“I will propose legislation to dedicate the revenue generated by our carbon pollution reduction rule to adaptive infrastructure,” Governor Northam said at a speech in Williamsburg last week. “Instead of sending tens of millions of dollars back to the companies creating the pollution, we should set those funds aside, take the chance to begin tackling these problems in a meaningful way.”
Executive Order 24, released today, lays out a series of actions the Commonwealth will undertake to limit the impact of flooding, extreme weather events, and also wildfires. This includes improving resilience of state-owned buildings by taking sea level rise projections into account, as well as creating a long-overdue “Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Plan” that will detail specific actions to adapt and protect Virginia’s coastal regions.
A big win for Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN ) who first proposed this idea in 2014 and has been advocating for it nonstop ever since. Read more.
Category: Water News
Baltimore, Maryland voters made history today by voting in favor of passing ballot question E, a city charter amendment that bans privatization of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Baltimore City Council voted unanimously to ban water privatization earlier this year. As of 11:15 p.m., Baltimore voters voted 77% in favor of this amendment with 91 percent of precincts reporting. This confirms Baltimore is now the first major city in the country to amend its charter to prohibit the sale and lease of the city’s water and sewer system.
“With water corporations circling around Baltimore over the past several years, ramped up privatization ploys last Spring, and a federal administration hellbent on propping up corporate power over peoples’ rights, it is momentous that the city has voted to keep its water public,” said Rianna Eckel, Maryland Organizer, Food & Water Watch.
“This vote makes it clear that grassroots organizing and people power have taken precedence over deep-pocketed corporate fat cats in Baltimore. Voters have chosen to resist pressure to sell and outsource one of the most vital and precious resources we have and have vowed to keep control, accountability, and transparency of our water.
Now that privatization is out of the picture, Baltimoreans can work with our elected officials to improve the accountability and affordability of our water system and ensure every person in our city has access to safe water at a price they can afford to pay. Food & Water Watch looks forward to working with other cities to protect their water systems from corporate control and using Baltimore as a model for water justice for the nation.”
A heated community meeting, in Michigan over water concerns in Otsego was conducted Saturday afternoon at the city’s middle school. The Allegan County Health Department hosted an open house for residents, followed by a presentation and Q & A. But, those there say they left the meeting with more questions than answers causing tensions to run high at that meeting in Otsego.
“It’s just due to the time frame and waiting and anticipating these results,” says Mary Zack. Zack was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at just 17, she started the group Justice for Otsego to get some answers about water and health concerns in her community.
But, after waiting 60 days for results on environmental testing of the city’s water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality says the lab they used made errors when testing Otsego’s water. Read more.
Environmental activists want more testing and accountability following coal ash breaches at two Duke Energy sites.
Critics contend that officials have been too slow to collect water samples and hold the utility accountable after gray muck from ash pits flooded into the Neuse and Cape Fear rivers last month.
Read More.
The Civil Rights Movement was about more than voting and lunch counters. It was also about the right of all Americans to live and work in a healthy, safe place. (Voting rights aren’t much good if you can’t walk to the polls because your asthma is bad that day.) That was why Dr. King had moved on to the Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his murder.
There is in Alabama a poisoned place called Uniontown. Its residents are primarily African-American. In no particular order, they have seen dumped on or near their places of abode coal ash, cheese waste, wastewater from a nearby catfish processing plant. All of that overtaxes the place’s antiquated sewage system until it starts giving up its proper contents all over the ground and into the rivers and groundwater. The people who live there know why this is the case, as this study from the Pew Charitable Trusts discovered. Read more.
This is the third coal ash spill that’s been reported since Florence’s historic rainfall caused catastrophic flooding throughout the state. Duke Energy, the country’s largest electric company, has been fighting attempts to force clean-up of these ponds for years. President Donald Trump’s administration has also loosened several regulations on coal ash storage.
