Sen.Vitter’s dead-zone stance is wrong, coastal experts say
21st November 2013 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
The Gulf dead zone south of Louisiana and Texas was above average in size this summer, and is getting some needed attention after no recent progress in efforts to reduce it, according to coastal experts. In a Nov. 1 letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Republican Senator David Vitter said the feds are being too tough on Louisiana in “an unwise approach” to dead-zone management. But others say the government needs to do more. The zone, measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in July at 5,840 square miles, approximates Massachusetts in size and is the biggest in the nation.
The dead zone is blamed on nitrogen and phosphorous entering the Mississippi River from fertilizers, animal waste, eroded soil, and municipal and industrial sewage. The nation’s corn crop, an intensive fertilizer user, is the largest ever this year. Runoff moves from Midwest states downriver to the lower Mississippi and the Gulf. In warm weather, nitrogen and phosphorous feed algae blooms at the river’s mouth in the Gulf. Algae, along with the protozoa that eat them, die and drop toward the ocean floor, where they decompose in an oxygen-consuming process. What remains is an area with too little oxygen for aquatic life, threatening Gulf fisheries.
Unlike Vitter, Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium in Chauvin, believes that EPA isn’t being too hard on Louisiana. “For the whole Mississippi River watershed, no regulations have been applied to date as a result of the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient and Hypoxia Task Force of federal and state representatives,” she said. “All actions so far are voluntary, with the focus on education.”
The task force, formed in 1997, consists of five federal agencies and twelve states, along with Indian tribes in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin or MARB. The sprawling, 31-state MARB accounts for 41 percent of the contiguous United States. Hypoxia task force members adopted a 2008 Action Plan and a 2009 Annual Operating Plan, released in mid-2008, hoping to reduce runoff and raise water quality.
Rabelais said the quality of the river’s water needs improvement if algae blooms and the dead zone’s size are to shrink. And she said the Pelican State could help pave the way to meeting those goals. “If Louisiana were responsible for the named offshore segments then it would necessarily have to work with upstream states to make a difference,” she said. “That effort doesn’t exist now.” The named segments are three Louisiana coastal areas west of the Mississippi River’s mouth—known as 021102, 070601 and 20806 and designated as threatened by EPA.
But Senator Vitter in his Nov. 1 letter to Nancy Stoner, EPA’s Acting Assistant Administrator of the Office of Water, said the agency doesn’t have enough evidence to include those segments in its list of impaired waters requiring a Total Maximum Daily Load or TMDL plan for regulation. A TMDL is a calculation to determine how much of a pollutant a body of water can bear and still meet water quality standards. Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA requires states to submit what it calls a 303(d) list of threatened coastal segments, rivers, streams and lakes every two years. States identify water where required pollution controls aren’t enough to maintain quality, and they set priorities for TMDLs based on sensitivity of the water body’s uses to pollution. States are required to draw up plans for completing TMDLs within eight to13 years of their first listings.
In his letter, Vitter, a member of the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, supported views held by the Louisiana Dept. of Environmental Quality. “EPA placed three Louisiana coastal sub-segments on the 303(d) list, beginning with the agency’s 2008 and 2010 list-decision documents,” Tim Beckstrom, DEQ spokesman, said last week. “DEQ has consistently stated that EPA’s assessments for these three bodies in the state’s territorial waters are inaccurate,” he said. “The area and the number of samples taken to support the listing were limited. A larger data collection is required to better represent the range of conditions and seasons along Louisiana’s coastal Gulf waters.”
Beckstrom added that TMDLs addressing the three Louisiana segments alone won’t solve the Gulf hypoxia issue. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey have shown that the state accounts for only about 2 percent of the oxygen-depleting nutrients entering the Gulf, he said.
Meanwhile, in a September 23 ruling U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey in New Orleans gave the EPA six months to decide whether to set Clean Water Act standards for nitrogen and phosphorous in all U.S. waterways, or else to explain why they aren’t needed. The suit was filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others in March 2012, challenging the EPA’s denial of the Mississippi River Collaborative’s 2008 petition asking the agency to set standards and cleanup plans for nitrogen and phosphorus. Plaintiffs argued that EPA “refused to respond to the question posed to it, which is whether such federal action is necessary to comply with the Clean Water Act.” Judge Zainey agreed with the plaintiffs that EPA’s failure to provide a direct answer was unlawful.
The state-federal hypoxia task force set up in 1997 hasn’t had much success, Eugene Turner, Oceanography and Coastal Sciences professor at Louisiana State University, said last week. “The nitrogen load in the river has gone up slightly, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, though it was supposed to be reduced,” he said. Farm policies aren’t helping. The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and several states have recommended that growers use less fertilizer and different cropping systems to reduce runoff from fields. “But federal farm subsidies encourage corn production and achieving higher yields,” he said. “Because it’s rough on the soil, corn requires lots of fertilizer. Farmers are only acting rationally by responding to subsidies.”
U.S. corn production has risen since Congress in 2005 mandated that ethanol be blended into gasoline under the Renewable Fuel Standard. Since then, farmers have cultivated more corn per acre. USDA expects this year’s crop to be a record and yields per acre to be the third highest ever. An estimated 35 percent of this corn harvest will be used for ethanol.
Budget cuts in science programs at NOAA and other federal agencies have affected research, management and cooperation on the hypoxia zone, and hindered efforts to reduce it, Turner also said.
Turner agrees with Rabalais of LUMCON that EPA isn’t being too strict on Louisiana. “There’s been little progress on the ground on the Gulf hypoxia issue for 20 years,” he said. “We need a carrot-and-stick approach, with rules and penalties. Leadership is needed at all levels if we’re going to see any progress.”
Many hundreds of dead zones exist in rivers, lakes, streams and oceans around the world. The largest man-made one is a string of hypoxia zones in the Baltic Sea, separating Scandinavia from mainland Europe, Turner said.
This article originally published in the November 11, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
