EPA Unhappy with PA's New Bay Diet Plan

 Bay Journal, EPA says Pennsylvania’s plan to clean up the Chesapeake still comes up short

Pennsylvania’s latest Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan still falls short of its assigned goals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which announced on Monday that it will begin ramping up inspection and enforcement actions as a result.

EPA officials want the state to provide an updated plan within 90 days — including details about how it will pay for needed pollution control activities — or the federal agency may take additional actions.

“Enforcement is part of what we do here at EPA,” said Adam Ortiz, administrator of the agency’s mid-Atlantic region, which includes most of the Bay watershed. “It's not always our first choice. It rarely is our first choice. But we're at a point now where we have to step up and do our part.”

EPA leaders said their review of Pennsylvania’s revised cleanup plan, submitted to the agency at the end of December, achieved only 70% of the state’s nitrogen reduction goal. Nitrogen is the major form of pollution in the Chesapeake.

Ortiz said the state lacks adequate programs and policies to keep manure from farmlands out of streams and, ultimately, the Bay. And, unlike most other states in the watershed, Pennsylvania is without dedicated funding programs to help farmers with conservation practices such as streamside buffers, cover crops or other actions that can help reduce nutrient-laden runoff. Farms are, by far, the largest source of water-fouling nutrients that reach the Bay from Pennsylvania.
. . .
At the end of December, Pennsylvania officials submitted a revised plan that they said met the goals. But most of the gap was filled by counting agricultural runoff control practices installed years ago that the EPA says have exceeded their expected lifespan and are no longer effective. When those practices are removed from Pennsylvania’s plan, the EPA said it still comes up 9.7 million pounds short.

Klenotic contended that the EPA’s position fails to adequately account for many older pollution control practices on farms that the state insists are still functioning. Water quality monitoring does show that nitrogen trends in the Susquehanna River, which drains most of the Pennsylvania portion of the Bay watershed, are improving. The EPA, though, maintains the state has failed to provide adequate documentation to show the old pollution control measures are still working.
. . .
If the state does not submit an adequate plan — and demonstrate that it has a funding mechanism to pay for it — Ortiz said the EPA could take further actions.

Those could include requiring wastewater treatment plants, which have already achieved their Bay goals in Pennsylvania, to do even more. That could be extremely expensive.

The agency could also put forth water quality standards that are stricter than those currently imposed by the state, or it could begin objecting to any new requests for discharge permits within the state’s portion of the Bay watershed.

As the article notes in an excised section, Pennsylvania does not border the Chesapeake Bay, and so does not benefit much, if at all, from attempts to clean up the Bay, the benefits of which go almost entirely to Maryland and Virginia. Somehow these two states need to find a way to help Pennsylvania meet its goals

More coverge:

EPA to step up federal actions in Pa. for water pollution - The Bradford (Pa.) Era

EPA: Expect 'tough love' after Pennsylvania's Chesapeake Bay pollution plan falls short again - Pittsburgh (Pa.) Post-Gazette

Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay Plan Misses Pollution Cut Target - Bloomberg News

EPA: State Plan To Clean Up PA's Part Of Chesapeake Bay Watershed Lacks Funding To Meet Water Pollution Reduction Goals - Pa. Environment Digest Blog

Court Overrule Maryland on Chicken Shit Smell

Bay Journal, Maryland agency seeks to overturn ruling that it must curb foul poultry air

The Maryland Department of the Environment plans to appeal a state judge’s ruling that the agency must account for ammonia discharges to the air before issuing water permits to high-density poultry farms.

The move would bring the legal clash to the Court of Special Appeals, the state’s second-highest court.

“We are committed to advancing the science, stewardship and conservation practices that seek to reduce pollution from poultry houses,” MDE Secretary Ben Grumbles said. “We are also committed to regulatory certainty in the wake of the unprecedented ruling in the lower court.”

Last year, the MDE finalized a revision to the five-year “general discharge permit” governing waste discharges into local waters from industrial-scale chicken-raising operations. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency subsequently accepted the changes.

But Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Sharon Burrell ruled March 11 this year that state officials must also regulate ammonia released into the air, because some of it falls into waters protected by the federal Clean Water Act, namely the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

On the other hand, given the prevailing winds, I suspect most of the the ammonia from Eastern Shore chicken houses is carried out to sea before it rains out.

Ammonia is a form of nitrogen, a nutrient that can trigger algae blooms in the Bay, creating oxygen-deprived “dead zones” where nearly no life exists. Reducing nitrogen runoff from farms is one of the top goals of the state-federal Bay restoration program.

MDE officials say that, if the state is also required to limit ammonia air emissions from poultry operations to improve water quality, it would open the door to regulating similar air emissions from a wide variety of sources, ranging from vehicles to landfills. Confusion and regulatory chaos would ensue, they say.

The circuit court lawsuit was initiated by the Assateague Coastal Trust, a group based in Berlin, MD, that has long opposed the chicken industry’s expansion on the Delmarva Peninsula. Maryland’s portion of peninsula boasts some 2,000 chicken houses, which emit gaseous ammonia through giant fans. The gas is largely the product of poultry urine.

The thought is generally right, but technically speaking, chickens, like all bird, do not urinate. Their feces and solid uric acid from their urinary tract are mixed together. The ammonia is produced when the uric acid is broken down by bacteria. 

I think having judges overruling state agencies responsible for regulations should be done with some care. State agencies have to consider many factors before instituting a rule, while judges get to substitute their own opinions, which may or may not be backed up by any actual knowledge.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Hane Ame ready and waiting at the The Other McCain.

Wrong, Just Wrong

By the AP, as published by NYPo, Chesapeake Bay ‘dead zone’ has 200 million tons of pollutants

When the Conowingo Dam opened to fanfare nearly a century ago, the massive wall of concrete and steel began its job of harnessing water power in northern Maryland. It also quietly provided a side benefit: trapping sediment and silt before it could flow miles downstream and pollute the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary.

The old hydroelectric dam spanning the lower Susquehanna River is still producing power, but its days of effectively trapping sediment in a 14-mile (22.5-kilometer) long reservoir behind its walls are over. Behind the 94-foot (29-meter) high barrier lies a massive inventory of coal-black muck — some 200 million tons (181 million metric tons) of pollutants picked up over decades from farmlands, industrial zones and towns.

How big a threat this sediment stockpile poses to the Chesapeake Bay or whether anything can even be done about it depends on who one talks to. With Maryland pushing to curb pollution in dam discharges, the issue has become a political football as Conowingo’s operator seeks to renew its federal license to operate the dam for 46 more years after its old license expired.

And as negotiations drag on, the lack of agreement about curbing runoff pollutants following the wettest year on record imperils hard-won gains in restoring the Chesapeake Bay. . . 

Do you see the problem here?

The so called "Dead Zone" in the Chesapeake Bay is the bottom water in the deep channel that runs out of oxygen in summer, forming a hypoxic (with less than 2 ppm oxygen), or in some cases anoxic (without oxygen) zone in the water that is deadly to organism. I reported on that last night; good news that it wasn't, at time they checked, as bad as they feared it would be based on the amount of rain we have had.

The 200 million tons that AP reports in the "Dead Zone" are the sediments safely, for now, captured behind Conowingo Dam. A pain, but not a current problem. The problem is that Conowingo pool is full, and is no longer catching new sediment that comes down. Those are a problem, but not 200 million tons worth.

We have no idea how many pounds of "pollutants" there are in the Bay; that rather depends on the definition. Certainly nutrients, mainly fixed nitrogen and phosphorus, are regarded as the primary problem. But they do not constitute 200 million tons. The annualized TMDL for nitrogen in the Bay is only 186 million pounds, phosphorus 12.6 million lbs. Even the TMDL for sediment is only 3.2 million tons.

They have part of the story right, and part dead wrong: Behold the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward — reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.