Just like Charleston, West Virginia last fall another major metropolitan area this morning finds itself unable to access healthy drinking water. Toledo, Ohio and a large area surrounding the city have been warned not to drink the water due to toxins in Lake Erie water derived from an algae bloom. In the case of Charleston, 300,000 people went without clean drinking water for months due to a leak from a chemical tank upstream from their drinking water intake on the Fox River. In Toledo this morning 500,000 people plus are without potable water. Officials are advising that people not boil the water as this concentrates the toxin and apparently it is difficult or impossible to filter it. The algae bloom creating the toxin has been traced to increased sewage and agricultural runoff into Lake Erie from as far away as Michigan. This should serve as wake up call and an exclamation point to all of us about this increasingly scarce resource-clean water! We all have grown to expect clean water when we turn on our taps. Increasingly we have witnessed man made causation to these water emergencies, whether it is leaky tanks, coal slurry impoundment failures, derailments of oil into rivers or agricultural run off as in the Toledo situation. In the Ozarks, we take our clean water streams for granted. In my life, I witnessed the Buffalo and Cuyahoga Rivers in New York and Cleveland, Ohio catch fire. Ive seen acres of dead fish and tar balls in Lake Erie where I grew up. Many of the great rivers of our history like the Hudson and the Potomac have been treated like trash dumps.Then they literally became sewers-with their fish unable to be eaten or waters clean enough to swim in. The sacred Ganges in northern India is a brown muddy sewer that looks nothing like the crystal streams that feed it from the highest mountains in the world-the Himalayas. Rivers reflect the sum total of the way the people in the watersheds treat them. We enjoy clean streams here because we dont have lots of industry or agriculture dumping sewage or chemicals upon the land or into streams. We also have a very active Stream Team program in Missouri that focuses on river clean-up and education. In the Ozarks we need to also focus on the karst nature of our geology. We have numerous sinkholes, losing streams and caves that form a whole different set of underground watersheds that often do not follow the more distinct watershed boundaries on the surface. Closer to home in Willow Springs placement of 37 tanks of petroleum products (Coastal Energy) in an area containing numerous sinkholes and only fifty feet from the Eleven Point Wild and Scenic River-a known losing stream is NOT a good one. There is no secondary containment for most of these tanks. A rupture of these tanks would cause permanent destruction of our karst watershed and the Eleven Point River. This is a dangerous combination of bad chemistry, physics and geology. The only real protection of our regional water supply and the waters of the Eleven Point River is to not have such a facility in such a place. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources and Region VII EPA bear most of the responsibility for permitting this facility. Its the absolute worst place for one of this nature. So as we read and hear more about the problems the people in Ohio are experiencing with their drinking water this Sunday morning, we should remember that WE ALL LIVE DOWN STREAM from somewhere.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 15:24:44 +0000