B. Bea Sharper on Swimming

 

Gazette Numerical Wizard B. Bee Sharper Reveals the Numerical Facts About Swimming that Harper’s Missed

 

Percentage of swimming worldwide that involves water — 100%.

Percentage of Americans who are afraid of swimming pools — around 50%.

Approximate number of drowning deaths that occur each year — 3800.

Approximate number of these drowning deaths that occur in pools –700.

Approximate number of pool-related emergency department treated injuries that occur each year — 5700.

Percentage of Americans who are afraid of deep, open bodies of water, like lakes — around 66%.

Percentage of Americans who are afraid of the deep end of a swimming pool — 46%.

Percentage of American men who say that they are unable to swim — 21%.

Percentage of American women who say that they are unable to swim — 51%.

Percentage of Americans who say that they are unable to swim — 37%.

Percentage of African Americans who say that they are unable to swim — 62%.

Percentage of Caucasian Americans who say that they are unable to swim — 32%.

Percentage of Asian Americans who say that they are unable to swim — 47%.

Percentage of Hispanic Americans who say that they are unable to swim — 44%.

Rank of drowning as cause of unintentional injury and death in children 1 to 19 — 2.

Factor by which 5 to 19 year old African American children are more likely to drown in a swimming pool than their peers — 6 times.

Percentage reduction in drowning of 1 to 4 year old children which can be attributed to formal swimming lessons –88%.

Reference Source: “More Swimmers Will Result in a Healthier Society, Fewer Drownings and Reduced Healthcare Costs, ” by Thomas Lachocki,  Ph. D..  Paper commissioned by the National Swimming Pool Foundation and reprinted in Water Conditioning and Purification Magazine, August, 2012,

Editor’s Note:   B. Bea Sharper, a big swimming pool fan,  wasn’t bothered that the numerical facts for this piece came from the National Swimming Pool Foundation, but the whole thing seemed a bit awkward to me.  The point being made, if I understood the article,  is that you should get  yourself a swimming pool so  you can learn  to swim so you won’t drown in a swimming pool.  Or that African Americans  especially should get a pool because their children are six times more likely than “their peers” to drown in a pool.  Isn’t this a little like saying you should get your child a gun so he will learn how to handle it and will be less likely to kill  himself with a gun? And as for the 46% of Americans who are afraid of the deep end of a swimming pool, they need to put in a pool so they can overcome their fear of the deep end of the pool. There’s a lesson here somewhere, but I’m missing it. –Hardly Waite, Pure Water Gazette.

 

 

 

 

Budget Cuts Lead to Pay Cuts which Lead to Worker Shortages which Lead to Public Danger and Greater Expense

In San Jose, CA, a rash of resignations driven by recent pay and benefit cuts has left the city’s massive wastewater treatment plant severely short-handed, raising the risk of a catastrophic sewage spill and forcing the city to pay top dollar for contract workers and overtime staff to keep it running.

A recent auditor’s report said, “Fewer people with less experience are now working more hours to operate and maintain the plant.” The reason given is below market compensation for skilled, experienced employees.

The San Jose plant has lost 90 workers — 43 percent of its workforce — in the past three years, according to a city management report that said the shortage has required costly overtime for remaining employees. The city is now considering a very pricey solution: Hiring contract workers.

Contract workers not only cost considerably more but are seldom as skilled as the regular workers they are replacing.

As water treatment and wastewater treatment plants age, cities are increasingly burdened with costly upkeep. Taxpayers seem unwilling to pay for services, creating a very dangerous situation. Political will is usually lacking when it comes to raising utilities prices to reflect the real cost of water because Americans have been conditioned by years of artificially low prices to believe that water should be free.

We must start paying a fair price for the water we use. Water is an area where austerity costs more in the long run.

More information about the Weepy Seepy dilemma.

Missouri Residents Are Angry Because They Weren’t Warned of TCE Contamination

 

Residents at Elmwood, MO in St. Louis County expressed justifiable anger upon learning that the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has been aware of serious contamination of their water since an industrial spill in 1988 but has not told them about it until now.

The DNR has been working on the issue since at least 1994,  but residents who have been using the tainted water were not informed of the 1988 spill until August of 2012. The EPA has recently been called in to aid in the investigation. The investigation seems to be mainly concerned with who is responsible for the spill and, therefore, financially responsible for the cleanup. The current occupant of the building where the spill occurred was not the tenant at the time.

The contaminant in question is Trichloroethylene (TCE). It is most commonly used as a degreaser for metal parts.  It can lead to chronic disease and cancer.  Levels once considered safe are now considered unsafe.  Trichloroethene is a manufactured, volatile organic chemical. It has also been used as a paint stripper, adhesive solvent and as an ingredient in paints and varnishes. The chemical can affect the nervous system.

