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For Immediate Release: July 22, 2020
Media Contact: Alejandro Diaz, 808-541-2711, [email protected]

Pacific Energy to pay civil penalty for violations of the Clean Water Act at the American Samoa Terminal

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa – The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have entered into a Consent Decree (CD) with Pacific Energy South West Pacific, Ltd. (Pacific Energy) related to that company’s violations of the Clean Water Act.

Under the CD, Pacific Energy will pay $300,000 in a civil penalty and will take action to protect Pago Pago Harbor by eliminating unauthorized wastewater discharges from the American Samoa Terminal. Pacific Energy also will take steps to return the terminal to compliance with Clean Water Act sampling and reporting requirements.

“Unauthorized discharges of pollutants into the Pago Pago Harbor are unacceptable,” said EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator John Busterud. “We are pleased that Pacific Energy will be taking actions to ensure the protection of an important coastal water resource.”

Pacific Energy operates a major bulk fuel terminal in Pago Pago that stores large quantities of petroleum fuel for distribution on American Samoa. The terminal routinely generates industrial wastewater by draining water that has separated from the fuel in its tanks. This industrial wastewater is then comingled with stormwater and discharged to Pago Pago Harbor.

Under the Clean Water Act, the terminal is required to have a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit and meet the requirements of that permit. Pacific Energy had an NPDES permit from 2010 through 2015 but did not conduct regular wastewater sampling or meet the permit’s other requirements. Pacific Energy allowed its NPDES permit to expire in 2015 and then operated without a permit – in violation of the Clean Water Act and of a related 2016 EPA administrative order – until November 1, 2019, when its current NPDES permit became effective.

Due to the lack of sampling information, it is impossible to know the quantity of pollutants that was contained in wastewater generated at the terminal and discharged into Pago Pago Harbor. Pacific Energy’s unmonitored discharge of pollutants such as oil, grease and other toxic pollutants to Pago Pago Harbor may have damaged water quality and harmed the chemical, physical, and biological balance of the Harbor. Many Samoans fish and recreate in Pago Pago Harbor, which is home to important cultural and environmental resources, including nearly 200 species of coral.

The CD will be lodged in federal district court by the U.S. Department of Justice and is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval. A copy of the CD will be available on the Department of Justice website at: www.justice.gov/enrd/consent-decrees.

For more information on EPA’s Industrial Wastewater program, please visit: https://www.epa.gov/npdes/industrial-wastewater.

Learn more about EPA’s Pacific Southwest Region. Connect with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

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Contact: [email protected]

EPA Tool to Help Local Officials Customize Restoration Efforts

ANNAPOLIS (July 21, 2020) – Local officials in Chesapeake Bay coastal areas will be better able to identify the best locations for their top environmental projects with an online tool under development through an EPA partnership.

EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office (CBPO) and Office of Research and Development (ORD), in coordination with the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership, are working on a science-based “decision support system” to help municipalities, counties and others pinpoint sites for priority restoration and conservation projects.

The partnership between CBPO and ORD’s Atlantic Coastal Environmental Sciences Division in Narragansett, Rhode Island, is the first step in creating a tool to assess the benefits of various approaches to building coastal resiliency in the Chesapeake Bay region.

Those approaches could include:

• Reducing flooding risks by identifying opportunities to restore flood plains and riparian zones.
• Planning for sea level rise adaptation with marsh migration and marsh hydrology restoration.
• Identifying optimal locations for economic development.
• Prioritizing protection and restoration of habitat.

The decision support system will allow local officials to assign a weight to their priorities, like air quality, water quality, recreation and habitat for wildlife, and find ideal locations in the watershed to restore or conserve land based on those weightings, according to Dr. Emily Trentacoste, an EPA environmental scientist representing CBPO in the Regional Research Partnership Program (R2P2).

“The idea is to be able to look at two areas and say, if I’m really interested in habitat for recreation for hunters and fishers, here are the best areas to conserve land, for example,” Trentacoste said.

The initial phase of work has involved understanding potential users of the system and their priorities.  The project is benefitting from strong user research and stakeholder engagement already conducted by the Chesapeake Bay Program partnership – one of the reasons the partners found the Chesapeake Bay region a ripe one for collaboration.

Trentacoste noted that each state in the Bay watershed has differences in who makes local decisions, whether it’s at the township level in Pennsylvania or the county level in Maryland.  “And there can be local planning boards that make the individual land use decisions,” she said.

“We plan to go in and actually engage with the communities to help us develop a useful tool in the end.  But right now, we’re just trying to get a lay of the land – how do local communities make decisions throughout the watershed,” said Trentacoste.  “Who are the players that are involved and what types of decisions are they actually making?”

The project is putting a geographic twist to a “Rapid Benefits Indicators Approach” developed by ORD researchers that examines ways to quantify benefits associated with restoration or conservation in different areas. (For more details on the approach, visit: https://www.epa.gov/water-research/rapid-benefit-indicators-rbi-approach )

And while the effort is starting with coastal areas, there is long-term interest in expanding to the headwater states.  It also may involve a suite of end products depending on the user and audience.

“We at the Chesapeake Bay Program want to get to the point where we can potentially have a tool or a series of tools for the entire Chesapeake Bay coastal region – customized to be Bay specific.  We also plan on having other products like story maps that walk through the process we used and results so you can see the types of benefits associated with different restoration practices,” said Trentacoste.

The decision support system tool is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.

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