This month marks the 50th anniversary of the federal , landmark legislation that greatly reduced the pollution of the nation’s waterways. The law has been key in the , helping return the lake to public use after an era of such high levels of pollution that swimming was banned.
Kristi Trail keeps a close eye on the lake and beyond in her role as executive director of the , the nonprofit focused on environmental sustainability across the 16 parishes that make up the basin's watershed. She spoke to The Times-Picayune | Ĵý about the Clean Water Act’s legacy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What big changes happened here because of the Clean Water Act?
It really helped to drive the work to clean up the Pontchartrain Basin. Before the Clean Water Act, there was untreated sewage that was routinely discharged in the local waterways, and it was really common all across the country. Even in the ‘60s around here, there were a lot of parts of Jefferson Parish that relied on septic tanks and those discharged into Lake Pontchartrain. But the Clean Water Act drove a lot of local sewage infrastructure, and that drastically improved the lake’s water quality. It also regulated agricultural and industrial runoff. We don't really have a lot of industrial runoff into the basin; a lot of that goes into the river. But for us, at least, it meant that dairy farmers had to comply with sanitation rules, and that helped a lot as well.
Was the Clean Water Act the most important factor in cleaning up the lake?
The Clean Water Act was a very big driver of the local work to clean up the lake. Aside from pollutants that were being dumped into the lake, the natural cleaning system was destroyed with clamshell dredging (dredging of the lake’s rangia clams for use in road construction and other projects was banned in 1990). You combine that with the sewage being dumped into the lake, and it was the two of those together that definitely created a highly polluted body of water. Now that we have the clams back, a healthy population of those clams can clean the entire volume of the lake in (clams filter the water).
Given the deregulation push in Washington and recent , are you concerned that elements of the Clean Water Act could be rolled back?
Water quality success is not permanent, and that applies down here as well. It does require constant monitoring, assessment, and then correcting if we see an issue. But the Clean Water Act has anti-backsliding protection built in. So the permit system that's created by the Clean Water Act does not allow new or reissued permits to be based on less stringent conditions than those in the original permit. And that's a good thing. But if there's not enough staff at EPA or at the regulatory level to help review and monitor those permits, that can be a problem. And so a lot of what we do is review when permits are up for public comment, because a lot of these facilities, even municipal wastewater treatment plants, have to reapply every five years. So we can check to make sure they're not applying for something that will allow them to discharge more pollutants than their previous permit, because the Clean Water Act is intended to prevent that.
What areas still need to be addressed and what can be done about them?
I think the regulations really need to keep up with the technology. The Clean Water Act lists parameters for known pollutants and industries. The Clean Water Act itself is meant to be updated every five to 10 years. But new products and processes are implemented much more quickly than that. We need our legislators to ensure that EPA has enough staff and funding to keep up with the pace of industry, because I think our concern is that right now, technology and industry are outpacing some of the regulations, and not necessarily in a bad, malicious way. But just because the technology is outpacing the regulations that are in place.
For us, we need a better way to regulate individual sewage systems, especially in more rural areas, or decentralized areas. Many people may not even know that areas outside of city sewer systems have to use on-site sewage units for their homes and businesses. Most of us that are in Orleans Parish or Jefferson Parish don’t think about it, and probably aren't even aware that there are areas just 30 miles away that have their own on-site sewage system. We see that mostly on the northshore, and those systems are exempt from the Clean Water Act. If a lot of those start to fail, it can result in the waterways being badly polluted, which is what we're starting to see in some of the waterways on the northshore.