by David Ball
Staff Writer
Two months ago, environmental groups sued JEA for violating the federal Clean Water Act for allowing millions of gallons of untreated wastewater to overflow out of sewage treatment plants and into the St. Johns River.
Last week, JEA won the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act Recognition Award for having one of the country’s best programs in treating industrial waste before it has a chance to enter city sewage treatment plants and then the river.
A contradiction? Not quite, say officials from JEA and the St. Johns Riverkeeper, one of the groups that filed suit.
“It’s essentially what we’ve always said about JEA,” said Riverkeeper Executive Director Jimmy Orth. “They’ve done some good things, and we’ve acknowledged this.
“They inherited an extremely broken system, and they have done some improvements to the system as a whole,” he continued. “But they’ve dragged their feet on making improvements and necessary repairs to certain parts of their infrastructure, and the sanitary sewer overflows are a good example.”
The federal lawsuit, filed by Riverkeeper and the Public Trust Environmental Law Institute of Florida, alleges years of unmitigated sewage discharge resulting in 8.3 million gallons of raw material flowing into the river from JEA’s Buckman and Arlington East wastewater treatment facilities.
Coincidentally, it was the Buckman facility that won JEA its first EPA Clean Water Act Recognition Award in 2003 for being deemed the best operated and maintained large secondary treatment facility in the country.
For this recent award, JEA was deemed to have the country’s best industrial pretreatment program, which strives to limit the amount of industrial waste that enters JEA pipes before it could cause problems in sewage treatment plants.
“We permit 85 industries to ensure what they are sending us does not hurt the treatment plant or the river,” said Dan Parnell, manager of industrial pretreatment for JEA. “Fat flows and grease from restaurants are probably our biggest problem.”
Parnell said one of the innovations JEA was awarded for was a partnership with local grease haul-out companies that maintain grease traps for restaurants and ensure they are following JEA guidelines.
“They take over a lot of responsibility from the restaurants and work almost like a consultant, and we make sure the haulers do the right thing,” said Parnell. “Basically, we can regulate 2,300 restaurants by regulating 12 haulers.”
Parnell said the Buckman plant handles the heaviest industrial load, with about 10 percent, or 3 million gallons, of its daily wastewater flow coming from industrial sources. He said that two sewage overflows caused by restaurant waste were reported in three years.
According to EPA, JEA was also recognized for “innovative methods of measuring environmental performance of the pretreatment program...(and) real-time analytical methods to evaluate treatability and inhibition...(and) many methods of outreach, including Web pages and workshops.”
Still, Riverkeeper General Counsel Michael Howle said a functioning industrial pretreatment program is a “no-brainer” and does not absolve JEA from fixing other problems addressed in the lawsuit.
“We acknowledge that JEA spends money on infrastructure,” said Howle, “but it’s a battle of priorities of that investment or an expanded commitment to those upgrades.”
Howle said he and JEA’s legal team, led by Deputy General Counsel Ernst Mueller, are still in an informal discovery phase and there is no time line when, or if, the suit will reach the courtroom. In a legal response to the lawsuit filed Sept. 20, Mueller denies nearly all of the allegations set forth.