Wracked Mermaid

Sewage dumped by Land and Sea

Perhaps the enactments of strongly worded, federal environmental laws in the early 1970s, such as the Clean Water Act, comforted the inhabitants of coastal communities into believing that polluting practices would become prohibited and marine resources would be protected.  At least within three miles from the sandy shores.  Beyond that statutory limit, however, raw sewage may still be dumped from the heads of ocean-going vessels without limit, without permit and without treatment.  The recent media attention questioning this practice, particularly the commercial ferries and eco-tour operations, poses the challenge to offer the same solution that local harbors offer to smaller craft:  appropriate pump-out facilities and the designation of 'No Discharge Zones'.  It is just a matter of scale.  Larger flow volumes will require larger holding tanks and properly engineered remediation.

 With the Lower Cape backshore beaches swamped with an increasing and persistant "MUNG" bloom that many disgusted beach-goers anecdotally associate with the off-shore boat disharge in the same way that land-based septic effluent is a widely recognized contribution to the nitrogen enrichment of marine embayments, the time to hault the dumping is none too soon.  It stands to reason that the same nutrient fueling the algae overgrowths which choke out estuarine productivity in less tidally flushed areas may also fertilize the nuisance rafts of that slimy brown stuff showing up in greater distributions and lasting for longer durations these days than ever before.  Anyone remember the 80s, when you could avoid the mung by going further down the beach, and the outbreak would clear up by the end of the week?

Certainly, where the effects of improper sewage disposal are tangible -- in the ocean waters we enjoy recreationally, or in the bays and harbors that support our shellfisheries, we demand a solution.  We want what Congress seemed to promise in passsing the landmark legislative acts now associated with the beginning of the Green Revolution in the early 1970s.  

But what about the improperly disposed sewage flowing from a restaurant, into a neighborhood's common groundwater, posing risk to private wells and migrating into sensitive creeks and wetlands?  (If a certain restuarant closure in a Lower Cape town has reduced your dining options this weekend, consider this rather than feeling inconvenienced).  Or any other land-based septic system failure, contributing our own human share to the pollution problem?  If even the EPA's 'big stick', the Clean Water Act, can fall short of truly providing regulatory and functional resource protection as boats continue to legally dump sanitary wastes in 2007, how many gaps might persist under of the state's Title 5 code and the authorities of local boards that implement on-site sewage disposal laws? 

 Perhaps too many ... it remains culturally easier to point out the anonymous, corporate operator and a practice that conveys a large volume and a sense of violation.  It is much more difficult to see our own small contributions adding up in the aggregate, perhaps polluting more in terms of nitrogen entrained in groundwaters and ultimately received some surface water body -- harbor, bay or ocean.