EPA Failing to Address Algae Blooms
Published: Saturday, November 20, 2021
By: Norm Schultz
The Environmental Protection Agency needs to put together an agency-wide Strategic Action Plan to reverse the out-of-control harmful algae blooms (HAB) plaquing our nation’s waterways.
That’s not my opinion, albeit I fully agree. Rather, it’s the conclusion of EPA’s own Office of Inspector General that the agency has failed to get things done. Meanwhile, scientists predict that HABs in recreational waterways, not to mention our drinking water sources, will increase as excess nutrients continue to pour into lakes and rivers, the temperatures warm, and there are extreme weather events.
There’s no doubt that HABs are impacting the waterways we boaters hope to enjoy. The point of the Inspector General’s evaluation was to determine how EPA is exercising its authority under the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts to address HABs and protect human health and the environment.
It’s well documented that HABs occur when high levels of nutrients—primarily nitrogen and phosphorus—pollute rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. It’s also known these nutrients come from livestock operations and farm fertilizer runoff topping the list.
Congress appointed the EPA Administrator as the leader for federal actions focused on reducing, mitigating, and controlling freshwater HABs. According to the Inspector General’s report, it was understood that by developing an agency-wide HAB strategy, the EPA would improve in four planning areas: (1) purpose, scope, and methodology; (2) problem definition and risk assessment; (3) organizational roles, responsibilities, and coordination; and (4) integration and implementation.
The result was expected to lead to the reduction of HABs and their impacts on human health and the environment using the authorities and tools provided by the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts. Further, the Inspector General found the EPA has not even fulfilled its 2015 commitment to Congress to develop additional drinking water health advisories for cyanotoxins associated with some blooms.
HABs do not occur only in lakes. A bloom extended 650 miles along the Ohio River hitting six states in 2015 and threatening the drinking water of over five million people. Moreover, the cyanotoxins formed by some HABs can be transported ever farther downstream from the bloom. The EPA’s National Rivers and Streams Assessment conducted in 2013 and 2014 detected the cyanotoxin microcystin in 37 percent of the 1.2 million miles of rivers and streams assessed.
While we often read about the extensive HABs in Lake Erie and Southwest Florida, or the lakes of Wisconsin and the 5000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, none of our nation’s waterways are immune. In July 2020, Utah public health officials warned Zion National Park visitors to stay out of the Virgin River.
Most important to our family boating enjoyment, the EPA needs to take immediate action to issue nitrogen and phosphorus numeric water quality criteria to effectively bring under control the levels of these nutrients running off into waterways.
Perhaps most disturbing, the need for the EPA to seriously address the HAB problem isn’t new! Twenty-three years ago, the “Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act of 1998” (HABHRCA) established a task force that included the EPA to assess the ecological and economic consequences of HABs. Further, it was to find alternatives for reducing, mitigating, and controlling HABs while assessing the social and economic costs-benefits of such alternatives.
Add to that, a 2014 amendment expanded HABHRCA beyond coastal, estuarine, and the Great Lakes to include “freshwater harmful algal blooms in lakes, rivers, estuaries (including their tributaries), and reservoirs.” It assigned leadership of the freshwater aspects of the program to the EPA Administrator. How’s that worked out?
Bottom line: the EPA has failed miserably to show a national leadership role in mitigating freshwater HABs and that must change now.
Reprinted from “Soundings Trade Only Today”
A version of this article appeared in the Buyer's Guide (November/December) 2022 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Applicable Everywhere, Environmental Impact, Law & Politics, Opinion
