Maryland Proposed 'No Discharge' Zone

[jkleins]

I am not buying it guys. I live in a little town in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Shenandoah Valley. Each of the several thousand of us in this little town are paying an extra couple hundred dollars a year to build a new water treatment plant to protect a Bay that few of us use to any extent because of environmental laws passed to protect the Bay. It is not fair to say that no one else is doing anything.

Yea some municipalities are not as good as others at keeping up with the population increases and get overflow of the water treatment plants. Our focus should be on holding them accountable too not using the "but he is doing it too" excuse that never worked in grade school and will probably not work much better now as adults.

Jim

[YOGAO]

The NDZ is part of a bigger, multi-pronged effort to clean up the Chesapeake, or at least get it to a point where it isn't getting worse.

As noted, PEOPLE (that's all you folks wanting to live in the watershed) are the problem. One of the reasons we LEFT Maryland was to reduce the impact we were having on the environment. It was actually the fastest way to have the biggest impact.

Maryland HAS implemented a so-called "flush tax" to fund sewage plant upgrades to eliminate the single biggest problem (outdated and overflowing treatment facilities), but that is a program that takes years and LOTS of dollars. Here is a related article.

Fair Winds,
Mike

[gonesail]

nobody in government seems to trust the Type I devices anymore. they want you to dump your sewage on land so it can then be dumped into the chesapeake

[knothead]

Compost your crap ashore and everybody wins.

[4arch]

A lot of the cruising guide lists of marinas with pumpouts are either outdated or were never accurate in the first place and the official Maryland Department of Natural Resources listing is inaccurate as well.

[gettinthere]

There is a lot of misunderstanding here.

A lectrosan device puts out effluent that is well within the federal regulations. BUT that will be banned. Overboard discharge of ALL kinds will be banned.

Meantime the municipalities are dumping RAW sewage.

So trying to compare raw sewage to treated discharges is a gross distortion of the facts on hand.

The treated discharge from a lectrasan is well within the federal limits for polution discharge. There is no need to ban this and it will not accomplish anything. In fact it could be seen to make things worse. Treated lectrasan dischage is well within federal regs but instead you take your boat to a pumpout facility, your cr@p is pumped out to the municipal sewer system and it might get dumped into the bay UNTREATED. That is a regression from the current situation.

It is already illegal to dump untreated sewage into the coastal waters of the US. Boaters are banned from doing this...but municipalities are dumping thousands of gallons of untreated sewage into the bays all over the country.

[FrankZ]

When we bought out boat it came with a LectraSan. It is convenient not dealing with pump outs but I have to make saltwater for it. I have been considering a PuraSan as a replacement but I suspect I will wait out this before making any decisions I am not sure where I could put a holding tank of any usable size.

[knothead]

Originally Posted by FrankZ

When we bought out boat it came with a LectraSan. It is convenient not dealing with pump outs but I have to make saltwater for it. I have been considering a PuraSan as a replacement but I suspect I will wait out this before making any decisions I am not sure where I could put a holding tank of any usable size.

Why in the world would you not opt for a composting head?
No holding tank. No stinky hoses. No through-hulls. No sloshing cesspool that could leak into your bilges. No pump-outs.
Instead, you snap the lid on a five gallon bucket set it into the dock cart and wheel it ashore to be turned into valuable fertilizer for your roses. Or just leave it to compost onboard if you don't use it that much.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.

[jkleins]

Originally Posted by gettinthere

There is a lot of misunderstanding here.

I think you are correct. It has always been my impression that the reason these are considered for the ban is because they don't work that well and are not a dependable way to purify waste. I will agree completely that if you these devices really put out the same effluent that waste water treatment plants do that banning them seems ridiculous. I was just under the impression that that was not the case.

Jim

[FrankZ]

Too tall.. too deep and I am not a farmer.

