DeKalb County’s repeated violations of a pollution-control agreement should trigger enforcement action, an audit and stricter oversight, according to a Georgia law firm that specializes in environmental cases.
The problem stems from multiple overflows from the county sewer system along a short, residential street, popular walking path and a tributary to South River. The county acknowledges the overflows and even admits it has been lax in reporting the incidents to state and federal regulators as agreed.
But the county says it has always cleaned them up as required and is completing other provisions of the agreement on schedule.
“In each instance, first-response crews and (sanitary sewer overflow) investigation teams responded in full compliance with the county’s Contingency and Emergency Response Plan (CERP), conducted debris clean-up and disinfection of the site, and followed up with the appropriate investigations,” notes a statement issued by the county Department of Watershed Management. “However, reporting these instances in required SSO-related filings with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was not completed.”
The agency says it’s asked an outside group to investigate. In the meantime, department employees are getting trained on how to file the reports.
“It is important to note that public health was protected and DWM staff completed the required response and cleanup activities as specified by state and federal laws,” the statement says.
But that’s not enough for the South River Watershed Alliance which hired the environmental law firm.
“History shows very clearly that DeKalb County must be forced to change and comply with the law,” wrote attorneys Hutton Brown and Elizabeth Obenshain of the Greenlaw firm.
They list a dozen sewage spills along Green Street that flowed into nearby Shoal Creek. They document how many days clean up took and the fact that in some instances there weren’t even warning signs during the delays, leaving people on the popular walking train to splash through the raw sewage.
The consent decree was signed in 2010 following a 2005 investigation by EPD. There had been as many as 90 sewage spills in the county per year leading up to that point and 307 in 2006.
The decree included steps the county agreed to take to upgrade its sewer system as well as spending $600,000 on improvements and $453,000 in penalties.
“Yet, has anything changed since 2005?” the lawyers write. “DeKalb County’s protocol for handling SSO’s in the Green Street area is clearly flawed given the failure to report as required, the failure to prepare 60-day reports as required and the failure to clean up in such a way as to protect human health and environment as required. One cannot assume that DeKalb County’s protocol is any different as applied to the rest of DeKalb County, leaving open the question of how many other SSO’s are unreported, how many other sites are not appropriately remediated and how many other chronic problems are not addressed.”
Officials of both EPD and EPA have met with county representatives on this issue recently, according to Jac Capp, head of the EPD Watershed Protection Branch.
“We expect to receive revised reports from the county to account for the underreported spills by July 31, 2016,” he said.
Asked if EPD will flex its muscles, Capp said, “We will review the revised reports once they are submitted.”
