Agency violates Clean Water Act - again

Sunday’s Bee (July 6) included a story tucked away on page A6 about the fact that EPA has slapped ITD with an additional fine — $325,000 — for violating the Clean Water Act on a Highway 95 project near Lake Coeur d’Alene. The original violation occurred when ITD’s faulty erosion control caused thousands of tons of sediment to flow into Mica Creek and Mica Bay. ITD and the contractor have now paid a total of $1.7 million in fines and compensation because of the violations, the “region’s largest ever fines” for a Clean Water Act violation.

The additional fine is the result of ITD’s failure to comply with the terms of a 2006 settlement of the EPA lawsuit against ITD. The terms of the court-ordered agreement are intended to prevent further water quality disasters from occurring on ITD projects in North Idaho.

Instead of meeting the requirements of the agreement and avoiding more fines, ITD apparently returned to its lax attitude regarding the protection of water quality — which cost us taxpayers another $325,000.

ITD is attempting to downplay the recent violations, calling them “technicalities” that have nothing to do with avoiding the type of mass failures that caused the damage to Mica Bay. EPA disagreed that they are mere technicalities, saying ITD “fell short of commitments it had made to prevent similar costly environmental accidents.”

It appears the agency is still unwilling to take the necessary precautions to avoid damage to waterways.

I shudder to think what will happen to our waterways if the Sand Creek project proceeds and more than 84,000 cubic yards of fill is dumped into the creek; massive highway walls are placed on Sand Creek’s unstable saturated soils; over a mile of Sand Creek’s shoreline is torn up and replaced with riprap, and the main creek channel is filled and ITD attempts to dredge a new channel around the fill, and so on.

A recipe for environmental and financial disaster for sure …

LIZ SEDLER

Sandpoint