Polluters outside reach of Clean Water Act

NEW YORK - Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens, and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers, and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

Today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time-consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our clean water programs in some states,’’ said Douglas F. Mundrick, an EPA lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.’’

The court rulings causing these problems focused on language in the Clean Water Act that limit it to “the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters’’ of the United States. For decades, “navigable waters’’ was broadly interpreted by regulators to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers. But the two decisions suggested that waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters’’ and are therefore not covered by the act, even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water.

Article courtesy of The New York Times