[Dioxin-l] Dioxin in waterways lawsuit in California

[Joy Towles]

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>                       Lawsuit Filed Over Tainted Waterways
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>                       Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
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>                                                                            Friday, January 14, 2000
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>                       Regulators have allowed more than 500 California waterways to
>                       become contaminated over the past 20 years while failing to set
>                       pollution standards required by the Clean Water Act,
>                       environmentalists charged in a lawsuit against the federal
>                       government.
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>                       The coalition of environmental groups is asking a federal judge in
>                       San Francisco to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
>                       to speed up deadlines for setting limits on the discharge of
>                       pollutants like dioxin, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) and
>                       mercury.
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>                       Felicia Marcus, EPA's regional administrator for Northern
>                       California, traced the delays to insufficient funding supplied to the
>                       state water boards. The federal government has delegated the
>                       boards to carry out the Clean Water Act in California.
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>                       ``Adequate resources were not allocated to do this work,'' Marcus
>                       said. But she said Gov. Gray Davis' administration has been more
>                       willing to tackle the job. Progress is being made, but the process is
>                       time-consuming, Marcus said.
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>                       The Clean Water Act calls for individual assessments of each
>                       contaminated waterway to determine the maximum amount of each
>                       harmful pollutant it can absorb daily without, for example, making
>                       water unhealthy to drink or fish unsafe to eat. Limits are then
>                       placed on industries and other polluters based on those
>                       calculations.
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>                       The standards, once set, could not only limit releases from
>                       refineries and other large dischargers, but could also restrict such
>                       things as household lawn pesticides.
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>                       The federal suit filed Wednesday alleges that 102 different
>                       contaminants have degraded drinking water, fish habitats, or other
>                       beneficial uses of state waterways, including San Francisco Bay
>                       and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
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>                       Congress set a 1979 deadline for the creation of standards for the
>                       total amount of contaminants that could be released daily into
>                       threatened waterways, said Mike Lozeau, an attorney representing
>                       WaterKeepers Northern California, its projects San Francisco
>                       BayKeeper and DeltaKeeper.
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>                       ©2000 San Francisco Chronicle   Page A20
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