Centerlines - April 2008 - (Page 25) ENVIRONMENT Deicing at Minneapolis-St. Paul. der running off into nearby streams and creeks. EPA Review Reveals Discrepancies in Airport Permitting While the actions by Saporito’s organization helped to put the problem in front of the EPA years ago, ongoing efforts by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) probably put the agency on its present course, according to the EPA’s Strassler. “The NRDC began to communicate its concerns about deicing fluids in airport storm water runoff more than 10 years ago,” he said. “As a result, we considered adding deicing fluids as a subcategory to a rule which covered chemical runoff from the internal cleaning of railway tank cars and chemical carrying truck trailers as well as other transportation equipment hauling hazardous wastes.” But the EPA, he added, decided at that time that it would be premature to include airport deicing fluid in the transportation equipment rules, which became final in August 2000. “Although we knew that all airports had to get storm water runoff permits, what was not known was whether those airports would install pollution controls under those permits. By the late 1990s we learned that some airports had made significant improvements in pollution controls, while others had not.” Continued lobbying by the NRDC caused the EPA to continue to look at the issue again, and in 2004 an announcement was published in the Federal Register that the agency would pursue regulations that would bring deicing fluids under ELG to be incorporated into airport permits. In 2006, the NRDC sued the New York State Department of Environment and Conservation over the discharge of pollutants from John F. Kennedy International Airport into Jamaica Bay and its tributaries. “We found that for over 20 years, the New York State Department of Environment and Conservation was renewing a storm www.aci-na.org | CENTERLINES some cases, a permit may specify a numerical limit on pollutant discharges, covering one or more contaminants emitted from discharge pipes on the airport property. Most NPDES permits incorporate the EPA’s Effluent Limitation Guidelines (ELG), which establish pollutant discharge limits for categories of industrial dischargers. But there are no ELGs devised specifically for airport permits. In fact, the current NPDES permits issued to airports are based on other provisions of the 1972 Clean Water Act (which established the NPDES permit process), such as the “best professional judgment” of the state or EPA office that issued the permit. Under any new airport regulations, ELGs would be included for the first time. For many airport operators and their tenants, that is the heart of the matter. It is easy to see why. What’s at Stake The key ingredient in deicing and anti-icing fluids for aircraft is ethylene glycol or propylene glycol, both of which are known to be oxygen-depleting agents, harmful to fish and other aquatic life. They, along with such anti-corrosion additives as dioxane, acetaldehyde, and formamides, have been shown to be slow to biodegrade and toxic to human health. Pavement deicers used at airports have also been shown to deplete oxygen. Strassler explained that the agency has been concerned about deicing chemicals in airport runoff since the mid-1990s. “We found that most permits required airports to conduct only occasional monitoring of discharges,” he said. “While the permits required a SWPPP, it was left up to the airports—themselves—to define any pollution problem and potential solutions,” he said. “There were no standards to make the permits effective in addressing the ongoing pollution problems with deicing and anti-icing fluids.” Jack Saporito, executive director of the Alliance of Residents Concerning O’Hare, an airport environmental watchdog group based in Elk Grove, Ill., pointed out that release of excessive amounts of these chemicals into the environment caused the group to sue Chicago O’Hare and the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, in 1996, for violations of the Clean Water Act. Citing the lawsuit against the Baltimore airport, Saporito’s group argued that only 5 percent of the deicing/anti-icing fluid was captured, with the remain- 25 http://www.aci-na.org
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