Posted on 10/11/2007 2:58:19 PM PDT by RDasher
Volunteers needed for environmental programs...
... The city has several programs open to individuals and organizations.
"This project involves gluing markers to storm drains in the city to warn residents of the consequences of dumping unwanted materials such as grass clippings into the drains."
It goes on how they will have teams to put these stickers on storm drains. Blah Blah Blah.
I got a good laugh out this one. But unfortunately these ideas come evidently from real people. I expect these signs will come off in the near future, and contribute to clogging the storm sewers. Stickers don't adhere to rust very well. :-)
Better make the signs in Spanish.
just a thought.
The city is paying for the stickers. Volunteers get to stick them on. — So taxpayers get to pay for them, and then be humiliated by such stupidity from our cities enviro-wackos.
oh! whoops! (just the thought of 20 gov. workers and 5 trucks sitting around all day fixing a clogged storm drain gives me the willies).
Where do they want me to drain my car oil now?
Then there is my acre of grass clippings that have taken me days to stuff into the drain, some times even weeks when it don’t rain and wash the previous weeks clippings away.
My neighbor stuffed all of his clippings down the storm drain one weekend and I was painting the house a vivid pink and poured all the unused paint down my drain.
It came a flood of a rain 5 min. later. The water backed up from my neighbors drain and flooded out my drain. Now the street out front matches my house! LOL
Backed up storm drains are a real problem here in south Texas where it's nothing for us to see 5-10" sometimes in a day. In 1979 we had a tropical storm stall over Alvin Texas and drop 43" in 2 days. In 2001 Houston saw 35" in a couple of days after weeks of steady rain had already soaked everything.
Backed up storm drains are a real problem here in south Texas where it's nothing for us to see 5-10" sometimes in a day. In 1979 we had a tropical storm stall over Alvin Texas and drop 43" in 2 days. In 2001 Houston saw 35" in a couple of days after weeks of steady rain had already soaked everything.
The clean water act now REQUIRES that rainwater be treated. Just in the largest cities right now, but will be extended to smaller ones in the future. The cost is expected to be about 1-1/2 BILLION dollars for an urban area of about 500,000 people (where I live).
The more that we can get people to STOP pouring oil, paint, bug killer, and excessive amounts of fertilizer into the storm drains, the less it will cost taxpayers to clean the stormwater up.
If you can get Congress to reverse the clean water act, this would not be necessary, but not even Republicans will support that. Keep in mind that the clean water act dates from about 1966 or 1967. It was originally to stop cities from dumping raw sewage into local streams and rivers. Yes, most did that back then. It has stopped that, but Congress continues to tighten it — with veto-proof majorities in all the votes I am aware of. It is a done deal.
Clean water act or not. I don’t think it is possible to treat rain water. Rain water is absolutely huge amounts of water. A few months ago in St Paul MN there was a sudden thunder storm, the storm sewers did there job, but two city workers who were working 150 below the surface where the main storm drain was were swept away. There bodies were found two days later in the Mississippi river.
If you tried to divert that amount of water to a treatment plant, you would likely cause flash floods in every urban center every time it rained.
For example; 1 inch of rain over a 5 mile sq (5 mi x 5 mi) equals 435 million gallons.
> Clean water act or not. I don’t think it is possible to treat rain water.
It is possible alright. All it takes is enough money.
You are right that current treatment plants cannot handle the volume of rainwater. That is why it is so expensive to clean up rainwater. It is not that rainwater is dirty. It gets that way when it falls on oil puddles, doggy-do, and excessively fertilized lawns.
Where I live, they estimate a cost of 1-1/2 Billion dollars for 500,000 people. That comes to $3,000 per person over 10 years. Since there are approx 2.5 people per household, that means about $7,500 per household. That is a LOT of money. Eventually, this will be required everywhere in the US, just like the original CWA.
I believe the original CWA was needed — it is not morally right to dump sh*t in a nearby stream and leave it for somebody else to clean up before they drink from it. And most of the USA (outside of the largest cities — and even they did not treat ALL of the sh*t their cities produced) did that in as recently as the early 1970’s. However, I question if treating rainwater is necessary. Whether or not it is is immeterial. It is going to happen. It is already happening.
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