SAC COUNTY, IOWA - AUGUST 17, 2010
Eight beef feedlots in Northwest Iowa face enforcement actions as EPA emphasizes compliance with clean water act (IA) Read More
Copyright (c)2007-2010 Curtis Bloes All Rights Reserved
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Sad. Maybe those who are discharging the pollutants into the river should have to drink, and bathe in it. Des Moines gets their water from the racoon river.
ReplyDeleteThese people charged are good cattle feeders. In 2007 they redid their yards to be in compliance. Maybe you should know the story before you comment.
ReplyDeleteYou can't make a judgement on pollution without knowing some facts - namely, how much pollution, what concentration of pollutants, and the volume of water it flows in to. Anything running in to the river up here, by the time it gets to Des Moines, is so diluted it's not a health problem; and the City of Des Moines water treatment system is specifically designed to remove all of those pollutants from the water.
ReplyDeleteYes, we need to work at cleaning up the waters in Iowa. But articles like this one are unfortunate because they lead the uneducated into knee-jerk reactions.
Case in point: A couple weeks ago, there was a 750,000 gallon spill at the Cedar Rapids wastewater treatment plant, over the course of 5 hours. Sounds like a lot, right? Wrong. Once you look at how much water was flowing through the river and do some math, it works out that the raw sewage (bathwater, dishwater, laundry, toilet, etc) "polluted" the river at a rate of just over 2 milliliters per gallon of river water.
In the case of many of these feedlots, the pollution comes only during times of heavy rains, when water runs off of the feedlot into the river. But at that same time, the river is carrying more water than normal due to that same heavy rain. So yes, there is pollution entering the river, and we should work to clean it up, but it is not the major issue it is made out to be.
Let me put it this way: I would be much more concerned about getting Giardia by drinking the untreated river water than any illness from the pollution from that feedlot.
The EPA is the only department in the federal governement that does not have any checks and balances. They can do whatever they want to whomever they want. At this time it would appear that they would like to shut down every open feed lot in the state.
ReplyDeleteWhile the first commenter seems to think that the farmers are at fault I would like to ask him/her how much they like beef. If feed lot owners are shut down by the EPA they WILL be a shortage of beef in the US and prices will sky rocket.
During last weeks heavy rainfall events many cities including Storm Lake and Spirit Lake started discharging into the lakes. This it legal under EPA rules because of excessive rainfall even though they have spent hundreds of thousands dollars to construct waste water treatment plants. Yet when a small feedlot discharges for the same reason they are handed fines up to $100,000 and are forced to construct containments that will cost another $100,000. Where is the fairness in that?
Sorry I just targeted cattle producers. We just lost a loved one to cancer. It's everything in our ground, in our air, and we are all to blame.
ReplyDeleteI am sorry about you losing a loved one but you have to realize that 20-50 years ago there were cattle standing in the water pooping and peeing as well as feedlots being built purposefully on hills so the manure would run down streams and rivers and then farmers would not have to deal with it. The one good thing about the new rules is that this no longer happens with the exception of extreme rainfalls yet the cancer rate continues to go up and up. Rest assured the cancer did not come from manure in the waters of the US.
ReplyDeleteAny pollutant in our water is too much. There is way too much cancer in rural Iowa. Those cattle standing in the water pooping and peeing 20 years ago are probably responsible for some of today's illnesses.
ReplyDeleteI bet most of the groceries bought at the supermarket pumped full of ingredients no one can pronounce have more to do with cancer than those cattle standing in the river 20 years ago! I think we need to take a look at the groceries we feed our family and the medication to "cure" them when they are sick rather than those cattle standing in water.
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