The Environmental Protection Agency is full of it, both literally and figuratively. It has no qualms about befouling a fragile ecosystem with human excrement, while threatening a Wyoming welder with fines of $75,000 a day for daring to build a trout pond on his property.
Charles Hurt of the Washington Times notes that Andy Johnson, a man who built a small pond on his rural property, was charged with violating the Clean Water Act. Never mind that the pond was created by diverting a stream flowing through his property or that the pond has become a sanctuary for wildlife such as ducks and geese passing through. The law’s the law, and Johnson is flouting it as long as his illegal pond continues to stand.
But the EPA hardly has room to talk. Its federal headquarters, housing 5,000 employees, resides on a tract of land a few blocks from the White House. On the agency website, annual energy and water consumption for its offices are listed. Not listed are the billions of gallons of untreated waste flushed directly into the Potomac year after year by their employees.
What is the import of this? Hurt explains:
[W]henever it rains in your Federal City, the sewage treatment plant cannot handle the flood of storm runoff and sewage at the same time. So it just dumps a couple of billion gallons of completely untreated sewage into the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, which flow into the celebrated Chesapeake Bay.
That is right: Whenever any of those bossy bureaucrats at the EPA takes a bowel movement at work on a rainy day, all the excrement floats right out into the Potomac River and on down to the Chesapeake Bay, helping destroy one of the most important and compromised ecosystems in the U.S. today.
How it is that dirty polluters like this are allowed to lecture anyone in this country — especially a small farmer — about proper stewardship of the environment? It just goes to show how corrupt this government has become. Why not charge Gina McCarthy and every one of her EPA employees $75,000 per flush?
To fix this problem, the government has authorized work “drilling giant underground tunnels to store this overflow sewage and storm runoff during rainfalls until the treatment plant can catch up.” The cost of the project to taxpayers? A cool $2.6 billion. Perhaps, Hurt muses, the EPA is targeting “innocent American families” for unjustified fines to offset the cost of cleaning up its own federal feces.
