Free Republic

Sharon Smith has to plunge her toilet to get it to flush. On rainy days, wastewater spills into her yard from nearby drainage ditches. Twice in the last year her house has flooded, leaving behind the sickening smell of sewage, she said. Her carpets are ruined, the floorboards are buckling, the bathroom wall is pulling away from the tub, she said. In the laundry room, the worst-hit part of the house, the smell of mold lingers. “I want to move, because this flooding is ridiculous,” said Smith, 59. For decades, residents of Centreville, a nearly all-Black town of 5,000 in...

Authorities in Alabama have busted an illegal winery that was operating at a municipal sewage plant. Sheriffs in DeKalb County discovered what they described as a “large” illegal alcohol operation in the Rainsville municipal building after receiving an anonymous tip about the setup Thursday. Photos released by police show glass containers, buckets, a fermenting rack and other equipment often used by bootleggers and amateur home wine makers in the same building that processes wastewater.

RAINSVILLE, Ala. - Sheriff’s officials say they’ve busted an illegal winery that was operating at a municipal sewage plant in a small north Alabama town. The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement it received an anonymous tip about an alcohol operation at a municipal building in the town of Rainsville on Thursday. Investigators then uncovered what’s described as a large illegal winery inside the Rainsville Waste Water Treatment Plant. Photos released by investigators show glass containers, buckets, a fermenting rack and other equipment often used by people who make wine at home. The agency says officers seized a...

DANBURY, Conn. (AP) — Comedian John Oliver made a secret trip to Connecticut last week to help cut the ribbon on a sign naming a sewage treatment plant in his honor. Danbury’s City Council voted earlier this month to rename the sewage plant “The John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant,” following a tongue-in-cheek battle that began with an expletive-filled rant against the city on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” in August. Mayor Mark Boughton responded to the attack by posting a video of himself at the sewage plant saying the city was going to name it after Oliver “because...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought. The University of Barcelona team, who had been testing waste water since mid-April this year to identify potential new outbreaks, decided to also run tests on older samples. They first found the virus was...

Researchers in the Netherlands said on Monday that the pathogen that causes COVID-19 was present in the sewage system of a Dutch city weeks before the first cases of coronavirus were confirmed in the same city through testing. The research indicates that sewage surveillance could be a useful tool in detecting whether coronavirus is present in a population before testing patients. Traces of the virus SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are present in the feces of many infected people. This means that testing wastewater for the pathogen can be a good way to determine whether coronavirus is present in...

The San Diego region will get $300 million in federal funding for a new U.S. facility to capture sewage spills from Mexico before they foul shorelines north of the border.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday accused the city of San Francisco of violating the Clean Water Act by allegedly dumping untreated wastewater into oceans. In a letter to San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Harlan Kelly, Regional EPA Administrator Michael Stoker said the city is failing to operate and properly maintain its wastewater collection facilities and failing to comply with water quality standards, among other violations. The letter alleged the city discharged some two billion gallons of untreated sewer water into the ocean annually. “The failure to properly operate and maintain the city’s sewage collection and treatment...

<p>A federally funded study has confirmed, not surprisingly, that marijuana use went up in Washington state after its first legal pot stores opened in 2014. In fact, consumption appeared to double, at least in one major city, over three years — a conclusion scientists reached by way of the unglamorous work of analyzing raw sewage.</p>

The proof is in the pee. A federally funded study has confirmed, not surprisingly, that marijuana use went up in Washington state after its first legal pot stores opened in 2014. In fact, consumption appeared to double, at least in one major city, over three years — a conclusion scientists reached by way of the unglamorous work of analyzing raw sewage. “It’s stinky,” said lead author Dan Burgard, a chemist at the University of Puget Sound. “But we’ve worked with urine, we’ve worked with wastewater, and we’ve worked with port-a-potties. It’s not as bad a port-a-potties.” The research entailed driving...

Two Palestinians died Monday and several others injured after Egyptian troops pumped toxic fumes into a smuggling tunnel stretching into the Sinai Peninsula from the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-run Gaza Interior Ministry was quoted by Wafa news as identifying the two as 39-year-old Hamas officer Abdul Hamid al-Aker, who was killed during a “security mission to inspect the tunnel,” and 28-year-old Sobhi Abu Qarshin. Abu Qarshin was said to have died during a rescue attempt. Several other security personnel were rescued by civil defense teams from inside the tunnel and were rushed to hospital, where they were described as being...

