WaterMatters at EnvironmentMemo

Does this make the Mississippi River a sewer?

There’s a lot in the news about how

CHILEAN authorities have approved a $2.8 billion plan to dam two rivers in Patagonia for hydro-electricity, triggering angry protests and claims that swathes of pristine wilderness will be destroyed. …

Chili wants progress, but is a high-energy future the way to go? OK, how about Floodagonia?

The rise of the Mississippi River has many consequences. One is rats.

When I lived in New Orleans a few decades back, one thing was sure: rats living amongst the rocks near the river lose these homes when the river rises. So, wear thick boots down at the French Quarter.

Rats can’t swim (I don’t think), they have teeth, and they can transmit diseases.

Here’s more information on why obtaining drinking water from an unprotected source, i.e., one receiving from upstream a multitude of industrial and other chemical discharges, can be extremely problematic in unknown ways.

They’re finding I-131 in the Philadelphia drinking water, and it’s not from Japan. But no doubt the scrutiny on the Japanese reactors led to this information coming to the forefront. Among other issues, there are people here with some explaining to do. It seems it took 3 years for information about elevated levels to come out. A few are soft-pedaling the data, saying that it was not a prolonged exposure. But who really knows? And alerts should have gone out so the source could be ascertained. There also may have been undetected spikes.

My immediate thought was: what is the source of this water? It turns out it is the Schuylkill River and
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Not very glamorous, and far from a Mediterranean diet: In the Med,

Fishermen will be paid to catch plastic, rather than fish, under bold new plans from the EU’s fisheries chief, aimed at providing fleets with an alternative source of income to reduce pressure on dwindling fish stocks.

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To learn about source waters (for drinking) in your state, or in mine in particular (North Carolina), one good place to check is source Water Assessment Programs (SWAP). As it says at the NC website:

North Carolina’s Source Water Assessment Program (SWAP) provides assessments of each public drinking water intake in North Carolina. These assessments provide a relative susceptibility rating calculated using state-wide data.

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