The Sand Island Plant Has Never Worked Right

posted in: October 1991 | 0

The city has avoided a judgment in court on the legal questions concerning its management of the Sand Island wastewater treatment plant. However, Honolulu residents continue to have a right to know what they have received in return for the millions of dollars spent in building and operating the Sand Island plant. A review of documents available in the public record suggests we have not been getting our money’s worth.

From the very outset, the Sand Island plant did not work as designed. The early years are described in an Operation and Maintenance Inspection Report of October 1984:

“The Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant is an 82.0 MGD [million gallons per day] advanced primary facility which was completed in August 1978. In December 1981, EPA Region IX prepared an extensive report … indicating that the plant had not yet become design operational and citing multiple reasons for the problem. During the following two years, detailed studies were performed by both private consultants and the Hawai`i Department of Health. The plant was not only violating NPDES permit limits but also was not in compliance with the operation and maintenance provisions of the permit. As a result, a list of improvements necessary to correct deficiencies at the plant was compiled by DOH… That list contains 84 items.

“For funding a budget purposes, some of the 84 items were consolidated into 18 major items which were included as part of a new NPDES permit issued on June 15, 1983… These 18 items appear in the Schedule of Compliance…”

The city had difficulty meeting that schedule “due to poor planning, an inadequate budget, a lack of manpower, changing conditions in design and development, and apparent cost underestimates by consultants,” DOH inspectors found in a series of visits to the plant from May to September 1984. Of the 85 items, just 45 had been corrected. The city “has made an effort with tangible results, but the most significant and most costly items are those which remain to be addressed… Sand Island [sewage treatment plant] is given an unacceptable rating…”

No Hope for Compliance

The amendments to the NPDES permit made in June 1983 substantially lowered the tolerated levels of suspended solids and biochemical-oxygen demand materials in the effluent. Congress had mandated the lower limits and the DOH had no choice but to force them upon the Sand Island plant, despite there being no hope the plant could comply.

Sure enough, when the first discharge monitoring reports began to come in following the effective date of the revised permit, the city reported five-day average concentrations of BOD (called BOD5) and total suspended solids (TSS) far in excess of permitted concentrations. Total daily effluent limitations were exceeded also, as were the 85 percent removal requirements for BOD and TSS. Nor were the violations small. In August 1983, for example, whereas the permit required 85 percent BOD removal, the Sand Island plant removed just 3 percent. Daily BOD5 concentration levels were to average 30 milligrams per liter. From July 1983 until February 1984, the lowest reported concentration for this permit parameter was 152 mg/l. Some months it was as high as 277 mg/l.

These violations resulted in a consent order signed January 30, 1985 by the city and the state. Under terms of that order, the city would be allowed to continue running the plant, meeting less than primary treatment standards, provided it complied with a Composite Correction Plan to phase in improvements needed to bring the plant up to secondary treatment standards.

The consent order has been described by Patrick Parenteau, the court-appointed expert on permits in the Sand Island case, as “short on commands and long on forgiveness.” Even so, he notes, it does require compliance with secondary treatment to be achieved (“albeit on a leisurely schedule”). (In his report to the court, he further questions whether the consent order could be construed as “effective enforcement — indeed whether it is ‘diligent prosecution’ in the language of … the Act” but concedes that this “is another question, one that is beyond the scope of my charge.” Effective enforcement and diligent prosecution of the Clean Water Act are responsibilities that fall to the state Department of Health under authority delegated by the Environmental Protection Agency.)

No Incentive to Improve

Here is what EPA auditors said about that Composite Correction Plan in their August 1989 report on the Department of Health’s enforcement actions:

The CCP “contained specific compliance dates for the completion of required actions. Our review disclosed that these dates were not being met; instead they were continually extended by DOH…. The city and county requested its initial extension to the CCP deadline in August 1985 and continued to request additional extensions in subsequent periods…. It is our opinion that DOH’s routine extensions of the required compliance schedule dates has defeated the purpose of the CCP. DOH’s actions have taken away the permittee’s incentive to adhere to the required compliance schedules, since they were aware that no penalties would be assessed.”

Having obtained a reprieve of sorts from the Department of Health, the city began to lobby hard for legislation that would allow it to put off indefinitely any upgrade of the Sand Island plant. It claimed that there would be no tangible benefit realized from the money spent to achieve secondary treatment levels (although it had no studies to back it up on this).1

Gunning for Dole

Because the Sand Island plant received discharges from Dole Cannery, the influent had high levels of soluble BOD material. This helps explain the very low rates of removal of BOD from the Sand Island plant — and why the city would have difficulty meeting even primary treatment standards for BOD.

The city therefore undertook to do everything it could to get an exemption from the primary treatment requirement that even plants with 301(h) waivers would have to meet. Jeremy Harris, appointed by Mayor Frank Fasi to the post of managing director for the City and County of Honolulu, set out the city’s position in a letter to the City Council dated April 22, 1987.

Harris stated that neither the city’s Wai`anae plant nor its Sand Island plant would be able to achieve this standard without massive improvements — costing $1.4 million at Wai`anae and a whopping $59 million at Sand Island. He recommended two avenues to relief: “Have regulations implementing this provision of the Act written such that a high-soluble BOD influent is recognized and the 30% removal requirement apply to settleable or nonsoluble BOD.” Alternatively, the city could “obtain a legislative exemption by amending the law,” Harris wrote, noting that “Senator Inouye obtained temporary relief for the Big Island sugar companies in regard to meeting their discharge requirements.”

The regulatory road was not auspicious, according to Harris. “Chances are slim that we will get our way because we are the only major waiver discharger that cannot meet the 30% removal requirement,” he told Council members.

Harris noted that “Dole Company discharges a very high soluble BOD wastewater and if no exemption is obtained, they may have to pay a costly surcharge on their sewer fees or expend capital for BOD treatment.” But this would be “a waste of sewer users’ and private moneys,” he said. As soon as the city got the 301(h) waiver from the EPA, “we need to renew our effort which should include contact with our congressmen … and Dole Company and its lobbying groups.”

1 The city has claimed all along that, as Jeremy Harris phrased it, “water quality monitoring has shown that all state water quality standards…have been met” in areas potentially affected by the Sand Island discharges. This is what the EPA auditors had to say in 1989 about the state Department of Health’s monitoring program: “DOH has failed to establish an adequate ambient water quality monitoring program…[T]he region’s FY 1987 year-end evaluation concluded that DOH’s ambient water quality monitoring program was seriously inadequate…[V]ery little water quality data were being collected…Both the Region and DOH have acknowledged that the effectiveness of the ambient water quality monitoring in Hawai`i has been hampered by limited resources.”

Volume 2, Number 4 October 1991

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