Darryl Fears has worked at The Washington Post for more than a decade, mostly as a reporter on the National staff. He currently covers the environment, focusing on the Chesapeake Bay and issues affecting wildlife.
This was great coverage in the Metro Section of Sunday's paper. Unfortunately there is no mention of the solution or the real problem with ocean outfall - the waste of fresh water.
In scenic Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, a proposed sewer outfall causes nasty fallout
By Darryl Fears January 24
Washington Post Article
There are glitzier beaches in America, but most are not nearly as pristine as Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach, where the water quality is routinely ranked among the nation’s best.
But the same can’t be said for dirty Rehoboth Bay, separated from the popular ocean beach by a sliver of coastal highway. For decades, wastewater treated at a nearby sewer facility has been dumped into a canal that runs to the bay. A court has ordered it to stop
The city’s proposed solution to the bay’s pollution — a tunnel that would divert the treated wastewater from a canal and carry it a mile offshore — caused an uproar that divided the city. Some residents side with environmentalists who say the plan will hurt the beach’s water quality, and others support Mayor Sam Cooper, who says the concern is completely overblown.
As word gets out, city and state officials worry about how tens of thousands of people who flock to the beach each summer from the Washington, Philadelphia and New Jersey areas will come to view the water.
“They want to keep this quiet,” said Gregg Rosner, a water quality adviser for the Delaware chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit conservation group that is leading the protest. “They don’t want tourists to know this is happening.”
The furor over the ocean outfall, which the tunnel is called, came to a head this month when the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control sided with the mayor and allowed the project to move forward.
Environmentalists are vowing to stop it by taking the fight beyond sleepy Rehoboth Beach to the people who vacation there. Just 20 percent of homes in Rehoboth Beach are owned by people who live there year-round, but unlike in some vacation spots, they are allowed to vote.
Cooper said anyone with a stake in Rehoboth Beach will understand that the outfall is harmless. “The facts speak louder than the emotions.” The 2 million gallons of wastewater will be thoroughly cleaned at a local treatment facility, flushed into a tunnel under the city and funneled into an underwater pipe, from which it’s released into 40 feet of water.
But the treatment doesn’t filter out all the pharmaceuticals that can be absorbed into the flesh of marine creatures. Hormonal drugs such as birth control pills flushed down toilets are suspected by the U.S. Geological Survey to be the cause of intersex fish in the Potomac River, with male smallmouth bass mysteriously developing female organs.
In an analysis of the wastewater’s potential impact two years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration didn’t list any of that as a concern.
The Surfrider Foundation and the local chapter of the Sierra Club believe that’s misguided and pledge to fight on.
“You have some folks calling us environmental crazies and another faction that’s backing us,” said John Doerfler, vice chair of the foundation. “As beach enthusiasts, we’re concerned about what will wash back, how will it affect the ecology.”
Cooper also isn’t backing down. A lifelong Rehoboth Beach resident, he said he knows his constituents well. He’s been mayor for the past 24 years and a council member for eight years before that. He said he takes pride in knowing that many people opposed the outfall when it was first proposed in 2010 but were swayed by his explanations.
“The people of Rehoboth seem to be satisfied with it,” he said.
The city is crafting language for a bond referendum this year to help fund the $35 million project. A date hasn’t been set, but environmentalists said they’re prepared to fight to defeat it, and if that fails, possibly file a lawsuit.
But Cooper said he’ll beat them as he has in the past. He easily defeated a mayoral candidate backed by the environmentalists in last year’s election in which the outfall was the central issue.
He had a simple argument: It’s not the only outfall on the Delaware coast. Another pours up to 6 million gallons of treated wastewater per day into the ocean between South Bethany Beach and Bethany Beach; nevertheless, coastal Delaware ranks at the top of a water quality list compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a conservation group. The coastal economy generates nearly $7 billion, according to the University of Delaware.
Yet another outfall operates nearby in Ocean City, Md., carrying up to 12 million gallons of wastewater per day two miles into the ocean.
But the mayor’s opponents point out that the state of Florida recently banned outfalls, saying they hurt water quality, harm coral reefs and are hazardousto marine life. Using strong language, the state ordered the cities that operate about five on the state’s southern Atlantic coast to cease operating them by 2025.
The state’s directive said outfalls “waste valuable water supplies” that can have other benefits and compromise “the coastal environment, quality of life, and local economies that depend on those resources.”
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has doubts, often referring to the Ocean City outfall as an environmental concern in a 2006 report. “The increase in coastal development also leads to decreased water quality due to stormwater runoff and ocean outfalls,” it said.
Delaware officials weren’t enthusiastic about adding another outfall, but their hands were tied, said David Small, secretary of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
Since 1998, Rehoboth Beach has been under a judge’s order to stop dumping wastewater from the Rehoboth Beach Wastewater Treatment Facility into the canal and Rehoboth Bay. It caused heavy nutrient pollution — phosphorous and nitrogen created by human and animal excrement.
Rehoboth Beach presented a plan in 2010 that had several proposals for getting rid of the nasty water in the canal, including injecting it into an underground well and spraying it on agriculture. The options sat waiting for a decision by a former DNEC secretary, Collin O’Mara, for more than a year as the order’s December 2014 deadline approached.
O’Mara, now president of the National Wildlife Federation in Washington, declined to comment, but the Delaware News Journal reported that he opposed the options, especially the outfall.
Small said when he took over for O’Mara six months ago, he felt compelled to act. “I felt this issue had been going on for decades,” Small said. “There was an analysis already done. I think it was as good an analysis that this agency has seen.”
Small said “our preference is not to discharge to the state’s surface water,” but with time running out, “the ocean outfall we believe is the best alternative.”The local chapter of the Sierra Club objected to Small’s Jan. 5 decision, saying he acted based on a “deeply flawed environmental impact statement” provided by the city.“Decisions made about the treatment and disposal of wastewater should be based upon sound scientific evidence and informed judgement,” and Small’s was not, said Amy Roe, the group’s conservation co-chair. He “has failed the residents of Delaware and those who enjoy . . . our coastline.”Outfalls “grind an ecosystem down,” Rosner said, and chemicals in wastewater harm fish. “They absorb it in their tissue and do not know what to do.”But resident Mable Granke is not convinced. She supports the mayor, she said, “100 percent.”“Where were they when this all started,” she asked of the environmentalists. “The city has worked on this for 10 years.”