RSS
Home
Chesapeake Bay pollution report is an indictment on failed clean-up policies
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.jpeg)
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation issued a report titled, "Bad Water 2009: The Impact on Human Health in the Chesapeake Bay Region". In it, the foundation makes its case for why something must be done about the bay's water. It does this by using anecdotal references of people's experiences with dirty water in the watershed area. While there is no doubt that pollution is a concern in the Bay, the report must be looked at with a critical eye in order to discern what is fact and what is opinion.
The cover of the report has four pictures on it. The bottom right picture is a would to the leg of one Bernie Voith. Bernie went swimming on a river that is a tributary to the Severn River. A day later, he had a systemic (body-wide) "fecal bacteria" infection that probably entered his bloodstream through a small cut in his leg, according to the report. The cut itself became necrotic (filled with dead tissue). According to scientists monitoring the river, "fecal bacteria (were) at 19 time the level that the EPA would consider safe for swimming." The only questions left unresolved by the report are Bernie's age (older people are more susceptible to systemic infections), what the strain of the bacteria that infected him was (E. coli, for example, has many strains, some found exclusively on certain animals), and how physicians can accurately conclude that the systemic infection came about from the cut on his leg and not the other way around?
There are other anecdotes and statistics in the report that speak of other pollutants, like mercury and nitrates, that are being washed into the Chesapeake Bay. The sources of many of these pollutants are human activities, like power plants, sewage treatment plants, and even the failure of dog owners to pick up their pets' waste. Mercury is a particular concern if you plan on consuming most (or all) of your fish from the Bay or its watershed. The whole report reads like an indictment.
Indictments of this type are aimed at provoking public opinion into becoming public action. The foundation is clearly hoping that the public will pressure officials into doing more to help the Bay. This is not to say that there is no problem or that nothing can be done. In fact, there is a huge problem (one that has been well documented many times) and there is still a lot that people who live in the Chesapeake Bay watershed can do to help the Bay. Maybe anecdotes are the way to go. They seem to help push a lot of policy agendas even though those whose anecdotes are used do not represent the whole of the population. Maybe all the technical information is best left for the technical-types who will actually carry out the work to clean the Bay. Maybe.
Related Articles:
Comments
