Conservationists waging a decade-long legal battle to force the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate ship ballast water just like any other pollutant are headed back to court.
Environmentalists last summer won a drawn-out lawsuit forcing the EPA to regulate ballast water under the Clean Water Act, and the EPA has responded to that court order by requiring ships to flush their ballast tanks in mid-ocean to expel any unwanted organisms.
That does not go far enough, according to the conservation groups that filed suit this week. They note that ballast tank flushing is already required for ships entering the Great Lakes, but it isn't effective enough to protect the lakes or the nation's coastal waters.
Nina Bell, executive director of Oregon-based Northwest Environmental Advocates, one of the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, said the EPA is giving the shipping industry "a free ride at the expense of the environment and taxpayers."
The plaintiffs want the EPA to require treatment systems that would do a better job of killing unwanted organisms than just ballast flushing.
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"EPA met the (court's) deadline and delivered a protective and practical permit to protect the nation's waterways from ship-borne pollution and to avoid an environmental and economic shipwreck," Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for water, said in a news release last month.
The plaintiff's attorneys say the Clean Water Act requires something more than just flushing ballast tanks, and they note that ballast treatment technology, while still evolving, is available and should be required.
Testing of ballast water treatment systems is taking place in Superior as part of the Great Ships Initiative. The research is being conducted by the Lake Superior Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.
"Not only did EPA pass up this tremendous opportunity to protect the country from invasive species discharged in ships' ballast water, it violated the Clean Water Act at the same time," Deborah Silvas, director of the Stanford Law School Environmental Clinic, said in a statement. "The law does not allow EPA to do what's politically expedient; it requires what is necessary to protect our waters."
Silvas is representing Northwest Environmental Advocates, People for Puget Sound and the Center for Biological Diversity.
The case was filed in California's 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
-- Copyright © 2009, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services
