Posted on 07/31/2013 4:33:17 PM PDT by DManA
I hear Milwaukee is a big offender too. Even thought they dumped a huge amount into an attempted fix that didn’t work.
It seems so arbitrary. St. Paul had mixed storm, sanitary sewers. The EPA forced them many 10s of million to dig up all their pipes and separate them.
And Chicago just gets a pass?
Pretty much all the big cities on the lakes do the same. In fact its really pretty common to have overflows in heavy rain all over the place.
Brooklyn Michigan upstream from me has a sewer system that overflows in heavy rains.
Not Duluth. Not anymore.
The EPA threatened the city that if they didn’t comply with their demands by a certain date they would stop ANY construction permitsa within the sewage district until compliance was met.
I don’t know what authority they have to do that but that’s the story the city put out. Maybe it was a lie. I don’t know.
The bigger a city is the more they get away with. Duluth is big enough to attract the attention of regulators but not big enough to have a lot of friends in DC.
They came down on democrat St. Paul with sledge hammer.
And I’m not saying it not a good thing we treat our sewage.
In the 30s they did a fish survey in the Mississippi. They didn’t find a single living fish in the 30 miles south of St. Paul.
Yeap. Grand Rapids, Bay City-Saginaw also. Pisses me off to know if my septic overflows they can fine me or jail me for not fixing it but these cities can flood these rivers with millions of gallons of raw sewage and all they do is issue a no swim advisory.
The bait shops down steam of Grand Rapids,Mi on the grand river sell plastic turds with treble hooks on it and call it the Grand River Brown Trout lure.
People swim in it during the summer and they pee in it. Case solved.
Insofar as the harbor being in jeopardy, they just did their normal dredging, it's fine, any boat can get in, the sand silted in over the winter from currents and storms, it did look bad for a short time. Yes, it's below the average, but it was lower in the 1960's, and the lake is clearly on the rise, you can see the difference this year.
As another poster said, it's a cyclical thing. I have a neighbor that has been panicked that the lake would go down forever because of AGW. He must be feeling confused since it actually rose this year. I can't wait to hear his excuse.......
I just got back from my Mom’s funeral in Northern Michigan. I was back home for over two weeks. It rained like crazy around my sister’s place near Jackson while up near Cadillac it was dry as a bone. Sure could use some of that rain up north.
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