Chattahoochee Riverkeeper suing City of Atlanta for violating Clean Water Act

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), representing Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK), has filed a lawsuit against the City of Atlanta for violating the Clean Water Act.

The lawsuit alleges that Atlanta’s largest wastewater treatment facility, R.M. Clayton has been dumping dangerously high levels of pollutants into the Chattahoochee River — including chemicals and harmful levels of bacteria like E. coli — violating both the Clean Water Act and their wastewater treatment permit.

CRK sent a letter in July notifying the City of Atlanta of its intention to sue if the underlying issues were not resolved within 60 days, which is required by the Clean Water Act. 

“We were really hoping the city would come to the table, sit with us, and find a way to get this resolved — not just for a temporary amount of time, but for long into the future,” said Jason Ulseth, riverkeeper and executive director of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.

According to Ulseth, the city did respond to an initial email CRK sent asking to meet, but communications soon went silent after they didn’t respond to a date request.

“The City of Atlanta has refused to come to the table, refused to accept responsibility for this huge sewage spill going into the river, and we felt it was completely necessary to file the federal lawsuit because they’ve refused to come to the table and show us what’s being done to fix it,” Ulseth said.

Working properly, the wastewater would be treated to acceptable levels using UV channels and safely discharged into the river. That hasn’t been the case, according to Ulseth. In March, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper conducted a routine water quality test — tests that they do in over 200 locations every week as part of their Neighborhood Water Watch Program — and found that the high levels of E. coli. That site visit also noted that one of the 4 UV channels to treat the wastewater was offline.

R.M. Clayton, built in 1935, is capable of treating and discharging up to 122 million gallons of sewage per day. In 2018, it completed a two-year, $56 million upgrade project to “enhance system operational efficiency and reliability.” An Environment Protection Division site visit on March 7 of this year, prompted by CRK’s testing, revealed that the facility planned to use a combination of chlorination, bleach and sand filters to decrease the levels of harmful bacteria.

Ulseth said that while the facility has implemented measures to stop the pollutants, they don’t address underlying causes and are only temporary solutions — and the chemicals used to kill the bacteria can even cause their own negative impacts on the river. What he and other riverkeepers are looking for are long term solutions — which starts with addressing the root causes.

“What we’ve learned this year is that Atlanta completely let that plant run into the ground,” Ulseth said. “When we first detected the major issue in March of this year, creating both a public health threat and threat to the river — that was because of a lack of maintenance and proper operations.”

The earliest forms of regulating water quality and pollution date back to 1948, but the Clean Water Act was largely formed in 1972, in the wake of an environmental focus in the nation with the Environmental Protection Agency forming just two years prior. It has since been amended multiple times to keep up with new knowledge.

E. coli thresholds are expressed as the number of colony-forming units (cfu) per 100 mL, according to the EPA. Current Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommendations state that E. coli levels should not exceed “a geometric mean (GM) of 126 cfu per 100 mL” over a 30-day period in fresh recreational waters and a “statistical threshold value (STV) of 410 cfu per 100 mL measured.”

At those thresholds, the EPA’s Recreational Water Quality Criteria document estimates that of 1,000 people who were in direct contact with the infected water, like swimming, only 36 would become sick.

According to that EPD site visit in March and CRK, the detected levels of E. coli were consistently much higher than 126 cfu per 100 mL — sometimes hundreds of cfu higher. The report noted that the E.coli for each day of the month of February was only within weekly limits seven out of the 29 days of the month; additionally, in the first five days of March, the lowest most probable number of E. coli cfu was 980 per 100 mL, approximately 7.7 times larger than that 126 recommendation. 

“The city did not tell anybody; they did not tell the public, they did not tell us, they did not tell the state regulators. They were operating the plant in clear violation and threatening public health downstream, which is totally unacceptable,” Ulseth said. “It’s one of the worst river catastrophes in the last 20 years on the Chattahoochee. 

Ulseth said he hopes that the lawsuit will bring forth a consent decree that will require “real, measurable and timed deadlines” to ensure the city is taking proper steps to remedy the facility, as well as outline proper maintenance and operation schedules to avoid this happening again.

Note: Saporta Report reached out to a representative of the City of Atlanta’s Office of Water Treatment and reclamation. This story will be updated if a response is given.