Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ingested the chemicals in drinking water. Tree swallows and bald eagles
in the area were found to have 55 to 71 ppm of PCBs in their body fat,
qualifying them as hazardous waste.
Under Superfund law, polluters are responsible for cleaning up the
messes that they make. GE spent millions of dollars on an ultimately
unsuccessful campaign to persuade the federal government not to
implement a dredging and cleanup plan to rid the river of PCBs. The
thirty-year economic and environmental struggle between GE and the
government lasted until 2009, when GE fi nally began dredging the river
bottom sediment. Two-and-a-half million cubic yards of toxic sludge
will be dredged and transported to a landfi ll in Texas. The project is
expected to cost $750 million and take at least six years. GE is still
fi ghting to reduce the amount of dredging it must do.
Two-and-a-half million cubic yards of Hudson River toxic sludge will
be wrapped in heavy plastic, like a burrito, loaded into open railcars,
and shipped to the Texas landfi ll in trains at least eighty cars long. By
the third year of the EPA-approved plan, two to three trains a week will
arrive at the dump site. At the landfi ll, excavators on platforms will rip
open the bags and transfer the sludge to 110-ton mining trucks. The
trucks will haul and deposit the sludge into a pit 75 feet deep into red
clay and lined with two layers of heavy polyethylene. Then it will be
covered with 3 feet of clay.
Chesapeake Bay
Maryland's Chesapeake Bay has had pollution problems for a hundred
years with no cleansing solution in sight. Nitrogen and phosphorus
runoff from widespread agriculture in the bay's watershed is the cause.
Oyster harvests declined from 53,000 tons in 1880 to 10,000 tons in
1980 to 100 tons in 2003. Oysters cleanse the water by fi ltering up to
5 quarts of water per hour, a task they can no longer perform adequately.
In 1880 there were enough oysters to fi lter all the water in the bay in
three days; by 1988 it took more than a year. The bivalve population
has been decimated, and a dead zone now covers up to a third of the
bay. A dead zone is a volume of water that lacks enough oxygen for
aerobic animal life to exist.
Fish contain high levels of mercury, and there are algal blooms and
voracious bacteria that threaten the health of people who fi sh, boat, and
swim in the estuary. 53 Health authorities advise against swimming until
two days after a signifi cant rain because the rain can sweep in animal
manure and human waste from older sewage systems and leaky septic
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