Friday, April 20, 2012

dirty water

and frustrated women..

ok, so the City of Santa Barbara is raising utility rates after a lawsuit was settled with the frustrated women of the nonprofit Channelkeeper..look folks, if you keep giving money to nonprofits like this, it all goes to their lawyers and lawsuits..for publicity..for more money...to keep the fear instilled that the beaches in Santa Barbara are so polluted only nonprofits can save them...the issue is replacement of sewer lines thoughout the city...most cities are on some kind of a sewer line replacement/rehab schedule...but Channelpeeper said the city of SB wasn't moving fast enough, so they sued! and now you're gonna pay extra for it!!

it's absurd...Channelpeeper panicked when a few manholes overflowed..the impact was minimal..even if you replace all the lines tomorrow, incidents will happen when pipes get plugged....that's why the city has those huge Vactors trucks....to clean out the lines...people dump everything but the kitchen sink in the sewer and it causes problems..

and some of these nonprofits with zero experience in the field claim that leaky sewer lines are affecting storm drains....that myth was debunked years ago..sewer lines aren't pressurized like your water lines, so waste goes to the treatment plant, not to the storm drains...and remember sewage is like Ivory soap..99.9 percent pure! so they say...
dog crap, bird poo, litter and them big ass ships are the main polluters...and make sure you have professionals running the treatment and distribution works...and for pity sake, don't believe everything Channelkeeper says....all in all, the beach/water quality is just fine..and you can thank the City of Santa Barbara for that..

btw, Heal the Ocean helped fund a study in 2007 that pointed to the obvious...it was reported by Melinda Burns...

Citizens’ groups such as Heal the Ocean have long suggested that the city’s aging sewer system was leaking into the ground water and traveling underground into the surf. But preliminary results from the study, which is funded in part by Heal the Ocean, suggest that city sewers are not to blame, the authors say.

the real culprit, they say, might be the shorebirds. Under this hypothesis, seagulls and other birds pick through the kelp for food; the kelp sits on the beach accumulating a lot of sea bird manure, or guano; a higher-than-usual tide comes along, washes the kelp off the beach, and bingo! The surf tests high for fecal bacteria.  
John Izbicki, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist from San Diego who heads the study, said that hundreds of samples taken from 13 ground water wells, Mission Creek and the ocean for more than two years do not show that city sewers are polluting the ground water.
“So far, we have not found direct evidence of contamination on the beachfront or in Mission Creek from the sewer water,” Izbicki said. “One of the concerns was the main sewer line along West Beach. But we have not seen evidence of fecal bacteria contamination from that line.”

next, there was a story in the News-Press about a "gravely injured pregnant sea lion" and the attack by a juvenile great white shark "ultimately cost the 300 pound mammal and her offspring their lives"

well, that's pretty dramatic..so is Wendy going to want the cops to catch the shark for killing unborn babies? I think the line has been blurred here...an unborn sea lion is not "offspring" since it hasn't been born yet...I would prefer that Steepleton called it "potential dessert" since the shark didn't quite get to eat it....anyway, be on the lookout for a young man in a gray suit!
                               
then I was shocked to see the News-Press send a reporter and photographer to cover the Citizen Extra Steps Awards ceremony...two famous Santa Barbara cops- Officers Kasi Beutel and Mark Corbett- were actually in the paper on page 3! I guess Wendy and Nipper must be sailing the Calixe on the Mediterranean!

if I were the News-Press editor, I would have put the cops on the front page and the sea lion tragedy on page 3...

but I keep forgetting we're in Wendy's World here....

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