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Honoring a Water Warrior in Southern California

2012-01-11T21:15:29Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Mark Gold, a stalwart of Southern California’s environmental community, and someone who built the influential, Santa Monica-based non-profit, Heal the Bay, into a local powerhouse, announced yesterday that he’s leaving after 23 years to take a position as associate director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

Mark’s departure is, if you pardon the pun, a watershed in Los Angeles—he’s been a unique figure on the local scene, someone who has made sustained contributions that add up to an impressive slate of accomplishments. Mark is unique. He was Heal the Bay’s chief scientist, fundraiser, executive, and he was an accomplished communicator, a go-to source for local reporters and (at times to my chagrin) a good quote.

Mark played “multiple positions,” and Heal the Bay, its members, and the public at large were the beneficiaries. He built Heal the Bay into a highly respected part of the local community; if you asked random people on the street to name a local environmental group, many would say Heal the Bay. That’s mostly because of Mark. He had enormous credibility with regulating agencies that make the decisions on water quality issues statewide. They had their staffs, and they also had Mark. Often, at the end of hearings, Mark would be recalled to answer scientific questions, with his answers carrying great weight—sometimes, it seemed, more weight than the opinions offered by the agency staff itself.

Personally, Mark’s departure has made a real impact on me. I have worked with Mark since I started at NRDC more than fifteen years ago, particularly closely in the days before I assumed the leadership of NRDC’s national water program. Mark and I were both in our late 20s when we began working together, and it’s amazing to me that we are, ahem, a little (okay a lot) older now. A lot of years have passed. During that time, we had moments of competitiveness, some spirited conversations about how to achieve our shared goals, me leading the local NRDC water team, and Mark Heal the Bay. Mostly, we appreciated and relied on what we each brought to many shared battles aimed at improving and enforcing the environmental frameworks that too often were not keeping local waters clean and safe.

Mark carried a huge load at Heal the Bay for decades, and he did it for the love of the work. Those of us who worked with Mark, and have done similar jobs, have a special appreciation for what it takes to do what Mark did for almost a quarter-century, doing the policy work, spreading the word, keeping the lights on.

One of the best things you can say about someone is that their life’s labor made a positive difference. Mark will make many more contributions at UCLA and beyond. But I will already say based on his work at Heal the Bay that his work has made that difference. His work benefited everyone who cares about the ocean in Southern California, and California (including those who opposed his efforts).

Mark, congratulations on a great run. And thank you.

Report: Cities Nationwide Using Green Techniques to Stop Water Pollution - EPA Should Take Note

2011-11-16T15:00:00Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

I live in California, and about the time each fall when we turn our clocks back to standard time many of us are hunting around our closets or car trunks looking for umbrellas we last saw in April. It’s the start of the rainy season out West. Of course, for much of the nation, rain falls through most of the year. To say the least, we need the rain. But it also comes with increased water pollution. Because of all of the paved and otherwise impervious surfaces in our cities, rain mixes with the pollutants that fall onto our city driveways, sidewalks, parking lots, and streets, creating a witches’ brew of polluted runoff.

Across the nation, an estimated 10 trillion gallons a year of untreated stormwater runs off roofs, roads, parking lots, and other paved surfaces, often through our cities’ sewage systems, into rivers and waterways that serve as drinking water supplies and flow to our beaches, increasing health risks, degrading ecosystems, and damaging tourist economies.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A major report we are releasing today, NRDC’s Rooftops to Rivers II, profiles 14 cities of all sizes using “green infrastructure”—a set of design strategies that mimic nature’s own hydrology and allow rain to filter back into the ground right where it falls—to tackle stormwater pollution and sewage overflows. The way we built cities before we knew better basically capped the ground in concrete, creating at first currents of runoff that as cities grew became torrents. Green infrastructure is a simple and powerful solution: make cities function from a water perspective more like the natural landscape by making them more pervious and, well, green.

The report significantly updates our first edition of Rooftops, which was published five years ago and became something of a report of record on what was then a growing but still boutique movement to solve the polluted runoff problem plaguing urban areas. I hope Rooftops II helps propel more progress by pulling together all of the newest data on green infrastructure’s benefits, attributes, economics—and lots of information on what cities across the nation are doing to harvest its many benefits. To help point the way, the report includes a new “Emerald City Scale” that we created to frame and communicate the basic elements of a strong and effective local green infrastructure program. My colleague Jon Devine has blogged about the index and how our case studies cities did in meeting our six-point Emerald City plan. We are also encouraging cities not profiled in this report to fill out an online form, telling us how they are achieving the “Emerald City” criteria. There’s a lot of exciting progress out there that we’d like to capture.

The cities profiled in Rooftops to Rivers are using vegetation around parking lots (called “swales”), rain gardens, green roofs, permeable pavement and trees to help absorb the water like sponges. By using green space, swales, cisterns and other techniques, green infrastructure solutions bestow a range of benefits on communities that embrace them. On top of clean water, these benefits include beautifying neighborhoods, providing more flood protection, augmenting local water supplies, cooling and cleansing the air, reducing illnesses, lowering heating and cooling energy costs, boosting economies, and supporting jobs.

As important as those benefits are, cities are focused on their financial bottom lines. They’re using green infrastructure because it delivers results and saves money compared to other ways of reducing water pollution. For example, a 2007 U.S. EPA study found that “in the vast majority of cases…[green infrastructure] practices save money for developers, property owners and communities while protecting and restoring water quality.” And just last month, the American Society of Landscape Architects released results of a survey that found green infrastructure reduced or did not influence costs 75 percent of the time.