Ten homes in Elmwood were recently tested for TCE contamination and all ten tested positive. Three homes had elevated TCE levels.

Standard water treatment for removal of TCE is activated carbon filtration or reverse osmosis.

The moral: If you’ve been trusting regulatory authorities to assure that your home’s water is safe, it may be time to rethink this.  Every home supplied by a municipality should probably have a good, whole house carbon filter and a reverse osmosis or high quality carbon drinking water system.

More about the Elmwood TCE Issue.

More about TCE.

Dr. Mercola Reports on Yet Another Study Indicating That

the US Is A Backward Country

According to the popular mercola.com website, fluoride is in 2012 still being added to 70 percent of public drinking water supplies in the US ostensibly as a cavity preventer.

According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, “This benefit is dubious at best, as there is practically no difference in tooth decay rates between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries, and no difference between states that fluoridate a high versus low percentage of their water.

“Yet, while fluoride in drinking water does NOT decrease rates of tooth decay, numerous studies show that this chemical has a wide array of devastating health effects – one of them being lowered IQ.”

A review of brain studies involving the use of fluoride has concluded that one of the adverse effects of fluoride exposure on children is damage to their neurological development.  According to the Harvard researchers, children who lived in high-fluoride areas had “significantly lower IQ than those in low fluoride areas,” with the authors noting: ” The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment.“

This adds to the mounting evidence demonstrating the damage fluoride inflicts on your brain, including your pineal gland. The results of one study looking at children’s intelligence in two towns – one with fluoridated water and one without – were particularly revealing, with about 28 percent of the children in the low-fluoride area scoring as “bright, normal or higher intelligence” compared to only 8 percent in the high-fluoride area.

Further, 15 percent of children in the high-fluoride city had signs of mental retardation, compared with only 6 percent in the low-fluoride city. And the study even accounted for other potential variables, such as lead exposure, iodine deficiency or a history of brain disease or head injury. There have been over 23 human studies and 100 animal studies linking fluoride to brain damage.

Read Dr. Mercola’s full account.

How to Keep Your Well Healthy

 

by Chris Carl

Reprinted from Care2.

Gazette Introductory Note:  This excellent overview of water well health is reprinted as a service to our readers.  The author points out basics that every well owner should be aware of.  Well owners have a responsibilty to themselves and to others.  When you punch a hole down to the water table, you open an avenue for contaminants to enter the ground water.  –-Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor. 

“Wellhead protection, whether a dug well or artesian, is a top priority in having a healthy well,” said Bart Cushing, owner of Cushing & Sons Dependable Water Wells in Keene, New Hampshire. “Wellhead protection will also solve about eighty percent of any problems you might run into as well,” he added. In the past few decades, wells have gone from being dug two to three feet wide to the more modern six-inch inch width and are primarily artesian and capped with cement.

Your first consideration when contemplating a well on your property is finding a well drilling business that has experience and references. Cushing said that people sometimes think they are saving money by hiring a contractor who is inexpensive and uses cheap, possibly hazardous materials. “I’ve had a lot of business during the recession fixing a lot of these mistakes,” said Cushing.

Once you’ve hired a reputable company you will need to consider:

*Where is the ground water?

*Is the proposed well away from sources of contamination?

*Is the location convenient to power and the building being supplied with water?

*Is the location assessable for drilling and pump installation?

Protecting your well from contaminants

Cushing advised having your well tested at least once a year, suggesting the late spring as the best time to test as that is when there is the most run-off from melting snow.

Cushing said he has been very surprised over the years regarding some of the things people don’t understand about keeping the water in their well healthy. “For example, if gasoline is spilled within one hundred feet of a well and there is enough of a gradient, sure enough, there will be petro chemicals in your well,” said Cushing. Though he added the chemicals could take two to three days to seep into the well.

 Atrazine Is Still Widely Used in The US

The herbicide atrazine is a fairly common ingredient of city tap water in the United States.  Atrazine is banned in the European Union,  but corporate-friendly US regulating agencies still allow it to be used.

Atrazine is one of the regulated chemicals that cities have most difficulty keeping within the EPA required limits.

The Huffington Post recently reported that  the Environmental Protection Agency has failed to notify the public about data showing that atrazine has been found at levels above the federal safety limit in drinking water in at least four states. Atrazine has been studied for its potential link to breast cancer, prostate cancer, and birth defects, and the EPA considers it to be a potential endocrine disruptor.

Removing atrazine is a costly undertaking for cities, requiring expensive carbon filtration equipment.  To recover the cost of filtering atrazine, water companies in six states are preparing a lawsuit against the makers of atrazine, the Swiss company Syngenta.  (Lots of luck.)

