A special U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ship departed St. Croix Friday, a week after collecting samples near two wastewater discharge pipes.
The Ocean Survey Vessel Peter W. Anderson was in the territory to perform water quality surveys of coastal waters impacted by discharges from the V.I. government’s Anguilla Wastewater Treatment Plant and V.I. Rum Industries rum distillery.
Since no testing has been done in the areas of the discharge pipes to determine impacts, results from OSV Peter W. Anderson’s visit will be used to establish a base line that future tests can be compared to. There is vigorous debate between environmentalists, fishermen, regulatory agencies and the dischargers about whether the discharges do or don’t harm the environment.
"We’re going to try and build up (data) a little more robust here in the Virgin Islands," said Ken Potts, an EPA biologist and dive supervisor onboard the OSV Peter W. Anderson. "We’ll establish a baseline to see where the hot spots are."
In the case of the rum factory, a large, dark plume off of St. Croix’s south shore marks the discharge area. The plume is the waste left over from the distilling process, which includes molasses.
"The plume is visibly evident," Potts said. "We’re not sure what the composition is or what tests are going to show. We don’t know until we get the data and run some analysis."
The same can be said for the Anguilla Wastewater Treatment Plant a few miles east of the rum discharge.
The wastewater discharged 8,000 feet to sea from the plant near the Henry E. Rohlsen Airport is treated at a primary level, unlike the vast majority of treatment plants in the U.S. that must discharge at secondary levels. The V.I. government has applied for a waiver to secondary treatment even though it can barely manage meeting compliance standards for its primary treatment plants.
The government’s inability to manage discharges from its sewage plants at the primary level, which means removing solids from liquid before discharging into the ocean, doesn’t bode well because secondary treatment entails higher – and more expensive – standards.
Secondary treatment uses chemical and biological methods to clean sewage before it is discharged outside a treatment plant.
The waiver has been pending for some 15 years in the hope that Public Works, the agency that operates the territory's sewage system, would meet primary discharge standards.
That, however, hasn’t occurred and the EPA is on the verge of denying the government’s waiver application.
The decision to deny may be helped by what scientists aboard the OSV Peter W. Anderson encountered last week off the south shore. And while some of what they discovered may or may not originate from the two discharge sites they tested, questions remain.
"We saw some floaters (human feces)," said Marcus Zobrist, an EPA environmental engineer. "There is some bacteria out there."
Charles LoBue, an EPA biologist, said that the ship was in St. Thomas earlier in the month collecting samples near the outfall of the Airport Lagoon Wastewater Treatment Plant. The preliminary testing for both St. Croix and St. Thomas could take at least a month to analyze and will be used to determine if further studies should be done, he said.
Meanwhile, the data generated during the OSV Peter W. Anderson’s visit will be used to assist the EPA and the V.I. Department of Planning and Natural Resources to assess the impacts both discharges on the marine community, including coral reefs, said Jim Casey, EPA’s V.I. coordinator