Posted on 06/19/2002 11:40:08 PM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:54:50 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The EPA blamed the Army Corps of Engineers yesterday for a court document suggesting that sludge dumped into the Potomac River helps fish, and the Interior Department wants the discharges stopped.
The document, reported yesterday by The Washington Times, was included in the Environmental Protection Agency's administrative record as part of an ongoing lawsuit to stop the sludge discharges along the river.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
By registering my boat, I am in effect giving the authorities blanket permission to board my vessel at any time. If the Coast Guard boards my boat, inspects the bilge and detects a rainbow sheen in the bilge water from one drop of oil or fuel, I can be fined thousands of dollars. The water doesn't have to make it outside the boat for me to be in violation.
Yet the Army Corps of Engineers have legally been able to dump slurries containing 30,000 milligrams of suspended solids per liter directly on spawning beds for the last twenty years. They justify this action under the guise of "protecting" the fish from my traumatic catch and release practices.
Locally, last month the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District dumped 21,000,000 gallons of partially treated sewage directly into Lake Michigan, bypassing a critical treatment step. Anticipating additional rains that did not come, they did this "just in case", even though they had over 133,000,000 gallons of reserve storage capacity in the multi-billion dollar Deep Tunnel system, all with tacit approval from the DNR and the EPA.
The MMSD had the gall to brag that the Deep Tunnel system was only 1/3 full at the beginning of the rainstorm. You see, typically it runs 1/2 full . . .
The MMSD has stated they can effectively process 133 million gallons a day. Prior to the dumping, it hadn't rained for nearly a month.
Why was the Deep Tunnel storage system not empty? Why isn't it empty right now?
Our precious rivers, lakes and waterways are under attack by the very agencies in charge of protecting them . . .
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