Broken Pipeline Dumps 550,000 Gallons of Gasoline into Wisconsin Groundwater

A gasoline pipeline belonging to West Shore spilled half a million gallons of gasoline over a two week period near Jackson, Wisconsin.  Testing of local wells has led to the oil company’s installation of  water treatment systems capable of removing gasoline in several homes with several more expected.

One of the wells had almost 550 times the acceptable level of benzene in its drinking water.

A single spilled gallon of gasoline can pollute 750,000 gallons of water.

 More details.

Rarely Seen Fish Demonstrate How Little We Know of the Planet We Inhabit

Ancient Greeks thought the sea was a river that flowed around the planet. “Ocean” comes from okeanos, Greek for “river.”  —National Geographic. 

Humans rarely encounter frilled sharks, which prefer to remain in the oceans’ depths, up to 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) below the surface. Considered living fossils, frilled sharks bear many physical characteristics of ancestors who swam the seas in the time of the dinosaurs. This 5.3-foot (1.6-meter) specimen was found in shallow water in Japan in 2007 and transferred to a marine park. It died hours after being caught.

The frilled shark is one of many marvels that can be seen on the National Geographic’s wonderful Ocean Life section.

 

The Likelihood of Dying

B. Bea Sharper Fills in the Blanks That Harper’s Misses.  Here B. B. Reports on a British Study on the Likelihood of Dying From Various Causes

 

Likelihood of dying from from food poisoning as compared with dying from ingesting food supplements — 900 times greater.

Likelihood of dying from a preventable medical injury during a hospital stay as compared with dying from ingesting food supplements — 300,000 times greater.

Likelihood of dying from from a preventable medical injury during a hospital stay as compared with dying from military force while serving on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan — 0 times greater (the same).

Likelihood of dying from from an adverse reaction to a pharmaceutical drug as compared with dying from ingesting food supplements — 62,000 times greater.

Likelihood of dying from from an adverse reaction to a pharmaceutical drug as compared with dying from ingesting a herbal remedy –7,750 times greater.

An Interesting Chart and More Stark Numerical Facts About the Dangers of Pharmaceuticals

 

 A Gray Water System Can Save Water, But It Can Also Be A Lot of Trouble–A Lot More Than Simple Conservation

by Hardly Waite

There was a time when talk of collecting and reusing “gray water” was strictly the province of hippies and readers of the Mother Earth News. With the increasing scarcity of water, we now hear more about it from a wider spectrum of the population.

In general, gray water refers to water that goes down the drains of bathroom sinks, showers, tubs, and clothes washers. Black water, by contrast, is the waste from kitchen sinks, dishwashers, and toilets.

With proper  in-home treatment, gray water can be reused.  Black water  can be reused only if treated by a municipal waste water system. Treated gray water can be used to flush toilets and for irrigation, under certain conditions. It is recommended, for example, that gray water not be reused through sprinkler heads.

The point is, reuse of gray water is limited.  It also requires significant plumbing modification on existing homes. (It is much easier to arrange when a new home is being built.)  Maintenance requirements can also be significant.

While gray water use can save water, much more can be saved by landscaping for low water requirements.

The Gazette’s opinion is that the first step in really progressive water management in the home is tossing out the 1950s notion that your moral obligation as an American is to grow and mow as much grass as possible.

 

More About the Pros and Cons of Gray Water

 The Controversial Practice Called Hydrofracturing or Fracking Is A Test of Our National Values

by Hardly Waite

The topic of hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking or hydrofracturing) and its potential effects on groundwater have dominated recent water news nationwide, but especially in the areas of the nation where fracking is practiced.  As evidence mounts that the practice is an impending environmental disaster,  there is no indication that efforts to curb fracking or to at least postpone it for further study have even the slightest chance of succeeding.

Fracking has been carried out virtually without regulation, thanks to the US Energy Policy Act signed into law in 2005 in the Bush/Cheney pro-drilling era. The Energy Policy Act fully exempted the oil and gas industry from the provisions of the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act,  the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.  In other words, the EPA and other government regulatory agencies have no real oversight authority where fracking is concerned.

