Coming to Puget Sound? Illegal to dump waste cleaner than shoreside teated?

Tom.B said:

What some here are missing is that a combined effort of small steps across a wide range of polluters is what eventually leads to cleaner waters.

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You are correct! I think that's exactly what's happening in San Diego and it's working! (I know this makes me sound like a "flaming Lib" but I can assure you that I'm not.) I just want clean water!

Chuck Gould said:

Flaw in the logic.

The waste that is pumped out to be treated in the municipal sewer plant reenters the sound. When it does, according to figures from the EPA, Seattle Metro, etc, it is measurably dirtier after treatment in the municipal system than if it is treated onboard.

The stuff we flush from home, or pump out into the marina pump out, doesn't just magically "disappear", it winds up right back in the sound. Less effectively treated.

So it's all going into the sound anyway, the only difference is whether it should be legal to treat it on board, to a standard *higher* than municipal treatment achieves.

Nobody, at least that I know, is advocating that raw sewage should be a permissible discharge.

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Donning an anti-flak jacket, I'll merely note that Dr. Dixie Lee Ray, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission and Wash State governor wrote a book called "Environmental Overkill" in the 70's. She deplored point source pollution, like leaking septic tanks, municipal discharges, storm sewers, etc. as a real problem in Puget Sound. Interestingly, however, she also noted that Puget Sound was ON AVERAGE nitrogen starved because it was quite deep and outside the areas that got way too much Nitrogen, the Sound actually needed a bit more. Recreational boaters, in her opinion, were doing the Sound good by flushing their tanks while underway because their contribution of Nitrogen, Phosphorous, etc., contributed to making the Sound healthier rather than otherwise.



From personal experience I can tell you that ecosystems are more complex than regulations can account for. I once owned and operated a 20 acre commercial greenhouse facility that used tons and tons of fertilizer in highly intensive production facilities. On our own we started monitoring our effect on the water in a salmon creek that passed through our property and received the majority of our run off. We measured water quality upstream before it entered our property and downstream after it did. Those test results over many years showed that the water was cleaner when it left our property and was better for the salmon than when it entered simply because our contribution of nutrients caused more growth of vegetation along and in the creek with the result that the plants filtered out more crud than we produced. A natural bio-filter, in other words. The salmon came back every year.

That may be true in parts of the Sound but the problem in Hood Canal is the low turnover of water and the promotion of oxygen-depleting algae and other organisms that are dropping oxygen levels too low to support fish, shellfish, etc.

It's my understanding that excess nitrogen in the water from runoff and other sources promotes the growth of these organisms that are "stealing" the oxygen and contributing to the die-off of the once-thriving fish and shellfish populations.

Marin said:

That may be true in parts of the Sound but the problem in Hood Canal is the low turnover of water and the promotion of oxygen-depleting algae and other organisms that are dropping oxygen levels too low to support fish, shellfish, etc.

It's my understanding that excess nitrogen in the water from runoff and other sources promotes the growth of these organisms that are "stealing" the oxygen and contributing to the die-off of the once-thriving fish and shellfish populations.

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Makes sense. Perhaps it would be more productive to designate those areas in the Sound with poor water movement or reduced depth to be NDZs. No considerate person would discharge effluent, treated or not close to anything, IMO, but randomly placed discharges of treated effluent by boats in the middle of the Sound with 3 knot currents and 600 foot depths would hardly seem to be on a par with a sewer pipe dumping into shallow water the effluent from 1,000 homes.

This has been a real eye opener as a conversation. Conclusion from this quarter. Given the need to reside in the Puget Sound area, I'd give up on any size of boat other than a open lapstrake Norwegian 16 foot rowboat transported with a trailer. I would restrict my voyages to Lake Union where access to shore side facility's exist. or quit boating!!
As it is how happy I am to be here in Alaska where to the best of my knowledge, there are only three public pumpouts in community boating harbors.
I'll be the first to admit that I secure my Y valve in port/departing port till out of the range of town using a bucket within that distance. After that, the Y valve is open for use "macerated" overboard. Yep, the holding tank is fresh, clean and empty.


I am too old to have to face the future with the restrictions you all list.
It would seem that the majority of you have been raised within the "How to boil Frogs" governmental oversight
This topic demonstrates just one of many of similar encroachments on your lives via mufti-levels of various governmental edicts, some good, some questionable.

"The best cure for sea sickness, is to sit under a tree"~Spike Milligan

A.M.Johnson

Al said:

I am too old to have to face the future with the restrictions you all list.

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Then I guess it's good you'll soon be gone?

While I am all for a Sound-wide NDZ I suspect the most intelligent approach is to start with what Delfin described, which is to declare the region's most sensitive and threatened places as NDZs.

Protecting the planet doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing process. Our diverse opinions tend to ensure that it isn't. But it does require that people be willing to help in the ways that make sense. The claim that one is "too old" to help out at all tells me that that person is of little to no value in the overall scheme of things and the sooner they are out of the loop the better.

A harsh assessment, absolutely. But even the Chinese have come to realize that protecting the environment is not something to be shrugged off in the name of the almighty dollar (or RMB in their case.). Burying one's head in the sand under the rationalization that "what I do doesn't make any difference" is, as far as I'm concerned, the epitome of irresponsibility. It does nothing to make things better but it does help make the problem that much harder to solve.

Al said:

This has been a real eye opener as a conversation. Conclusion from this quarter. Given the need to reside in the Puget Sound area, I'd give up on any size of boat other than a open lapstrake Norwegian 16 foot rowboat transported with a trailer. I would restrict my voyages to Lake Union where access to shore side facility's exist. or quit boating!!
As it is how happy I am to be here in Alaska where to the best of my knowledge, there are only three public pumpouts in community boating harbors.
I'll be the first to admit that I secure my Y valve in port/departing port till out of the range of town using a bucket within that distance. After that, the Y valve is open for use "macerated" overboard. Yep, the holding tank is fresh, clean and empty.


I am too old to have to face the future with the restrictions you all list.
It would seem that the majority of you have been raised within the "How to boil Frogs" governmental oversight
This topic demonstrates just one of many of similar encroachments on your lives via mufti-levels of various governmental edicts, some good, some questionable.

"The best cure for sea sickness, is to sit under a tree"~Spike Milligan

A.M.Johnson

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Al,

It won't be long before the Environmental Waco Terrorists are in Alaska. They try to every year.

Marin,

I would have to disagree with you. If you take all the boaters waste in all of Puget Sound that is actually dumped into Puget Sound, it would amount to a mosquito on an elephant’s ass.

If you are serious about reducing pollution in Puget Sound, then instead of a NDZ that targets boaters, go after the big polluters and heavy fines. Also increase enforcement of the CURRENT laws on the books and leave us little mosquito boaters alone. Or go down to Kookafornia and spread the environmental waco terrorist theories’ down there and keep it out of the PNW and Alaska.