Aging sewer systems fouling Great Lakes waters, report says

Aging sewer systems fouling Great Lakes waters, report says

http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw115937_20050517.htm

May 17, 2005, 7:00 PM EDT

Sewage is fouling the Great Lakes and other waters in the region because many municipal waste treatment systems are failing to stop overflows, environmental groups said in a report Tuesday.

Most municipal systems in six Great Lakes states that combine stormwater with domestic and industrial sewage haven't met minimum federal standards for preventing such discharges, nor have they received approval for long-term plans to control overflows, the report said.

The situation poses a health hazard that could get worse under Bush administration proposals to slash funding for wastewater system upgrades and to let sewage plants skip some stages of treatment during heavy rains or melting snow, environmentalists said.

"Combined sewer overflows are a major threat to water quality in the Great Lakes states," said Michele Merkel, counsel to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., that conducted the study...

Milwaukee Making Progress on Stray Condoms

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/05/13/national/a134127D99.DTL

Friday, May 13, 2005

After spending more than $1.8 million for a temporary system to catch stray condoms slipping through a sewage treatment plant, a Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District spokesman says officials are fairly confident a majority of condoms are now being caught before they can reach Lake Michigan.


Bill Graffin commented Thursday, more than two years after a fisherman reported seeing what he called a slick of thousands of condoms floating in the lake following a heavy rainstorm in April of 2003.


Initially, a single laborer armed with a swimming pool skimmer was posted at the chlorine tanks at the Jones Island treatment plant to capture condoms that survived earlier phases of screening at the plant.


The manual scooping was supplemented during the summers of 2003 and 2004, when MMSD also had the crew of the district's 43-foot research boat fishing for condoms that made it through the plant and into the harbor...

while ours are denied. Be advised this isn't going to allowed to be continued. It's our taxes paid for our citizens. Why does Bush have such a problem with this. Oh, he's a globalist.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. <...> Is there no other way the world may live?"

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower

http://www.pacificgrove.com/sewer/welcometo.html

Things are rotten everywhere.

in older systems often occur during heavy rains, as the storm sewer overflows into the sanitary sewer and the whole mess becomes intermingled and flows out of the city. This happens in many places, including Washington, DC, where the flows run into the anacostia river, the potomac river, and on to the chesapeake bay.

One solution to this, currently being embraced by the city of Chicago, is the aggressive encouragement of greenroofing: where a thin (or thick) layer of growing media (engineered soil,etc.) is placed on the roofs of buildings. The roofs then absorb some water, and slow the rest, lowering the peak runoff flows.

Another solution is replacing impermeable paved surfaces with permeable and perforated ones, though this may be difficult with Chicago's weather.

A more fundamental change would be to recognize the Lakes, and rivers, etc., as the common property of all of us, and charge those who sully them appropriately. For chicago, it might wind up with a tax on peak runoff per property: which would hit those with large impermeable surfaces the most, and encourage them to take appropriate measures, such as the aforementioned greenroofs, parking surfacse, and catch basins. Those folks with small properties, such as a rowhouse, would hardly be hit at all. They could be protected by a 'person exemption' for a limited amount of flow.

...storm and septic at the sewage plant. When a big rain fell, the excess sewage would just be dumped into streams. Now, they try to "back it up" in the conduits with strategically-placed valves at points in the system so they can release it and treat it for days later. That is only a partial solution.
We sure could use $82 Billion or $300 Billion to solve real problems like this, couldn't we? :hurts: