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Tue 6 Sep, 2005 06:15 am
I have brought this question up several time in the last week and gotten no response so I'll try again.
Is all this filthy, toxic, chemical and disease ridden water in New Orleans now being pumped back into two MAJOR water supplies, one of which serves THE ENTIRE MID WEST.........
AS IS?
Please God, say it ain't so.
No idea really, I just heard a report they are pumping flood water into a lake, but I dont know if its a major water source.
material girl wrote:No idea really, I just heard a report they are pumping flood water into a lake, but I dont know if its a major water source.
Get a map and check out the size of it if you have the resources. Anything that big seeps into the ground and spreads, even if none of it was used for anything but swimming and fishing.
E-coli, among other things, could be spread in epidemic proportions.
It is scary.
Phoenix32890 wrote:
That is scary! 
Obviously only (Non-USAmerican) journalists, environmental groups etc are talking about that ... until now.
(Besides elsewhere, it is one of themes at the conference of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which just takes place in Berlin/Germany.)
I saw them pumping the water from the city and it was green. No kidding. Straight from the city to the body of water.
Good question BVT. Under normal circumstances our sewage goes to a public or private sewage treatment plant to be processedÂ…but now I'm curious where is all this bacteria ridden sludge going to go and who else and what else will it affect?
Walter Hinteler wrote:Phoenix32890 wrote:
That is scary!
Obviously only (Non-USAmerican) journalists, environmental groups etc are talking about that ... until now.
(Besides elsewhere, it is one of themes at the conference of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which just takes place in Berlin/Germany.)
I started talking about it one minute after they said they were going to pump it out and I'm an ignant liberal musician, so surely some smarter people have HAD to consider it and have gone on ahead and started doing it anyway.
Know what I think? bush is receiving all this heat, whether he deserves it or not, and so now he's decided he has to look presidential and make things happen fast and damn the consequences. Well junior, you guys had your chance to act quickly and decisively and blew it. Why hurry now? Take your time and do it right so even more people don't get sick, suffer and die. We already know you guys are incompetent.
In the interest of fairness, I don't lay all this blame on poor junior, but the president sets the tone for the country and the adminstratrion and the government, and he's C.I.C.
Actually, for such things there should be an emergency plan - especially, since all knowledge is bundled now in one single department.
Well, the good news is that you can buy Flagyl (for dysentery) as a generic. The bad news............................I don't even want to think about it!
Phoenix32890 wrote:Well, the good news is that you can buy Flagyl (for dysentery) as a generic. The bad news............................I don't even want to think about it!
if you can get off the toilet to go to the store
I heard that this was the method they would be using, directly back into the main water systems. The news item indicated that much of it would flow into the Mississippi and then flow on down to The Gulf Of Mexico. SO far I have heard nothing of treatments but another part of what I believe on the final outcome for the water is that any which is expected to directly feed into peoples water supplies will be tested and treated as necessary.
The news item I saw this morning on the television showed water being pumped and it was going directly into a body of water, not sure if it was Ponchartrain or the Mississippi, was mainly just glad to see they were pumping it out since 4 days ago they said it would be 3 or 4 weeks before any pumping began.
What people are continually neglecting to think about is that water is always being polluted. Giant reservoirs which feed into pipe lines which serve various communities are subjected to all sorts of contaminates on a regular basis and are continually tested and treated. What? You think birds fly around the edges of reservoirs and never leave their droppings in the water?
Sturgis wrote:I heard that this was the method they would be using, directly back into the main water systems. The news item indicated that much of it would flow into the Mississippi and then flow on down to The Gulf Of Mexico. SO far I have heard nothing of treatments but another part of what I believe on the final outcome for the water is that any which is expected to directly feed into peoples water supplies will be tested and treated as necessary.
The news item I saw this morning on the television showed water being pumped and it was going directly into a body of water, not sure if it was Ponchartrain or the Mississippi, was mainly just glad to see they were pumping it out since 4 days ago they said it would be 3 or 4 weeks before any pumping began.
