Driving by today, I noticed that our erstwhile Sewage Treatment Plant is now styled the Water Reclamation Facility. Yep, still smells “as sweet.”
That reminds me of something I read earlier today:
The heavy rain expected from Hurricane Florence could flood hog manure pits, coal ash dumps and other industrial sites in North Carolina, creating a noxious witches’ brew of waste that might wash into homes and threaten drinking water supplies.
Cheers!
I think this happens pretty often with the big storms… Hugo, Fran, Floyd, probably even Andrew and Katrina (maybe not NC, but elsewhere). Not fun.
We have (create?) a similar problem every time it rains heavily. Like many places, we have combined sewers (storm and sanitary) so with heavy rain, the flow exceeds the capacity of the Sewage Trea----- uh, Water Reclamation Facility, and the overflow goes right into the Cuyahoga River. Our own drinking water comes from upstream, but our waste then goes down to Lake Erie, where if it doesn’t directly contaminate drinking water supplies, it feeds algal blooms that will. Over recent years, we’ve built many massive stormwater retention basins, and a tunnel boring machine (named Rosie, and she got a local beer named for her) is just emerging after building a mile-plus long one. The problem is that development of land, leading to runoff into the storm sewers instead of absorption into soil, seems to outpace these measures, while storms keep getting wetter.
My town has actually implemented a stormwater utility to deal with these issues. About 35 times a year, out sewer/runoff system is overloaded and dumps into the Illinois River. Our options were either spend a few million with a German company to put in giant cisterns to capture excess runoff and gradually release it, or work on reducing runoff in other ways. The town opted for the latter-small projects and steps to reduce runoff, paid for with a utility/tax that charges residents based on impervious area on their property. Impervious area is determined with Google maps, and residents can get grants for rain barrels, permeable paver driveways, rain gardens, etc. We’ll see how it works, I hope it does, as it’d probably help drive construction with local companies and small businesses.
We’re also implementing scads of little projects just like that – permeable pavers, little green spaces, rain barrels, the works. These are hoped to reduce, but not eliminate, the need for more large projects. The overall plan keeps getting modified with such projects in an attempt to reduce cost and still satisfy an EPA mandate tied up in court for decades. One street will get permeable bumpouts along the sidewalk, a rain garden will go into a traffic island… But this largely happens in the already leafier neighborhoods, and I wonder if it mostly serves to make the Whole Foods shoppers there feel more virtuous.