So I was at work today and a customer said he found pictures of Trump for sale. I said that I didn't know we had those available (clueless). He said, "Yeah, they were in the BATHROOM surrounded by a horseshoe frame." I said, "So, you are not a fan." He said that he wasn't a fan and that he had "the guy in the back" cracking up about his hilarious description of how his rump was exposed to Trump. I said, "Well, I guess no one loves everyone all of the time." What I wanted to say was, "Hey, you...

, HOST: Port-au-Prince, Haiti is a city of more than 3 million people with no sewer system. International donors have spent millions of dollars on infrastructure meant to help the situation. But a multi-year plan to build sewage treatment plants all over the country has stalled. And residents say things are getting worse. Rebecca Hersher reports. REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: Port-au-Prince's low cinderblock housing projects are the frontline of the sewage problem in the city. Project Drouillard or Project D is hopping on a sunny Friday afternoon. Men are playing dominoes. Kids are shooting marbles in the narrow dirt alleyways. (CROSSTALK)...

Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is one of the largest cities in the world without a central sewage system. Most of the more than 3 million residents use outhouses and rely on workers with some of the worst jobs in the world, hauling away human excrement by hand one bucket at a time. The men are called bayakou, and they work in the dark by candlelight. Rebecca Hersher spent a night with a group of them.

Port-au-Prince is about the size of Chicago. But it doesn't have a sewer system. It's one of the largest cities in the world without one. That's a big problem, but never more so than during a time of cholera... the disease is endemic — more than a half-million people have gotten sick and at least 7,050 have died. The cumulative sewage of 3 million people flows through open ditches. It mixes with ubiquitous piles of garbage. Each night, an all-but-invisible army of workers called bayakou descend into man-sized holes with buckets to remove human waste from septic pits and latrines,...

Officials with the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission, or IBWC, said they received word from the agency’s Mexican counterpart, the Comision Internacional de Limites y Aguas, or CILA, there was no report of a spill. “We did speak with Mexico, and we got through to CILA, and they said there’s no information regarding a spill,” said Lori Kuczmanski, spokeswoman for IBWC... Spearheaded by Dedina, an effort is building throughout the county to take the IBWC to court to force the federal agency to ramp up pressure on Mexico to stop the sewage spills. Imperial Beach and Chula Vista, as...

Are the Mexicans using "sewage warfare" against U.S. Border Patrol agents?  A top Border Patrol agent warns that something isn't right out there. Christopher J. Harris, senior patrol agent at the Border Patrol and a top official with Local 16 of the National Border Patrol Council, told an American Freedom Alliance conference Sunday in Los Angeles that the situation in Imperial Beach, where Mexican raw sewage is being pumped onto San Diego beaches with impunity, is more than just ruined beaches and noxious smells, as the media have reported.  It's a toxic hazard to those who serve in the capacity of...

This is how the city cleans a sewage overflow on Memphis Drive, they spray the sewage and toxic industrial chemicals from Dupont and Invista and whoever else in the woods. "They keep letting the sewage pour out. This is there fix to everything, throw a little lime down to hide their crimes. I've called and complained about this as well as many of my neighbors. I'm on record calling, I've documented everything with video of the city engaged in violations like this as well as spraying raw sewage in the woods they were supposed to be cleaning up. When we...

Officials in Southern California are crying foul after more than 140 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Tijuana River in Mexico and flowed north of the border for more than two weeks, according to a report. The spill was caused Feb. 2 during rehabilitation of a sewage collector pipe and wasn't contained until Thursday, the International Boundary and Water Commission said in its report released Friday. The river drains into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side. Serge Dedina, the mayor of Imperial Beach, California, said residents of his city and other coastal communities just north of the...

Biofuels are often touted as an alternative to fossil fuels, but many depend on raw materials that would quickly become scarce if production were scaled up. As an alternative to these alternatives, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has found a way to potentially produce 30 million barrels of biocrude oil per year from the 34 billion gal (128 billion liters) of raw sewage that Americans create every day. According to PNNL, the problem with using sewage as a source material for biocrude is it's too wet and requires drying before more conventional processes can handle...