Wastewater

The Maryland Department of the Environment is expected to tell a Westminster business today that it can't wash trucks in its service bay unless it installs a system to catch oil that could drain into the city's water supply.The state agency will deny a permit to Westminster Lawn Service at a public meeting scheduled at 2 p.m. in the County Office Building, said Mark Jacobs, an MDE administrative officer.The lawn service applied in August for a permit to discharge wastewater into underground water via a well and underground pipe.

Months of uncertainty over how to dispose of wastewater from a planned 400-student addition to Glenelg High School in western Howard County will delay opening the new wing, school officials say. Even a best-case scenario will force at least a several-month delay, said Sydney L. Cousin, associate school superintendent for finance and operations. And if another series of hurdles can't be cleared quickly, the addition could be delayed a full year or more beyond the scheduled August 2001 opening, he said.

THE DISPUTE over the temperature of water discharged from the Hampstead wastewater treatment plant into Piney Run illustrates the complexities of anti-pollution laws -- and the hidden threat of thermal pollution.It also highlights different visions of the area's future: Carroll County favors more development there; Baltimore County, just across the county line, does not.Baltimore County residents charge that effluent from the Carroll plant is too warm for a state-protected trout stream: The legal limit is 68 degrees or the ambient water temperature.

Hopes that a long-awaited, 400-seat addition at Glenelg High School will be ready for use late next year were dealt a blow by a request this week for a new state hearing on a wastewater treatment plant vital to the project, school officials said. Howard school Superintendent Sydney L. Cousin and Chief Operating Officer Raymond Brown said a request for another Maryland Department of the Environment hearing on the disputed wastewater treatment plant for the school could delay completion of the addition until April or August 2007.

The Carroll County commissioners expect to decide soon on a plan to lower the temperature of treated water discharged from the county's wastewater treatment plant near Hampstead. The cost of correcting the temperature is estimated to cost as much as $2.2 million, Carroll Comptroller Eugene Curfman said. But until a specific remedy is chosen, he said the cost won't be known for sure. The commissioners voted unanimously last week to allow the county to incur the debt. Commissioner Julia Walsh Gouge, a former mayor of Hampstead, said the temperature of the water discharged into Piney Run is 1 to 1 1/2 degrees too high, on average, but nonetheless must be lowered.

With more than 60 percent of their septic systems failing, a group of Lineboro residents has turned to a state-backed, self-help wastewater program for relief.Concerned about health risks and property values, they have recruited 35 of approximately 65 property owners in the unincorporated rural community along the Pennsylvania border, forming the Lineboro Environmental Wastewater Treatment Association (LEWTA)."We've known about it [the wastewater problem] for a lot of years -- probably 20 years or more -- because when people went to sell or buy property, the ground wouldn't pass a perk [percolation]

Howard County school officials say a proposed wastewater treatment plant for Glenelg High School is safe. So does the Maryland Department of the Environment, which approved a permit that is "fully protective of public health and state groundwater quality standards." But several western Howard residents are not too sure. "What options do you have when you create a monster?" said Rose Fieghenne, a longtime Glenelg resident who lives near the high school. "I haven't seen evidence of assurances.

Breaking off nearly eight months of negotiations, federal and state officials filed suit yesterday seeking potentially tens of millions of dollars in penalties from Baltimore for years of alleged pollution of Gwynns Falls and the Patapsco River with tainted wastewater from two major municipal facilities.In papers filed in U.S. District Court, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Maryland Department of the Environment charged that since 1992, the city's Ashburton water-filtration plant has routinely discharged too much chlorine and other waste materials into the Gwynns Falls, a tributary of the Patapsco.

The county commissioners dealt a blow yesterday to Carroll's Board of Education, refusing to allow the panel to spend leftover money from school construction projects that were completed under budget. Acting on the recommendation of county Budget Director Steven D. Powell, Commissioners Donald I. Dell and Robin Bartlett Frazier denied the school board's request to spend $52,000 remaining in the budget from the construction of Cranberry Station Elementary School. "I think it's the right thing to do," Frazier said of the decision.

When Dorothy Rowland moved to her farm in northern Baltimore County 30 years ago, she could hop across the section of Piney Run that trickled through her property. Now, "I don't think a broad jumper could get across that thing," she said. The stream has cut steep banks as high as 6 feet. Algae coat many of the rocks in the stream bed. A procession of foamy bubbles never seems to stop. Piney Run has changed, Rowland and other Baltimore County residents say, from a clear, gentle stream to a murky, polluted torrent.