Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for December 27, 2008 GO JUMP IN THE RIVER

Methinks that the EPA folks have been drinking too much of their product!

I don't care if they turn the Mississipi river into Aquafina, Dasani, Evian, or pure dee Perrier. When the current gets you...you drown! (And, then, there's always those 12-foot alligator gars!)

Too many examples in Cairo's history...too many kids lost...for the government to make a big push for turning the rivers into swimming holes.

EPA wants Mississippi River designated as safe for swimmers

Whenever Huck Finn wanted to cool off on a hot summer day, his creator, Mark Twain, would write the boy into a swimming session in the Mississippi River. The EPA wants real people today to be able to swim in the river as well.

In a recent letter to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Benjamin Grumbles, the EPA's assistant administrator for the Clean Water Program, told the department to take another look at its recreation use designation for the Mississippi River from the Meramec River to the Ohio River. Grumbles reminded Missouri's pollution police agency that the federal Clean Water Act presumes that rivers, streams and lakes should be clean enough for swimming. If the water is not safe, the law allows the state agency to show why it is not possible to make the water clean.

And on Jan. 7, DNR staff will recommend the state Clean Water Commission change the Mississippi's designation from secondary contact recreation, a standard that covers boating, fishing and wading, to whole body contact. The result could mean new requirements for expensive upgrades at sewage treatment plants along the river, including the Cape Girardeau plant.

The Mississippi River is one of the most studied rivers in the world. At the Open River Field Station in Jackson, the Missouri Department of Conservation monitors several factors related to water quality, including indicators of fertilizer pollution, the acidity of the water and how much dirt and sand is in the water.

But the key measure for human contact with the water is the level of E. coli, a bacteria present in human and animal waste that reaches the river in the discharge from sewage treatment plants and in the runoff from open land where livestock and wildlife graze.

"When you are swimming, you are probably never going to swallow enough water" to have health problems caused by fertilizer or chemical pollutants, said John Ford, an environmental specialist with DNR's Water Pollution Program. "The only risk you have from swallowing a small amount of water is bacteria and protozoans."

In recent years, the DNR has reviewed the classifications for 3,600 stream segments and 400 lakes and designated the water for whole body contact. The DNR passed on classifying 142 other bodies of water, and the EPA made determinations of a whole body contact designation for 141. The remaining unclassified water was the Mississippi River from Dam 27 north of St. Louis to the Ohio River.

Of that 195.5-mile stretch, the EPA is seeking a whole body contact designation on 1.3 miles from Dam 27 to North Riverfront Park in St. Louis, and 164.7 miles from the Meramec to the Ohio. The remaining approximately 30 miles of river, mainly along the St. Louis riverfront, will retain a designation that swimming is not recommended.

"The Clean Water Act sets out that recreation shall be available in and on the waters of the United States," said John DeLashmit of the EPA's Region 7 office in Kansas City. "The rebuttable presumption is that unless we are shown otherwise that United States waters are safe for swimming and other aquatic recreation. The DNR did not submit anything showing that is not attainable on the Mississippi River."

Data collected at Thebes, Ill., by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency shows that the E. coli levels in the river fluctuate within a wide range. At times, the bacteria is almost non-existent. At others, especially in periods immediately after heavy rains, the level spikes to counts that are as much as seven times the proposed maximum level for whole body contact.

The mathematical model for analyzing the data, however, shows bacteria counts are generally below the strictest current standard for whole body contact. But because that Class A designation is usually used for lakes and streams that have heavy swimming use at places such as swimming beaches, the DNR is asking that the Mississippi be placed in the Class B category. That category recognizes that people do swim in the river but that it is not a primary swimming destination, so the allowable bacteria counts are higher.

The counts are based on readings taken between April 1 and Oct. 31, the defined recreation season, Ford said.

Along with the designation for whole body contact, the DNR must also determine whether or not the water is ready for the named use or if it is impaired and in need of a clean up plan, said DeLashmit. If the river is impaired, he said, the DNR will write an improvement plan that could include recommendations on controlling livestock runoff, for example.

Regardless of whether the river is listed as impaired or not, the designation for whole body contact means sewage treatment plants along the river will have to make improvements. Because the river is not designated for full contact now, said John Hoke, an environmental specialist and use attainability coordinator for the DNR, no plant discharging into the river is required to disinfect its effluent.

When a plant dumps into a river or lake that is designated for swimming, it must disinfect the effluent. The limits on the discharge are a mean reading of 400 colonies of fecal coliform per 100 milliliters, with a daily maximum reading of 1,000 colonies per 100 milliliters.

"What it means practically in terms of wastewater treatment plants is that they would be required to disinfect," Hoke said. The disinfection requirement would be put in place when a plant's permit is renewed.

Cape Girardeau discharges an average of 5.5 million gallons of treated sewage daily into the Mississippi from the wastewater treatment plant at 429 Cooper St., said Dennis Hale, plant manager. The city does not disinfect the wastewater.

The two common disinfecting methods are chlorination and ultraviolet light, Hale said. Installing disinfecting equipment would be the first major upgrade to the plant since it was constructed in the 1970s, Hale said.

"As far as what it would cost, I would hate to guess," Hale said. "Either one would be pretty expensive."

The whole body contact designation would be an invitation to the public to take a new look at the river. Many people have a mistaken impression that the river is far too polluted for swimming, several sources said.

"There is a big plus to getting people back on the Mississippi River," Ford said. "The resource is there to be used, and there are some really interesting places on the river."

It's cows...dedicated cows.

Just found another article on the government's (failed) attempts to clean up our nation's natural swimming holes...

