Idaho Water Quality Standards
In Idaho water quality standards are so political that the legislature must give final approval to them. This dramatically decreases the chance that the standards will be protective of human health, fish, and wildlife, and particularly threatened and endangered species.
So, it should not be a surprise that when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) went to the federal fish and wildlife agencies as early as 1996 to ask for a review of Idaho toxic criteria, and those expert agencies concluded that the Idaho criteria were not protective, none of the federal agencies wanted to take responsibility for the outcome. So they didn’t; the process just ground to a halt and they could not get it restarted, even after hiring a consultant.
In 2013, NWEA filed a lawsuit against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for failing to act after so many years of delay on 23 toxic pollutants. In 2015, NWEA settled with NMFS and FWS on the basis that they would complete the required consultations under the Endangered Species Act, which they did. Between the two agencies, they concluded that Idaho water quality standards—for arsenic, copper, lead, nickel, selenium, zinc, cyanide, and mercury—would jeopardize the continued existence of threatened and endangered species.
The NWEA lawsuit also named the EPA because it had not even bothered to ask NMFS and FWS to review yet other water quality standards it had approved for Idaho. And it had failed to promulgate a mercury criterion for Idaho after disapproving the state’s submission in 2008, nine years ago. In May 2015, EPA filed a motion to dismiss certain claims in the case; the Idaho judge has completely ignored the case since that time.
Idaho Arsenic Standards for Human Health
Arsenic pollution in water is both naturally occurring and caused by human activities. Arsenic is well known for causing cancer—including bladder, skin, liver, kidney, and prostate cancers—as well as other chronic diseases. Arsenic can damage almost every human function, including the nervous, cardiovascular, renal, and respiratory systems.
In 2010, Idaho water quality standards were updated under the Clean Water Act (CWA), standards that apply to the levels of pollution in streams and rivers. But instead of using the relatively low levels that EPA recommended, it used EPA-recommended levels under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The difference was stark: a maximum of 0.14 µg/L under the CWA versus 10 µg/L under the SDWA. The reason is two-fold. First, the SDWA takes water treatment into account because it applies at the end of a tap. And, second, the SDWA level was a highly political choice by the President George Bush Administration. Contrary to its own policies, EPA then approved Idaho’s choice of a dangerous level of arsenic.
In 2015, NWEA challenged EPA’s approval of the Idaho arsenic standard for human health. And, in 2016, EPA agreed in a court order to reverse its approval and establish new arsenic standards for Idaho by mid-2019. In a separate out-of-court agreement, EPA committed to issue CWA discharge permits using more protective levels during the interim period before the new standards are in place. And, EPA agreed to increase monitoring of pollution discharges to detect arsenic. In September 2016, EPA disapproved Idaho’s arsenic criteria.
