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Untreated water goes directly into a stream. Photo: MN Pollution Control Agency, CC BY-NC 2.0
Last Week we wrote about the detriment that road salt can have on waterways, plants, and animals and how runoff is causing dead zones in lakes. It turns out that the story doesn’t stop there and all that salt is actually reacting with soil and water pipes to form toxic substances that can poison drinking water and harm the environment. The Revelator recently published an article examining a report published last month that found that not only is salinity increasing in many surface waters, but when you add salt to the environment it can mobilize heavy metals, nutrient pollution and other contaminants that are combining to create new “chemical cocktails” in rivers, streams, and reservoirs. These cocktails can be a danger to our drinking water, wildlife and riverine ecology. And they’ve already contributed to a public health crisis in at least one U.S. city.
It turns out that in Flint, MI while lead made headlines for poisoning people, salt was what made a bad situation worse. The Revelator reported that when the city switched sources of water to the highly polluted Flint River, the water had a much higher salinity because of runoff from road salts, which, without proper treatment, increased the corrosivity of the water.Gene Likens, a prominent ecologist and co-author of the study, explained that the “change in the chemistry of the water flowing through the pipes liberated lead from the pipes or lead-soldered connections.” Lead was the villain, but salt was its enabler.
This same process can cause other neurotoxins like manganese to leach from water pipes as well. Salt is entering our watersheds at increasing levels and the fact that we pave over much of the ground means that when it rains all that salt washes away instead of being absorbed into the ground. But even when salt does get absorbed into the ground it can liberate heavy metals and scientists are still trying to determine how this is affecting people and wildlife.
Why This Matters: Road salt is a serious problem not just for biodiversity but for human health impacts as well. Unfortunately, alternatives to keep roads frost-free haven’t proven to be as effective or cost-competitive and for snowy cities, being on a “low-salt diet” is proving to be a difficult task. Regardless, we have to start rethinking how we de-ice roads without salt especially because we don’t fully understand the impacts it’s having on the environment.
Florida and Georgia faced off again in the Supreme Court on Monday, asking the Justices to settle their long-running dispute over water. The problem is that there is not enough to go around in three rivers the emanate in Georgia but flow through Florida to the Gulf of Mexico.
Why This Matters: The states failed to reach a water compact more than a decade ago — now they have nowhere else to go but the Supreme Court, which has “original jurisdiction” over a dispute between two states.
The National Flood Insurance Program is revising its rates for flood coverage on April 1st, and to reflect current risks, and experts say they may need to quadruple. FEMA’s new risk rating system will use a model proposed by the First Street Foundation, which found that by 2050, insurance premiums on flood-risk homes would need to rise sevenfold to cover the costs of annual damage.
Why This Matters: The rising premiums create a conundrum for the Biden administration, which has promised to honor science in federal policymaking but has also pledged to address economic issues facing the working class.
By Bob Irvin, President and CEO, American Rivers A vision is emerging in the Pacific Northwest that would not only save iconic salmon, but boost clean energy and vital infrastructure, and honor treaties with Northwest tribes — revitalizing an entire region and building resilience in the face of climate change. Salmon in the Pacific Northwest […]
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