Dilemma for Delaware beaches' renowned water quality

They rank among the cleanest in the nation: miles of Atlantic Ocean surf at the edge of Delaware beaches that double as resort playgrounds and crowded mainstays for the state's economy.

Yet, this weekend holiday arrives at a pivotal moment as state and local officials look for a new place to daily send up to 3.4 million gallons of treated sewage now pumped from Rehoboth Beach into a canal just off the polluted inland bays.

After years of studies, court battles and debates, the leading option simply calls for pumping the waste about a mile into the ocean off of the north end of Rehoboth Beach, via a $30 million outfall pipe.

It's an idea that has environmental groups and some residents worried the government is simply trading one dirty water problem for another, hoping simple dilution will protect Delaware's ocean beaches from the inland bays' fate.

Greg Rosner, a Delaware Surfrider Foundation member, said the proposed Rehoboth outfall is archaic – "the wrong message to send" about the state's biggest tourism attraction.

Last week, Delaware's beaches were listed among the best of 30 coastal states for clean water by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Based on water samples nationwide over a five-years span, Dewey Beach is a "superstar" of America's shores.

If the outfall is built, Rosner predicts, "The PR [public relations] nightmare will never end."

The disputes pit concern for Delaware's tourism industry, beach ratings and offshore environment against a need to comply with a court-backed order to end treated sewage releases to a canal outfall just north of Rehoboth Bay without crushing ratepayers.

An environmental impact study, completed in late 2012, said an ocean outfall is the best solution to the city's practice of pumping wastewater into the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal, which feeds Rehoboth Bay and Indian River Bay. Wastewater high in nitrogen and phosphorus pollutes the water and promotes algae growth, which undermines habitat for fish.

Although the environmental impact study supported construction of the outfall pipe, outgoing Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Secretary Collin P. O'Mara quietly urged the city to consider an innovative, if seldom-used, option: Discharge wastewater to a series of upland, artificial wetlands. The wetlands would "polish" treated wastewater and release fresh water back to the inshore environment, without adding to ocean beach pollution risks.

"I'm encouraging some additional review," said O'Mara, who left his position to become president and chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation. O'Mara said that he also "has some concerns about the habitat" for fish and ocean animals surrounding any potential outfall.

But DNREC's own staff and local experts have largely dismissed the wetland option as unworkable, and one experienced county wastewater management and public works official termed the marsh option a potential "nightmare."

Newly appointed DNREC Secretary David S. Small said he has yet to review the full record. "I'm not sure what, if anything, it says about wetlands," Small said. "I don't know that it addresses wetlands. I want to discuss the record internally with our team to see what that may reveal as far as whether there are other options."

"Either way, we're going to have to look at the deadline" of Dec. 31 for removing the discharges from the bay environment, Small said. "That's a tight timeline and probably not realistic at this point."

The News Journal learned about DNREC's alternative studies from records obtained under a state Freedom of Information Act request. State officials turned over dozens of emails, inspection reports and other documents relating to the existing Rehoboth Treatment Plant and the review for the upgrade.

Frustrated Rehoboth officials have complained for months that state officials have been dragging their feet on permitting and financial assistance for the outfall. The delay is significant because Rehoboth is under a court-backed order to stop discharging its treated wastewater into the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal by Dec. 31.

Rehoboth Beach Mayor Samuel Cooper said he was aware of O'Mara's interest in a created wetland from conversations with the city's engineers and some DNREC staffers.

Still, Cooper wonders: "Why didn't he call us so we could sit down and meet? How does doing nothing resolve anything? To just leave it hanging is no answer."

DNREC's Financial Assistance Branch has made a recommendation to O'Mara, but that proposal has not been acted on. The recommendation has not been released and was not included in the FOIA documents.

O'Mara said there is considerable interest both locally and from the federal Environmental Protection Agency in seeing Rehoboth Beach get its discharge out of the canal. However, the permit review process for the proposed ocean outfall at the federal level could be more challenging than city officials anticipate, he said.