We’re releasing Rooftops to Rivers as the EPA is reforming and updating for the first time in two decades the national Clean Water Act rules that apply to controlling stormwater runoff pollution at the source. This is a huge opportunity (that EPA cannot afford to miss) to catch up to what many local communities are already doing, and ensure that the nation as a whole follows a smart, cost-effective, and multi-beneficial approach to solving leading water pollution problems. What can EPA do? Well, first, it must move forward and propose a rule, which it has promised to do this year. Second, EPA must make green infrastructure the rule’s central focus. That means fashioning the rule update so that new development and redevelopment projects are required to retain stormwater onsite with green infrastructure techniques to keep it from turning into runoff pollution. This approach should apply throughout urban and urbanizing areas. The EPA should also require retrofits in already developed areas and as part of infrastructure reconstruction projects.

In so doing, the EPA will embody the lessons learned from cities across this country and the leaders who understand that, from an environmental, public health, and economic perspective, green infrastructure is the best approach to cleaning up our waters, while delivering a whole range of additional benefits. This progress and the prospect that EPA will help it spread is a good reason to smile when raising an umbrella into the season’s first rain here in California or wherever it is raining this fall.

Proven, Cost-Effective Solutions that Can Help Communities Reduce Flood Damage

2011-09-30T16:34:43Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

The flooding and punishing storms that ravaged so many communities this year have left their mark not only in water-logged basements but also in strained dams, cracked earthen levees, eroded riverbanks and many other systems we rely upon to manage flood waters.

Repairing this strained infrastructure comes with a staggering price tag. The Army Corps of Engineers announced it needs more than $2 billion repair damage from this year’s flooding.

That number is far higher than $150 million the Corps had budgeted. Worse yet, it doesn’t include the cost of cleaning up after Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee pounded states from Virginia to Vermont.

If this were an isolated spike in the budget, it might be easier to deal with it, but it looks instead like the beginning of a steady climb. Scientists say that many regions of the country will experience increased rains and more powerful storms as a result of climate change.

New York State is already witnessing the acceleration of rainwater. After Tropical Storm Lee caused the Susquehanna River to crest at 41-feet, one woman in nearby Binghamton, said, “In 2005, we had the 100-year flood, and in 2006, we had the 500-year flood,” she said. “What-year flood is this?”

Each new wave of flooding will put added strain on communities’ water infrastructure—and on their budgets. But even as we make much needed repairs to dams and concrete canals, we can also start investing in a set of solutions that could make us even better prepared to minimize flooding damage.

Green infrastructure is a set of design strategies that mimic nature's own hydrology and allow rain to filter back into the ground right where it falls.

Instead of rain hitting huge swaths of concrete in our cities, we can use things like porous pavement, planted swales around parking lots, rain gardens planted along sidewalks, green roofs, and additional trees to help absorb the water like sponges. Under natural conditions, the amount of rain that is converted to runoff is less than 10 percent of rainfall volume.

If a 1-inch rainstorm fell on a 1-acre natural meadow, it would typically produce about 218 cubic feet of runoff. That’s enough to fill 28 standard bathtubs. The same storm falling on a 1-acre paved parking lot would produce roughly 3,450 cubic feet of runoff—nearly 16 times more than the natural meadow, and enough to fill 448 bathtubs.

Obviously we can’t return our built environments into grassy meadows, but green infrastructure allows us to create a similar effect throughout our communities. Using permeable pavement instead of conventional asphalt or concrete, for instance, can make a significant difference—even in the face of powerful storms like Irene.

Philadelphia has become a national leader in green infrastructure. The city recently installed its first block-long permeable street, and its Water Commissioner Howard Neukrug said that after the recent storms that hit the city, they “couldn’t find any water there” despite major flooding elsewhere in the city.

Green infrastructure may not capture all the runoff in a hurricane, but it will reduce the volume of flood waters and decrease the damage done to our aging dams, levees, and canals. It will also make us ready to receive the wave of more frequent and more intense rainfalls that will be hitting some many communities across the nation in the coming years.

In a recent report called Thirsty for Answers: Preparing for the Water-related Impacts of Climate Change in American Cities, NRDC described how different cities are applying these same techniques. Most found that not only were they a cost-effective way to manage stormwater, but they were also welcomed by residents who enjoyed the added green space.

If we update our approaches to urban development and redevelopment to make them greener today, we won’t be scrambling to find as much emergency funding in every budget cycle.

The EPA can help the nation move in this much needed direction this fall, when it updates its own 20-year-old rules for managing urban runoff. Fortunately, the agency—including Administrator Lisa Jackson—is interested in green infrastructure techniques. By making green infrastructure standard operating procedure, the EPA’s rules can help prepare the nation for the sort of challenges we have experienced this spring and summer. The EPA shouldn’t miss this opportunity.

Americans Towns and Cities Facing Water-Related Impacts of Climate Change

2011-08-30T21:24:23Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Hurricane Irene capped off—we hope—four months of punishing weather across the country. From the flooding that ravaged the Mississippi River basin to the drought that scorched the Southwest to the heat wave that gripped most of the nation, this has been a summer of extremes.

Each one of these events—hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves—happens every year, but the intensity of these familiar weather patterns has everyone wondering if what we are seeing today is climate change in devastating action.

