlighted the dangers of oil spills. 1969 was the year an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. In 1971 the heart wrenching photographs by W. Eugene Smith showed children poisoned by mercury in Minamata, Japan. Responses from the public included the first Earth Day in 1970 and the formation of the organization Greenpeace in 1971. |
|
Richard Nixon is not remembered fondly by most for his handling of the end of the Vietnam War, then his role in the Watergate scandal, and finally resignation from office. People often do not remember that it was Nixon who formed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by executive order in 1970. He created the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), he signed the Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Endangered Species Act. This was in an era when Republicans were fiscally conservative, and it is thought Nixon likely would have signed the CWA except that he wanted to cut the $24.6 billion authorization federal grant funding by $6 billion. Many contend that it was political expediency rather than any strong feeling for the environment that drove Nixon. It is a coincidence of history that 16 years later in 1988 the Republican candidate George H.W. Bush would damage Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis’ campaign with attacks on the environmental pollution in Boston Harbor. . |
|
Coverage in 1972 of the passage of the Clean Water Act was fairly limited. The Boston Globe mentioned it in a wrap up of legislation that the 92nd U.S. Congress accomplished before adjourning. Earlier reporting that year had noted negotiations between House and Senate versions. Reporting after the signing primarily covered President Nixon’s continuing efforts to cut $6 billion from the funding. To the public it was not clear what the passage of the Clean Water Act would have on efforts to clean up Boston Harbor. On the other hand, to MDC and state officials the passage of law was likely confirmation that the federal government was taking control of pollution reduction efforts and making dramatic changes in how it was to be accomplished. The passage of Clean Water Act changed how pollution was measured, who would have who had authority to enforce the reduction of that pollution, and who could sue if the pollution was not reduced. |
| The end of the dilution solution |
Top |
| From the time when a metropolitan sewage system was first proposed for Boston, the nearness to the ocean provided metropolitan officials with what they thought was the best solution for how to dispose of wastewater. From the 1876 report, The Sewerage of Boston, |
| “[The method of disposal of sewage] adopted the world over by cities near deep water consists in carrying the sewage out so far that its point of discharge will be remote from dwellings, and beyond the possibility of doing harm.” |
| In 1939, even as treatment plants were first being proposed, local officials calculated that 250 mgd flow of raw sewage would be diluted about 600 times by the 150,000 mgd flow of the tide in and out of the harbor resulting in, |
| “…enough dilution to maintain a sufficient amount of dissolved oxygen in the harbor to prevent gross nuisance.” |
| With similar logic the accepted way to determine “gross nuisance” was to make measurements in the water where the wastewater was being discharged. Massachusetts had been an innovator in developing the standards for determining if a given body of water was polluted. For the legislators crafting the new law the problem with this long-held method was that it favored those who had a large body of water to dispose of their wastewater, like Boston Harbor. The Clean Water Act continued to require that the ambient water quality standards be met. It added a requirement that the point source of wastewater discharges also meet a standard of secondary treatment. In 1972 the MDC’s aging Nut Island treatment plant and the relatively new Deer Island treatment only met a primary level of treatment. |
|
Secondary wastewater treatment requires that three key measurements of discharges be met. First, 85% of toxic pollutants be removed, up from 40% for primary treatment. In practice even a higher percentage of especially toxic chemicals needed to be removed, and this would be accomplished by identifying their industrial source and requiring compliance. Second was the requirement that 90% of solids be removed, up from a typical 60% for primary treatment. The third was the requirement that the Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) of the discharge be reduced by 85%, up from 35% for primary treatment. The idea of reducing the volume of solids in treated wastewater is easily understood. The meaning of reducing the amount of BOD is less clear. The more organic matter in the sewage, the greater the BOD; and the greater the BOD, the lower the amount of dissolved oxygen available for animals such as fish to use. This was the cause of the problem with rotting sea lettuce in Winthrop. The type of algae found there was tolerant of low oxygen levels and when it blooms it suffocates other aquatic plants. When it dies, bacteria feed on it using more oxygen in the water depleting the oxygen available to other species, suffocating or driving them away. Rotting sea lettuce produces hydrogen sulfide which in the case of Winthrop was strong enough to peel paint off houses. |
| Under the Clean Air Act, all discharges of pollutants into U.S. waters would be prohibited unless authorized by the EPA under a new National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). Administration. As explained by the EPA, |
| “The Clean Water Act prohibits anybody from discharging "pollutants" through a "point source" into a "water of the United States" unless they have an NPDES permit. The permit will contain limits on what you can discharge, monitoring and reporting requirements, and other provisions to ensure that the discharge does not hurt water quality or people's health.” |
| The permits would be administered by states after they were qualified by the EPA. Also clarified in the new law were which waters was included. The earlier limitation to enforcement only for intrastate water was now changed to all navigable waters and their tributaries. And there was an ambitious timeline, |
“(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;” |
| It is clear why the MDC and state officials were not pleased with the new law. The two metropolitan sewage plants, including one only four years old, could not meet the new point-source standards, and the poor conditions of many tide gates and numerous problematic CSOs made even reaching required ambient water standards difficult. Combined that with a reluctance of state legislators to give the MDC more money made the situation desperate. Another feature of new law, not likely on any one’s mind in 1972, was the provision that allowed individual citizens to sue if pollution levels were not reduced. In just over 10 years a lawsuit by a Quincy official would set in motion the next big change for Deer Island. |
