Water-quality group registers concerns with EPA over MMA's sewage disposal into canal
BOURNE — The Pocasset Water Quality Coalition and the Bourne Sewer Commissioners and have registered opposite opinions about a new permit for Massachusetts Maritime Academy sewage disposal into the Cape Cod Canal at Academy Drive on Taylors Point.
The coalition on Tuesday formally registered water quality concerns with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the draft five-year permit for the MMA disposal.
On Wednesday, it released the public comments it made to the EPA, including through emails to Gov. Charlie Baker’s office, Upper Cape state legislators, local environmental groups, MMA and Environmental Partners, the Bourne consultant working on town wastewater topics/issues.
What did the Pocasset Water Quality Coalition think?
The Pocasset group noted water quality in Buzzards Bay near the MMA discharge is extremely degraded.
“The waters do not meet the ‘Designated Use’ of fishable and swimmable quality,” the coalition commented to the EPA. “The limitations on MMA specified in the draft permit do nothing to improve or even maintain the water quality of nearby waters. Much responsibility for this egregious omission lies with the EPA Region 1 and with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This needs to be remedied.”
The Pocasset group cited excess nitrogen issues — a concern that has also been raised by the town sewer commission.
What did the Bourne Sewer Commissioners think?
But on Jan. 25, sewer panel members authorized Bourne Administrator Glenn Cannon to draft a letter of favorable permit comment to state and U.S. environmental authorities on MMA's new draft five-year permit.
The commission, however, does seek more effluent monitoring for nitrogen impacts in the canal and some bays around the Buzzards Bay rim, with documented environmental impairments.
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The permit involves 77,000 gallons per day of campus disposal into the waterway. MMA holds a current disposal permit as a provision of the U.S. Clean Water Act.
Sewer Commission Chairman Mary Jane Mastrangelo said the new draft permit includes a changed effluent dilution formula from the current MMA permit, taking into account Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research into effects during slack tides.
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The EPA has said that “conditions and limitations of the draft outfall permit adequately protect all aquatic life as well as the essential fish habitat in the canal. Further mitigation is not warranted.”
Is the Mass. Maritime Academy the only contributor?
Pocasset coalition President Keith Barber said Thursday that “the major cause for this ongoing degradation of water quality is the discharge of excess nitrogen that fertilizes noxious algal growth.”
The nitrogen, he said, comes from permitted “point-source” discharges, septic system loading to groundwater, and surface “nonpoint-source” discharges from the watersheds of streams and sub-estuaries feeding the canal and Buzzards Bay.
Barber argued that the MMA wastewater discharge, with its nitrogen loading, is a contributor, “though a minor one,” to other waste discharges around the bay and to the bay’s continued degradation.
“The draft permit appears to minimize the intensity of monitoring of nitrogen," he said, "and presents only perfunctory requirements for current or future management of nitrogen or even requirements for updated compliance studies for evaluating options for future reductions of nitrogen loading" during the permit's five-year term.