EPA officials in Philadelphia, where the city's choice would be reviewed, declined to comment. An EPA spokesman said the agency would prefer to wait until they have a permit application in hand.

The city's two proposed ocean outfall pipe options stop just west of Hen & Chicken Shoals, off the city's northeast corner. The shallow sand flats are part of a broader, federally designated essential fish habitat – a critical area for all stages of winter and windowpane flounders, several mackerel species as well as cobia. Multiple life stages of summer flounder, sea bass and several shark species also use the habitat at the shoals.

Sending discharges to acres of new, created wetlands, O'Mara said, could avoid new risks for offshore habitats while creating new recreational and onshore habitat resources for the area. Costs might be comparable to the outfall, with lower, long-term maintenance expenses.

And although the city-commissioned environmental impact statement considered worst-case scenarios and suggest little chance of failure – a finding shared by much of the staff within DNREC – O'Mara said he believes it may be overly optimistic, given the increased risk from storms projected with climate change and sea level rise.

During Hurricane Sandy, in late October 2012, flooding around the Lewes Wastewater Treatment Plant forced its emergency evacuation, followed by a sewage release to the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal.

The current Rehoboth Beach treatment plant exceeded some of its discharge limits as well. And high flow discharges during Sandy, which hit during the offseason, forced the use of an out-of-service holding basin.

Rehoboth's plan

Under Rehoboth's proposed ocean outfall scenario, the city would continue to use its treatment plant along the banks of the canal. A pipeline would carry the treated waste under municipal streets and out to Deauville Beach. From there it would move about a mile off the swimming beach before being discharged into the ocean.

Henlopen Acres, the community of North Shores and Cape Henlopen State Park are just to the north of the outfall. Residential neighbors send their wastewater to Rehoboth for treatment and disposal.

Rehoboth has been discharging its wastewater into the canal for decades, with diluted discharges ultimately flowing into Rehoboth Bay. Early operations barely treated the wastes, although upgrades and improvements reduced the amount of pollution reaching open water.

In the 1980s, just as the city was poised to build a new treatment plant, a citizen group sued to halt discharges to the canal, pressing instead for land application of wastewater to protect both the canal and bay. Rehoboth prevailed and built a new treatment plant in 1987, and received state permits to continue canal discharge.

Other municipal and industrial dischargers got their waste and processed water out of the canal, however. Sussex County invested millions of dollars to build new wastewater treatment plants, eliminating thousands of aging and failing septic systems around the inland bays.

Officials at the Center for the Inland Bays say they have been waiting long enough to remove the harmful discharges from the bays.

Chris Bason, executive director of the center, said that DNREC approved a "total maximum daily load" or TMDL, for fertilizer-like nitrogen and phosphorus pollutants in the bays in 1998, with a goal of eliminating all treatment plant discharges to surface waters.

"The TMDL was completed in 1998. We are 16 years down the road" and Rehoboth is still discharging into the canal, Bason said.

Although Rehoboth Beach challenged the 1998 plan, a consent decree dating to 2002 required eventual compliance with a requirement to either remove the pollutants or remove the discharge – with the deadline for a plan currently at Dec. 31.

"We're not going to make that and that's embarrassing," Bason said.

Behind the dispute is a U.S. District Court settlement to a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club and American Littoral Society after the EPA regional office failed to enforce a requirement to set Clean Water Act pollution limits.

As a part of the settlement, the federal court ordered a total maximum daily load be developed for the Inland Bays by Dec. 1998 and that document, developed by the state, called for the systematic elimination of wastewater discharges to the Inland Bays. The result: municipalities like Georgetown, Millsboro and Rehoboth Beach had to find other places to dispose treated wastewater.

Meanwhile, said Bason, the Rehoboth treatment plant is still a major source of nitrogen and phosphorous in Rehoboth Bay: 17,120 pounds of nitrogen and 1,180 pounds of phosphorous on average, every single year.

"That bay is so polluted," Bason said. "There's no sea grass."

He said the nitrogen and phosphorous fuel growth on the dominant remaining plant – algae.

