By Antigone Barton 

Source: PalmBeachPost.com

08/11/06 

DELRAY BEACH — Three years after a group of recreational divers told state officials that a growth of waste-fed algae was killing a stretch of coral reef, officials from the sewage treatment plant that discharges partly treated waste into the ocean upstream of the reef have agreed to test the surrounding waters for pollutants.

The result could be a renewed two-year permit for the plant that could be changed, depending on the results of the testing, said Department of Environmental Protection officials who discussed the plan Thursday with officials from the Boynton/Delray Beach South Central Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant.

While officials termed the meeting "constructive," critics were not impressed.

"They should never be allowed to have a permit as long as they are dumping nutrients on the reef," said Ed Tichenor, director of Palm Beach County Reef Rescue, a nonprofit group formed by the divers.

The plant has operated on an expired permit since December, when it reached an impasse with DEP officials, who cited the divers' finding and asked the plant to test the water to prove it was not harming the reef.

The Clean Water Act, passed in 1972, requires that a plant show that it will not harm the receiving waters before it can receive a permit to discharge waste.

The plant's permit, however, has never before required it to test the waters around the outfall pipe through which it discharges 13 million gallons of partly treated waste a day. As a result, DEP officials said they had no evidence that the plant's discharge was causing the Lyngbea algae bloom that divers reported was suffocating the reef.

After officials did not respond to reports from Tichenor, who is a retired environmental scientist, Reef Rescue divers, with the help of the county Environmental Resource Management department and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, began testing the waters themselves.

They found a correlation between the direction of the current, the amount of waste discharged by the plant and the patterns of algae growth on the reef. The testing plan the sewage treatment plant, with scientists from the National Oceanographic Institute, has offered replicates the monitoring performed by Reef Rescue, Tichenor said Thursday.

"Because they're doing the same plan we did, I assume they're going to get the same results, showing they are harming the reef," Tichenor said.

After seeing an earlier version of the sewage treatment plant's plan, Tichenor told DEP officials the plant should also test the water around its pipe for bacteria that causes illness in humans, a suggestion that has been integrated into the plan, according to DEP officials. The plan has also added more testing locations, as Tichenor suggested.

But Tichenor said DEP officials do not seem to have heeded his most emphatic suggestion that the plant not receive a permit until it has shown that it is not contaminating the receiving waters, in violation of the Clean Water Act. "The reissuing of a ... permit ... at this point in time is a clear violation of the federal statute."