My colleague Dan Lashof, the director of NRDC’s Climate Center and a participant in the scientific assessment of global warming through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that the extreme events we seen this year are no longer a matter of “freak weather.” Instead, he has noted the “increasingly clear links between weather events and climate change. As Dan explains, no one can say that a particular weather event was “caused” by climate change, but the odds are changing—against us.

In New York City, for instance, Hurricane Irene’s storm surges were made more damaging by the fact that the city’s sea level is about 13 inches higher than it was a century ago. While it didn’t point out that relationship, the New York Times over the weekend published an article that made the connection, entitled “Seeing Irene as a harbinger of climate change.”

People used to talk about global warming in the future tense. But, as my colleague Kim Knowlton has written, we can see the finger prints of climate change right now in communities across the country. It already shaping people’s lives and influencing city budgets.

Some of the first and most devastating impacts of climate change will be water related, and NRDC’s newly redesigned Water Program has been focusing what that means for American towns and cities.

In the past month, for instance, we released two groundbreaking reports on the topic.

In Thirsty for Answers: Preparing for the Water-related Impacts of Climate Change in American Cities, we found that climate change is leaving communities open to a range of vulnerabilities. We looked at 12 target cities, and confirmed that fortunately, some are trying to become better prepared to deal with these changes.

Boston, for instance, has experienced an increase in relative sea level of 11.8 inches in the past 20 years. Now water development projects, such as Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Seaport Square, are placing ground floors and critical electrical and plumbing systems at higher elevations to reduce the risk of further sea-level rise.

The frequency of heavy rainfall in Chicago is expected to increase by 50 percent in the next 30 years, and without improvements to the city’s aging water infrastructure, it will dramatically expand the number of raw sewage that ends up in Lake Michigan and its beaches. In recent years, the city has turned to green infrastructure—things like pocket parks, rooftop gardens, and grassy swales—that can keep rain where it falls and prevent it from flooding sewage treatment plants. Since 2008, the city has increased permeable area—places where rain can filter right into the ground—by 20 percent in more than 265 new development projects.

For many other cities, the challenge comes not from too much water, but not enough. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, for instance, are already confronting shirking water supplies as a result of shifting snowfall in the regions they draw their water from.

The good news is that increasingly cities are planning to protect water resources, but as USA Today reported in a story that included the views of my colleague, Michelle Mehta, the Water Program also recently published a report that found that Western water shortages could become more extreme if water-intensive fossil fuel development continues to grow.

Between a Rock and a Dry Place: The Water Supply Impacts of Oil Shale Development and Climate Change on the Colorado River Basin Water Supply, concludes that oil shale drilling combined with unchecked climate change could have major impacts on a source of water for 30 million people from Wyoming to Southern California.

Water from the Colorado River Basin is already over-promised. The supply in this drought-prone region can’t keep up with demand from farmers, ranchers, and urban water users. Climate change will intensify drought conditions and cause more precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow, leaving more communities short of water come the spring melt.

Meanwhile, getting oil out of shale rock is highly water intensive: it takes about 3 to 5 barrels of water to produce 1 barrel of oil. By the time it is burned as fuel, it releases up to three times carbon emissions as diesel.

Given the summer we have had—and health problems, property damage, and strained city budgets these weather events left in their wake—it seems foolhardy not to focus on reducing our carbon pollution. But planning for the impacts of climate change is also indispensible. Thirsty for Answers and Between a Rock and a Dry Place point us in the right direction. Whether you spent the summer with too little water or too much, it’s clear the time to act is now.

EPA Tells It Like It Is on HR 2018--the Dirty Water Bill

2011-06-23T19:57:49Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

A number of my NRDC Water Program colleagues are blogging on HR 2018, reflecting its status as one of the worst dirty water bills any of us have seen. NRDC’s Founding Director John Adams has now weighed in with a beautiful piece that underscores how nonsensical and destructive 2018 would be if passed.

The bill blasted out of the House Transportation & Infrastructure committee in record time yesterday, with no hearing. Even if you support repealing foundational elements of our nation’s clean water law, doing so without airing the issues is an indefensible process. But trying to speed the bill along while folks are on summer vacation (many enjoying waters protected by the very Clean Water Act provisions the bill would gut) is, of course, the plan.

Now, the US EPA, in response to a request from Representative Tim Bishop of New York, has confirmed the analysis of many environmental advocates and others about the bill. EPA, like many government agencies, doesn’t always use the most direct language in letters to members of Congress. But this is a destructive enough bill that EPA has quickly and commendably found a strong voice. EPA’s words speak for themselves:

The first line of EPA’s “Technical Assessment H.R. 2018” gets right to the point: “The bill would overturn almost 40 years of federal legislation by preventing EPA from protecting public health and water quality.”

EPA here is not overstating. HR 2018, as EPA’s analysis notes, prevents EPA from assuring that upstream states don’t lower standards in a way that passes pollution to their downstream neighbors—a classic problem the Clean Water Act was designed in part to address. And it prevents EPA from responding to the best science to improve water quality standards as we learn more about the impacts of pollution.

This is like preventing your doctor from updating a course of treatment based on new medical discoveries. It makes no sense.

