EPA $#!*s The Bay, Kills Trees

EPA flushes their feces directly in Potomac River, untreated

"Whenever bossy bureaucrats at the EPA take a bowel movement at work on a rainy day, all the excrement floats right out into the Potomac River," claimed Drudge Report editor, Charles Hurt, on Tuesday in his Washington Times column. Hurt went on to describe how the untreated waste of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) then flows into the Chesapeake Bay, "helping to destroy one of the most important and compromised ecosystems in the U.S. today."

The Drudge editor believes it "utter hypocrisy" that EPA headquarters is flushing billions of gallons of untreated waste directly into the Potomac River each year while daring to threaten Andy Johnson, the owner of a family trout pond, "an oasis for wildlife such as ducks and geese," with fines of $75,000 a day for violating the Clean Water Act. The sheer hypocrisy of the agency prompted Hurt to ask, "Why not charge Gina McCarthy and every one of her EPA employees $75,000 per flush?"

The Drudge Report has used the immense power of its news influence to spread the story of what many consider to be an outrage of power by the EPA. As recently as four days ago, a central Drudge Report headline spotlighted a Fox News article about the defiant rancher who says he is being unfairly targeted and will defy the EPA even if he loses everything. The Fox News story which has captured the attention of more than just the Drudge report editors is: Wyoming welder faces $75,000 a day in EPA fines for building pond on his property."


The EPA federal headquarters, housing 5000 employees, is located a few blocks from the White House. On its website, annual energy and water consumption for EPA offices are listed. However, Hurt pointed out, the EPA does not list the gallons of untreated waste water flushed directly into the Potomac year after year by their employees.

The problem, as Hurt explains it, stems from the inability of the sewage treatment plant to handle storm runoff and sewage simultaneously. When rain floods the sewage system, billions of gallons of untreated sewage from the "dirty polluters" of the EPA building flush directly into "the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, which flow into the celebrated Chesapeake Bay."

This charge is a little bit of stretch; the EPA doesn't decide where it's headquarters are located, nor have instant control over where their feces are directed. Congress decides where they are located, and has to allocate them money for their own buildings, and has not chosen, at least as far as I know, to equip them with composting toilets which would not discharge into Washington D.C.s wholly inadequate combined storm water/sewage system.

However, to enlarge the point, the government is often much tougher on its citizens than it is to itself, and cities are notorious in their reluctance to upgrade their waste systems with their own money. This is one reason that socialist countries, like the China and the former Soviet Union have such lousy environmental records; having control over the economy, they suddenly find higher priorities than environmental concerns.

However, I will allow EPA to claim full credit for this one: Saving trees? EPA wastes $1.5 million storing unneeded pamphlets in warehouse

For an agency with a mission to protect the environment, the EPA sure can waste a lot of paper.

That’s what investigators found when they inspected a warehouse in Ohio where the Environmental Protection Agency was storing millions of pamphlets and brochures. But lots of small slips of green paper were also wasted — it cost taxpayers $1.5 million annually for the storage.

The warehouse in Blue Ash, Ohio, run by the National Service Center for Environmental Publications (NSCEP), is stocked with more than 18 million publications — a backlog of more than six years as the agency only ships out about 3 million publications annually.

The agency’s internal watchdog concluded that it costs the agency $1.2 million to preserve and store the pamphlets in the warehouse, plus about another $400,000 for management and leasing costs of the space — not to mention the printing costs that have now gone for naught since no one is reading the publications.

Most of the pamphlets that the EPA is current making, printing too many of and storing the excess could be delivered digitally. Moreover, most of them are simplistic propaganda, and therefore, a waste of time and money in the first place.