The following description of the fracking procedure is excerpted from an interview with Marianne R. Metzger of National Testing Laboratories that apppeared in Water Quality Products magazine (July, 2012).

Hydraulic fracturing, usually called fracking,  is a process used to remove natural gas from shale deposits.

Fracking is done by drilling a well  down  several hundred feet,  then drilling horizontally, often for several hundred feet.  Special fracking materials, mostly water but also a blend of  chemicals and a sand-like substance called proppant,  are then pumped into the well under pressure.  This special fracking solution permeates the cracks, the proppant sets up to hold the cracks open,  and natural gas can then rise to the surface.

Although a well casing is in place where the borehole passes through the water table, the act of opening these small cracks will eventually allow naturally occurring contaminants like methane, usually the first to be noticed,  to migrate into the aquifer. Methane sometimes gets to aquifers naturally, but fracking speeds the process up. It only makes sense that cracks that can carry natural gas can carry a variety of water contaminants as well.

Earthquakes have been associated with fracking, especially where deep wells are used to dispose of fracking wastes, though no specific cause and effect relationship has been established.  Air pollution has also been a problem in the areas surrounding drilling sites.

 

 

 

 

According to Marianne Metzger, “People should absolutely be concerned [about fracking]; not only is there a concern about water contamination from the fracking process itself, but there are other things to consider, including the noise from the drill site, air pollution, waste stream generated, waste retention ponds, increased truck traffic and heavy equipment, which can also contribute to environmental contamination. We are now starting to see how these gas wells are negatively impacting home and property values, as there have been instances in which mortgage companies will refuse a mortgage on a property that is located near a gas well. I highly recommend that anyone with a private well in areas where gas drilling is occurring has their water tested and speaks to a lawyer regarding language in any lease addressing water quality.”

 

In Fairness to Penn State,  the Baptism of  Certain Catholics Should be Vacated

by Tiger Tom

One of the many penalties  heaped on Penn State’s football program as punishment for university officials covering up child abuse was the “vacating” of several years of football victories.  The vacated victories were all football games won during the tenure of saint turned scumbag head coach Joe Paterno.  Paterno fell from grace when it was revealed that he kept quiet though he knew that one of his staff had been luring little boys into showers.  Fortunately for Paterno,  he died and was spared the heartbreak of seeing his victories vacated.

The Penn State situation is identical to the ongoing sexual abuse coverup scandals in the Catholic Church. It’s hard to say if the Church is like a Football Program or if a Football Program is like the Church. I don’t want to offend either.  It probably doesn’t matter because in both cases it’s about high officials in a powerful hierarchical organization protecting the organization’s sanctity by hiding the sins of underlings against those the organization is ostensibly set up to benefit. Something like that, anyway.

When I heard about the vacated victories I did some research to find out what, exactly, vacating consists of.   “Vacating, ” one sports expert explains, “does not have the same effect as a forfeit, which would award the victory to the other team. Instead it just leaves the game in a strange limbo in which it is treated as if it wasn’t officially played.”  Limbo may be the key word here.

The vacating of victories seems like a strange punishment to me.  In its effort to punish a dead coach, the NCAA vacated the result of games played by many hundreds of young football players who had nothing to do with covering up child abuse.  These young players, most of them still alive and proud to show their trophies, are, after all,  the ones who played and won the games, not dead Joe Paterno.

To a cleric, it would seem to me, though I confess to knowing little of such things, the equivalent of a football victory is the salvation of a soul.  That is the Ultimate Victory from the viewpoint of the Church.

Therefore, I, Tiger Tom, propose that in the many cases where clerics are found guilty of concealing the abuse of children the Ultimate Penalty be the vacating of the baptism of all those baptized  under the auspices of said cleric.  This is only fair.

