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Bulletin Board

MURKY, NOT CLEAN, WATERS is the title of a report released this May by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility which says that there's little reliable data to support official claims that the nation's rivers and streams have gotten cleaner over the last 20 years. This insiders account written by U.S. EPA specialists suggests that pollution reductions are more fiction than fact - fiction created by data manipulation, bad science, politics and bureaucratic torpor on the part of EPA and its state partners. Murky Waters details numerous inconsistencies in waterway monitoring and measurement of impairment, points the finger at EPA for weak oversight, and recommends changes in the water quality reporting system.
http://www.peer.org/murky.html

WHAT MAKES A PERFECT WETLAND? is the question behind MIT researcher Heidi Nepf's latest study. Nepf has built a model wetland in her lab, according to a May 3 article posted by the Environmental News Network, which consists of a 66-foot-long flume (like a big fish tank) filled with artificial plants (wooden dowels armed with plastic strips) and awash in up to 1,500 gallons of water. Nepf wants to learn more about how water moves around different kinds of plants, and how such movements influence a wetland's capacity to filter nutrients and contaminants. The turbulence and stillness of the water around aquatic plants, and even the little wakes rippling around them, are all significant to such functions, and the focus of Nepf's experiments.

STORMWATER POLLUTION REDUCTION WORKS, according to a report published by the National Resources Defense Council this spring. Stormwater Strategies details more than 150 examples of successful runoff pollution prevention programs run by communities, including a few from the Bay Area. "The report shows that when motivated, local governments are able to develop strong programs to fight this problem," says BayKeeper's Mike Lozeau. More motivation promises to come this October, when U.S. EPA issues a new rule extending a requirement that big cities and counties develop stormwater management plans to communities with populations below 100,000 and a density greater than 1,000 people per square mile. Such communities will likely need some of the strategies detailed in the report, among them educating the public, controlling construction site runoff, eliminating improper discharges, and undertaking prevention in municipal operations.

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