But the perniciousness of 2018 means that even this isn’t the full story. EPA then lists its other impacts, and you quickly get the sense that this bill is irredeemable:

“The bill would prevent EPA from providing its views on whether a proposed project that pollutes or even destroys lakes, streams, or wetlands would violate CWA standards.”
“The bill would remove EPA’s existing state coordination role and eliminate the careful Federal/State balance established in the current CWA.”
“The bill would prevent EPA from protecting communities from unacceptable adverse impacts to their water supplies and the environment caused by Federal permits.”
“The bill would substantively eliminate the opportunity for EPA, the federal government’s expert on water quality, to comment on Federal permits impacting water quality and public health.

HR 2018 is, at least in part, a direct reaction to positive actions the administration has taken to protect water quality—vetoing a particularly destructive mountain-top mining proposal; upgrading water quality standards in Florida; and proposing stronger action to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, to name three.

It is intended, at minimum, as a message: EPA, watch out, if you use your authority, we will take it away. Now that HR 2018 has been turned loose in Congress, we all need to send an equally clear message that we won’t stand for these sort of attacks on the nation’s bedrock water quality statute.

Time to Stop Attacks on the Clean Water Act and Protect Americans' Top Environmental Priority

2011-06-21T21:12:50Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

To quote Yogi Berra, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” After spending much of the spring attacking the Clean Air Act, several lawmakers in the House have now set their sights on the Clean Water Act. This latest onslaught puts lawmakers squarely at odds with the American people, who say in poll after poll that their number one environmental priority is clean water.

And yet the introduction of H.R. 2018, slated for mark-up tomorrow in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, takes direct aim at the Clean Water Act. The bill, sponsored by Congressman John Mica of Florida, strips EPA of critical oversight authority that for decades has resulted in improved water quality across the country.

And it’s not just Republicans leading the charge. Several Democrats, including Representatives Nick Rahall (W.Va.), Jason Altmire (PA) and Tim Holden (PA), have co-sponsored the legislation.

HR 2018 is dirty water bill that would turn the regulatory clock back to a period where rivers actually caught fire and the federal government couldn’t stop it.

It would deprive Americans of minimum health and environmental standards that apply no matter where you live or travel in the nation. While states appropriately have a primary role in implementing clean water protections, the law does not function effectively without a federal floor—a “safety net”—that ensures that people have a minimum level of clean water and safe drinking water regardless of what state they live in. HR 2018 shreds the safety net by stopping EPA from ensuring adequate standards to protect health and the environment.

At worse, the bill could unleash a 2011 version of an environmental “race to the bottom” that the modern federal Clean Water Act was designed to stop. The bills also punches through a federal floor—a set of minimum standards that protects people in the US no matter where they live—and opens the door to a downward spiral as states are forced to compete against each other, and their better judgment, to lower standards to attract investment or otherwise.

HR 2018 is an attack on the basic structure of federal environmental laws that have put the nation on a path to a cleaner environment and stronger economy.

This is why NRDC is fighting to protect America’s water:

According to a 2009 Gallop Poll, water quality is America’s No. 1 environmental concern, eclipsing all others. In fact the four top spots in the recent poll asking Americans about their environmental concerns were all water-related.
Clean water promotes a healthy economy. The nation’s rivers, lakes, bays, wetlands and streams are vital to our health and economy. For example, in 2004 ocean-related economic activity alone contributed $138 billion dollars to the nation’s economy. Clean water in general is tied to massive economic output, threatened by HR 2018.
HR 2018 limits the federal government’s ability to ensure that states effectively implement or make necessary improvements to their water quality standards to deal with modern pollution challenges. Water quality standards are just what they sound like: they are limits on pollution necessary to keep people who use, enjoy and contact water healthy and the environment itself strong. Thus, the bill attacks a critical element of the Clean Water Act. This bill deprives EPA of the tool it used to restore Lake Erie and is now being used to clean up and protect (1) the Florida Everglades, (2) Chesapeake Bay and (3) other waters, including those impacted by mountain-top coal mining. The bill would also block EPA from objecting to individual permits that fail to comply with water quality standards.
HR 2018 blocks EPA’s ability to stop dredge and fill projects that have “unacceptable adverse effect[s] on municipal water supplies, shellfish beds and fishery areas…, wildlife or recreational areas.” Although this “veto” authority has been used only thirteen times in the past 38 years, it is a critical safeguard against the most destructive proposals—like mountain-top coal mining that destroys streams.
HR 2018 prevents the EPA from making scientifically-based upgrades of standards, including for toxic pollutants. EPA was forced to promulgate water quality standards for a number of states, including California, when those states failed to update their own standards. Many states have relied on “placeholder” standards that EPA approved pending development of more protective standards; these planned public health upgrades would be threatened.

We tried it the HR 2018 way—it doesn’t work. The provisions attacked by HR 2018 were put in place in the Clean Water Act specifically to cure a wholesale failure in the national effort to reduce water pollution related to a lack of federal oversight of the nation’s clean water efforts. Legislative history of the Clean Water Act indicates that without federal backstops, the dog won’t hunt. A senate committee report from 1971 notes that "the Committee concludes that the national effort to abate and control water pollution has been inadequate in every vital aspect." The approach referred to in the legislative history of the Act depended on the sort of scheme HR 2018 would resurrect.

I hope that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee tomorrow soundly rejects this misguided effort. The bill is not redeemable. But there will be an opportunity tomorrow to make sure that, at minimum, the bill doesn’t completely gut protections for our waters even if it isn’t killed outright; at a minimum, a positive vote on an amendment to be offered by Representative Tim Bishop would be a step in the right direction.

