My ex-wife used to be on the water quality commission board on our sea coast town. What I learned from that, is that all it took, was one sewage treatment station failure incident (and they happened on a reguar basis) for a community to dump more raw untreated sewage into the ocean in one day, than recreational boaters could put there in ten years. And, usually, when it happened, it would be reported in a
single column, one inch announcement, on page seventeen of the paper. And, often, all it would take, would be a
power failure, or a really heavy rain. It was a given every time we had a tropical storm that it would happen.
You couldn't make her swim off of the beach, anywhere, after being on that commission and she would constantly say that anyone who had learned what she had, would not swim in it either. And, it would usually take about a week for the ocean to clean itself (from e. coli counts, it happened so often, that the county had a
boat set up for taking these readings on a full time basis, and often, the boat would be the way they had discovered an incident even happened) after one of these incidents.
I don't believe recreational boats should dump raw sewage inside the prohibited limits, but I don't think it makes much of a real difference when someone does any more. It's more of the principal of the thing than a real problem. Remember, the vast majority of the boats out on the water don't even have heads in them. But, they all have people in them.
A lot of these
pump out stations were built for the same reason that about 90 per cent of local city and county construction gets done. Contractors search out and find federal construction grants, including
pump out construction, and take packages to the local
government, showing how they can build these grant subsidized projects for the community at very small costs (again, personal
family experience, my brother in law, a civil
engineer, works for a very large firm, and his only job is to take these packages to local governments and market them to them. His company has provided a lot of this stuff, including pump out facilities and other harbor improvements, this very way). It's amazing to me how many times, these local governments decide they have a problem, because someone wanting to make some
money tells them they have a problem and a grant to fix it.
No doubt there is some benefit to the
environment from pump out facilities and services. But, that's rarely the reason theses systems actually get built, installed, or purchased. Most of the times, the
money would be much better spent on trying to improve the land sewage treatment systems. Hey, but that's
government.
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