CWN Comments on EPA's Sanitary Sewer Overflow and Peak Flows Policy
August 2, 2010
Water Docket
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Mail code: 4203M
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NW.
Washington, DC 20460
Attention Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW–2010– 0464/
EPA's Sanitary Sewer Overflow and Peak Flows Policy
To Whom It May Concern:
Clean Water Network, the largest membership coalition in the country working to protect our nation’s water resources, urge U.S. EPA to propose a strong and comprehensive Sanitary Sewer Overflows (SSOs) rule that protects public health and clean water, improves public notification and monitoring, makes clear that sanitary sewer overflows are illegal, and ensures that systems are planning for the future by investing in innovative, smart, clean and green sustainable infrastructure.
Clean Water Network strongly supports modifying the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) regulations as they apply to municipal sanitary sewer collection systems and SSOs. EPA action is needed in order to better protect the environment and public health from the harmful effects of sanitary sewer overflows and basement backups.
SSOs cause infection, disease, and nitrification of drinking water. They can also cross contaminate drinking water delivery pipes as well as contaminate drinking water sources. EPA estimates there are 1.8 to 3.5 million cases of illness annually from swimming in waters contaminated by SSOs. These overflows also cause fish killing algal blooms, create dead zones and contribute to groundwater contamination.
In addition to massive public health concerns, there are economic consequences including loss of recreation and tourism revenue opportunities, lost-work days, decrease in fisheries, raw sewage in basements and parks requiring clean up, roads caving in causing traffic tie ups, and injury and death from dangerous sink holes. In addition, by not knowing the rate of failure for their sewer pipe collection system (almost exclusively big pipe systems in the first place without considering non-structural alternatives) communities have not targeted dollars efficiently to repair, replace or augment with green infrastructure their aging, burgeoning pipes. Because of this, municipal sewer rates are skyrocketing and many municipalities have a fix or replacement schedule of 100 years or more.
EPA estimates that there are 23,000-75,000 SSOs a year and this will become worse in some areas that will experience more frequent and intense storms. Severe weather will mean an increase in broken pipes, mechanical, equipment or power failure, system overload, blockages, and a failure to maintain infrastructure and manage stormwater.
There is no question that EPA should take aggressive action to address these serious public health threats by clarifying and strengthening its permit conditions for SSO reporting, recordkeeping and public notification.
Sanitary Sewer Overflows – Addressing Issues Set Forth by EPA
Permit conditions for SSO reporting, recordkeeping and public right to know
- Right to Know: Currently there are no consistent regulations for reporting sewer overflows that could affect public health. At a minimum, the SSO rule must include notification of overflows to public health officials, the local community, and downstream drinking water treatment plants.
- Reporting and Recordkeeping – NPDES permit holders must be required to record SSOs and report them to the state or the EPA as soon as possible and follow-up with a written report explaining the duration and
- volume of the overflow and steps taken to mitigate the overflow prevent recurrence.
- Both these requirements should apply to SSOs that reach waters of the U.S and to SSOs that do not. (e.g. sewage backups into basements).
Permit Conditions for Capacity Management, Operations and Maintenance (CMOM)
CMOM is required under EPA regulations but is not well defined. Generally, CMOM includes evaluating and maintaining the sewer system and planning for capacity issues to avoid overflows.
Integrating strong CMOM requirements into permits will ensure that POTWs plan for the future and plan ahead to avoid SSOs. CMOM should require communities plan for stormwater, SSOs and CSOs (where applicable) together and in a more integrated manner. CMOM should also include evaluating water efficiency and green infrastructure approaches to reduce the amount of water coming into the sewer system. A truly integrated water resource management plan that evaluates alternative approaches and innovative technologies should be a requirement before any federal funding is used. Even better and more effective would be utilizing federal SRF and other funding sources to incentivize innovation.
Permits for Municipal Satellite Collection Systems –
Permits for Satellite Collection Systems must be required. Currently, although there are SSOs from these satellite collection systems there is no permit required.
Costs and benefits of Capacity Management, Operations and Maintenance (CMOM) and asset management of sanitary sewers
There will be major cost-savings achieved by avoiding SSOs and related health and environmental costs. Clean Water Network urges EPA to look at costs of SSO control and stormwater together – these should be integrated and not additive. We also want to highlight the multiple benefits of preventing SSOs to clean water and communities and recommend reducing SSO and CMOM costs by demanding that we re-think our support for bigger and bigger sewage collection and treatment systems. By demanding support for decentralized and distributive schemes, we will relieve pressure from the failing centralized systems and begin to explore and shift to neighborhood scale sewage solutions that are much more resilient and efficient. Weight should be given in the SRF point scoring systems so that pilots and demonstration of alternatives can be tried in different geographies.
Thank you very much for considering our views on this important topic.
Sincerely,
Natalie Roy
Natalie Roy
Executive Director