Solutions for Shrinking the Dead Zone in the Aftermath of the Great Flood of 2011

2011-05-24T15:02:23Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

The Mississippi River Flood of 2011 has upended thousands of lives. Residents have seen their homes destroyed and farmers have seen their crops inundated. But the damage done by this flood isn’t limited to the length of the river.

As flood waters scoured the farmlands of the Midwest, they picked up enormous amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus and funneled them down river into the Gulf of Mexico. The massive influx of these two pollutants is expected to create a “Dead Zone” of lifeless water, perhaps the largest ever recorded in the Gulf.

The wave of water moving down the Mississippi this month was clearly an extreme event, but it shines a spotlight on a process that is happening all the time.

When it rains, runoff pulls nitrogen, phosphorus, and other chemicals off of farmlands and city streets, dumps them into the river, and sends them down into the Gulf. There, nitrogen and phosphorus feed the algae that makes the Dead Zone.

The Flood of 2011 temporarily accelerated this cycle, but the forces that created the Dead Zone are a flood in slow motion.

They build up slowly but their prolonged impact on marine life, on coastal communities, and on the Louisiana fishermen who depend on crab, shrimp, lobster, and other species to make a living, can be as devastating as a flood or hurricane.

We humans can’t prevent extreme weather events from descending upon us, but we can stop the floods of our own making. Solutions exist that can cut down on the amount of pollution that we dump into rivers and reduce the Dead Zones that force marine life to either flee or die.

Nitrogen and phosphorus come from a variety of sources, including animal feedlots, agricultural fertilization, urban runoff, and sewage treatment plants. The following solutions would allow farmers and municipalities to thrive while cutting down on pollution.

Preserve Wetlands and Headwater Streams

Mother Nature has already designed an excellent system for reducing nutrient pollution: wetlands and small streams. They filter out pollution before it reaches major waterways. As my colleague Jon Devine pointed out, even the George W. Bush White House concluded that wetlands along the Mississippi “retain nitrates and phosphates that would otherwise drain from adjacent farmlands.”

The trouble is that, following a pair of Supreme Court decisions, the Bush administration also adopted policies that went far beyond those decisions in undermining legal protections against polluting many streams and wetlands. These resources became vulnerable to developers, mining companies, and other industrial interests. The Obama administration has proposed restoring Clean Water Act protections to many of these natural filters, and NRDC wholeheartedly supports this move. You can too, by submitting comments in support of the administration’s push to protect these resources.

Stop the Rain Where It Falls

Rainwater is the vehicle that transports pollution off of farmlands and city streets. If we can capture rainwater where it falls, then we can cut down the amount of dirty chemicals it can carry into our waterways.

Green infrastructure—things like porous pavement, green roofs, grassy swales, parks and pocket gardens—give rainfall a chance to soak back into the ground. Most conventional drainage systems rely on concrete pipes and canals, but adding more spongy unpaved ground along a waterway or throughout a watershed will allow more rain to get absorbed where it falls, before being shunted through storm sewers and into our streams.

This also reduces overflows at sewage treatment plants, because it reduces the amount of incoming water they need to process.

Clean Up Sewage Plants

That’s right, runoff isn’t the only source of nutrient pollution: sewage treatment plants also release nitrogen and phosphorus contained in human waste. And yet there is no federal standard governing how much nutrient pollution these plants can dump into our waterways.

Public health and environmental groups have asked the EPA to set such standards for more than 15 years without result. The Gulf Dead Zone, which is now sometimes larger than New Jersey, should be reason enough for the agency to finally take action.

Promote Farming Practices that Reduce Runoff

We recognize that controlling Dead Zone pollution will not be free. Just as society rewards farmers for conserving wildlife habitat, it should also reward them for preserving wetlands and other natural barriers that prevent agricultural fertilizer from leaving farms.

Likewise, we should broadly institute best practices on farms, as highlighted in a great report by the Environmental Law & Policy Center and the Mississippi River Collaborative, with which NRDC works closely on nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the basin.

At the end of the day, however, it is going to take federal leadership to get these programs implemented widely enough and strategically enough to solve the problem of Dead Zone pollution. That’s going to take quantifiable targets and enforceable cleanup strategies, as Jon Devine discussed in an earlier post.

EPA Steps Up Its Support for Green Infrastructure as Weapon against Polluted Stormwater

2011-05-06T18:17:56Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

In a few months, the EPA will release new draft rules aimed at reducing stormwater—one of the largest sources of pollution in America’s lakes, bays, and beaches. NRDC is pushing hard to have green roofs, pocket parks, rain gardens, and other green infrastructure solutions play a major role in those new national rules, which will update approaches designed more than twenty years ago.

The good news is that the EPA isn’t waiting for the new rules to enhance its promotion of green infrastructure solutions.

It has already begun beating the drum—sending a clear signal that green infrastructure is a critical weapon in the fight against polluted water.

Just before Earth Day, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson gave a speech in Philadelphia celebrating that city’s leadership in embracing green infrastructure solutions.

“The green infrastructure changes you’ve made since 2006 have saved the city about $170 million,” she said. “We are here today because we want to bring these kinds of benefits to cities and towns across the nation.”

A week later, the EPA launched what is has described as "A Strategic Agenda to Protect Waters and Build More Livable Communities through Green Infrastructure." The plan includes working with 10 cities across the nation adopt some of the same solutions that have helped Philadelphia save money and cut down on pollution. (NRDC is working with Philadelphia and local partners on that city’s green infrastructure plan.)