The case of atrazine and other herbicides clearly underlines the need for point of use treatment.  Atrazine can be removed with relative ease with a high quality carbon drinking water filter, but it is very expensive for city water suppliers to provide high quality carbon filtration for water that is going to flush toilets and water golf courses.

More on city water chemicals from the Huffington Post

 

U.S. Lags Behind China and India, Ranking Third in Overall Water Consumption

A New Study Has Found that Wastewater Disposal Is the Main Danger From Fracking

Scientists at Stony Brook University in an August 2012 article in the journal Risk Analysis asserted that future research into problems involved with the controversial oil/gas recovery practice commonly known as “fracking” will focus mainly on wastewater disposal.  That is because even in the best cases at least 200 cubic meters (over 50,000 gallons) of contaminated water is released from every treated well.

Waste water from fracking presents risks from salts and radioactive materials that are “several orders of magnitude larger” than for other potential water pollution possibilities examined in the study. Other water pollution pathways studied include tanker truck spills, well casing failures,  accidental drill site fluid spills,  and retention tank failures.  The fracking wastewater disposal risks, the study found, “dwarf the other water risks.”

The enormity of the risk that fracking entails can be seen in this assessment:

If only 10 percent of the Marcellus Shale region was developed, that could equate to 40,000 wells. Under the best-case median risk calculation that Rozell and Reaven [authors of the study] developed, the volume of contaminated wastewater “would equate to several hours flow of the Hudson River or a few thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools.” That represents a “potential substantial risk” that suggests additional steps should be taken to lower the potential for contaminated fracking fluid release, the authors say. Specifically, they suggest that “regulators should explore the option of mandating alternative fracturing procedures and methods to reduce the wastewater usage and contamination from shale gas extraction in the Marcellus Shale.” These would include various alternatives such as nitrogen-based or liquefied petroleum gas fracturing methods that would substantially reduce the amount of wastewater generated.

More information on the dangers of wastewater produced by fracking from the Wall Street Journal.

EPA Is Providing Funds to Reduce Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico

In 2012 the EPA issued a  grant to the  Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority for the purpose of combating hypoxia.

A large area in the northern  Gulf of Mexico is called the “dead zone.”  The problem is known technically as hypoxia.
Hypoxia means low oxygen and is primarily a problem in coastal waters. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is an area of hypoxic waters at the mouth of the

Mississippi River. Its area varies in size, but can cover up to 6,000 to 7,000 square miles.  The dead zone is caused by nutrient enrichment from the Mississippi River, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous.

Hypoxic waters have dissolved oxygen concentrations of less than 2-3 ppm. Hypoxia can be caused by a variety of factors, including excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, which promote growth of algae. As dead algae decompose, oxygen is consumed in the process, resulting in low levels of oxygen in the water.

Nutrients can come from many sources, including any of the following:

• Fertilizers from agriculture, golf courses, and suburban lawns
• Erosion of soil full of nutrients
• Discharges from sewage treatment plants
• Deposition of atmospheric nitrogen

More from the EPA’s Website.

High Levels of Lead Have Been Found in Half the Garden Hoses Tested

An admonition from the National Gardening Association:

A common summer scene involves kids squirting each other with the garden hose. Invariably, on a hot summer day some of the kids will take a drink from the hose. We’ve all done it, whether as kids or adults. It turns out that drinking from a plastic hose may be hazardous to our health.

Lab tests conducted on water left sitting for a day in 10 common brands of garden hoses revealed that 5 out of the 10 hoses had lead levels higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s safe levels for drinking water. Despite a mandate for manufacturers to significantly reduce lead levels in hoses by July 31st, it appears there are still brands with excessive lead leaching into the water.

You can avoid lead hoses entirely by purchasing hoses sold for boats or RVs, which don’t contain lead. Flush out any hose before using it, and avoid hoses with brass fittings, which also contain lead.

Similarly,  Consumer Reports tested 16 hoses.  Four of the 16 were labelled “safe for drinking” and did, in fact, contain no more lead after water had stood in them for several hours than was found in water coming straight from the tap.  The remaining hoses, some labelled unsafe for drinking and others not labelled, contained lead, the worst 10 to 100 times the EPA allowable for lead in drinking water (15 ppb).

The issue is that many hoses are made of polyvinyl chloride, which uses lead as a stabilizer, and when water stands in the hose over a period of time water picks up lead from the hose materials.

The moral:  If you’re going to drink from a garden hose or use it in any other way that matters (e. g., watering your garden or filling your fish pond), buy a hose that’s intended to be safe for drinking water.  It’s true there are garden hose filters that remove lead, but it makes a lot more sense to pay a few dollars more up front for a lead-free hose  than to put lead in the water then filter it out.