I TOLD YOU SO!!!! (snow white says this is too long)
This is done just after midnight and there really isn’t much change regarding the SPC forecast for Saturday. The idea is that a short wave runs along a boundary to the north and storms will erupt along the track but they have the severe risk area this far south due to the potential for guys forming south of the short or the short moving along farther south than the models indicate. I’ll update this during the day on Saturday.
The Dead Zone If you want to look back at a previous post of mine on this subject, look no further than here: ”I Told You So” from June 16, 2007 and “A Real Problem” from May 14, 2007
What I’m talking about is water pollution. I’ve talked often about how, in my view, we need to be concentrating our efforts on cleaning up a known death trap…that is the pollution of our waters. Unlike Global Warming, we know for a fact that we are polluting our waters. I know it every time we go to scull on Harrod’s Creek. The other day when we put one of the boats on the water, the always delicate Snow White screeched “It’s feces!!” And you know what? She was right. My father-in-law told me it was a sewer and he hasn’t been there for years. He’s known it for years. Reports have come in for years about all of the municipalities that pollute directly into the Ohio River all up and down the waterway. No one does a thing. But we do give Academy Awards for movies that gets people all worked up over something else that may or may not be happening and may or may not be something of which we can do something about. But water pollution is something we can do something about and we should do something about. Water is a basic building block of all life. Without it, we and everything else dies. Poison it and we poison ourselves.
As part of the effort to stave off Global Warming and also reduce energy dependence on foreign oil, Congress mandated ethanol. Corn prices soared and corn production increased. More fertilizer has been used. That fertilizer is known to end up in the rivers through run-off. The fertilizer, I believe it’s the nitrogen, helps to decrease the oxygen content and makes for a dead zone. When Snow White and I went to the Chesapeake Bay last summer, crabbing interests were in a decline because the number of crabs had been depleted due to a dead zone in the bay. It has also been a well known fact that there is a dead zone near the mouth of the Mississippi River. The photo above below Colonel Klink is a NASA photo where the red and yellow colors show depleted oxygen levels. Marine life cannot live in these zones. Here is a link to the NASA page that explains further.
Now comes a report that the rains and Midwest flooding will only increase the dead zone. More fertilizer for more corn crops so we can inefficiently produced ethanol to raise corn prices and not affect gasoline prices in the least. More fertilizer then has more rain which puts more runoff into the Mississippi River that then goes into the Gulf of Mexico and then there is more uninhabitable marine areas. Prior to this time it was 5,800 square miles of dead Gulf of Mexico. How much more do you want? Maybe I should make a movie and get people’s attention. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…Global Warming is worth studying but water pollution deserves action today…now. We’re 68% water…our bodies…where do you think that water comes from? Our planet. Poison the earth’s water and we poison ourselves. We are in fact poisoning our planet…no question its all around us. Yet, we do nothing. Here’s a story that came out today.
Dead Zone In Gulf Larger than Predicted 10,000 Square Miles?
On This Date In History: Woodrow Wilson went into office with the idea that America wanted change from the Republican days of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Never mind that he never got 50% of the vote. He wanted to get America back to where he thought the founders intended and that was a non-interventionist foreign policy. Yet, he invaded Mexico at least twice and took us into World War I. I won’t debate the merits of World War I and will only mention that the first invasion of Mexico happened in Vera Cruz in 1914 when a handful of sailors were detained briefly by Mexican authorities. The President sent a bunch of battleships and Marines to the area. The Mexicans released the sailors and apologized. Not good enough. Wilson demanded that the Mexicans also raise the American flag to a 21 gun salute. Wilson wanted to embarrass a President of Mexico that he didn’t like. The Mexican president refused to fire off 21 cannons while raising the American flag so we invaded briefly. So much for change. TR must have chuckled and applauded Wilson’s gunboat diplomacy.
On this date in 1916, General John J. Pershing’s troops were attack by the Mexican army. Why? Well, maybe it was because he took his 10,000 troops into Mexican territory. They were after Pancho Villa who had executed several Americans in Mexico and then briefly crossed the US border and burned down a town in New Mexico. So, Wilson the non-interventionist sent Pershing into a foreign country too find a bandit who had killed some Americans. The end result was some American soldiers were killed, more Mexican soldiers were killed and after 11 months, Pershing returned to the United States empty handed. Villa lived several more years before being assassinated…by what most historians suspect was the Mexican government.
Woodrow Wilson promised change, to be less belligerent with other nations of the world and later to track down a bandit who had killed Americans abroad and on US soil. Oh…and one of Wilson’s legacies was the Treaty of Versailles which was so flawed that it directly led to the calamity known as World War II. Change can be dangerous. History if full of unintended consequences.
EPA and the academic crowd have been successful in blaming the dead zones on excess use of fertilizers by farmers, but fail to even mention that about 25% of this fertilizer causing the dead zones originates for municipal sewage treatment plants, as nitrogenous (urine and protein) waste was ignored and not treated under the Clean Water Act.
