Salisbury invested $80 million in upgrading its sewage treatment facility in response to a state mandate to filter more nutrients from its Chesapeake Bay-bound effluent.
But when the new plant was switched on in 2010, the pollution still flowed, a report states. A second renovation attempt is scheduled to be completed in May 2018 at a cost of $64 million.
A new report released Wednesday shines a spotlight on the financial and environmental costs of the project.
The plant discharged more than 200 tons of nitrogen into the Wicomico River last year, more than four times what its permit allows, according to the Environmental Integrity Project. As of the end of September, it had released more than three times as much nitrogen as permitted for an entire year.
But Salisbury is a piker compared to Baltimore:
Despite spending $1.2 billion on plant upgrades since 2004, Maryland was home to 12 of the failing plants, the group said. That represents about one out of seven of the state's large-scale facilities.
The list includes the state's second-largest sewage facility, the Patapsco Wastewater Treatment Plant near Baltimore, which discharged 3.7 million pounds of nitrogen last year. That's four times its permitted amount.
Meanwhile, the State and EPA try to blame farmers for Chesapeake Bay's pollution problems. Well, it's true. Farmers grow the food that city dwellers eat which turns into shit and piss in their sewage systems.
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