Learn about water quality in your area
Document ActionsThe Sounder - Spring 2010Boatyard General Stormwater Permit The Sweep Community Oyster Roast Washington State Department of Transportation Stormwater General Permit View From the Helm: Enforcing the Boatyard Stormwater General Permit
The Boatyard Stormwater General Permit (SGP) applies to facilities that primarily work on boats 65 feet long and smaller. There are about 80 boatyards in the Puget Sound region. These boatyards discharge significant levels of copper and other metals in concentrations that have been proven to have lethal effects on fish, particularly young salmonids. The history of Puget Soundkeeper Alliance (PSA) in working to improve this situation is long and sometimes agonizing. We sat on a stakeholders’ committee convened by the Department of Ecology (Ecology) for many months. In 2005, Ecology finally issued a permit that disappointed everyone. PSA as well as the Northwest Marine Trade Association (NMTA), appealed to the Pollution Control Hearings Board (PCHB) for different reasons. Evidence presented at the trial showed the lethality of copper, the sensitivity of such impaired waters as Lake Union, and the boatyards’ noncompliance with earlier permits. The benchmarks for metal discharges were challenged as too high and the procedures for compliance as interminable. Much of the PCHB decision agreed with PSA.
Compliance with the Clean Water Act is mandatory and many yards are in violation of the 2005 permit that is in force. Although PSA and NMTA have worked cooperatively and dedicated significant financial resources to demonstrating that boatyards can economically control their high levels of heavy metals, Ecology has continued to drag its feet on issuing the revised permit promised in 2007. Moreover, the yards that have invested in clean technology and decreased their discharges of metals are understandably upset that other yards continue to take advantage of Ecology’s delays. They tell us it raises the cost of a haul out to boat owners by about $25. As in most industries, the issue of a “level playing field” is important in economic competition, especially in these hard times. Yard owners have accompanied PSA to visit Ecology with these concerns and some have even reported dirty practices they see in nearby yards. Last September, PSA wrote to every boatyard in Washington advising them that it was important to “clean up their acts.” Receiving only one response to that general warning, we initiated 60 day notices of suit in December to a number of yards that continue to discharge exceptionally high levels of metals and have failed to take the required corrective action, often for over three years. An example is a boatyard that appealed the permit individually and continues to fail to comply with water quality standards for turbidity, copper, lead, and zinc. The benchmark for copper is 38 parts per billion (ppb). This yard’s copper discharge in October 2006 was 2000 ppb, in January 2008 was 5650 ppb, and in October 2009 was 1148 ppb. PSA recognizes and highly values the boatyard industry in Puget Sound. We also recognize that stormwater in our urban environment poses difficult legal and technical issues. We continue to cooperate with the permitted community to seek solutions. Our boatyard pollution control experiment is heartening in the cooperative approach we forged, and in the technical capability of the treatment systems tested. Unfortunately, a voluntary approach to achieving compliance with permit conditions is not effective in all cases; it is clear that legal action remains an important and necessary tool to ensure that all boatyards are taking the measures necessary to protect our marine resources. Cleanup Events Reach New High MarkOver 1,000 PSA volunteers removed 7 tons of trash including 3,345 cigarette butts from Puget Sound waterways. In 2009, with 21 cleanups, PSA set a new record for volunteer events. PSA staff, along with over 1000 volunteers, took to the water in kayaks, patrolled city walkways, and walked beaches from Port Susan to Shelton. The estimated trash removal from our waterways, shorelines and adjacent upland areas for 2009 was 7 tons! The loot included some alarming items like toxic boat maintenance products from the Ship Canal, syringes, a sunken raft from Lake Union, and most of a derelict monofilament fishing net on the Duwamish River. At the October 17th Duwamish River Cleanup, which was part of the larger Duwamish Alive! event, volunteers found Sometimes the numbers are astonishing. At the September 24, 2009 International Coastal Cleanup Day at Myrtle Edwards Park, PSA volunteers picked up and counted 950 cigarette butts, 946 polystyrene (Styrofoam) pieces, 236 plastic bags, 109 pieces of rope and 98 ear plugs among other things. PSA participated in 6 separate events that month in partnership with the global effort sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy. At these events all the trash is counted and added to international totals. The most-collected item by PSA volunteers (and worldwide) was cigarette butts. In 2010, PSA will grow our cleanup program bigger than ever, widening our impact to provide education for the community and more opportunities for volunteers. The Boeing Company and Brown Bear Car Wash are supporting this effort. Look for announcements of events in the near future. Duwamish Alive! takes place on April 17, 2010, and PSA’s Lake Union–Portage Bay Sweep event is in May. The Marine Debris Problem: Marine debris is a growing problem and plastic is the worst offender. Unlike other more biodegradable materials, plastic photo-degrades into smaller and smaller pieces that act as toxic sponges for environmental pollutants. These pollutants eventually become available to organisms by mimicking food sources. The size of this problem is overwhelming. Globally, five separate oceanic gyres swirl slowly and accumulate the floating debris entering the world’s oceans, mostly from land-based sources. The most famous is the North Pacific gyre between California and Japan. Some estimate it to be the size of Texas, while others estimate it to be twice the size of the Continental U.S.! Unfortunately, it is impacting a wider swath of the ocean than ever before and any potential cleanup effort is daunting. Within our region, PSA is working to clean up trash in inland waters before it goes to sea. The DocketPuget Soundkeeper Alliance improves water quality in Puget Sound by enforcing the Clean Water Act (CWA). The CWA allows citizens to file lawsuits against polluters to protect our water from illegal pollution. Our focus is on stormwater runoff, which is recognized as the primary threat to the health of Puget Sound, and our litigation strategy is three-fold:
PSA continues to work diligently through SGP appeals processes:
In the year 2009, PSA settled fifteen Clean Water Act cases resulting in $337,357 in mitigation dollars awarded to organizations working to improve the affected areas. PSA does not receive any money from these cases. Ten additional businesses received our 60-day notices of intent to sue for violations of their permits under the Clean Water Act. These actions will bring us to the table with the violators to discuss solutions to their violations. Of the nine unpermitted businesses that PSA targeted in 2009 for further examination, three have applied for permits. Two found that permits were not needed. We are still working with the other four businesses. Looking into 2010, with the State’s budget woes directly affecting the Department of Ecology’s ability to enforce the Clean Water Act, Puget Soundkeeper Alliance will continue its important enforcement work for a healthy Puget Sound. Upcoming Events
Soundkeeper Volunteer Training - Learn to identify, report and prevent water pollution in your neighborhood while you are enjoying the outdoors. 3rd Annual Community Oyster Roast
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Rather than continue litigation, PSA, NMTA and Ecology joined in an historic experiment. Funded in part by PSA, the parties agreed to a controlled experiment to install three different treatment mechanisms at selected boatyards to test their effectiveness in filtering out metals in the stormwater coming off the yards. PSA agreed not to file suit against yards already in violation of their permits until the experiment was concluded, which it was in 2007. The results of the study demonstrated that one of the treatment technologies stood out above the rest in removing copper from contaminated stormwater. As a result, the permit writer at Ecology agreed to draft new benchmarks that would reflect the effectiveness of this treatment, and hailed its importance in advancing the treatment of stormwater in other contexts.
several hundred rounds of unspent, rusty ammunition which was promptly claimed by the Seattle Police bomb squad. Occasionally, relatively benign items turn up to lighten the moment: during the Ship Canal Cleanup on October 3, a full beer can, a long stemmed rose and a fairly new Nike soccer ball were recovered. Debris removal from our waterways can be very rewarding, but it can be disheartening when you consider the magnitude of the problem.
Lake Union & Portage Bay Sweep
Scary Threats That Haunt Puget Sound
Duwamish Alive! and Earth Day Festival
