Tuesday, December 27, 2011

An unavoidable Climate Change issue that must be addressed soon


As Climate Change takes hold there will be more flooding in the Northeast of the US so there will be more incidents of overflows from sewage systems. This is one of those issues related to Climate Change that even a Climate Change denier public official is going to have to face no matter how entrenched he or she is in their denial. Besides out-dated sewer systems that allow raw sewage to flow into our lakes and streams during frequent and heavy rainfall, our sewer system infrastructures are getting old.

Our sewer systems are going to have to be repaired, replaced, and altered to deal with the predicted increase in extreme weather. We can do things like preserve and even create more wetlands that are able to absorb some of the increases in precipitation, but we are going to have to act quickly.

Under our present attitudes towards government in these lean financial times, where government has little money and little political will to put more money into protecting and preserving our environment, things are going to get tough. The public is going to have to learn about this aspect of Climate Change in our Northeast region in order to back the kind of financial burden making these very expensive changes will require. Good luck with that. Who will put the Climate Change bell on the cat of Climate Change expenses?

Already, sewer system overflows are a major problem, contaminating our waters, but it will get much worse the longer we don’t face it now.

US cities struggle to control sewer overflows  | ajc.com TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Twice in recent summers, visitors to parts of Michigan's western coast were greeted by mounds of garbage strewn along miles of sandy beach: plastic bottles, eating utensils, food wrappers, even hypodermic syringes. At least some of the rubbish had drifted across Lake Michigan from Milwaukee, a vivid reminder that many cities still flush nasty stuff into streams and lakes during heavy storms, fouling the waters with bacteria and viruses that can make people seriously ill. Thousands of overflows from sewage systems that collect storm water and wastewater are believed to occur each year. Regulators and environmentalists want them stopped, and since the late 1990s the Environmental Protection Agency or state officials have reached legal agreements with more than 40 cities or counties — Atlanta, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis and Indianapolis among them — to improve wastewater systems that in some cases are a century old. Costs are reaching hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. (December 26, 2011) Atlanta News

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