Speaker answers $2 billion question
Theron Miller from the Utah Division of Water Quality, UDWQ, spoke last week in the College of Natural Resources fall seminar series. In his lecture, Are Farmington Bay Wetlands Impaired? Issues and Some Answers to this $2 Billion Question, Miller examined the controversial condition of the south-eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake.
“These are huge politically, scientifically and certainly financially charged questions,” Miller said, as he described the context of the current battle over the future of waste water treatment in Utah.
“Let me give you some background on the Clean Water Act,” Miller said. “It’s 150 pages or so of congressional jargon, signed by Richard Nixon in 1972, and it outlines 129 priority pollutants. What about nutrients?”
Because the Clean Water Act, CWA, doesn’t regulate the addition of normally non-toxic nutrients to water systems, acceptable nitrogen and phosphorus levels are hotly debated, Miller said. Excessive nutrients can cause explosive algal growth which can lead to low oxygen levels and, in this case, a reduction of water plants used by waterfowl for nesting and food. He said the nutrient in question here is phosphorus introduced into the bay from detergents and human fecal matter discharged from sewage plants into the Jordan River and surrounding canals.
Recently the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has issued general nutrient level guidelines for streams and lakes but “nobody, not the state or EPA has attempted to develop nutrient criteria for wetlands,” said Miller. “The Great Salt Lake is so different that the EPA guidelines aren’t effective.”
The EPA and CWA prohibit actions which harm the “beneficial uses” of lakes or streams, Miller said. The main beneficial use of Farmington bay, as determined by the UDWQ, is nesting and feeding habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds.
“Five to seven million birds depend on the Great Salt Lake during their migration,” Miller said.
High nutrient levels have shifted aquatic insect populations and significantly changed the eating habits of migratory birds. However this isn’t the major problem Miller said.
“So far, I conclude that the shorebirds are doing pretty well,” Miller said.
Miller said the issue is that sewage-fed algae, stirred up by non-native carp, is coating leaves and out competing valuable aquatic plants which reduces waterfowl cover.
The beneficial uses of Farmington Bay and the condition of its wetlands are such controversial questions because of the huge cost of advanced phosphorus treatment techniques, Miller said.
“To reduce phosphorus significantly in Farmington Bay would require 2 billion dollars,” Miller said.
Currently, water from sewage plants has 2 to 5 milligrams of phosphorus per liter, said Miller. A “tertiary treatment plant” would reduce those levels to .02 to .06 milligrams per liter by adding aluminum and other metals to the waste to clump onto and remove phosphorus.
“Now it’s a question of cost,” Miller said. “You, the public, have to pay for this.”
There are other possibilities for phosphorus treatment, Miller said. One newly developed approach is to fluctuate oxygen levels in the sewage which remove 70 percent of phosphorus.
“That likely will be a national regulation in the next five years” Miller said.
Though the Farmington Bay issue deals primarily with Salt Lake and Davis counties, similar issues face Cache County with Cutler Reservoir, Miller said. He said if Cache citizens keep using their toilets, sewage municipal bills are bound to go up.
–ben.abbott@aggiemail.usu.edu