FRIDAY HARBOR STP

Sewage plant exceeds limits twice with no penalty either time

The Friday Harbor sewage treatment plant has exceeded its Clean Water Act discharge limits twice this year. Suspended solids in its effluent ran 381% over the permitted limit at the end of March and 296% over limit again on July 24, six days ago. Biochemical oxygen demand, a measure of how much a discharge will deplete oxygen in the water it enters, exceeded limits by 150% and 71% in those same two periods. Same outfall, four months apart: that pattern points to a persistent operating problem rather than a single bad day. The plant is not an outlier here. It is one of five wastewater facilities near the San Juan Islands currently flagged by the EPA for significant non-compliance, and among the 21 Clean Water Act permitted facilities within roughly 15 km of the islands, 14 have active violations right now and 17 have had at least one in the past year. Across all of them, the total penalties assessed to date add up to zero dollars. Violations are being logged; nothing is following from them. What isn't known matters here too. No dissolved oxygen, turbidity, or bacteria reading near this outfall was available to check whether the surrounding water is actually showing stress from these discharges. This is a paper record of exceedances, not a measurement of harm in the surrounding waters. But repeated overages at the same discharge point, with no enforcement response on record, are worth watching as the water warms into late summer, the season when oxygen demand in coastal waters is already at its highest.