Perpetual State of
Violation
Black Warrior Riverkeeper has taken a comprehensive look at all of the
municipal and private wastewater treatment plants and lagoons throughout
our watershed. Of the 53 plants, 23 are in major violation of their permits.
We estimate that over the past five years, these plants have violated the
Clean Water Act a minimum of 24,657 times.
Alabama sewage treatment plants are permitted by the state Department of
Environmental Management (ADEM.) ADEM has an informal agreement with wastewater
utilities, allowing them to operate in violation of their Clean Water Act
permits as long as they simply say that they are working on upgrades and
improvements of their plants and collection lines. In other words, this
is an unregulated community of polluters, with a few exceptions. ADEM has
been known to step in and enforce the law, but only after a considerable
amount of time has passed and much raw sewage has entered streams. Usually,
citizen enforcement of the Clean Water Act through lawsuits is what gets
ADEM moving – and this is where the Waterkeeper movement is making
a difference in Alabama.
Out of the 23 Clean Water Act violators, Black Warrior Riverkeeper has
issued five notices of ‘intent to sue.’ We are talking with
officials at the rest of the facilities, hoping that we can get a voluntary
commitment from them to work on cleaning up their mess.
Donaldson Correctional Facility was Black Warrior Riverkeeper’s first
sewage case. After issuing a 60-day notice of intent to sue in November
2004, the Alabama Attorney General’s office stepped in and took the
case from us. ADEM would have done so, but they had already allowed the
state prison to discharge in violation of its permit for nine years. ADEM
knew that we could argue that their lack of diligent prosecution gave us
the right to carry on, so they asked the Attorney General to step in to
protect its sister state organization, the Department of Corrections.
One problem was that the prison greatly exceeded capacity. Designed to
accommodate 900 prisoners, since 1991 it has held 1,500 – overwhelming
the small wastewater treatment plant. After we intervened in the lawsuit
the Department of Corrections agreed to work with us, and contracted with
a private sewer operator to take over the operation of the treatment plant.
The company has spent more than $400,000 upgrading the facility’s
equipment, including the construction of a 100,000-gallon surge basin.
Donaldson has been meeting its permit limits since August 2005.
Valley Creek, one of the watershed’s 53 wastewater treatment plants, discharges 65 million gallons per day of treated wastewater into the Black Warrior River. The Black Warrior River watershed is home to more than a million people and provides drinking water source for two of Alabama’s largest cities: Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.