The agency will advise these cities on how they can use green infrastructure to treat rain where it falls and keep dirty stormwater from entering and overwhelming city sewer systems. The plan also features other components, like clarifying the role of green infrastructure in the regulatory realm; enhancing outreach and access to information on the topic; and financing mechanisms.

These shows of support for green infrastructure will likely influence how states and local governments approach their responsibility to clean up water pollution.

The EPA’s most significant voice is its regulatory voice. It is the principle interpreter of the Clean Water Act, and it has the authority to review and reject permits. I certainly hope the agency will use all the levers of its administrative role—like the forthcoming rule making on stormwater—to advance green infrastructure.

But I am also glad to see it use additional ways of communicating support. Administrator Jackson’s comments and the new plan may not be binding, but local governments will take note. When that federal agency in charge of approving permits and grants to local communities is focused on green infrastructure, it focuses the attention of local governments as well.

It’s like when Wal-Mart announces that it would like its suppliers to put certain sustainability practices in place. Even if these practices aren’t required by a contract at first, the fact that the biggest retailer in the United States cares about sustainability means suppliers will respond.

I hope we see a similar dynamic unfold with clean water solutions. Many local governments, like Philadelphia and Los Angeles, are already adopting green infrastructure programs. But there is no doubt that getting the unambiguous backing of the most influential federal clean water agency will help bring green infrastructure to more states and more communities.

Though No Dirty Water Riders Passed, New Budget Slashes Funding for Water Protection

2011-04-19T18:50:12Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Over the course of the grueling budget process, NRDC and our partners managed to beat back harmful policy riders that had little to do with cutting the deficit and everything to do with reducing environmental safeguards. Several would have threatened our ability to keep America’s water clean.

The most significant victory is that the continuing resolution does not include riders that would have limited the government’s authority to implement the Clean Water Act.

Nor does it include amendments the House passed in February that went after citizen-supported efforts to clean up iconic waterways like the Chesapeake Bay, the San Joaquin River, and the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem, as well as the waters that draw millions of tourists to Florida each year.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the continuing resolution slashes the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget in general and strips away funding for state water infrastructure programs in particular.

We do not know precisely how the general cuts will shake out at EPA’s water office, but we could see:

A reduced ability to enforce rules that keep raw sewage and livestock waste out of our drinking water supplies;
A reduced amount of money to help local agencies test and monitor beachwater for health hazards—so fewer beachgoers will know if they are swimming in fecal bacteria or not; and
A reduced capacity to tighten pollution controls—so coal mines, power plants, and even big cities dealing with dirty stormwater won’t have as much encouragement to clean up.

Some impacts to water programs are already clear. EPA’s geographically-focused programs will lose $190 million, as compared with last fiscal year. This means fewer resources to help protect and restore a host of treasured waters, including the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, Puget Sound, and Lake Champlain.

On top of those cuts, the continuing resolution takes a big chunk out of the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Funds: a total of $997 million. This is an improvement over the budget the House passed a few months ago, but it is still represents a major cut.

These cuts could touch a lot of people’s lives. These funds help states pay for much needed improvements in our aging water infrastructure. Many cities have systems that are a hundred years old and in desperate need of updating. In fact, our nation’s long-term water infrastructure needs were already hundreds of billions of dollars greater than the funding we were providing before these new cuts took effect.

But even as we struggle to keep our nation’s water clean with such limited resources, we must prepare for yet another fight. We fully expect that many of the dirty policy riders we beat back this time will rear their heads again. They could appear in the appropriations bills for FY12, in the legislation that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling, and as stand-alone measures.

Likewise, we need to remain vigilant in defending the EPA’s core water program, as we are already hearing calls from House Republican leaders for major cuts to the agency’s operating budget in the next fiscal year and for many years to come.

It is going to be a long 112th Congress for water advocates, but we will remain vigilant and keep battling against those who would strip away the safeguards that keep our water clean.

Test identifies potent toxin in Los Angeles fish die-off

2011-03-14T21:08:58Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Scientists continue to investigate the mass die-off of fish in Southern California last week. The LA Times reported over the weekend that some early claims of no evidence of toxic exposure were in error.

In fact, some of the million or so dead fish have tested positive for domoic acid, which is a naturally occurring toxin produced by algal blooms. The Times quoted USC scientist, David Caron: "It is possible that high levels of domoic acid in the sardines in King Harbor may have exacerbated physiological stress of the fish brought on by oxygen depletion of the water, or may have been a contributing explanation for them congregating in the harbor at very high abundances, but this has not been confirmed." Domoic acid has caused other big die-offs, as the American College of Veterinary Pathologists and others have noted.

Last week, I blogged about this mystery, wondering about the role of urban runoff over time. The Times itself noted the possible connections to unusually heavy early winter rains and other environmental factors. While domoic acid is natural and produced by algae, the amount of algae in ocean waters is influenced by a range of factors. Some have suggested a connection with runoff pollution, which can be rich in nutrients, in increasing the incidence and seriousness of algal blooms.

The results of more tests are due later this week. The exact causality here may never be perfectly established, but as scientists investigate this and similar situations the pollution connection deserves especially careful scrutiny.

Massive Fish Kill Raises Questions in Los Angeles

2011-03-09T01:42:09Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

There was a massive fish kill near Los Angeles, with the developing story reported on by the Los Angeles Times. It’s too early to know exactly what happened, but one theory discussed in the Times piece is intriguing: that the fish kill may result from a “perfect storm” of factors, one of which is runoff pollution. It has long been known that urban runoff is a major and in many places growing source of water pollution in the U.S. In Southern California, this is true. As early as 1996, work by the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) identified runoff as exceeding all other point source of pollution but one (a treatment plant which has since been upgraded).

