Govt Stands by as Mercury Taints Water

By JASON DEAREN (AP)

NEW IDRIA, Calif. — Abandoned mercury mines throughout central California’s rugged coastal mountains are polluting the state’s major waterways, rendering fish unsafe to eat and risking the health of at least 100,000 impoverished people.

But an Associated Press investigation found that the federal government has tried to clean up fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of mines — and most cleanups have failed to stem the contamination.

Although the mining ceased decades ago, records and interviews show the vast majority of sites have not even been studied to assess the pollution, let alone been touched.

While millions live in the affected Delta region, the pollution disproportionately hurts the poor and immigrants who rely on local fish as part of their diet, according to a study conducted by University of California, Davis ecologist Fraser Shilling. His research found that 100,000 people, which he calls a conservative estimate, regularly eat tainted fish at levels deemed unsafe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

But neither the state nor federal government has studied long-term health effects of mercury on the people who regularly eat fish from these waters.

The legacy of more than a century of mercury mining in California — which produced more of the silvery metal than anywhere else in the nation — harms people and the environment in myriad ways.

Far to the north, American Indians who live atop mine waste on the shores of one of the world’s most mercury-polluted lakes have elevated levels of the heavy metal in their bodies and fears about their health.

And other mercury mines are the biggest sources of the pollution in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast.

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Dredging Causes High Levels of PCBs in Air and Water

By Dennis Yusko, Times Union

FORT EDWARD — Federal officials have modified how they dredge the Upper Hudson River after high levels of PCBs were found in the air and water near Rogers Island in Washington County, they said Friday.

Air and water monitoring conducted along the river in Fort Edward last week showed higher-than-allowed levels of PCBs in the air and water contamination of up to 442 parts per trillion, just short of the federal standard of 500 parts per trillion that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said would shut the project down.

“At no point was anybody in danger,” EPA spokeswoman Kristen Skopeck said. “It just told us that we needed to make changes.”

But dredging critics jumped on the findings Friday, calling them a “crisis on the Hudson” and demanding the EPA immediately cease all dredging.

“After years of dismissing the idea that dredging will cause the resuspension of considerable amounts of PCBs, causing levels in water to spike and volatilization into the air, EPA officials now not only admit that resuspension is occurring, but also that noise and air quality levels have reached the threshold that EPA is supposed to use to shut the project down,” Tim Havens, Sr., said in a written statement.

Havens is president of Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation (CEASE). Its members charged that the EPA was endangering the environment and welfare of local residents.

“EPA is exceeding the safety levels, and they are not even at full production,” Havens said.

The EPA, state Health Department and state Department of Environmental Conservation are monitoring the water and air around Fort Edward to ensure there are no health risks to people along the river, Skopeck said. PCB levels have dropped since General Electric Co. contractors reduced dredging in parts of the river that are most contaminated and changed the ways they handle soil scooped from the riverbed, she said.

The EPA in 2002 ordered GE to remove more than two million cubic yards of PCB-contaminated sediment from the bottom of the river between Fort Edward and Troy. GE plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls legally discharged PCBs into the river for 30 years until 1977. PCBs have been found to cause health problems in humans and animals.

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Source: timesunion.com

Ask Your Senators to Save Our Waterways from Uncontrolled Pollution

Source:  National Resources Defense Council

In 2001 and 2006, the Supreme Court issued decisions that have been interpreted to mean that the Clean Water Act — which protects America’s water bodies from unregulated industrial pollution, oil spills and destruction by filling — might not apply to many water bodies that are “isolated” from others, that are located far from “navigable” waterways or that are dry for portions of the year. The wetlands and streams affected by these decisions are vital to communities and the environment: we rely on these waterways to replenish drinking water supplies, lessen flood damage, purify water and support wildlife habitat.

Since the first Supreme Court ruling in 2001, government agencies have declared thousands of water bodies unprotected by the Clean Water Act. More lose protection all the time, and the government’s ability to enforce the law has been hamstrung by questions about which waterways remain protected and which ones do not.

The Clean Water Restoration Act would ensure that Clean Water Act protections once again apply to all water bodies that were covered by the law before the Supreme Court’s misguided rulings. By clearly outlining what water bodies the law protects, Congress can ensure that the Clean Water Act will comprehensively guard against polluted rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands. While campaigning, President Obama indicated that he would support and sign legislation fixing this problem.

What to do:
Send a message urging your senators to co-sponsor the Clean Water Restoration Act (S. 787).  Click here to take action.

Learn more at NRDC

Sarah Palin’s dead lake

By promoting runaway development in her hometown, say locals, Palin has “fouled her own nest” — and that goes for the lake where she lives.

By David Talbot from Salon.com

Sept. 19, 2008 | WASILLA, Alaska — Every morning she’s at home here, Sarah Palin wakes up to a postcard view from her lakeside home. Out the windows of her two-story wood-framed house stretch the serene, birch-lined waters of Lake Lucille. Ducks go gliding by the red-and-white Piper Cub floatplane docked outside. With the snow-frosted Chugach and Talkeetna mountains looming in the distance, the scene seems to define the Alaska that Palin celebrates: rugged, majestic, unspoiled.

