« "Pretty damn eloquent" 2004 summed up in 60 seconds | Main | Well, he looks good in a flight suit »
June 27, 2003
Bush to ease Florida drinking water rules
Thanks to TBOGG for pointing out this story from the Tampa Tribune:
Every day, 640 million gallons of sewage in Florida is injected deep underground, where it's supposed to stay far away from drinking water supplies.
But what goes down is coming up, migrating into portions of the aquifer that cities and counties tap for their water supplies, a violation of current federal regulations governing drinking water.Officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency were in Tampa on Wednesday to get public opinion about a controversial proposal to relax those rules and allow what's called deep-well injection of sewage to continue, even if the treated effluent is mixing with drinking water.
Changes are opposed by environmental groups, but utilities - mainly in South Florida - want the regulations altered. The change would apply only to Florida.
Although the vast majority of the injected sewage is in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, St. Petersburg uses that method to dispose of an average of 20 million gallons a day - about 3 percent of the state's total and almost exclusively during the rainy season when demand for its reclaimed water hits bottom.
If you can't beat 'em, stop the recount, then drown 'em in their own waste.
But that's not the best part. Here's the clincher:
Under its proposal, the EPA is considering two options. Both would allow utilities to inject sewage underground even if it migrates to where drinking water is withdrawn.* Option 1 would let the wells operate but with more thorough treatment and disinfection of the wastewater first, and to do studies to prove the sewage is not harming drinking water supplies.
* Option 2 would let individual utilities do studies to show the water in the aquifer where the sewage was injected continued to meet drinking water standards. Also, all utilities would have to improve their treatment and disinfection by 2015 regardless of what the studies showed.
The final rule is expected to be adopted by December 2004.
In other words, to avoid any negative impact on the Bush-Cheney re-elect.
Posted by Mike at June 27, 2003 01:56 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/113
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)