In addition to coal ash spills, at least 110 ponds of pig feces have either released their contents into the environment or are at “imminent risk of doing so,” The New York Times reported on Wednesday. Those spills are presenting health concerns, too. “You basically have a toxic soup for people who live in close proximity to those lagoons,” Sacoby Wilson, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland, told Vice News. “All of these contaminants that are in the hog lagoons, like salmonella, giardia, and E-coli, can get into the waterways and infect people trying to get out.”
Read more.
I wonder how many parents, in the excitement of this new school year, were stunned to read this week that there is a good chance that their children’s school drinking water is tainted with lead?
More concerning to me is how many more parents still have no idea whether there is lead in their kids’ school water fountain. Children are more at risk from the danger of lead poisoning than adults and the damage lasts a lifetime. Yet the majority of schools nationally don’t test their water, or if they do, they don’t provide the information to parents.
Despite the danger, there is no national requirement for water in public schools to be tested. In April Scott Pruitt and other high ranking EPA staff told me that they are going back to basics. “Basics” was defined as Superfund and getting lead out of water. EPA created a new website just for lead and water, and hired Dr. Hughes to run the program within EPA.
This raise the question in my mind if they are really serious. If so, wouldn’t public schools be the first place to make a significant impact? In the big splash headlines of their initiative EPA said, “EPA is committed to taking action to address this threat, and improve health outcomes for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens – our children.” Clearly they know what population is at highest risk so where’s the action? Children are the most vulnerable and it’s clear that even a small step toward testing and repairs would go a long way to protect children.
Trump and EPA still have an opportunity to really make a difference by supporting the legislation that has been sitting on the senate floor for months with no movement. Republicans can champion this bill and show the country that EPA meant what they said and are moving to remove lead within the most vulnerable, this country’s children and future leaders.
There is a solution, the “Get the Lead Out of School Act (SB 1401) requires every school in the country to test drinking water for lead. The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, (D-IL) would require school administrators to share the results of the water testing with parents and the community. Unfortunately, the bill has been languishing on the Senate floor for months.
If the lead level is greater than the EPA’s 15 parts per billion standard, then the Get the Lead out of Schools Act also provides funding to solve the problem.
We take clean water for granted, at least until we don’t have it anymore. We also expect that our children will be safe when we send them to school each day. I know I did. As a young parent 40 years ago, I sent my own children to school, never connecting it with their frequent rashes and assorted health issues, or the high rate of birth defects and other health problems in my neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, called Love Canal.
My own grandchildren go to school in Texas where a study last year by Environment Texas, showed that 65 percent of the schools there that tested their water for lead found levels that exceeded recommendations b the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still, the state government has refused to pass legislation requiring schools to test drinking water.
It’s not that unusual. Most states don’t require schools to check for lead-tainted drinking water, which makes the national legislation that much more critical if we are serious about protecting our kids.
“It’s sending the message to students, parents and employees that we really don’t care about public education in Detroit, that we allow for second-class citizenry in Detroit,” Vitti said then. “And that hurts my heart and it angers me and it frustrates me that I can’t fix it right now.”Nikolai Vitti, is the superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Read more.
Elevated levels of PFOA were found in the village of Hoosick Falls public water system in 2014. The state Health Department and village officials were later criticized because they waited roughly 16 months — and faced pressure from the EPA — before they warned the public to stop drinking the water. Read more.
Pollution tied to infant deaths and cancer in adults has shown up for decades in the groundwater beneath a nuclear fuel factory less than two miles from Michael Daugherty’s house.The uranium leak in Hopkins, South Carolina occurred in June. It was reported to state and federal authorities on July 12, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Mildred Myers, a Gadsden resident, said she is glad DHEC is investigating, but that she always has been worried about the Westinghouse plant. The recent spill only reinforces her concerns, said Myers, a founder of the Lower Richland community group, S.C. Environment Watch.
“They always say they have got it under control and they are doing this or that. But they really have not done anything yet that is very efficient at cleaning things up,’’ Myers said. “So many things have occurred and things have not really gotten better.’’ Read more.