Editorial | NEPA asleep on the job

The National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) has said that a lack of oxygen was the likely cause of last weekend’s big fish kill at the eastern end of Kingston Harbour. Which most people did not need anyone to tell them.

While the agency gave the proximate reason for the tragedy, what it did not address are the causes of the problem, and how NEPA may have contributed to it. Neither did it say how it plans to prevent, or limit, the likelihood of such catastrophes in the future.

To put the issue differently, NEPA can’t pretend to be a neutral bystander in this matter, for it has clear, indisputable and terminal obligations to the environmental safety of Jamaicans.

An executive agency, NEPA has been in operation for 22 years. It is supposed to carry out the technical and administrative functions of a plethora of environmental bodies, such as the Natural Resources Conservation Authority (NRCA), the Town and Country Planning Authority (TCPA), and the Land Development and Utilisation Commission (LDUC).

Those responsibilities include setting standards for water and air quality, issuing licences for sewage treatment facilities and policing those plants to ensure that they adhere to regulatory standards. It also has the power to institute legal action against individuals and organisations, including public-sector agencies, that fail in their regulatory obligations. This includes when they discharge untreated effluent into the natural environment.

TREND NOT NEW

On Saturday, tens of thousands of dead and dying fish floated onto the shore of long stretches of Kingston Harbour. NEPA rejected initial speculation that the fish were victims of an oil spill from vessels operating, or being repaired, in the busy industrial area.

The assessment of Anthony McKenzie, the agency’s director of environmental management and conservation, was that the fish died from a lack of oxygen, the result of an overload of oxygen-depleting nutrients in the harbour.

“You can look out and see the red/brown colour in the water with the algae, and then there is the normal greenish colour,” Mr McKenzie told this newspaper.

“... We are noticing a trend for that section of the harbour this time of the year, but red tide is not unusual to the harbour,” he added.

We take particular note of Mr McKenzie’s observation of “a trend” of algae growth in Kingston Harbour in the latter months of the year. Indeed, in November there was also a significant, though smaller, fish kill in the harbour’s eastern region.

At the time, Mr McKenzie’s colleague, Lisa Kirkland, NEPA’s manager for pollution monitoring and assessment, confirmed a reduction of oxygen in the water, to between three to 4.7 milligrammes per litre, when “tropical shallow-water fish ... need at least five milligrammes per litre for them to be okay”.

That was the result of excess nutrients in the water, which, combined with high temperatures, led to algal bloom, and, as can often happen in such circumstances, a depletion of oxygen in the water.

But the trend observed by Mr McKenzie is not new. Neither it is limited “to this time of year”. It is so, and notoriously known to be so, even by people who are not experts in these matters, that Kingston Harbour has been essentially dead for the better part of four decades. Indeed, in the latter part of the 1980s, the authorities put an end to the annual cross-harbour swim race, from Kingston to Port Royal, because they deemed it detrimental to people’s health.

DECADES OF TALK

Up to a few years ago, an estimated 20 million gallons of untreated, or only partially treated, sewage or other nasty effluent flowed into the harbour daily. Another 1.5 million tonnes of solid waste reached it. Much of the harbour’s contaminating discharge was from industrial plants near the coast, as well as run-off, including fertiliser residue, from rivers, streams and gullies that reach the sea. That cocktail is of danger to marine life and human health.

There have been decades of talk about cleaning up the harbour, including through the 2008 upgrading of the Soapberry Treatment Plant in St Catherine, which has a capacity to treat 20,000 tonnes of wastewater daily. But Soapberry is far from enough. And despite the development of smaller treatment facilities, there have been no Soapberry-sized projects for the city. And neither is there a sense of a robust enforcement of the regulatory rules by NEPA against companies and institutions whose effluent reaches the waterways and into the harbour.

That is not a problem peculiar to the capital. On Sunday, this newspaper also reported on the increasing contamination of the Negril River in the western resort town of the same name, which threatens marine life. The reported culprit is a wastewater treatment plant owned by a subsidiary of the government’s National Water Commission, whose ponds apparently leak into the river. Negril stakeholders claim that the facility was badly designed.

But worse, people in Negril, whose lives and livelihoods are at risk, do not believe that the problem, ongoing for decades, has received significant attention from NEPA. And that, for many people, is par for the course.