water pouloution

[SRH7934]

One can only wonder what type of asbestos abatement program they have. My guess unfortunately is not much.

[Guest]

Here in Detroit we have our pet coke problems along the Detroit river. This product provides many shipping related jobs. Shipping jobs are needed very badly.

[Guest]

Look at the oil coming out of those ships in that photo. Unreal!!

[Rob]

You're absolutely right about that. But there's plenty more in that water that washed and still washes off city streets, alleyways and yards.

We need to be thinking about how to preserve the resource for now and the future. Those satellite photos of huge algal blooms in the Great Lakes are disturbing. Try a google image search on "Great Lakes algal bloom".

[MN Boater]

We'd be naive to think that only innocuous, all-natural ingredients make up the contaminants in runoff from a major city(or even a small municipality for that matter). In the case of Milwaukee it's an established fact that their antiquated municipal sewers mix storm and sanitary flows in not-so-major precipitation events. And that combined flow of untreated, under treated or just old plain raw sewage flows into Lake Michigan.

The following links to a recent Huffington Post article on Great Lakes algal blooms due to non-point-source runoff from overuse of chemicals on both farms and lawns and, of course, due to various human and animal pollutants(read poop):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/1 ... 10902.html

The stuff that ran into the Duluth Harbor and changed it's color came out of the St. Louis river. Even the Gooseberry river was running rusty red that night!!.

[Rob]

We'd be naive to think that only innocuous, all-natural ingredients make up the contaminants in runoff from a major city(or even a small municipality for that matter). In the case of Milwaukee it's an established fact that their antiquated municipal sewers mix storm and sanitary flows in not-so-major precipitation events. And that combined flow of untreated, under treated or just old plain raw sewage flows into Lake Michigan.

The following links to a recent Huffington Post article on Great Lakes algal blooms due to non-point-source runoff from overuse of chemicals on both farms and lawns and, of course, due to various human and animal pollutants(read poop):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/1 ... 10902.html

[MN Boater]

Isn't that why we send ships there to be scrapped, their almost utter lack of regulation? Money seemingly trumps every other consideration. It's extremely dangerous, dirty work. Sooner or later it will come back to bite us all in our collective posterior.

Check out the recent discussion of Milwaukee's and Chicago's huge amount of polluted runoff into Lake Michigan. I'm an advocate for ALL uses of our waterways, including swimming, which I'm very hesitant to do in Lake Michigan, as our cottage sits almost directly across the lake from Milwaukee. You should see the foamy gunk I witnessed on the beach last week.

Maybe we could get aerial pictures of major cities along the Great Lakes after major precipitation events. I know last year's storm in Duluth changed the color of the western end of Lake Superior.

That was runoff from the land that changed the water color, not man made pollution. That would have happened whether we (humans) populated the earth or not.

[Cosmic_Charlie]

The shore pollution is only a part of the very large problems presented by ship breaking. It's a horrible business. This 60 Minutes video is a few years old, but it's interesting.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=3228443n

[Rob]

Isn't that why we send ships there to be scrapped, their almost utter lack of regulation? Money seemingly trumps every other consideration. It's extremely dangerous, dirty work. Sooner or later it will come back to bite us all in our collective posterior.

Check out the recent discussion of Milwaukee's and Chicago's huge amount of polluted runoff into Lake Michigan. I'm an advocate for ALL uses of our waterways, including swimming, which I'm very hesitant to do in Lake Michigan, as our cottage sits almost directly across the lake from Milwaukee. You should see the foamy gunk I witnessed on the beach last week.

Maybe we could get aerial pictures of major cities along the Great Lakes after major precipitation events. I know last year's storm in Duluth changed the color of the western end of Lake Superior.

[MN Boater]

I was reading about the ships sent for breaking in the news part of boatnerd. I took a look at the Alang ship breakers in India on Google map satellite. Look at the oil and other pollution in the water at that site. Unreal!!