"And that's why the bay is so cloudy," Bason added.

The center hasn't taken a position on the outfall. But it did prepare a fact sheet which notes that of the 13 main sources of pollution, only two remain in the Inland Bays – Rehoboth and Millsboro, and Millsboro is scheduled to come out of the bays this year.

The alternatives

Rehoboth and its consulting engineers looked in depth at a range of alternatives as part of a draft environmental impact study.

Two main options emerged: ocean outfall and land application, where treated waste is spread on fields, typically when they are planted with crops to uptake the nitrogen and phosphorous.

Rehoboth commissioners opted for the ocean outfall, seeing it as the most efficient and least costly option at $30.4 million.

Sky-high costs hobbled the land application option. City officials needed something close but land near the resort community for spraying the waste was expensive. And among dozens of landowners contacted, only three considered talking about selling their property as land application sites.

While city residential property owners typically pay $326 annually in sewer fees, the estimated cost of land application ranged from $1,010 to $1,400 per property owner annually, according to the environmental impact statement.

The estimate was made in 2009 dollars, as was the per property owner estimate for the ocean outfall, which came in at $635.

City officials went with the lower-cost option, bolstered by reassurance from the consultants that a properly diffused ocean discharge could operate without an environmental impact even in worst-case scenarios.

Cooper said the recommended plan would continue to process and treat the wastewater at the city's 3.4-million-gallon-a-day plan along the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal, disinfect the discharge, remove trace chlorine and then pipe it to the ocean. The outfall pipe will have a capacity of 7 million gallons, Cooper said, explaining that should help plant operators better manage peak flows at times of extreme use.

City leaders found significant support for the plan at public hearings. They also found it potentially easier to shepherd through the permit process.

James May, a professor of law and graduate engineering at Widener University, said that ocean outfalls might prove a difficult sell politically. They only need to meet minimum, primary treatment standards and rely on technology that dates to the 1920s. The ocean's vastness, he said, assures that pollutants are rapidly diluted.

Two wastewater facilities already operate ocean outfalls off Delaware, the county-run South Coastal ocean outfall, which discharges about a mile off Bethany Beach, and a larger outfall off Ocean City, Md. Both have been in operation for more than three decades with few issues.

However, in 1992, the EPA released the results of a five-year study on the two outfalls that found an impact on aquatic life and habitat on the ocean bottom, even though "the discharges are not a public health threat."

Sediments around the discharge pipes, EPA scientists said, had become "a sink for many contaminants in the marine environment." Varying populations of pathogenic, cyst-forming microbes were found, along with a drug resistant bacteria known to cause food poisoning.

The scientists drew no conclusions on the broader impact of their findings except to observe the changes in the bottom sediments.

John Schneider, DNREC's watershed assessment manager, said that the state's environmental staff was "happy" with the findings in the city's study of alternatives. Bacteria are not an issue with treatment plants these days, he said, and DNREC officials don't see failures.

"We asked the city of Rehoboth to look at catastrophes, power outages, a storm, a hurricane," he said. The conclusion: "It just can't happen there ... it's perfectly safe."

Anthony E. Hummel, an environmental engineer in the state Surface Water Discharge Section, wrote in an email dated Sept. 24, 2012, that the environmental impact study found the outfall "the most practical solution considering the availability of land and the protection of groundwater and water quality of the Inland Bays."

"The ocean outfall alternative also had the lowest impact on estimated user charges and greatest acceptance by citizens of Rehoboth Beach. The treatment plant would continue to discharge the same high quality effluent to the Atlantic Ocean that is currently discharged to the L-R Canal," Hummel wrote. "Mixing is more than adequate to meet surface water quality standards under even the most extreme circumstances."

But conservation groups such as the Surfrider Foundation and the Marine Education, Research & Rehabilitation Institute have concerns.

"The Delaware Surfrider Chapter announced in March along with other environmental groups, that we don't want this outfall pipe," said John Weber, Mid-Atlantic regional manager for the Surfrider Foundation. "Three months later and we still don't have a decision."

