Carl Hiaasen: EPA ducks duty to keep water clean

EPA ducks duty to keep water clean

By CARL HIAASEN
Posted on Sun, Jun. 15, 2008
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/columnists/carl_hiaasen/story/569567.html

To showcase its long-standing indifference toward the environment, the Bush administration last week announced it will not interfere with Florida's practice of pumping polluted farm water and suburban runoff into the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee.

The ruling is the bureaucratic equivalent of an upraised middle digit aimed at all those naive souls who had looked to the government as a protector of our threatened wetlands and aquifers.

Snubbing a 2006 court decision, the Environmental Protection Agency says it won't require permits for ''transfers'' of massive volumes of water, no matter how scuzzy that water is.

''Clean water permits should focus on water pollution, not water movement,'' declared Benjamin Grumbles, one of many useless EPA hacks who next year will be out of a job, and not a moment too soon.

The agency's reasoning for ducking its responsibility is craven and porous. It claims the federal permit program is designed strictly to stop polluters from trashing waterways -- not to prevent dirty waters from being moved into clean waters by local governments.

Extend this lame logic to a personal level. Say someone hands you a bucket of raw sewage. As long as you didn't create the sewage yourself, you'd be free to pour it into a neighbor's swimming pool.

Intentionally contaminating healthy water with polluted water -- regardless of the source -- is itself a flagrant act of pollution. Yet the EPA says it can't be bothered with regulating such transfers.

The Florida case stems from lawsuits initiated by the Miccosukee Tribe and environmental groups against the South Florida Water Management District, which pumps billions of gallons of water through canals and marshlands.

Agricultural pollution

Flood control and maintaining adequate urban water supplies are the district's priorities, though it is deeply involved in numerous Everglades restoration projects.

For years, Miccosukee leaders have claimed that the agency funnels dangerous amounts of agricultural pollution into tribal waters, in violation of the federal Clean Water Act.

State water managers say they need independent authority to move and allocate water for the public good -- or at least, their view of what's in the public good.

The board members are political appointees so, not surprisingly, what's good for sugar tycoons, cattle barons and housing developers is often deemed good for the general public.

And if that means uncorking crappy water into Lake Okeechobee or the Everglades, so be it.

Cattle dung, fertilizers

A few years ago, the issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that a Broward pumping station could operate without a permit. However, the High Court sent the case back to federal court in South Florida to deal with the key pollution questions.

In December 2006, in a second case, U.S. District Judge Cecilia Altonaga ruled that by back-pumping billions of gallons of farm effluent into Lake Okeechobee, state water managers were violating the intent of the Clean Water Act.

The judge rebuffed the EPA's narrow interpretation of its permitting authority, and she also rejected assertions by the South Florida Water Management District that it would be too costly and complicated to seek federal permission for water transfers.

There would be no lawsuits, or debate, if the water being transferred were actually clean. Millions of tons of cattle dung and fertilizer tend to produce unhealthy lakes, rivers and bays.

The horrid results of the district's primitive pumping policies are most visibly evident during seasons of heavy rain. As soon as the floodgates of Lake Okeechobee are opened, huge cascades of nutrient-choked water rush into the St. Lucie waterway to the east, and the Caloosahatchee River to the west.

Eventually this crud is swept all the way to the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. It's nothing more sophisticated than the deliberate flushing of an enormous, fetid toilet.

The EPA says the U.S. government's role should focus on stopping pollution at its source. Of course, if the agency had been doing its job, cane growers and ranchers and municipalities wouldn't have been allowed to drown the Everglades with their filthy runoff for all those decades.

The spineless way out

Indeed, if the agency had done its job, the Clean Water Act wouldn't be the joke that it is today all around the country.

The Miccosukees probably weren't stunned that, under its current leadership, the EPA would take the spineless way out and let Florida continue pumping dirty water wherever it pleases.

As the sun sets on the calamitous presidency of George W. Bush, the same government that falsely pledged to help save the Everglades now won't lift a finger to make the state stop contaminating it.

We should have expected no more.