And, yet, the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead.

“Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake — it can’t support a fish population,” said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. “It’s a runway for floatplanes.”

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans “have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

“Sarah’s legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth,” said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. “The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it’s not a pleasant place to live. It’s not thought out. And that’s a shame.

“Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can’t understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition.”

Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla’s frenzied development was Palin’s own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as “impaired” in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.

“Sarah,” a recent biography of Palin by Kaylene Johnson, features a photo of a beaming Palin, sitting in a rowboat on Lake Lucille clutching a fishing rod. But, according to local fishermen, the Republican vice-presidential candidate would have to be very lucky to reel in something edible.

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Source: Salon

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More natural gas today, less and polluted water tomorrow.

After decades of declining US natural-gas production, an advanced drilling system so powerful it fractures rock with high-pressure fluid is opening up vast shale-gas deposits.

Instead of falling, US gas production is rising, with up to 118 years’ worth of “unconventional” natural gas reserves in 21 huge shale basins, an industry study in July reported. Such reserves could make the nation more energy self-sufficient and provide more of a cleaner “bridge fuel” to help meet carbon-reduction goals urged by environmentalists.

Shale gas reserves have a powerful economic lure. Companies, states, and landowners could all reap a windfall in the tens of billions. Some also predict lower heating costs for residential gas users as production increases.

Now, scores of natural gas companies are fanning out from Fort Worth, Texas, where hydraulic fracturing of shale has been done for at least five years, to lease shale lands in 19 states, including Pennsylvania and New York.

But some warn that by expanding “hydraulic fracturing” of shale, America strikes a Faustian bargain: It gains new energy reserves, but it consumes and quite possibly pollutes critical water resources.

“People need to understand that these are not your old-fashioned gas wells,” says Tracy Carluccio, special projects director for Delaware Riverkeeper, a watchdog group worried about a surge in new gas drilling from New York to Pennsylvania and from Ohio to West Virginia. “This technology produces tremendous amounts of polluted water and uses dangerous chemicals in every single well that’s developed.”

Traditional gas wells bore straight into porous stone, using a few thousand gallons of water during drilling. But dense shale has gas locked inside.

Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” and horizontal drilling unlock it.

Each hydraulically fractured horizontal well can require from 2 million to 7 million gallons of fresh water mixed with sand and thousands of gallons of industrial chemicals to make the water penetrate more easily.

This frac-water mixture is blasted at high pressure into shale deposits up to 10,000 feet deep, fracturing them. The sand lodges in the cracks, propping them open and providing a path for the gas to exit after external pressure is released.

Besides using vast amounts of groundwater, scientists and environmentalists worry that toxic frac water – 30 percent or more – remains underground and may years later pollute freshwater aquifers.

Millions of gallons of frac water come back to the surface. It could be treated, but in Texas it is most often reinjected into the ground.

Millions more gallons of “produced” water flow out later during gas production. This flow, too, is often tainted with radioactivity and poisons from the shale. Often stored in pits, that waste can leak or overflow while awaiting reinjection.

Simply put: “Each of these wells uses millions of gallons of fresh water, and all of it is going to be contaminated,” Ms. Carluccio says.

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Source: The Christian Science Monitor

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Tiger Woods Project Will Impact Island’s Water Resources

Nassau, Bahamas (August 19, 2008) -An independent review of the Tiger Woods Albany Bahamas project EIA by international consulting firm Black & Veitch reveals that construction of the Tiger Woods Albany Bahamas project will have significant impacts on Nassau, Bahamas coastal resources and the marine environment.

The review states, “Construction of the project will have significant impacts on coastal resources” and “Construction and operation of the marina, jetties, and access channel and construction of other project components near the beach have the potential to cause adverse impacts to the marine environment.”

According to the review, Black & Veatch International was contracted to review and support The Bahamas’ BEST Commission in conducting an objective evaluation of the Albany Bahamas Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) submittals.

Black & Veatch’s findings of the potentially significant environmental impacts of concern were summarized:

Groundwater Resources – Black & Veatch stated, “Potentially significant impacts to groundwater resources could arise from the application and management of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides particularly on the golf course, as well as from saltwater intrusion from construction of the marina.”

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Source: Rearth.org

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Waste water crops are feeding millions

STOCKHOLM-Vegetables, rice and other cereals in at least 53 cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America may someday come with warning labels that read “this is a byproduct of raw sewage”.

Against the backdrop of rising food prices and a shortage of drinking water worldwide, urban farmers are being forced to use either untreated waste water or polluted river water both for their agricultural needs and for their economic survival.

A 53-city survey finds the practice most common in some of the world’s poorest nations where waste water use is critical both to farmer’s incomes and urban food security while simultaneously raising critical health risks.

The study conducted by the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI) — and released to coincide with World Water Week in the Swedish capital of Stockholm — indicates that about 80 per cent of the cities surveyed are using untreated or partially treated waste-water for agriculture.

In over 70 per cent of the cities studied, more than half of urban agricultural land is irrigated with waste water that is either raw or diluted in streams.

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Source: Business Daily

For more information on water conservation, visit www.nuprana.com