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Pesky Pesticides
Bay Area folk spray 85 tons of diazinon on their gardens and grounds each year, and lately, enough of it has been running off into local creeks to kill critters at the bottom of the aquatic food web, stirring regulators to call for cuts in inputs from all sources. A report presented to the S.F. Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board in late September recommends that a multitude of stakeholders help solve the problem through a TMDL, a Clean Water Act tool that facilitates agreement among pollutant sources in a watershed over the "total maximum daily load" of a contaminant that can be discharged into a water body-and on how to reduce that load.
The ubiquitous diazinon-also toxic to birds and mammals-is the primary culprit identified in the TMDL as "impairing" 35 urban creeks relative to federal water quality standards. Stormwater runoff-which carries the pesticide-comes from the entire urban landscape. "Who's responsible for that source is a complicated thing," says the Regional Board's Bill Johnson. "You can track diazinon all the way back to the manufacturers, to the formulators who put it in their products, to the distributors who sell it to retailers, and to the retailers who put it on their shelves. Then there's the consumers, whose choices determine whether this stuff gets applied or not."
"It ends up in a lot of people's hands before it ever ends up in the creek," says Geoff Brosseau of the Bay Area Stormwater Management Agencies Association. "Many of those people probably have a role to play in solving this."
The preliminary TMDL report points the finger at municipal stormwater managers as those who should bear much of the responsibility for consumer re-education and pollution prevention outreach. "Most of it is going to fall on us, because we're the last ones holding the hot potato," says Brosseau, who is skeptical whether stormwater agencies can solve the problem. "Technically speaking, I don't see how we can deal with it at the end of the pipe. This issue cuts across so many kinds of agencies, departments, and scales of geography. We need to be smart about this, and work together to address every option, not just clean up our act at the bottom of the watershed."
Success in getting consumers to make alternative pest-control choices may depend on the outreach efforts set forth in the TMDL report. "We're a bit worried about what people are going to turn to," says Johnson. "The chemical market is flooding us with new chemical alternatives, a lot of them pyrethroids, which may pose an equal or even greater risk." The TMDL advocates pollution prevention and integrated pest management (IPM), which involves using pest-resistant plants and beneficial insects, tolerating minor pest problems, and applying chemicals as a last resort.
Stormwater agencies will get help implementing the TMDL from the Regional Board, the U.S. EPA, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Although stormwater agencies are held accountable for urban runoff, Johnson points out, state and federal agencies, not municipalities, are responsible for regulating pesticide use. "That's why interagency cooperation is going to be a critical part of implementation," says Johnson. The final TMDL report is due out by early 2003.
Contact: Bill Johnson (510)622-2354 PC
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