|
One of the objectives written into the 1972 Clean Water Act stated that the “national goal [was] that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.” Read literally it raised the question, why invest in a secondary treatment plant which at best removed 90% of pollution when the requirement would soon to be to remove 100%? A Massachusetts politician who picked up on the ambiguity was William M. Bulger. After five terms in the state’s House of Representatives he, in 1970, had just been elected to the State Senate (on his way to becoming Senate president in 1978, and eventually one of the most powerful politicians in the state). With his district’s South Boston and Dorchester beaches regularly closed because of pollution he was looking for a solution and was doubtful that a “Rube Goldberg end-of-pipe contraption” secondary treatment plant was the answer. His preferred solution to the eventual requirement of zero discharge, land disposal. Also known as sewage farming it was one of the earliest methods of sewage treatment. In Massachusetts, its use was promoted by Lemuel Shattuck (1793-1859) in his influential 1850 book, Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and Personal Health. As chairman of a state commission authorized to conduct a survey of sanitary conditions in Massachusetts, Shattuck authored a 540-page book that covered a wide range of public health matters in detail with many visionary and far-reaching recommendations. Today he has been called the Prophet of American Public Health. In England, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine honors him among other leaders in the field on a frieze surrounding their building. In Massachusetts, the state hospital in Jamaica Plain is named in his honor. In the book, on page 212, recommendation number forty is, “whenever practicable, the refuse and sewage of cities and towns he collected and applied to the purposes of agriculture.” Then Shattuck goes on to provide a statistical and financial analysis on the value of using human manure “for the promotion of vegetation.” He also warned that it was, “enormously wasteful to consign the excreta of the population to rivers and water-courses.” |
| Shattuck’s argument against disposing of sewage into rivers was picked up by critics of building the Boston Main Drainage System in the 1870s. They added a moral imperative arguing that flushing human waste into the harbor and not using it as fertilizer would be, “a debt to nature,” and destroy the vitality of the soil used for farming. Modern day fertilizers would solve that problem, but they did correctly predict that areas in the harbor where the sewage discharged would become, “a huge cauldron of poison” and definitely were correct when they said paying the elaborate sewage system would leave a “burden of debt and taxation upon the city.” The examination in the late 1800s of using Rumney Marsh in Saugus, Mass. was undertaken for this purpose. In his 1936 Engineers’ Report, Arthur D. Weston acknowledged sewage irrigation but noted that it was better suited for cities in arid regions or ones with low-priced land nearby. Now in 1972 the idea was back. |
|
William Bulger was an astute politician and likely knew that “zero discharge” was an aspirational goal, still pushed the idea of land disposal to solve the problem of pollution in Boston Harbor. In early 1972 formed a special commission to investigate pollution in the harbor and then in the summer held two hearings. Bulger packed the hearings with academics, consultants, and politicians who supported land disposal. Of special interest to Bulger was the land disposal project in Muskegon, Mi. where officials were receiving help for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. For the Corps, pollution control was a welcome new direction. Conservationists were beginning to limit their typical “dam it or drain it” projects. Land disposal projects, with its requirements for large lagoons and irrigation fields, matched their construction expertise. The EPA initially had opposed land disposal projects but after criticism of their preference for treatment plants, they too supported the Muskegon project. In attendance at Bulger’s Boston Harbor Pollution hearings was MDC Commissioner John Sears, Thomas McMahon, the state's Director of Pollution Control, and representatives from the EPA. Commissioner Sears, well aware that his agency’s funding was in hands of politicians like Bulger, could do little but go a long with Bulger’s scheme. It would be the two representatives from the EPA who would be the target of Bulger’s wrath. They were accused of pursuing what Bulger thought was a wasteful plan of constructing secondary treatment plants and of ignoring the option of land disposal. McMahon still held true to his belief that CSOs were the bigger problem, but by now had accepted that Boston would only get federal money if they agreed to build secondary treatment. This was unacceptable to Bulger. |
|
As Arthur Weston had said twenty-five years earlier, land disposal is a good sewage treatment option for sites that are in arid regions or ones with low-priced land. The Muskegon, Mi. sewage farm opened in 1973, served a population of 90,000, and was in an area with plenty of available land. The sewage farm including lagoons and field was a little over 17 sq. mi. in size. Much earlier, in 1897, Melbourne in Australia had constructed a land disposal sewage system. Their facility measures 42 square miles. Boston has similar metropolitan population to Melbourne, but they have a separate stormwater sewer system, and get less than half the rainfall of Boston. All of Boston proper within Route 128 is about 90 sq. mi. The estimates in 1972 of how large a sewage farm the Boston metropolitan would need ranged between 130 to 300 square miles. More than all of land inside Route 128. In addition to the unavailability of land, the sewage in the Boston metropolitan system flows downward towards the harbor. Massive expensive changes would have to have been made to pump the sewage uphill. Despite how unlikely the scheme seems today the political clout of William Bulger kept it alive at least for a while. By 1975 he had dropped his support of a sewage farm in favor of drying and selling sludge as fertilizer becoming an early advocate. |
| It is not clear if Bulger’s misguided promotion of sewage farms delayed the eventual construction of a new sewage treatment plant on Deer Island. Later when a secondary treatment plant became inevitable, he vigorously opposed incineration as an option for destroying the sludge. He was a strong critic of efforts to drill for oil on Georges Bank. And it was support of legislation that would lead to the water and sewer divisions of the MDC becoming an independent authority. Nevertheless, the appeal of a low-tech solution to cleaning up wastewater continued on the national level and when it came to develop a plan for Boston, the concept resurfaced. |
|