In the recent (2012) case of Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former aide to the archbishop of Philadelphia who was found guilty of looking the other way while young boys were being abused, I think it would be fair to vacate the baptism of all Catholics in the area of his jurisdiction who were baptized and therefore saved from eternal torment during the time when the Monsignor knowingly withheld information.  Vacating their baptism, of course, would not mean that they were doomed to Hell.  It would be simply as if they had never lived. The Monsignor is the one who would really suffer, seeing his record as a soul saver reduced to the number of  baptisms that occurred before his fall.

If Joe Paterno can give up his victories, surely a few Catholics, especially if they are football fans, won’t mind giving up the salvation of their souls.  Sometimes collateral damage can’t be avoided,  as they would say at the NCAA.

Giant Sturgeon, Largest Freshwater Fish Ever Landed on a Rod and Reel, Caught and Released in British Columbia

 

A monster white sturgeon weighing an estimated 1,100 pounds and measuring 12 feet, 4 inches was caught and released on the Fraser River, a British Columbia waterway famous for its big sturgeon.

Catches of white sturgeon averaging 30 to 100 pounds are typical on the Fraser, even an occasional 250-pounder, but nothing as massive as this sturgeon, believed to be the biggest freshwater fish ever caught on rod and reel in North America…and possibly the oldest.

Estimated age of the fish is over 100 years old.

Read More, See More Pictures

When You Use Water You Use Energy, And Vice Versa

  Water Conservation Results in Energy Conservation, and Vice Versa

Energy depends on water.  Water is an essential ingredient in both the creation and delivery of energy.

Half of our water use every day is for cooling power plants. In addition, the oil and gas industries use tens of millions of gallons a day, injecting water into aging oil fields to improve production, and to free natural gas in shale formations through hydraulic fracturing.

In times of water shortage, power blackouts can occur simply because there is not enough water available to produce energy.  And the consequential  shortage of power can add to the shortage of water.

For years people have longed to make a car that runs on water.  All cars run on water.  Tremendous amounts of water are required to produce and process gasoline, to produce metals and plastics for car parts, and even to build the roads that cars are driven on.

More from the New York Times

The US Air Force Has Spilled  24 Million Gallons of Jet Fuel which is Making Its Way Toward Albuquerque’s Largest and Best Water Wells

 

It has been called the largest threat to a city’s drinking water supply in history.  As much as 24 million gallons of jet fuel — or twice the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill — is seeping into an underground aquifer and steadily toward  drought-stricken Albuquerque’s  largest and most pristine water wells.

Though the US military has a poor record for environmental protection, the Albuquerque fuel-spill case reveals  new levels arrogance and disregard for citizens’ health and well-being.  The spill was first discovered in 1999 when the Air Force noticed a pool of fuel coming up out of the ground at its old aircraft fuel storage center, which dates back to the 1950s. Air Force officials say the fuel was leaking from an underground pipe for at least 40 years as tests on elements in the plume — which contains the cancer-causing Benzene and other harmful toxins — show it dates back to at least the 1970s.

Initially, the Air Force estimated the spill to be about 100,000 gallons. But as more than 130 monitoring wells have been dug around the site, estimates on the size and severity of the spill have continued to grow.

In 2007, fuel was found 500 feet down in the aquifer that provides Albuquerque half of its drinking water. In the spring of 2012, the state geologist who initially estimated the spill at 8 million gallons said he now thinks it could be as much as 24 million gallons. And a new report from the Air Force indicates rising groundwater levels have further exacerbated the problem, swamping some of the spill beneath the water table.

With the outcome in doubt, the fate of a city seems to hinge on the Air Force’s questionable ability to remedy the problem.  At this late date, there may not be a solution.   The Air Force has spent heavily on expert advice from consultants, but the amount of spilled fuel actually recovered to this point is not impressive.

More information about the spill.

Water Does Not Necessarily Cost More in Areas Where It Is Scarce.  Seattle Tops the List of Ten Cities with the Costliest Water.