"Western N.Y. toxic sites could endanger Great Lakes; Study points to more than 800 hazardous places" by Dan Herbeck | Associated Press, April 22, 2013
BUFFALO — Thirty-five years after underground toxics turned the Niagara Falls neighborhood of Love Canal into a ghost town, researchers are warning that Western New York is still home to nearly 800 hazardous waste sites that could someday lead to big trouble, not only for local residents, but for the Great Lakes region.
A recently completed study, believed to be the most comprehensive look ever at hazardous waste sites in Western New York, found potential chemical hazards lurking across Erie, Niagara and Cattaraugus counties:
■ Half of the world’s known radium is stored about a mile from the Lewiston-Porter schools.
■ The most deadly wastes from all over the Northeast are hauled along local roads to a dump site in Niagara County.
■ Lead from a former smelting plant is believed to be linked to a deadly outbreak of lupus on Buffalo’s East Side.
■ Radioactive waste from the West Valley nuclear storage facility in Cattaraugus County could someday endanger the Great Lakes.
And this f***ing government is worried about global warming, nuclear plants in Iran, fart poots from Korea, and all the rest.
The vast majority of these waste sites are in the Great Lakes watershed, the largest source of fresh water in the world.
I thought that was kind of important.
Many are directly adjacent or close to Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, the Niagara and Buffalo rivers, or other waterways that feed the Great Lakes.
An estimated 26 million to 40 million people drink the water from the Great Lakes, which contain more than one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water.
‘‘It’s important. It’s overwhelming,’’ said Joseph A. Gardella Jr., an environmentalist and University at Buffalo chemistry professor who coauthored the study that was completed by the Western New York Environmental Alliance, the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo, and the University at Buffalo’s Urban Design Project.
‘‘This information is a wake-up call,’’ said Brian P. Smith, program director for the Western New York Citizens Campaign for the Environment. ‘‘Policymakers need to look at it, digest it, and find out what wastes are in their districts. We need to work to comprehensively clean up the waste in a way that is protective of public health. Protecting the Great Lakes has to be one of our top priorities.’’
Can I get a glass of water first?
Some of the material is left over from industry or war projects.
Yeah, all the wars for the sake of profit, conquest, empire, and Israel turned out to be not that great an idea. Too late now.
And more dangerous material continues to be hauled here from elsewhere because this region has become a dumping ground for other communities’ poisons and wastes.
Also see: The Winds of Washington State
Among the most significant findings:
■ Niagara County has more than twice as many federal- and state-designated hazardous waste sites as comparably sized counties throughout the state.
■ The three counties contain 174 federal or state ‘‘Superfund’’ hazardous waste sites, 43 designated as ‘‘significant threats’’ to public health.
■ Erie County has almost eight times as many brownfield cleanup sites as the average county in the state, and Niagara County has more than twice as many as the average county.
‘‘Are we overburdened with waste? Yes, with all kinds of waste,’’ said Lynda H. Schneekloth, a professor at the university’s Urban Design Project. ‘‘We never knew how much of it was out there until we conducted this study.’’
The job of protecting people in Western New York from hazardous waste mainly falls on two watchdog agencies — the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the Environmental Protection Agency. The state agency has a much bigger presence than the EPA in Western New York and is more actively involved on a day-to-day basis.
Meaning no one is watching -- for the u$ual rea$ons.
Despite the presence of these hundreds of waste sites, the public safety situation is ‘‘light-years better’’ than it was in the late 1970s, said EPA spokesman Michael J. Basile. That’s because the two agencies constantly monitor the sites, he said.
Yeah, watching it is stopping it. What a f***ing lame as pos statement from a fart-mister.
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Readers, I just want you to know it has been a privilege serving you, and I'm sorry if I never got to your issue or item.
Related: Saving the Great Lakes
Too late.
At least the pollution should kill all the Asian Carp, right?
"Asian carp likely to be in Great Lakes; Invasive species a threat to harm fish ecosystem" by John Flesher | Associated Press, April 05, 2013
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Asian carp have probably found their way into the Great Lakes, but there is time to stop the dreaded invaders from becoming established and unraveling food chains that support a $7 billion fishing industry and sensitive ecosystems, according to a report released Thursday.
Written by specialists who pioneered use of genetic data to search for the aggressive fish, the paper disagrees with government scientists who say many of the Asian carp DNA hits recorded in or near the lakes in recent years could have come from other sources, such as excrement from birds that fed on carp in distant rivers.
Those are the ones you never, ever listen to.
“The most plausible explanation is still that there are some carp out there,” said Christopher Jerde of the University of Notre Dame, the lead author. “We can be cautiously optimistic . . . that we’re not at the point where they’ll start reproducing, spreading further, and doing serious damage.”
Be alarmed, but don't.
The paper summarizes findings by Jerde and other scientists from Notre Dame, The Nature Conservancy, and Central Michigan University during two years of searching the Great Lakes basin for Asian carp. The fish have migrated northward in the Mississippi River and many tributaries since escaping from Deep South ponds in the 1970s.
How did Asian Carp get into Deep South ponds? Imported from Asia, where they?
Globalization sucks.
Of particular concern are silver and bighead carp, which gorge on plankton — microscopic plants and animals that virtually all fish eat at some point. The carp reproduce prolifically, and the biggest can reach 100 pounds.
Between September 2009 and October 2011, Jerde and his colleagues collected more than 2,800 water samples from parts of the Great Lakes and tributary rivers. The samples were poured through microfiber filters to extract DNA, which fish shed in their excrement, scales, and body slime.
Laboratory analysis turned up 58 positive hits for bighead or silver carp in the Chicago Area Waterway System — a network of rivers and canals linked directly to Lake Michigan — and six in western Lake Erie. Some of the DNA was found in Lake Calumet, where a bighead carp was caught in 2010.
“I would say there’s at least some evidence for Asian carp being present in southern Lake Michigan,” Jerde said. “The question is how many.”
More recently, sampling by the Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies also yielded positive results in the Chicago waterways. But while the government team acknowledges the presence of Asian carp genetic fingerprints, it disagrees that they necessarily signal the presence of live fish.
The issue could influence debate over whether to seal off Lake Michigan from the Chicago waterways, a mammoth engineering task that would cost billions of dollars and take years to complete.
It's already too late.
The Army Corps of Engineers has pledged to offer options for preventing species migrations between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed.
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I don't think you can eat them, and who would want to?
See: Boston Globe Keeps Carping on the Same Old Story
Not your tastiest catch, but you have time to choke it down.
They have known about this problem for years and nothing has been done as resources were spent on wars based on lies and bailing out looted banks? And now we have another manufactured and fictitious crisis Boston while a REAL URGENT CRISIS has been NEGLECTED so its now IRREVERSIBLE?
That's what all the staged and scripted productions mean, ladies and gentlemen. It means this government is INCAPABLE of RESPONDING or SOLVING REAL CRISES. It can only "solve" those crises that it manufactures itself to advance a pre-planned agenda.
No wonder this nation and world are in such horrible, horrible, shape.