Cows "do'd" it...in fact, double do'd it!

And, I've got the simple, obvious solution...

After years and years and years of hearing how unions and tenure are the bane of our existence...the cause of everything bad about education, let's unionize and tenurize cows!

You might have to pay a little more for milk and hamburgers, but that inconvenience would be more than offset by the comfort of knowing that we would have contented herds of cows that just didn't give a sh*t!

After 25 years and almost $6 billion spent, government misses deadlines

By David A. Fahrenthold
The Washington Post

Despite 25 years and almost $6 billion, the government campaign to clean up the Chesapeake Bay has failed to meet its deadlines.

A tour of the Chesapeake and its watershed shows what happened: Solutions to the pollution problems were often obvious. But governments struggled to implement them on a large scale, unable to overcome budget shortages, bureaucratic inertia and political opposition from farmers, builders, watermen and other groups.

Stream-bank fences

"That's a horror show."

Oranges and yellows were climbing the wooded mountains on either side of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But Jeff Kelble, who is the Shenandoah's "riverkeeper," was looking at a something uglier: a weedy stream through a dairy pasture, with a line of black-and-white cows standing in the middle of it.

"They're just [defecating] away," Kelble said. "Where's it going to go?"

In this case, to the North River, then to the South Fork of the Shenandoah River, then to the Potomac River, then to the Chesapeake. There, tiny particles of these cows' manure would feed the algae that cause dead zones.

This kind of pollution, which scientists call "direct deposition" of manure, has a simple solution, which those leading the cleanup have known about since 1983.

Fences

Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania all pledged that their farmers would put up fences along streambanks to keep cows out. But they didn't make it a legal requirement: Officials feared this kind of regulation would be a burden on farmers and would be difficult to enforce.

Instead, governments encouraged farmers to do it and reimbursed them for some or all of the cost.

"Most people want to do what's right, and it's best to incent that," said former Virginia governor George Allen (R), who served from 1994 to 1998.

But in Virginia, many farmers simply didn't want the hassle. And reimbursement funding, which came out of state budget surpluses, was often short. From July 2006 to June 2007, Virginia turned away 144 farmers who wanted to fence off 84 miles of streambank.

Now, Virginia has reached only about 20 percent of its goal for fencing off streams. Across the Chesapeake watershed, the figure is 27 percent.

"Perhaps at some point we need to begin asking ourselves . . . 'Is this voluntary approach actually getting us where we need to be?' " said L. Preston Bryant Jr., Virginia's secretary of natural resources. "That has not been the Virginia way."

Blue crabs

Under the water now, the sooks are finishing their run.

Millions of female crabs have crawled dozens of miles south along the shoulders of the bay's deep channel, completing an astonishing and hidden migration. They will overwinter stuck in the mud, wake up when weather warms and release their eggs into the tide.

One early winter day, Adam Smith, a crabber from Shady Side in Anne Arundel County, wasn't chasing them. Instead, he was using a metal dredge to clean the bottom of the Severn River, preparing it for a state-run oyster-planting program.

The work was compensation for the new limits on the crab harvest: Maryland was, in effect, paying him and dozens of other watermen not to crab.

"Any little bit helps, these days," said Smith, 33, as he was pelted by spitball-size wads of blowing snow. "It gets a little harder each year."

In 1987, the bay cleanup promised to rebuild the Chesapeake's blue crab population. In the 1990s, Maryland and Virginia joined a "Bi-State Blue Crab Advisory Committee" and worked together to limit the harvest by upping the minimum size for catchable crabs and forcing watermen to take more time off.

But it wasn't enough: Watermen worked harder, and the crab population remained small, so that in some years more than 70 percent of the adult crabs in the bay wound up caught. That was far above 53 percent, the level considered "overfishing."

In 2003, the committee disbanded. The official reason was that Virginia could not afford its $95,000 share of the budget.

Howard R. Ernst, a political-science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who has studied the bay cleanup, said he believes the states caved to pressure from watermen, who called the harvest limits crushing. "It was killed because it worked," he said.

"Did the watermen's . . . lobbying head off major crab regulation cutbacks? . . . Yes," said John Bull, a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. But Bull said that states also hadn't realized the severity of the crab's decline until the past couple of years. "It's understandable that we didn't go far enough," he said.

Septic tanks

There was a problem under Eric Bentley's lawn.

Bentley, who designs satellite-guidance systems for NASA in Greenbelt, lives near the waterfront in Stevensville, Md., just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. His 30-year-old septic tank was working as it was meant to, which meant it was slowly leaking nitrogen into the dirt, where groundwater carried it to the bay.

Of all the Chesapeake's problems, this is the kind the cleanup has done the least to fix. Nitrogen from urban and suburban sources -- greasy city streets, fertilized lawns and a growing number of septic tanks -- has gone up 14 percent since 1985, and phosphorus has gone up 16 percent.

The problem: Cleaning up these sources requires digging up storm water pipes. Building "rain gardens" near mall parking lots. And tearing up Bentley's lawn.

In 2000, the state proposed requiring cleaner septic systems in areas near the shore; that idea was shot down after builders and real estate agents said it might chill the market for new homes. And, until 2006, Maryland homeowners who fixed the systems on their own got no reimbursement from the state.

"We knew, collectively, that septic systems were a source. But there wasn't a program in place," said Shari T. Wilson, the state's secretary of the environment.

There is now, funded by Maryland's "flush tax." Bentley got his tank replaced this year, which cost more than $10,000. The state paid all but $350.

That leaves at least 50,660 septic systems to fix in Maryland, officials say.

The state can afford about 650 a year.