Boot Key Harbor
"Marathon- the Heart of the Florida Keys"

An On-Line Cruising Guide for the Florida Keys & Cuba
Best viewed at 1024x768 or higher

USE YOUR BROWSER BACK BUTTON TO RETURN TO THE PREVIOUS PAGE

View From the Pilothouse

by Skip Allen
Chairman, Southern Boating Publications
Southern Boating, Vol 28 No.5, January 2000

In a sensible world the EPA and the environmental community would be doing everything they could to encourage boat owners to equip with on-board treatment units. The result would be less pollution.

Greetings from back in the 20th century. Although you may be reading this in the 21st, I am sitting here composing before our January deadline, and I have to report that governmental stupidity will be with us for some time - as if that was anything new. In a recent example of misguided regulation, the Southeast Region of the EPA has approved the application for designation of a No Discharge Zone (NDZ) in an area 600 feet wide surrounding the city of Key West, Florida.

As I write, the beaches of Key West are officially closed for swimming, due to excessive levels of colliform bacteria which result from the operation of the city's existing sewage treatment plant. This sewage treatment disaster is currently being rebuilt at a cost of many millions of taxpayer dollars. If the new NDZ is ever enforced, sewage from vessels which are now equipped with on-board treatment systems will be added to the flow into the city's broken-down treatment plant. The immediate and inevitable result - more pollution. What makes this situation all the more unacceptable is that there are at least two Type I on-board sewage treatment systems which process waste to a degree equal to or significantly better than what will be done when and if the new Key West treatment plant is completed.

Let me give you a bit of background. Thirty years ago an acquaintance of mine was staying at a fancy hotel in the Caribbean, Virgin Gorda to be exact. At the manager's cocktail party he happened to bump into the hotel's chief engineer. They talked about the beautifully kept grounds on the property and then he asked how they managed to find enough water to irrigate all these exotic plants, water being a perennial problem on most Caribbean Islands. Not to be indelicate, the answer was that the sewage treatment plant could refine its input to the point where it could be used safely on the plants and was pure enough that it could, in the words of the engineer, have been used for drinking water in an emergency. That's 30 years ago!

Since that time, technology has improved to the point where that massive plant in Virgin Gorda has been scaled down to where it can fit in a boat and deliver water technically pure enough that will not harm delicate marine organisms such as shellfish and certainly not human beings. In a sensible world the EPA and the environmental community would be doing everything they could to encourage boat owners to equip with on-board treatment units. The result would be less pollution, not more. Boat owners, knowing that their investment in the equipment would not be jeopardized by some governmental bureaucrat would willingly buy, install and use the MSDs. No one who has ever been on a boat with a holding tank wants to live with that unworkable answer to the waste disposal problem.

The EPA's Key West approval was based on its usual criteria - number of allegedly available pump-out stations. The net result will, for the reasons noted above, be a decrease in water quality in the Key West area.

Despite these advances in technology, there seems to be an attitude in the EPA and among some in the environmental community which says "Don't bother me with the facts once I have started an investigation."

OK, we can rant and rave about this problem, but that won't get anything done to benefit the waters or our boats. We need to make ourselves heard where it counts, in Congress, with the folks who write our laws and who spend OUR money funding the EPA, which then ignores scientific fact and reasonableness in its administration of the Clean Water Act. We also need to educate the environmental community about what is accomplished by today's MSDs, such as the Raritan Lectrasan or the Groco Thermopure. Perhaps if they were properly informed they might work with us to not only encourage the use of these devices on boats but also to encourage their use at land-side sources of sewage. Treating waste where it is generated would yield better protection for our environment and minimize the impact of the usual treatment plant break-downs which occur with such regularity.

Aside from all that, I'm sure this year will be absolutely peachy for everyone. By the way, I want to thank Chuck Husick for proving many of the grisly facts presented here. Meantime y'all have a great New Year.