That EPA ignored this pollution is caused by a worldwide incorrect applied pollution test, used to implement the Clean Water Act and although EPA in 1984 acknowledged this incorrect use, in stead of correcting the test, it allowed an alternative test and thereby officially ignored this type of pollution and by doing so lowered the goal of the CWA from 100% treatment (elimination of all pollution by 1985) to a measly 35% treatment, without even notifying Congress.
Other problems caused by this incorrect applied test are that we do not know the real performance of a sewage treatment plants and have no idea what the effluent waste loading is on receiving water bodies, besides also the possibility that such plants are designed to treat the wrong waste in sewage. Nitrogenous waste, besides like fecal waste exerting an oxygen demand is also a fertilizer for algae and aquatic plants, causing eutrophication which eventually ends in dead zones, most notorious the one in the Gulf Of Mexico.
In an attempt to correct its mistake, EPA initiated watershed programs, where all contributing pollution form different runoff sources is established, among others the effluents of sewage treatment plants or also called point-source pollution. Though this program, EPA hoped that much better treatment would be required for what it determined to be secondary treatment.
This program, however, violates the intend of the CWA as Congress demanded the Act to be implemented with a ‘technology-based’ program, demanding ‘bets available technology’ and not a ‘water quality-based’ program, whereby effluent standards of sewage treatment plant could be set based on the water quality of receiving water bodies. Such a program, Congress felt, could be easily manipulated by local politicians and would defeat the original intend of the act to set uniform nation-wide standards to treat sewage.
Sal Lake County recently published a draft report of such a watershed TMDL study and whiles it, besides the actual flow rates, monitors ten different chemical analyzes for the non-point sources, while it only has two water quality analyses of the effluents of the point sources, while these flows clearly dominate the water quality of the river.
If interested in my comments of the study contact me at pmaier@erda.net or if you like know about incorrect test that caused the failure of the CWA, visit http://www.petermaier.net and read the description of this test (BOD) in the Technical PDF section.
Peter, Thank you for your addition. There will be arguments over what causes what and research is necessary. What burns me is that we KNOW that we have farm run-off. That one is in the quandry category because we need the crops. We need to work on it. But, what is totally inexcusable in my view is the sewage. We KNOW where it comes from. We KNOW the problems, yet we do nothing. Here in Louisville, it is so well known that when there is a heavy rain that the sewage goes into the river. The solution? Post a sign that says no swimming. People who fish tell me that they just can’t eat the fish except every two weeks. No one gets PO’d but they do go to stupid movies and claim they are saving the world by going to the movie instead of demanding from the local leaders to clean up the river.
Thanx again for your comments. The more education and opinion we can get out there, the better.
What also is ignored is the amount of reactive nitrogen (nitrates and ammonia)) coming from the atmosphere, as the result of nitrogen oxides from burning fossil fuel. Chapel Hill a few years ago claimed that 50% of the reactive nitrogen entering open waters in the Eastern United States originate from this form of air pollution.
What really makes this worse is the fact, if we had tested correctly in the past, we would have built sewage treatment plants that would have treated this nitrogenous waste, actually at a lower cost as we now built, what are only odor control facilities.
This field of engineering is based on a century old tradition and when tradition is involve, change is nearly impossible, especially if the media is not paying any attention and only report on what the EPA is telling them.
BUT, you can lead a horse to water, but can not force him to drink.
If there is an increase in the stuff coming from the sky as a result of air pollution, why are the contrations of dead zones not found at the mouth of every river? Also, are you trying to take away the focus on the agricultural aspect, suggesting that is a red-herring, or are you suggesting that the problem is much bigger than the agricultural side. I suspect that it’s the latter and not the former but I wanted to be clear.
When this ‘green’ rain (rain with fertilizer) hits land the fertilizer will also be used to grow gasses and plants on land, so how much ends up in the rivers depend on what happened to the runoff.
Agriculture certainly has an influence, mainly due to the increased use of synthesized fertilizer during the past decades, but it is inherent to the grow processes that part of these fertilizer get into the air and in the groundwater, consequently in the rivers. I also am convinced that farmers are smart enough to use fertilizer wisely, so most of it gets into the food crops they are growing.
How much exactly comes from the atmosphere, from runoff or lack of sewage treatment is not clear, but I think that EPA has been blaming farmers for this increase of nutrient in the Mississippi River causing the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and indeed using it as a red herring in order to avoid having to explain the other two causes of nutrient enrichment EPA is directly responsible for.
Lack of ‘nitrogenous waste’ sewage treatment also explains by the increased occurrence of red tides along the ocean shores near large cities, caused by the same nutrient enrichment phenomenon but not ending up as dead zones, as in such cases there is enough oxygen in the water.
I’ve been screaming every chance I get about the water pollution problem from our sewage. We do stories all of the time and nothing happens. I suspect that local media does it but national media does not follow suit. Besides that, no one follows up on anything. Remember the Ozone depletion? You would think that with the US passing some legilation in Congress, the problem is fixed since no one ever reports on it any more. All hail the politicians!