EPA tries changing rules on wastewater

By JEAN HELLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 15, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- It is a subject Bill Johnson is sick of talking about, writing about, arguing about -- even thinking about.

For nine years, the city of St. Petersburg has been fighting to get environmental permits to continue pumping millions of gallons of treated wastewater 1,000 feet into the ground. Pinellas County was fighting a similar battle. The normally implacable Johnson, the city's utility director, has trouble containing his exasperation when he discusses the issue.

How frustrated is he? "Don't even ask," Johnson says.

Now the federal Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a revision to requirements for wastewater disposal in Florida that will ease Johnson's pain, basically by making it legal for the city to continue doing what it has been doing since the 1980s. The proposal has already been challenged by environmental groups.

"Our overarching concern is that for two decades, underground injection has been the loophole for unlimited growth," said Suzi Ruhl of the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation in Tallahassee. "For 20 years, these facilities have violated the law, and the way the EPA is now proposing to take care of the problem is to legalize the violations.

"The EPA's proposal only applies to 24 counties in Florida. That means every other county in the state, every other county in the country, has found an alternative."

But the EPA says its proposal is a good solution to a growing problem.

"Through this revision, we are proposing a viable solution to a longstanding problem concerning disposal of more than 400-million gallons of wastewater each day in Florida," said John H. Hankinson Jr., EPA regional administrator in Atlanta. "This proposed action is a big step forward in maximizing protection of Florida's precious coastal ecosystems from Tampa Bay to the coral reefs while ensuring that drinking water sources are protected."

In St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, deep-well injection of treated wastewater was the child of attempts to clean up the Gulf of Mexico by halting the practice of dumping the cleaned-up sewage there. In theory, the wastewater would remain deep in the Floridan Aquifer, buried beneath layers of rock and clay. But it didn't happen that way.

Very quickly, the wastewater began migrating up, finally reaching a layer of water that is legally designated as an "underground source of drinking water," although it is so brackish beneath St. Petersburg it is far from drinkable.

The EPA's proposal would sanction that migration as long as it could be demonstrated that the underground water source wasn't adversely affected.

"The water under the city is crappy, so how can we hurt crappy water?" Johnson said.

Pinellas County's problem was more serious because the migration threatened private wells that were still used for drinking water. That and other difficulties caused Pinellas to decide to abandon its deep-well injection entirely and spend $100-million to build a system to deliver the wastewater to barrier island communities for irrigation.

"It's expensive, but my understanding is we didn't have a choice," Pinellas Commissioner Bob Stewart said Thursday.

Johnson said the EPA's rules are primarily aimed at Florida's east coast, where the migration of water from deep-well injection is threatening drinking water supplies.

"In St. Petersburg, our injection has actually improved the quality of the water in the aquifer by freshening it up," he said.

"At the Albert Whitted and Southwest treatment plants, we're going to start recovering the water and using it to augment our supplies of reclaimed water every March, April and May. Those are normal dry months when our supplies of reclaimed water are depleted. All we have to do is chlorinate it."

For St. Petersburg, the only alternative to the EPA's current proposal is to go to full advanced treatment, which would purify the water sufficiently that it could be dumped into surface water bodies.

"But that would cost us $100-million at each one of our four plants," Johnson said. "Four-hundred-million dollars total. That is just the dumbest thing."

The EPA will hold hearings and accept written comments for 60 days from the July 7 publication date in the Federal Register and make a final ruling at an unspecified time after the comments have been analyzed. Hearings will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. and again from 6 to 9 p.m. July 25 at Fletcher Lounge at the University of Tampa.

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