Some are calling it Toilet to Tap and that's not much of an exaggeration. Past practice has been that when water is diverted from one place to another a discharge permit was required. However, according to a new rule issued by the EPA water can now be diverted from one area to another without a permit.
A permit is still required if one diverts water, uses it and a contaminate is entered into the flow. But according to the new EPA rules one can divert "water", even contaminated water as long as no additional contaminates are added without a discharge permit. The AP reports:
"Clean water permits should focus on water pollution, not water movement," Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, said in a statement. He later noted that the decision reaffirmed the agency's 30-year view of the Clean Water Act.......
"You could take a really scuzzy canal system ... and pump it into a drinking water supply," said David Guest, managing director of the Florida office for Earthjustice...."
According to the report "Troubled Waters" assembled by PIRG.
"Nationally, more than 3600 major facilities (57%) exceeded their Clean Water Act permit limits at least once between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2005....
.....The 3600 major facilities exceeding their permits in the time period studied reported more than 24,400 exceedances of their Clean Water Act permit limits. This means that many facilities exceeded their permits more than once and for more than one pollutant.
Common Dreams relates: "The rule is intended to effectively overrule a 2006 federal court decision which declared the practice of unpermitted pollution pumping to be illegal.....
......"In the face of irrefutable evidence that transfers of contaminated water pose grave public health threats, the EPA is trying to disguise disposal of polluted water as allocation of water for later public use," said Guest. "If it poisons you when you drink it, it's not allocation for public use."
In addition some states are finding "Clean Water Loans" diverted, as in this story from NJ:
"In testimony before the committee today, New Jersey PEER Director Bill Wolfe argued that fundamental features enabling Encap remain. Under the new plan -
1) Clean water funds could be used to subsidize private "brownfields" projects (for example, multi-million dollar loans to big corporations, such as Hartz Mountain ($31 million) and Michelin Tire ($6.6 million) are on the funding list). In addition, tax-secured loans could still go to new development including projects only tangentially related to clean water purposes - as opposed to upgrading existing deficient infrastructure, despite state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) estimates of a $16 billion infrastructure backlog"
Sen Barbara Boxer- excerpt from senate hearing. (4-15-08)
"Yet, EPA is now nearly 6 years behind the schedule established in a court settlement to list the endocrine disrupting chemicals it will test. And EPA still has not even established all of the tests needed to detect these chemicals, much less evaluated the chemicals using those tests.
EPA now says it is not prepared to require drinking water systems to monitor for pharmaceuticals or to set standards for pharmaceuticals in tap water, because it doesn’t have data showing harmful effects from low levels of exposure. But this lack of data is in large part a result of EPA’s failure to ensure that companies that make these chemicals complete the testing needed to evaluate those effects.
Because of these problems, EPA has not set a drinking water standard for a single pharmaceutical. In fact, EPA hasn’t even proposed to set a single health standard for any pharmaceutical in drinking water.
The result of these failures is that millions of Americans turn on their kitchen taps and drink low levels of pharmaceuticals in their water every day."
Then there was the accounting of our pollutants that the EPA apparently found just to exhausting to compile. From Environment News Service:
"The database, known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, is used by federal agencies, state and local authorities, private companies, and individuals to plan a response when chemicals are found in air, water, or soil. IRIS offers guidance on which of 540 chemical in the database are toxic, and at what levels. The IRIS website gets about 20,000 hits per year.
A backlog of assessments for IRIS extending back for years has been delayed further by a new review process that the EPA and White House Office of Management and Budget revealed on April 10, 2008.
While the EPA has averaged almost 20 assessments a year in draft in the past two years, the Office of Management and Budget has only approved two a year for posting to IRIS.
"The White House has effectively blocked the EPA from posting new health assessments of hazardous chemicals by prolonging the assessments because of inevitable uncertainties about the interaction of chemicals and human health," said Congressman Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat who chairs the House Science Subcommittee on Investigation and Oversight."
It seems one "bad apple" does spoil the whole bunch......