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Our county in Oregon is starting to seriously worry about affluent 
run-off.  They are now just campaigning to get livestock owners to be 
more aware, but they are promising restrictive rules, if the rivers 
don't get better.

-Paul  L.
On Thursday, January 8, 2004, at 08:53 AM, David LeBlanc wrote:

> Lynne Glazer said:
>
> > The horse poop conundrum is about the water runoff
> > into the OCEAN,
>
> While I'll agree that a few horse piles aren't going to do any real 
> damage,
> I can tell you how we've ended up worrying about things like this. When
> waste water is treated, the first point is a settling pond with 
> filtration -
> not very fine, but enough to get out things like lawn chairs, since 
> most
> places storm runoff gets treated too (which can be a disaster, but 
> that's
> another story).
>
> The effluent then normally goes into several phases of biological 
> reactors,
> and what comes out the other side is very clean - in many cases 
> cleaner than
> the water we're dumping into. It would actually be easier to turn that 
> back
> to drinking water in most cases than to turn river water into drinking
> water.
>
> Where we run into problems is that in some places we've skipped the
> biological reactors and pumped what is essentially raw sewage right 
> into the
> ocean. Despite the ocean being a big place, a continuous stream of 
> nearly
> raw sewage causes a lot of damage, and does result in human health 
> hazards.
> I'm fairly sure most places have treatment in place by now, but I was 
> amazed
> to find out there were several places in CA 10 years ago when I was 
> studying
> this that did dump settled sewage right into the ocean.
>
> The storm runoff and streams are another problem - excess nitrogen from
> people over-fertilizing their lawns (farmers are in general less of a
> problem than homeowners - fertilizer costs $$), oil from roads, and all
> sorts of things create a significant pollutant load.
>
> Once you've gone and screwed up a water body, the rules about what you 
> can
> put into it get much stricter than if it isn't in a problem state. Same
> thing with air. I know of a water treatment plant in Georgia where the
> output is required to be cleaner than the river - it would actually be
> illegal to take in water from the river and pump it back out. So if 
> they'd
> taken care not to screw up the water quality in the first place, no one
> would be worrying about things like a few horse piles. That same 
> population
> density that causes your property values to be ridiculous also pose 
> some
> really interesting challenges in terms of both providing enough 
> drinking
> water and getting rid of the waste.
>
> I also think that CA tends to take many things to extremes, and some 
> of the
> very worst environmental problems in the US have been in CA, so 
> there's a
> corresponding hyper-sensitivity.
>
>
>
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