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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
 Posted - 09/05/2005 : 19:25:11
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I want to make a prediction. No ESP involved.
The local, state, and fed gov (in New Orleans) will miss a chance to prevent further ecological catastrophe.
They have fixed a couple of the major levee breaks, and the rest will prob be patched up before long.
Today they started pumping teh water (I use that term loosely) out into the lake.
This water is contaminated beyond belief with sewage, oil, gasoline, rotting garbage, corpses (human and animal), household chemicals from hundreds of thousands of homes, and other things I haven't thought of.
Has anyone considered the ecological impact of pumping out trillions of gallons of this polluted water into the surounding environment? I can't find any reference to any environmental scientist being consulted.
I realize the scope of decontaminating that much water is beyond daunting, but surely there is something that can be done to mitigate the obvious ecological disaster we are about to create clearing out that water.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 09/05/2005 : 20:00:42 [Permalink]
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This article deals with exactly what you are talking about: http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200509/200509050037.html
From that article:
"As Ken Green, executive director of the Environmental Literacy Council, explains, there is simply no other option except to send the untreated water back into the Gulf. 'They have had a lot of sewage and a lot of chemicals that has hit the water, and there's really no way to treat that amount of water that they're going to have to pump out of the entire city. And, so, it's going to be dumped straight into the Gulf [of Mexico], which means you're going to have higher concentrations of those kinds of toxins in the Gulf waters. As I said, the scale of the disaster is such that you can't run this water through a treatment system to purify it before you put it out in the ocean,' he said.
"He says time will eventually heal most of the environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico. But there is concern about how dumping the contaminated water might affect the fishing industry."
Oddly enough, that's from a newspaper out of South Korea, and it's all I could find in the news online about this issue. Not that I looked all that hard. |
"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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| Edited by - marfknox on 09/05/2005 20:01:31 |
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tw101356
Skeptic Friend
USA
333 Posts |
Posted - 09/05/2005 : 20:52:34 [Permalink]
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The New Orleans Times-Picayune blog has a good article here. Nice to see that LSU researchers are monitoring the water going into the lake.
They don't sound like they think it will be devastating, but it will be a setback to years of cleanup efforts. They were interviewed while sampling and don't have any analysis data yet.
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- TW
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 09/05/2005 : 22:02:18 [Permalink]
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That illustrates my point quite well.
Nobody is seriously considering that there could be something done to mitigate the damage.
I'm not saying there is anything, but what is a couple weeks at this point to ask the question? To consult some ecologists?
What would be lost by taking a few days at this point to make sure an opportunity isn't missed?
quote:
"As Ken Green, executive director of the Environmental Literacy Council, explains, there is simply no other option except to send the untreated water back into the Gulf.
I'd like more than one opinion on the matter. But that may just be me.
Perhaps Green is correct, but maybe somebody out there knows something he doesn't.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 09/07/2005 : 13:55:15 [Permalink]
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quote:
"As Ken Green, executive director of the Environmental Literacy Council, explains, there is simply no other option except to send the untreated water back into the Gulf. "
Well, you could always fix those levees and leave the water in New Orleans for the amount of time it would take to treat it (ie, not allowing people to move back). It might not sound like a realistic option, but you could always argue that New Orleans should not be inhabited anyway. Lying below sea level and being an old flood plain (methinks), the best option (in the long term) might actually be to treat the water and then let nature reclaim the territory. |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 09/07/2005 : 14:10:29 [Permalink]
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quote:
Lying below sea level and being an old flood plain (methinks), the best option (in the long term) might actually be to treat the water and then let nature reclaim the territory.
Never gonna happen. heh.
The water is going to be pumped out. I was just hoping for a tad less haste and an effort to either mitigate or solidly plan for the disaster they are going to create.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 09/08/2005 : 14:49:23 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Dude
quote:
Lying below sea level and being an old flood plain (methinks), the best option (in the long term) might actually be to treat the water and then let nature reclaim the territory.
Never gonna happen. heh.
I know. But, at the least, people have to realize that this is probably going to happen again. Especially if the predicted outcomes of global warmig come true (ie higher sea levels and more violent storms). |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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marfknox
SFN Die Hard
USA
3739 Posts |
Posted - 09/10/2005 : 16:28:39 [Permalink]
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Clips from a Sept. 9 article in Salon.comhttp://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/09/wasteland/index.html
Within the impacted area are at least 2,200 underground fuel tanks, many potentially ruptured, says Rodney Mallett, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Officials also predict that thousands of cars, lawn mowers and weed-eaters are also submerged, leaking gas and oil into the waterways.
In addition, tens of thousands of barrels of oil have spilled from refineries and drilling rigs in at least 13 sites between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the coast, Katrina damaged 58 drilling rigs and platforms in the Gulf, according to Rigzone.com, an oil and gas industry Web site. At least one rig has sunk and another was swept 66 miles through the gulf before washing up on Dauphin Island. It remains unclear how badly the hundreds of underwater pipelines connecting the oil to shore have been damaged.
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that bacteria in the water flooding Gulf Coast areas are at 10 times the agency's standard for human health, and already four people have died from waterborne bacteria.
Although the samples are from flooded neighborhoods and not heavily industrialized zones, officials predict that the impact zone's water is laced with a slew of toxic chemicals such as lead, PCBs and herbicides. This sludge will eventually settle onto the soil and filter into the groundwater below, says Gina Solomon, M.D., a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. While it may be too early to predict the levels of total contamination, many of these chemicals are known to cause cancer, birth defects or neurological problems.
Yet it's become apparent that federal and state agencies had no plans in place to deal with the environmental impact of the storm and are now scrambling to know where to even begin to address the catastrophe. What's also become clear is that Superfund, the federal till for environmental cleanup, notably for Louisiana and Mississippi, has run dry, due in large part to anti-tax and anti-regulation policies favorable to oil and chemical industries.
"Chemical spills that would normally seem horrible on their own are dwarfed by the huge scale of this disaster," says Solomon. "Right now, people quite rightly are focusing on getting food and water and shelter for the victims, but the environmental mess and contamination could haunt this area for many years to come." |
"Too much certainty and clarity could lead to cruel intolerance" -Karen Armstrong
Check out my art store: http://www.marfknox.etsy.com
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| Edited by - marfknox on 09/10/2005 16:29:18 |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26022 Posts |
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