That's a very good, reasoned article. There are reasons to be concerned with the Gulf and the lake, but I don't think they are the biggest issues. Here are a couple of responses I posted on an earlier thread about those:
Originally Posted by catherine
I just heard on the news that this is going to cause an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico!
What you get in major rain events like this is localized catastrophic effect (not environmental disaster), and it doesn't matter whether the water coming into the Gulf is clean or contaminated. It's fresh water pouring into a highly-saline gulf at a rate far above normal flow. So you get a very rapid desalinization of a localized area.
You can expect large fish kills all along the coast, and the news media will blame them on contaminated water, but it's really just the shock of the fresh water.
We get the same thing here every major rain event. Our flood control system diverts water to holding areas and canals, and water managers try to hold it there and disperse it gradually. But sometimes they just can't store any more without flooding and they have to dump.
Originally Posted by lovethattink
Won't the e-coli contaminated water being pumped out of NO infect the water source it's being pumped to?
I'm not familiar with Lake Ponchatrain (nor do I know how to spell it), but natural lakes tend to take care of that on their own. They have one area of dense vegetation which rises from the lake bed through and above the water level (called the littoral zone) and abundant vegetation on the bed itself. That vegetation just gobbles up nasty stuff -- to the point actually, that we are creating man-made littoral zones in the Everglades as one aspect of Everglades Restoration.
The same question came up after the hurricanes in Florida. The Everglades Agricultural Area (a huge farming area around the south shore of Lake Okeechobee) was flooded and had to be pumped out. There was no option but to pump that heavily contaminated (phosphorus from fertilizer, mercury from pesticides) water back into Lake Okeechobee.
Those hurricanes were in the late summer. In December, I took an training tour of the Lake Okeechobee littoral zone with South Florida Water Management District and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scientists. Short story -- the lake is fine. We are somewhat concerned about mercury moving up the food chain and affecting the osprey in the area, but that will work itself out.
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To understand the "local catastrophic effect" mentioned above, think about spilling gasoline while mowing your yard. You end up with a dead area where the gas killed the grass. It also probably killed any insects in the immediate area. But the rest of your yard is okay. In time the grass will grow back.
Local catastophic effects happen all the time in nature. They're part of nature. Nature adjusts. Don't forget that a hurricane, even a Hellish one like Katrina is a force of nature, and a natural part of the system.
The much tougher challenges are the toxic waste cleanup on land, and restoring water supply. I don't know the hydrology of the NO area, or what their water source is, but the estimates of years rather than weeks sounds quite reasonable to me. It's the kind of estimate a lot of people will read and say, "Naw, that ain't right!" but I wouldn't be surprised if it took two years.
