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Talk about your dirty water
By adamg on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 5:52am
MetaBoston points us to this interesting video, which shows an animation of e. coli blooms moving through the Charles River basin (make sure your sound is on for full effect):
The animation is by Ferdi Hellweger, a Northeastern civil and environment engineering professor who says most of the e. coli in the basin comes from Stony Brook and the Muddy River.
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Comments
In laymans terms, this is
In laymans terms, this is poop. So, how are we going to fix it?
It also isn't the Algal bloom's we see further down the river in the summer. Those are most likely from fertilizer rain runoff on the new baseball fields down near MGH.
We can’t just damn up the stony brook/muddy river. Conservation efforts on the Charles have lead to huge drops in run off and other dumping getting in the river that shouldn’t, but as we can see some of its smaller tributaries are basically toxic waste dumps still contributing to it’s problems. Have you ever walked down commonwealth or beacon and taken a look at the water in the muddy.. no wonder it’s a problem. And it ain’t mud, it’s sludge.
It seems there’s a group dedicated to restoration of the waterway, but do they have any fruits to show for their labor? http://www.muddyrivermmoc.org/index.html
You've got no basis for saying that.
We have no idea what concentrations those colors represented, and what threat those concentrations represented to the public health. I'm guessing the standard "red=bad, green=good", but what are the actual numbers? It also might be helpful to see some kind of time scale.
How the lead researcher can talk about rainfall and the Charles River Dam affecting water quality, while releasing a video that gives no indication of either is beyond me. With no presentation of the study's actual data, this video's as good to the public as one someone just made up with a motion GIF.
If NEU did a better job of explaining its research and delivering data to the public, we could end up with less e. coli in the Charles and fewer unverified commenters on our blogs talking about poop and "toxic waste dumps" from positions of complete ignorance.
-Cosmo
http://cosmocatalano.com
World's Toughest Writer
Ok buddy, I'm willing to
Ok buddy,
I'm willing to give you the benefit of doubt if you're willing to take a dip in the muddy between Commonwealth and Beacon streets.
My guess is you won't.
Furthermore, e coli is primarily found in the digestive tracks of animals. So yes, it is shit.
Third, learn how to use the Internets and do some research yourself. the link is to an news article, not the periodical: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearc...
Oooh, a mappy thingy!
As a paddler and as someone who rowed in college, I can tell one big reason for the gradients you see there: the current.
Where the current slows down a lot, you will get higher concentrations - not just because of slow moving water concentrating stuff, but stuff liking slower moving water. Inject more crap in at a point where the river is wide and slow and the results are striking.
This isn't poop per se - but one could say it's poop eaters and poop surfers that get out of control when the combined sewage overflows pump sewerage into the river (via the Muddy and Stony Brook, if they haven't stopped that by now). Some of what you see here started up stream and concentrates where the river widens and slows down.
buildings not hooked up to sewage pipes
A couple of years back some friends of mine found out that the sewage line from their building (multiunit converted brownstone) on the Fenway was not actually hooked up to the city sewage system. There was a pipe from their building but it was misaligned with the city's pipe by about a foot. Their building was likely dumping, so to speak, directly into the Muddy River. My friends' system was fixed but I wonder how many of the other buildings have similarly broken conduits...
As I recall, there are known
As I recall, there are known sewer connections to Muddy River from Brookline. Actually doing something about it would cost real money, so no one wants to talk about it. Stony Brook was built as a stormwater drain - it has a separate sewer line running on top of the larger stormwater conduit. It's possible that the sewer line is leaking into the conduit - it's 100 years old now.
http://rememberjamaicaplain.blogspot.com/2007/11/s...
But it's not poo, because
But it's not poo, because Cosmo "World's Toughest Writer" can't read, nor does he know how to research on the web. He apparently didn't know the difference between a news blurb, and an scientific peer review paper.
He should also fix his crap blog while he's at it, the thing give me a headache and the content isn't there.