Sludge Watch ==> North Carolina - airport sewage plant discharges repeatedly to wetland -no fine

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

The airport sewage plant diverts the sludge pipe into a culvert to discharge 
the sludge to a wetland.

Consequences of getting caught?  Nothing. No fines.

How can the public have any confidence in a regulatory regime that has 
little enforcement and no consequences for environmental crimes?


Here is an editorial from the Herald Sun.


............................................................................


Published on Friday, February 02, 2007



Our View: Airport sludge discharge exposes more than a befouled wetland.

In the unlikely event that no harm resulted from the deliberate piping of 
sludge into a wetland between the Laurinburg-Maxton Airport and Shoe Heel 
Creek, the public can count itself twice lucky.

That would be once for the low impact of repeated dumping into an 
environmentally sensitive area, and once for a low-cost alert to 
deficiencies in the monitoring regimen.

At this point, officials say that Gary Arnett, who retired in January as 
superintendent of the airport commission’s wastewater treatment plant, 
repeatedly diverted waste from the plant into the wetland because it would 
save the commission money.

The response that immediately comes to mind is, “Want to bet?”

The Environmental Protection Agency is on this case, as is the state 
Division of Water Quality. Even if the damage is slight, do you buy the 
premise that they will impose no fines for clear and undeniable violations 
of the commission’s waste-disposal permit, which says exactly how much 
sludge may be applied as fertilizer, and where it may be applied? If there’s 
a cleanup, large or small, who do you think will pay for it? Who, for that 
matter, will foot the bill for these investigations and scientific studies?

False economy isn’t the only problem. As obvious as the diversion pipe 
itself is that airport officials and state regulators have been, to put it 
diplomatically, insufficiently attentive to what was going on right under 
their noses.

Maybe the dumped sludge is invisible from both ground and air (although an 
Observer reporter and photographer were told they couldn’t visit the site 
for safety reasons, and nobody added that there was nothing there to see). 
But the airport commission’s paperwork certainly wasn’t invisible. If 
wastewater intake remains steady or increases, and disposal costs go down, 
that ought to serve as a tipoff that something out of the ordinary is taking 
place. How was it possible for the beneficiary of this false economy not to 
realize that it was benefiting? To what did it attribute these remarkable 
savings?

There was paperwork right under the regulators’ noses, too. The airport 
commission (not Arnett, but the commission) applied for permission to spread 
less waste than usual, despite the fact that it was spreading waste half as 
often as usual. No red flag went up at the Division of Water Quality. A 
spokeswoman explained that there had been a bureaucratic restructuring, with 
new duties added, and so on. The explanation is plausible, but explanations 
don’t ensure water quality.

The point is not that we have ourselves a full-blown scandal, with scads of 
culprits. The point is that, whether this was a one-man show, honest error 
or something else nobody has even thought of yet, it’s clear right now that 
at least one airport commission and one state agency have gaps to fill.

http://www.heraldsun.com/state/6-814769.cfm