May 20, 2014 — A coalition of environmental groups that sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to force it to issue standards for industrial cooling water intake devices is likely to go back to court to challenge the regulation.
Lawyers told reporters that the rule issued Monday does not do enough to change the status quo, in which states exercise nearly all authority over power plant and factory intake devices that can harm fish.
“There is a very strong likelihood that we’ll be back in court to challenge the rule, because it doesn’t come close to what the Clean Water Act requires,” Reed Super, an attorney for the Riverkeeper coalition, said Tuesday.
Steve Fleischli, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the “EPA has promulgated a largely worthless rule that will do almost nothing to protect our waterways and our fisheries from power plants.”
Riverkeeper sued in 1992, two decades after the Clean Water Act passed with a section that required the EPA to set standards for water intake systems. The group agreed to stop its legal action when the government agency promised to take action.
Cooling systems that pass water through once and put it back into a river, lake or other body of water can harm fish and other aquatic life by either taking them into the system, where the heat kills them, or trapping them at the intake. The EPA estimated that 2.1 billion fish, crabs and shrimp are killed each year in the cooling systems.
Read the full story at The Hill