Input on Bay input

And we’re not talking the pretty input of a mountain brook, either – it’s more like overflow from a clogged commode.

This is something I didn’t know about Jim Pelura; he has a little more than a layman’s grasp of the controversy behind septic systems here in Maryland. Let’s just say that there’s a far greater cause of Chesapeake Bay pollution not being addressed.

Pelura wrote in an e-mail to me:

The pending legislation centered around septic tanks is another example of Annapolis putting emotions ahead of science in lawmaking.

To listen to Governor O’Malley and his supporters in the Maryland General Assembly, one would think that septic tanks are the major contributor to Bay pollution.  They have consistently ignored actual data from the Maryland Department of the Environment concerning the cause of over-nutrification (pollution) of the Chesapeake Bay.

In 2005, as a Trustee of the Maryland Agricultural Land Preservation Foundation, I explained in a letter to Ms. Kim Coble of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation that,  according to the Maryland Department of the Environment, close to 700 million gallons of raw or minimally treated sewage was dumped into Maryland waterways in 2004 and over 400 million gallons in 2005.  I also indicated in that letter that the Maryland Department of the Environment has been aware of this situation, and in 1995 cautioned that antiquated and poorly maintained sewage treatment plants were a major cause of Bay pollution.

While the situation is improving, unfortunately this trend continues to today, with sewage treatment facility malfunctions being the major source of pollution to the Bay.  

The recent numbers for sewage spills due to malfunctioning treatment plants are: 20 million gallons in 2008, 98 million gallons in 2009, and 97 million gallons in 2010.

According to the Patuxent Riverkeeper, the Dorsey Run Waste Water Treatment Plant in Anne Arundel County (just one example) had 24 violations between 2005 and 2010.  Records show that, between July 2003 and June 2009, problems at this facility and in the sewer pipes leading to it caused sewage spills totaling about 2.2 million gallons of raw sewage.  A further 11 million gallons of partially treated sewage were discharged when the plant failed in October 2007.  According to the Riverkeeper, “there are a potpourri of buggy, outmoded and troubled industrial facilities and wastewater plants that exist by virtue of state-issued permits that are regularly violated and that the State rarely enforces.”

It is up to all of us to insure that our waterways are kept clean and free of contaminants, including sewage. 

We can do this by insisting that our elected officials from both parties promote legislation based in fact and on science instead of popular opinion.

Blaming those folks with septic tanks is not only wrong but indefensible. (Emphasis in original.)

Yet what is the solution the state desires? Hooking future developments up to new or existing sewage treatment plants!

We have a situation in Salisbury where the wastewater treatment plant still isn’t performing properly, even with expensive upgrades that local ratepayers remain on the hook for. Obviously adding to the problem by hooking up even more homes and businesses isn’t going to help fix the problem, so apparently the solution is to not have new development at all. (Sorry, biology won’t permit us to address the root cause. We all have to eat.)

There are times I suspect that the true aim of these radical greenies is to depopulate large rural areas of the state so the creatures of precious Gaia can move about freely, and eliminating the prospect for development can accomplish that goal through attrition. Imagine the economic chaos which would ensue here if Perdue moved away – aside from the area immediately around the university, Salisbury could well look like Detroit if that were to occur. They couch it as ‘farmland preservation’ but in driving around the area I see a lot of rural places where crops aren’t grown – it’s either stands of forest or wetlands.

To those people who fear our area looking like MoCo or the Baltimore suburbs, I assure you we have a LONG way to go before we even come close to that density. It ain’t happening in my lifetime.

So Pelura’s right: before we start taking development rights away from our area of the state as well as rural areas around the bigger cities, perhaps the state should address the problems with the system in place. Adding development and jobs to the state will help in that respect by bringing in revenue that could work to fix these treatment plants; sadly the General Assembly seems more intent on making the state even less business-friendly and spends far too much effort debating unimportant issues like gay marriage.

I realize that upgrading the system will cost billions and maintaining it on an ongoing basis will cost even more. But it’s a relatively legitimate function of a state or local government to treat wastewater and combat the spread of disease, as long as they keep the process and regulation as simple and basic as possible to achieve desired results. Cleaning up untreated sewage shouldn’t require multiple volumes of rules and regulations to do a basic task: filter out the solids and neutralize harmful bacteria.

As it turns out, Mother Nature has a pretty good method for doing this on its own – otherwise we would become violently ill simply by drinking well water. As someone who has drank well water for much of his life, I think I’ve made it through without adverse effects so the rest of us can too. There’s no need for reinventing the wheel just to get rid of less than 1/10 of the problem when Pelura identifies a much more target-rich environment.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

One thought on “Input on Bay input”

  1. Very informative and eye-opening post!

    As far as I can tell from talking to environmentalists, most of them are not shy about stating that yes, they do want to curb back the human population and the sprawl by any means necessary. Most of their policies are anti-capitalist because they see our species as a threat, and capitalism is what drives our species.

    Unfortunately, they have a lot of catchy slogans and they do stand (on the surface) for a cause most consider a no-brainer: protecting the environment. So the general public goes along without really getting into the full agenda.

    Meanwhile, politicians who want to curry favor know that they must appear to be environmentally friendly, so they pull stunts like O’Malley wading into a polluted lake to support policies that will actually make no difference to their budgets (or to the environment). They ignore the real issues because, let’s face it, combating real issues is expensive, and they’d much rather spend tax dollars on entitlements that get the support of another vocal minority group forever than help everyone a little in a fashion that often flies under the radar.

Comments are closed.