> Baltimore ploughed snow right into the city’s Inner Harbor. While this may seem like a no-brainer for cities near water, the practice is frowned upon for environmental reasons.
If it were rain, it would get there anyway, so why not just dump it.
Because it would be racist. Putting snow in the ocean makes it less saline, causing people to be less buoyant. This will affect blacks more, causing more blacks to drown.
rain goes into the waste treatment center through the storm sewers. It is treated just like household sewer water. That is a requirement from the EPA.
This has been a serious problem for older water and sewer systems through out the country, particularly in the East and Great Lakes States. Large water events have caused the overflow of sewers directly into the lakes or oceans. This happens less than a handful of times a year and the water is clear within days. Yet because of this we have to spend billions to comply with new regulations.
Your EPA at work.
Actually, most rain does not dump directly into major bodies of water. The earth is a very large and capable filtration system, which is made less effective with pavement and sewers.
Therefore, it actually makes environmental sense to NOT send rainwater directly off of pavement and into the rivers and lakes. Not sure that means putting it in a wastewater treatment center, but doing so is a lot like allowing the earth’s natural filtration do the job.
In Virginia, we are required to have rainwater collection facilities, which often are just grassy “pits” where the water can build up and hopefully then seep into the ground, getting filtered on the way to the aquifer. If there is too much rain, then it runs off through a pipe near the top of the collection pits, so sediment can settle to the bottom.
Our HOA parking lot had a treatment facility at the lower end, where there were rocks under the ground covered with dirt, such that rain would run onto the grass and then soak quickly into the ground and get filtered through the rocks.
Anyway, I don’t think having a generally good plan for filtering should preclude just dumping snow into the ocean in emergency situations. Just wanted to counter the argument that suggested it was a silly concern.
