74 
Whether or not there are adequate means to control ocean 
pollution necessitates, first, a clarification and greater exercise 
of existing authorities. The recent enactment of the National 
Environmental Policy Act (P.L. 91-190) and the activities of the 
Council on Environmental Quality may provide this needed incentive 
to more fully test existing authorities. However, before these © 
existing authorities can be fully tested, interim guidelines and 
water quality standards need to be reviewed, or established where 
needed. 
Unfortunately, data on which to establish water quality cri- 
teria and standards are meager; further, it is questionable as to 
which agency, if any, has authority to develop them. There are 
also other institutional problems to be resolved. 
Sete study conducted for the Bureau of Solid Waste Manage- 
ment —" revealed serious gaps in communication between Federal and 
State agencies concerned with pollution and ocean disposal. The 
report concluded, 
"Although there are many Federal, State, and local 
agencies involved in one way or another with the 
disposal of wastes from barges and ships in any one 
city, rarely did more than one of these agencies have 
a comprehensive picture of the total activities of 
this city. This lack of effective data management 
appears to be due primarily to both a lack of com- 
munication between agencies involved and the con- 
centration of interest in a given agency in only 
specific types of waste." 
Additionally, in too many instances, the expertise in one agency 
is not made available to another because its availability is not 
known and occasionally too sophisticated or too expensive to be 
used by another agency. 
There is also a corresponding breakdown in obtaining and process- 
ing of environmental data essential for assessing future waste dis- 
posal activities. Continuous effective monitoring and surveillance 
of disposal activities is non-existent. Few, if any, adequate 
follow-up studies have ever been made. 
SS  , 
11/ 
~ Marine Disposal of Solid Wastes - An Interim Survey. Robert P. 
Brown and David D. Smith. A staff report of the Oceanographic 
Engineering Division, Dillingham Corporation, La Jolla, Calif. 
51 
