The Maryland Department of the Environment has reached a settlement agreement with a St. Mary’s County utility after repeated sewage spills over several years.
In 2021, one sewage spill from the system, operated by the county’s Metropolitan Commission, contaminated oysters that sickened more than 20 people in Virginia.
Under the consent decree agreement, which still must be approved by the St. Mary’s County Circuit Court, the county’s Metropolitan Commission will pay $250,000 — with half going to the state and the other half funding an oyster restoration project on the Potomac River.
The Commission also is required to complete a list of repairs to its sewage collection system aimed at preventing leaks. It also must complete a study of the system’s capacity and any illegal hookups, and craft a new emergency plan for overflows, including a communications plan.
In a statement , Potomac Riverkeeper Network president Nancy Stoner called the consent decree “a win for the river, the oysters, watermen, and the public.” The network was a party to the settlement.
“For five years, MetCom’s sewage spills have sent raw sewage streaming into our streams and rivers and storm drains, contaminating oyster beds and exposing the public to serious health risks,” Stoner said in a statement.
According to a legal complaint filed in late 2022 on behalf of the Maryland Department of the Environment, there were 58 sewer overflows between from the start of 2017 to December 2022, when the complaint was filed. The overflows came from MetCom’s collection system, which transports sewage from homes and businesses in the county to its wastewater treatment plants. The overflows peaked in 2020, when a total of 1.5 million gallons of sewage spilled.
As MDE negotiated a settlement with MetCom, the violations continued, according to the consent decree, with nine overflow events cited between December 2022 and the present.
Prior to the consent decree, MetCom completed some upgrades to its system, and began studying the role of rainfall, which can inundate collection systems, leading to overflows. But the consent decree will require a schedule of additional improvements, with penalties for missed deadlines.
MetCom did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
The consent decree does not resolve all of the claims in the case. The Riverkeeper Network still has an open claim for reimbursement for its legal fees and the cost of retaining an engineer, said Bob Dreher, the network’s legal director.
Dreher said there also are outstanding claims against MetCom from Shore Thing Shellfish, the aquaculture company whose oysters were tainted because of an October 2022 sewage spill into a Potomac River tributary, and then served at a Virginia winery, sickening more than 20 people.
At the time, the MetCom said that it contacted MDE to warn it about the spill, but word of the contamination was not passed along to the agencies’ shellfish division , according to officials there, and the waterway was not closed to oyster harvesting in time.
Though some financial matters remain unresolved, Dreher said the consent decree is a “complete remedy” for stopping the overflows themselves, given the list of required improvements.
“This is one of the biggest settlements and commitments to repair and upgrading of a sewage treatment system in our region’s history,” he said in an interview.
The Potomac Riverkeeper Network believes the MetCom system is aging and in need of accelerated maintenance, Dreher said. The collection infrastructure has been increasingly burdened by rising water levels in streams spurred by climate change, causing the system to be inundated periodically with water, Dreher said. That has strained its capacity, as have unauthorized hookups to the system.
“It’s all of those things,” Dreher said. “But it’s basically — I think — a backlog of the failure to fully invest in the system to keep it operating correctly.”
This article may be updated.
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