Toledo water test results face extended delay

A massive effort to get fresh water samples flown to a highly specialized U.S. Environmental Protection Agency laboratory in Cincinnati became an unexpected all-night ordeal, delaying any announcement about test results early today, but the plane carrying the ice-downed samples is expected to arrive at its destination about 10 a.m.

It remains unclear how many hours it will take before that laboratory generates test results, data that is expected to be the most important to date in the second day of the Toledo metro area's unprecedented water crisis that affects 500,000 people.

"None of which is in the Texas news"

Do a google news search and they are prominent in the news.

I will say that there are no current stories on the Texas red tide, but there are stories on the Florida red tide. Its a little early in the season for red tide in texas.

And while you are at Google News, you should look at the recent stories covered extensively by the Florida media over the GOP politicians and Big Sugar. Big Sugar generates a lot of run-off pollution.

I'll give it to you briefly but it would take only 20-30 min to get all the details.

Big Sugar is paying for these GOPers to take free trips to the King Ranch in Texas, which is a high dollar hunting ranch. King Ranch is also in the Florida sugar business. So after all these stories run, Gov Scott, who also got a free trip, appointed this man from the King Ranch to a regulatory board in Florida. The short of it is Big Sugar doesn't clean up their pollution, the ratepayers and taxpayers have to pay for it.

Or in the case of the OK-ARK lawsuit I mentioned above, the ARK taxpayers had to pay the judgement that OK won, because ARK allows Tyson and the Tyson contract growers to pollute the river

And I guarantee you, this algae bloom in Lake Eire can be traced back to where it originated before it ran-off into the lake. But they won't do it.

In the US, most of the societal costs of pollution are not paid for by the polluter. Instead, they are externalized or socialized and society pays for them either in the rates they pay or the taxes they pay. There are also nuisance costs. The locals have to adjust their life to the negative impact.

Thanks Karto,

One concern I always had was about bad chemicals in the water, and how do deal with them, since they likely can slip through any filter that lets water pass through (i.e., since their on the order of the size of water molecules, rather than the much, much larger living cells). You can’t poison, you could neutralize, if you know just what you’re dealing with, which is likely not possible.

It seems that distilling would give the best chance, then run through filtering and charcoal.

But better is to have your water inventoried and know how to access it. In my case, since I still use a tank water heater (I’m no idiot), I have 50 gallons sitting up there - for this, it would be a tough call as to whether to access it, since I don’t know if it was filled with bad water. Better to have a supply ready (which I don’t have) and, of course, to have rooftop collection capability.

First thing I suggest to quit getting news from places like Google or yahoo, these are LameStream Media personified with a biased axe to grind.

Back when the first Clean Water Act became law of the Land, I was a Pollution Control and Abatement Officer. Much of the pollution you claim was ceased by most companies, especially the big companies. It only took a few years of actually making a difference before the wildeyed inexperienced grads, who saw a deadly polluter in every company, gained control of pollution control. Still, the USA has some of the cleanest air and water compared to any country in the world.

Farmers, big and small, try very hard to not over fertilize. Why?, mainly because its their money running down the drain.

Now if you can show me there was no red tide before chemical fertilizer farming began, I might see some of it your way, otherwise you would be better off not seeing a nasty ol polluter behind every tree.

Google is just a news index like free republic is a news index. Free Republic is also chat room where you can waste a lot of time.

You may have been a regulatory enforcer back then but I worked on the other side and I began before the Clean Acts.

I had 31 hours of chemistry and 28 hours of biology. I began a career in industrial chemicals(manufacturing) before there were enviro regs. So my employer transferred me to their CA plant where I dealt with state enviro regs before the federal Clean Acts were implemented.

I had many jobs types such as chemist, mfg management, sales, etc. But we sold the polluting product to other manufacturers who used it in their processes, so that was most of my effort. 20 years in consumables and 20 years in capital equipment.

So to meet the reg my buyer would have to pay more the material and would have make a capital equipment purchase but he will save money on effenciancy and labor, and lower his emissions, so that the asshole regulators would get off his back. And if he wanted to, I could show him how to cheat and cheat the system. And if he got caught, he could play dumb. Everybody cheats to some degree. Everybody dumps when it rains. That is called converting your point pollution to non-point pollution(Run-off pollution)

And as you say, back then, great strides were made in point pollution, but not much was ever done about non point. Back there in the 70s, EPA decided not to move on the non-point in the Chesapeake. So it has really only been in the last 15 yrs that we began to look at non-point, but not much has been accomplished.

Mankind has been fertilizing for a long time, but it is only in modern times with petrochemicals that it has become cheaper. Farmers(especially the small one) are like everyone else, they don't want to waste money, but it is more about the yield and the payback.

You are correct, mankind has known about algae and plankton blooms a long time, and taken advantage of them. There has always been natural run-off but you can hardly compare that to modern times runoff.

We know a lot more about the role of water temp and hours of daylight in these processes. In modern times we have all these satellites in orbit staring at the earth so we know a lot more about these processes on a global scale. All this becomes evident how hydrologic cycles drive nutrient run-off coupled with nutrient streams that begin at the poles that drive the food chain and drive the carbon-oxygen cycle.

These cycles and forces(local and global) have been in place a long, long time. The ascent of man measured by the exponential human growth curve begins only after the industrial revolution. And that growth curve is not over. 7 billion today will be 11 billion in 2100(85 years). 1 billion more Asians and 3 billion more Africans.

"a smart company used the waste in a another process"

That's quite common. 30 years ago when the cost of disposal at hazardous waste landfills rose sharply, you find away to blend in to virgin material, if you use disposal cost as a negative price. Back out the disposal cost from the raw cost, so you end up with a very low price product.

"or sold it to another manufacturer"

Same situation. Sell it cheap to a roofing tar manufacturer. You don't make a lot of money selling it to the roofing company but you avoided the hazardous waste disposal costs.

This all falls under the concept of pollution versus pollution streams. If the downstream price goes up, the material will divert from the upstream into a different stream.

This applies to that fertilizer running off. If there is a price to that run-off, it will take a different path. But in that case, the farmer saves money by avoiding the run-off costs plus he saves money by being more efficient with the fertilizer he actually uses.

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