CALIFORNIA, Md. – A Southern Maryland public utility has agreed to pay a $250,000 penalty and to repair and upgrade its wastewater collection system to prevent chronic overflows of raw sewage into tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, including one suspected of contaminating farmed oysters.
The St. Mary’s County Metropolitan Commission made those pledges to settle a lawsuit brought by the Maryland Department of the Environment, the Potomac Riverkeeper Network and a St. Mary’s County oyster farmer affected by the sewage overflows.
Nancy Stoner, president of the Potomac watchdog group, called the settlement “a win for the river, the oysters, watermen and the public.”
MDE had sued the commission, known as MetCom, in 2022, accusing it of unlawfully spilling nearly 2.2 million gallons of untreated sewage, most of it into Bay tributaries, in dozens of sewer overflows during the previous five years. A spill in 2021 during a tidal flood was tied to a food poisoning outbreak that sickened 27 people in Virginia who consumed oysters from a sewage-tainted St. Mary’s County creek.
The state’s lawsuit came nearly two months after the Potomac Riverkeeper Network had filed a formal notice it intended to sue the commission. The group was joined in that action by Shore Thing Shellfish, a small aquaculture business that raises oysters in cages on the bottom of St. George Creek, a Potomac tributary.
Shore Thing contended in its original complaint that it had been forced twice in 2020 and 2021 to stop selling oysters for periods of 21 days each after sewage spills in the creek. Because of what MDE later acknowledged was an internal communications breakdown, the oyster farm did not learn of the October 2021 spill until days later, when attendees at weekend festivals in Virginia reported getting sick after eating raw oysters. Shore Thing had unknowingly harvested its bivalves from contaminated water to supply the festivals.
In a 78-page consent decree filed in state court July 24, MDE said that since filing its lawsuit there had been nine more sewage spills from December 2022 through June 2024, dumping more than 76,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into local waters.
The decree requires MetCom to take immediate action to find and fix pump stations and pipes that have been the source of repeated spills. The commission also agreed to evaluate its entire system for at least the next nine years and upgrade it as necessary to prevent overflows during floods and rainstorms.
MetCom further pledged to develop an emergency response plan to notify the public of any overflows and clean up spilled sewage.
Half of the $250,500 penalty MetCom agreed to pay will go to the state’s Clean Water Fund, while the other half will finance an oyster restoration project in the Potomac River.
“The steps to halt raw sewage discharges into the Potomac are among the most significant in the history of the Potomac watershed and certainly the broadest in my 20 years of fighting for clean water,” said Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks.
Bob Dreher, the group’s legal director, said the decree provides “an enforceable framework to make sure MetCom reviews its entire system,” fix broken pumping stations and other infrastructure and then review its overall capacity to ensure there are no more overflows. He called it a “huge step forward.”
George Erichsen, MetCom’s executive director, noted that some of the measures required in the consent decree were already underway or planned by the time the agreement was finalized. Additional flow monitoring, modeling and reports should help determine priorities for rehabilitation of the sewage collection system, he said. The consent decree provides a long term plan, he added, to help reduce or eliminate the number and size of sewage overflows.
Two issues remain in litigation. The parties failed to reach an agreement on the Riverkeeper Network’s claims for attorney’s fees and costs to perform engineering studies of MetCom’s system. Also unresolved are Shore Thing’s claims for compensation because of the harm the sewage spills did to its business. Dreher said the parties are still trying to reach a settlement on those disputes.