When I saw the story written by Times reporters Barboza and Weiss (who won a Pulitzer for his series on the oceans a few years ago), I thought of the SCCWRP study because it posed a question nearly ten years ago that now seems perhaps prescient: long-term, what is the fate of all those pollutants in storm water? Among other things, we know that, short-term, storm water can be acutely toxic in the near-shore ocean environment. We know it can substantially increase human health risks for bathers that encounter storm water plumes, even in the dry season when the runoff is from urban water sources like sprinklers. Does the responsibility for this massive fish kill and others like it start, at least in part, with the urban slop discharged to coastal water in LA and other places? It’s too early to tell, but stay tuned.

GOP Budget Takes Aim at The Environmental Issue Country Thinks Is Most Important

2011-02-17T19:52:09Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

The Republican budget proposal being debated in Congress right now would slash funding for many programs that safeguard public health and the environment. These cuts and other outright bans on certain EPA activities would stop the agency from doing its job in countless ways, chief among them: reducing water pollution.

My colleagues have blogged in detail here and here about what these cuts would do to our system of safeguarding waterways. Safe to say, the Republican anti-clean water attacks have the look and feel of a feeding frenzy, with everyone flapping around and jostling to make the biggest cut or offer the most sweeping restriction on the EPA’s clean water power.

These attacks are bad policy. But they are also tone deaf and totally out-of-touch with what solid majorities of Americans care deeply about: clean water.

In a 2009 Gallup Poll, nearly 60 percent of Americans ranked the pollution of drinking water as their most pressing environmental concern. Indeed, all the top four concerns voters selected were related to water—pollution of rivers and lakes, contamination of water from toxic waste, and adequate supply of freshwater for America’s households.

These water issues outstripped concerns about air pollution, endangered species, and climate change.

That’s because Americans have a deep and abiding love of water—the beaches we swim in, the rivers and lakes we fish in, and the clean drinking water that comes out of our taps. We also want to protect our children's health--and our own.

The range and depth of this interest and concern extends beyond health and beyond local issues, too. For example, an astonishing 90 percent of Americans said that the loss of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands in was an important issue to them, according to a 2007 poll by Louisiana State University.

So it’s difficult not to conclude that the House Republican budgets dirty water agenda is pointed at the very heart of Americans' love for the environment. That's not just poor public policy, but bizarre politics.

Cities Worry about Polluted Snow, But Routinely Let Dirty Rain Flow into Beaches

2011-02-10T18:11:44Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

The AP just ran a story about Eastern cities that have so much snow piling up they are thinking about dumping it into nearby rivers and harbors. Several city officials are concerned, however, about what the pollution in the snow would do to the water. Having been scraped off city streets, the snow now has oil, chemicals, and trash buried within it, and most cities see dumping it into the water as a measure of last resort.

This caught my eye because while I live in California today, I grew up outside Philadelphia and keenly remember how quickly the fresh snow turned brown or black along the street in front of my house.

So while I appreciate their caution in the face of polluted snow, I can’t help but marvel at the irony. While some cities exercise admirable caution in attempting not to dump frozen storm water into the ocean, many other cities across the nation let flowing storm water runoff course largely unchecked into their waterways all year-round.

When it is frozen, cities in the colder parts of the country think twice about it. That is no doubt because some of these Eastern cities have what are called combined sewer systems, which allow them to treat pollutants in storm water when it is not frozen.

But large parts of the country have separate storm sewers that flow to receiving waters without any treatment. So, when precipitation comes down as rain in places like Los Angeles and wipes toxic chemicals from the streets into our rivers and beaches, why that is just business as usual.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not encouraging cities to treat snow the way some treat dirty storm water. Quite the opposite: I wish the caution prompted by looking at a towering pile of polluted urban slush would extend to management of the often toxic wet stuff everywhere, all the time.

Big events—anything from this winter’s snowstorms to the BP oil spill disaster—get our attention and make us think about the pollution going into our water. But just because storm water pollution in many communities happens in slow motion doesn’t mean it isn’t having an enormous impact.

For example, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment estimates that every year 6 million gallons of oil get dumped into California’s coastal waters after stormwater carries it off paved roads and parking lots and drops it into the ocean. Los Angeles County generates 1.8 million gallons alone.

Oil is only one ingredient in storm water. Most urban and suburban runoff also includes herbicide, pesticides, bacteria, heavy metals like cadmium and zinc, and every other pollutant you might find seeping from industrial and residential sites.

This witch’s brew of chemicals has serious consequences, from fouling drinking water to closing beaches and poisoning shellfish beds. That is why the Environmental Protection Agency has identified urban runoff as one of the greatest threats to our nation’s waters.

The scope of this pollution could be demoralizing except for the fact that there are readily available, cost-effective solutions. Something called green infrastructure--things like pocket parks, grassy swales, and permeable pavement—has been proven to keep water on site and dramatically reduce the dirty storm water polluting our beaches.

Granted, green infrastructure may not help clear the streets of record-breaking snowfalls, but it will reduce the amount of pollution ending up in our rivers and beaches the rest of the year. If cities have to resort to dumping polluted snow occasionally, at least our waterways will be less overburdened and more resilient.