Suzanne Thurman, who directs MERR, Inc., described ocean outfalls as an "archaic solution." The methods release pharmaceuticals and other residual chemicals like caffeine, antibiotics and endocrine disruptors that aren't removed in the treatment process, creating a risk for marine mammals and other marine life.

Thurman, one of those favoring the wetland option, said that the outfall's likely position near sensitive Hen & Chicken Shoals was a special concern.

"In my opinion, it should be a preserve," she said. "It's so vital."

As late as 2012, the DNREC staff looked for possible land sites – five-acre parcels within five miles of the city – for creating wetlands. They came up with dozens of possibilities.

"Collin personally asked that we look at the wetland option," Schneider said.

But in the end, a report prepared by DNREC staff found it would be less than ideal.

The report found that constructed wetlands "have been used in the U.S. as an alternative to complex mechanical WWTFs designed to provide tertiary treatment for nutrient removal." But they are not commonly used to reduce nitrogen and phosphorous in treated wastewater, key issues in Rehoboth Beach.

While farmland is available nearby, DNREC staffers found, treated wastewater would still need to be disposed of, something that would require a state-issued discharge permit because ultimately, the treated waste would end up in Rehoboth Bay.

"DNREC staff do not believe that a constructed wetlands system can consistently meet water quality standards for Delaware's Inland Bays. Consequently, DNREC does not recommend this option for the city of Rehoboth Beach."

Kent County Public Works Director Hans Medlarz said he would have concerns about the potential cost and reliability of wetland treatment for large wastewater volumes."I have not seen it done on a large scale," Medlarz said. "As soon as the vegetation reaches a mature point it eventually will have to be harvested so it doesn't die and decay and release nutrients back into the water."

"That works just fine in a small created wetland, but if you have acres and acres, how would you remove all that biomass," Medlarz said. "You could have a few good years and then you could have a nightmare on your hands."

Some communities have made attempts. Disney World in Florida has used wetlands and floating hyacinths as part of its wastewater treatment plan for years, but the resort also has faced criticism for taking a toll on wetland ecosystems that were there before its construction.

Under O'Mara's vision, the wetland would be created from an upland area.

In Washington, Ind., the American Council of Engineering Companies recently honored city consultants for designing a $26 million wetland treatment system to deal with mixed stormwater and wastewater when tanks used to control combined sewer overflows are overwhelmed. Expanding the community's conventional plant to handle the overflow would have cost $53 million.

"I like these kind of challenges and I certainly have had some ideas which appeared innovative to me at the time, and I've lived to regret," Medlarz said. "The general public works director would not want to be on the bleeding edge of new technology."

Tidewater Utilities Inc. President Gerard Esposito said constructed wetlands are fragile, undermining the potential reliability of sewage treatment systems that rely on them.

"If you're the guy with the permit on the line, you don't want to have the last point of compliance be coming off a wetland," Esposito said. "People with good intentions usually shy away from those, not because it's unproven, it's just that it's inconsistently in compliance at a certain scale."

Tidewater has urged the city to consider use of current and future capacity in the company's new Wandendale commercial wastewater plant west of the city as an ocean disposal alternative. Wandendale uses both spray irrigation of treated wastewater on farm fields and more-confined rapid-infiltration beds for wastewater treatment.

"It's known and it's cheaper," Esposito said. He noted that constructed wetlands could require a relatively large amount of land, a potential financial negative in the resort area where land prices are high.

In Rehoboth, Cooper didn't raise those issues. Instead, he worried more about the availability of land for a created wetland and whether it would remove nitrogen and phosphorous and still allow city officials to meet the total maximum daily load requirements.

Ironically, he said, in the spring when Gov. Jack Markell was pitching both his water and gas tax proposals, he stopped by the Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce.

Cooper said the governor told the crowd of business leaders that the water tax money would help with the Rehoboth Beach outfall.

"Either deny it," Cooper said of the outfall request "and give a rationale for it," or sit down and discuss the other alternatives.

Contact Jeff Montgomery at (302) 463-3344 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com.

Contact Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com