[knothead]

I bet you're not a plumber either, yet you choose to play about with cesspools and the like.
Lots of little old ladies would be happy to show you how to maintain a compost pile.

Whatever works for ya.

[jkleins]

Originally Posted by knothead

Why in the world would you not opt for a composting head?
No holding tank. No stinky hoses. No through-hulls. No sloshing cesspool that could leak into your bilges. No pump-outs.
Instead, you snap the lid on a five gallon bucket set it into the dock cart and wheel it ashore to be turned into valuable fertilizer for your roses. Or just leave it to compost onboard if you don't use it that much.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Or you could ask "why carry a big bucket of doo-doo around in a rickety dock cart when you can put it in a nice enclosed smell-free holding tank that you just need to empty every once in a while with a nice suction device." Seems like a no-brainer to me

Jim

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by S/V Illusion

Just what we need - another rant about how the government can't figure out anything...
NDZs are not the problem; they are a partial solution. Blaming politicians or "the government" for raw sewage discharges isn't a solution or even marginally accurate; to be precise, you are the problem.

Come back to reality folks. Pay the huge tax burden associated with building larger sewage treatment plants capable of handling combined sewer overflows. Hold your political representatives accountable for NOT raising taxes sufficient to pay for this.

If you aren't willing to pay and don't want to vote for a politician who wants to raise your taxes, please stop complaining here where it does absolutely no good.

Ummm, I don't think you understood the logic of the original post. He was not ranting against the failure to build sewage plants. That's a different problem, different conversation, different thread. He was complaining that the government picks on cruisers as a cosmetic "we're doing something about it" measure, which burdens us unfairly, discourages something really good like Lectrasans, diverts attention from the real problem, and does nothing to actually improve the marine environment.

I totally agree with him. We started cruising in England last year. In contrast to Florida, where we used to sail, there are NO discharge rules at all (other than rules in individual marinas, which are not even slighly enforced). Holding tanks are almost non-existent and no one has even heard of a Lectrasan. Elaborate scientific studies were done here which showed that dumping marine heads directly overboard even into rivers (tidal estuaries, that is), is such a tiny volume of sewage compared to other sources (like whole cities overflowing into rivers, as the OP mentioned) that cruisers have NO material effect on the marine environment. That yacht discharges amount to 0.001% (say) of all of the pollution in the rivers and that changing the laws would produce no measurable improvement of the water.

So I completely agree with the OP -- let the politicians stop making scapegoats out of us.

And bravo for the English, who seem to actually care about sailors, and are willing to be reasonable and scientific about making policies affecting us. By the way, there is also no requirement of any kind of registration or licenses (except for VHF), and yachts are exempt from any kind of taxes (other than VAT on the purchase price, imposed only once, on the first purchaser). Yeah! That's a real seafaring nation for you.

We are fanatically careful with garbage, and would never let so much as a beer bottle top get into the water. But human waste in the tiny quantities discharged by sailors (unlike, for example, laundry detergent which causes algae blooms and is really hamful) is a natural organic material which is quickly broken down in the ocean. I wouldn't discharge into a small anchorage where people are swimming, but underway in the ocean it is simply ridiculous to worry about it.

[Chief Engineer]

Most of the beaches get closed on the Chesapeake get closed because of Duck and Permanent Canada Goose Crap....e. coli

[S/V Illusion]

I think your analogy with the UK falls apart pretty quickly when one considers the flushing rate of most of their estuaries vs. that of places like the Chesapeake Bay. Regardless,I know of no one who would like to swim in an area which allows holding tank waste to be direct-discharged.

When you consider the myriad sources of pollution from urban runoff, not easily controllable, rural non-point source runoff which is impracticable to control, combined sewer overflows not economically feasible to control and politicians reluctant to advocate huge tax increases to pay for pollution control, that leave boats which are both an easy and a legitimate target.

This is the real world we live in and economic realities do matter except to those who always want to blame the government blindly for everything they can't fully understand.