A federal agency that monitors water quality says it stopped measuring sediment pollution levels in a creek that runs alongside the controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” months ago due to safety concerns.
The issue is particularly important as a local environmental group’s motion to stop construction of the project will get its day in federal court on 15 November.
The motion for a preliminary injunction alleges that the project’s construction in a forest south-east of Atlanta has resulted in sediment discharging into Intrenchment Creek, endangering fauna and exceeding federally allowed limits. The environmental group hopes a district court judge will stop the project while the underlying lawsuit is resolved, based on alleged federal Clean Water Act violations.
The US Geological Survey’s (USGS)“streamgage” has been inactive since the agency removed it in February due to concern about the ongoing movement opposed to the training center, now in its third year. Although the gauge uploads sediment data remotely, USGS personnel had to visit the site periodically to clean out leaves and other debris. The agency decided its employees were under “unacceptable” risk in making those visits, wrote spokesperson Jason Burton in an email.
But in March, within weeks of USGS removing the gauge, Dekalb county closed the public park portion of nearby South River Forest, removing access by activists to what had been ongoing campsites in protest against “Cop City”. Police officers have also monitored the construction site on the ground and by helicopter since then, and there have been no incidents that authorities have described as violent or dangerous. A march to the construction site is planned for 13 November – but it too is described by organizers as a nonviolent, peaceful protest.
The Dekalb county commissioner Ted Terry – a former Sierra Club director whose district includes the “Cop City” site – said the idea that activists are somehow a threat to the water-monitoring efforts is wrong: “There’s an officer on every corner. The assumption that it is not a safe place is preposterous.”
Jacqueline Echols, the board president of South River Watershed Alliance (SRWA), the organization behind the federal lawsuit, said that sediment data from before February and photos taken since construction began still demonstrate the excessive levels of sediment entering the creek. But Terry noted that “stopping monitoring … takes away a key piece of evidence about whether the Clean Water Act is being violated or not”.
Local reporter John Ruch first reported the federal agency’s decision to remove the monitor in May. Efforts by Terry and Echols to get the USGS to turn the gauge back on have so far been unsuccessful.
The device measures sediment levels in the creek at a location about 500ft (152 metres) from the south-east corner of the construction site, according to Sarah H Ledford, a geosciences professor at Georgia State University. Due to the land’s natural slope, most of the sediment from the site flows by the gauge, making it an ideal location for measuring the project’s impact on fish and other life in the creek, said Ledford.
The issue is not a trivial one, as “sediment runoff is the No 1 polluter of rivers and streams in the US, and the reason the [federal] Environmental Protection Agency classifies them as ‘too dirty’ for fish and other fauna”, added Ledford. It is partly for this reason that scientists such as Ledford rely on monitors for ongoing research.
Terry and Echols have for months been petitioning the USGS, the city of Atlanta and Dekalb county to restore the gauge, with no apparent resolution. The agency “initiated a risk assessment internally with our security experts and has had interactions with federal law enforcement officials” during that period, wrote Burton.
Meanwhile, construction continues apace at the “Cop City” site, with recent photos taken by an independent drone operator and seen by the Guardian showing what appears to be a rectangular cement pad in a clear-cut area spanning tens of acres.
“What the city of Atlanta is doing from the standpoint of construction is strategic,” said Echols. “Everything they’ve done is in a hurry – to try to suggest to the court and anyone else that they’ve gone too far and spent too much money to turn around.”
Terry, the local politician, said: “What the city is trying to do is make the lawsuit moot, by saying: ‘We’ve already poured concrete.’”
Echols, who has been working on cleaning up Intrenchment Creek and the waterway it flows into – the South River – for more than a decade, said that the USGS, “by taking the route of not taking sediment samples, is supporting the [‘Cop City’] project. They are complicit as far as I’m concerned.”