Senator Turns Polluted Beach Vacation into a Bill to Identify What's Dirtying the Water

2011-02-03T20:24:55Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Last summer, Florida State Senator Eleanor Sobel rented a house along the Florida coast to host visiting relatives. Her family was looking forward to a nice beach vacation, but when they went down to the water, they learned that local health officials had posted an advisory against swimming. The water, they had determined, wasn’t safe for humans.

What happened to Senator Sobel isn’t unusual. Swimmers confront the same kinds of warnings around the nation every year. More than 18,000 similar advisories were issued at ocean, bay, and Great Lakes beaches in 2009, according to Testing the Waters, NRDC’s annual beach report.

Three-quarters of those beach closings were issued because of elevated levels of bacteria associated with fecal contamination—most often a result of poorly designed sewage systems and contaminated stormwater.

But when Senator Sobel asked why the beach she was visiting was closed, officials didn’t know where the contamination came from. This is not unusual either. Across the nation, the source of contaminated beachwater was reported as unknown more than half the time in 2009.

This spurred Senator Sobel into action. The Florida Department of Health already monitors beach water quality year round and determines when it is too polluted for swimming. But Senator Sobel wants to get to the root of problem. She has introduced a bill that would require the department to investigate where beach pollution comes from.

I applaud Senator Sobel’s legislation. It’s not enough to test to see if beachwater is dirty. If we want to keep our beaches safe from bacteria and other contaminants, we have to know where the pollution is coming from in the first place. And then we can start cleaning it up.

That is why one of NRDC’s principal recommendations to states and cities is to follow up on water quality testing with what are called “sanitary surveys”—lingo that means, trace back from the flunked test until you find the source of the pollution upstream. Indeed, when local authorities report that the cause of a closure is “unknown” that often just means “we didn’t look into it.”

We have proven solutions that address the most common sources of beach contamination. If Florida officials discover, for instance, that much of the unknown sources of bacteria actually trace back to sewage overflows and stormwater runoff, a solution called green infrastructure can help communities clean up their beaches.

Green infrastructure refers to things like pocket parks, green roofs, grassy swales, and permeable pavement that have been shown to keep water on site and dramatically reduce dirty stormwater. This in turn keeps stormwater out of aging sewer systems, which means they are less likely to overflow with untreated waste that ends up in our beaches.

There is simply too much at stake not to put cost-effective solutions like this in place. As Senator Sobel has pointed out, tourism is one of the biggest drivers of the Florida economy. Its 1,000 miles of beaches attract millions of dollars to the state—but only if they are clean. No one wants to invest in plane tickets or vacation rentals only to be shut out of the beach, like Senator Sobel was, or worse, spend the trip dealing with skin rashes, gastrointestinal illnesses, pinkeye, or even meningitis or hepatitis that were contracted from dirty beach water.

Once Florida starts identifying where beach pollution is coming from and puts smart solutions in place to prevent it, it will start to see it robust beach economy expand. For example, a 2007 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that an increase in water quality in Long Beach, California, to the healthier standards of Huntington City Beach would create $8.8 million in economic benefits over a 10-year period.

Senator Sobel’s legislation will help move Florida closer to the benefits of maintaining clean and safe beaches.

NRDC Expert Wins Award for Innovative Ways to Use Water More Efficiently

2010-12-14T18:40:25Z

David Beckman, Senior Attorney & Director, Water Program, Los Angeles

Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed telling people that NRDC is home to the MVP of the water efficiency field: Ed Osann. His name may not be on trading cards yet, but Ed’s star status among water experts was confirmed last week when the California Urban Water Conservation Council gave Ed its prestigious Mike Moynahan Excellence Award.

This is a major honor, and I am so glad Ed’s talents are being recognized.

Confronting today’s water challenges—aging infrastructure, shortages, climate change, diffuse sources of pollution—requires tremendous technical ability, and Ed certainly has that. But he also has something else that is necessary to truly break through and solve these intractable problems: a spark of innovation.

If we want to provide Americans with clean and sufficient water in the coming decades, we need to do things differently. We can’t clean up polluted runoff from thousands of miles of pavement the same way we address pollution from a single factory pipe. Nor can we continue using water-hogging appliances and irrigation systems when climate change will prolong drought conditions.

We need new solutions, new inventions, new ways of working together. Not only does Ed recognize this reality, but he possesses the necessary spirit of ingenuity.

Ed is especially adept at finding opportunities to help Americans use water more efficiently. He saw an opening, for instance, to make a few technical changes in clothes washers that would enable them to function well using less water. He then worked with a broad partnership of manufacturers, water agencies, and government officials to turn these innovations into a recommendation for federal standards.

When the new standards—and accompanying tax incentives—are in full effect, they will save about 530 million gallons of water each day. That is about equal to the current needs of every water customer in the City of Los Angeles. Ed is also helping shape energy and water efficiency standards for other home appliances that could save consumers $30 billion by 2030.

NRDC is lucky that Ed joined us last year. Our Water Program is focused on solving water problems, and Ed is skilled at creating solutions.

Together, we are working on a host of new initiatives, including helping Great Lakes states put water conservation programs in place and working with the California Department of Water Resources effort to help agricultural and urban water users follow the landmark Water Conservation Act of 2009.

These are some of the ways NRDC helping homeowners, businesses, and states use water in smarter, more efficient ways. Ed Osann will to be a powerful and creative force in putting these solutions in place.