What people are continually neglecting to think about is that water is always being polluted. Giant reservoirs which feed into pipe lines which serve various communities are subjected to all sorts of contaminates on a regular basis and are continually tested and treated. What? You think birds fly around the edges of reservoirs and never leave their droppings in the water?
I know you're not seriously comparing day to day pollution with this
i wonder, if who ever is making the decision where to pump the water, is simply hoping to rely on regular day to day water treatment to make it safe again?
They appear to be pumping the water back into Pontchartrain, untreated. Im not sure that the water is "toxic" , it may be degraded . Oil licks from gas tanks and all will break down by bacterial action and Im sure they will monitor. The thing Im most appaled at is that the LAkes (Pontchartrain and Borgne) are actually large embayments with little "flushing" so, if I was the czar of remediation here, Id actually pump this crappy water into the river or out to Breton Sound, where natural wave action and aeration could speed up the breakdown of any toxics or bacteria.
Itd be way too long to treat this stuff, its gonna take weeks to pump the water down so they can move around better and maybe a month or more to dry it out (assuming we dont get even more rain) I did a quick calc, at a time I was there, the pumps could do about 25000 gal a SECOND. With the amount of water thats there, I calculated, day and night pumping, it would take almost 4 months to dry it out completely.
The pumps have huge bar screens and catch basins to help keep out the "big chunks" Itll be a constant job to have some trackhoes and dozers just scooping **** off the bar screens so the pumps dont foul
Im amazed, simply amazed that they got the levee patched cause a friend of mine that workd for the Corps of Engineers said that the inner core of the levee was "compactible **** fill". This means that its subject to the minorest of shear and can break easily. So theyve been dumping sand and granular based materials in those big " supermarket bags". All that will do is slow down the flow and buy time. The levees need rebuilding and the LSU engineering School already has a number of good designs with heavy spread-foot cores and sliding flood gates (This will happen again since it happened the very years that the French founded NAwlins, again in the mid 1800s and 1927, were now almost able to define a periodicity of return based on real data)
Remember, theres a number of oil rigs that have sustained pipe shears in which the oil is leaking out into the Gulf, and this may take weeks to fix. This is a question for JIM, we used to have catch baskets and shutoofs at the drill points. Dont the permanent wells have any blowout protection? Why are any wells leaking at all?
No BVT I am not. What I was trying to say is that water will at least be tested and treated. Admittedly it would also be advisable to boil water for cooking and drinking for a long time to come. The facts being what they are the water has to go somewhere and if we were braver we could do a deeper more comprehensive search and find out just how many water supply systems are inundated with contaminates daily. Much of the water being pumped out of New Orleans at this time, is water which would have been pumped in the past and much of it would have been similar to what has made its way to water supplies in the past. Is there more than usual? Yes. Clearly people walking through the water stir in extra bacteria and standing water creates problems. It would startle, stun and scare many people to know how much human waste is flushed out into waterways which then pass along to water supply systems. Not a pretty picture Polly. For now just be alert as to what is happening and wash your water thoroughly. Huh?
farmerman wrote:They appear to be pumping the water back into Pontchartrain, untreated. Im not sure that the water is "toxic" , it may be degraded . Oil licks from gas tanks and all will break down by bacterial action and Im sure they will monitor. The thing Im most appaled at is that the LAkes (Pontchartrain and Borgne) are actually large embayments with little "flushing" so, if I was the czar of remediation here, Id actually pump this crappy water into the river or out to Breton Sound, where natural wave action and aeration could speed up the breakdown of any toxics or bacteria.
They've been pumping stuff into Lake Pontchartrain for decades and had this very problem all along where the bacteria is slow to break down. The lake was closed to swimmers for decades because of the bacteria levels and there was a huge "Grand Opening" festival back 2 or 3 years ago (it might have been 2001??) when the swimming ban was finally lifted.
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