Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The city of Palouse may get more time to decide on a plan for its wastewater treatment plant after a change in requirements from the Washington State Department of Ecology.
Informed at a meeting in Spokane Aug. 23 at the DOE’s Eastern Region office, the city has been given a new target for reducing discharge of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB), a group of 209 man-made compounds used in manufacturing.
The change comes three months before Palouse’s deadline to set a plan by Dec. 31 to address nitrogen levels and a cooler overall effluence for the plant.
“The writing on the wall is the approach we were going to take; that’s not gonna work,” said Palouse Mayor Michael Echanove.
The city had decided on a plan to build a storage lagoon, which would store treated wastewater during low-flow periods on the Palouse River and release it during high-flow periods.
With the new requirement, Palouse would need to discharge treated wastewater into a land application – storing it and irrigating it off onto a non-edible crop.
Another option may be to evaporate it off, similar to Ritzville, which has 40 acres of lagoons.
“There’s ways to do this. The biggest thing you need is a checkbook,” Echanove said.
With the new directive on PCBs, Echanove and the city’s appointed committee on the subject will consider their options.
“To plan for it now since you’re already doing a significant update,” said Brooke Beeler, spokesperson for DOE.
The city will now prepare a letter to the Department of Ecology to seek an extension on the Dec. 31 deadline.
“A wastewater treatment plant is a never-ending project,” Echanove said. “There’s just no other way to put it.”
The change in PCB rules came from the Washington State DOE in conjunction with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The new rules will now affect any new permits or updated permits.
PCBs were produced for commercial use from the 1920s until the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act banned certain uses and restricted PCB concentrations.
Found in old electrical transformers and capacitors, PCBs were also contained in carbonless copy paper and caulk used to seal cracks in buildings.
PCBs are still produced – either in regulated lower levels or inadvertently in manufacturing of chemicals such as dyes and pigments.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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