Unknown to Lehigh County residents, one of the reasons Ocean Spray moved here was to avoid costly upgrades to their pre-sewer treatment plant. When you're in violation of New Jersey environmental standards, what do you do, you turn to Donny Cunningham. Here in Sap Valley, we invited Ocean Spray with incentives and called it progress. They, along with the other new bottling industries attracted by Cunningham and LCA, will now jeopardize your home. Rather than expand the sewer treatment plant, homeowners are being forced to block their plumbing safety net, their floor drains. Up to a decade ago, floor drains were mandated by code so that if a pipe broke, your home was protected against flooding. Although nothing has ever gone down my floor drain, I must now block it to comply with
new regulations. The thinking is that a drop saved here, and a drop saved there from thousands and thousands of homes, can spare the LCA the expense of enlarging the sewer plant, or building an additional one, and still meet EPA standards. Hell, there's even enough capacity left to invite Ocean Spray. Now, if your hot water heater springs a leak, its too bad for you.
reprinted from April of 2014
ADDENDUM DECEMBER 18, 2019: While the commercial rates paid by the bottling companies remain attractive to them, homeowners in Allentown and other local municipalities are now seeing their residential water rates double.
molovinsky on allentown is produced every weekday, year-round.
ADDENDUM JANUARY 26, 2022: We now learn from Peter Hall at the Morning Call that carcinogens found in the Delaware River have been traced back to the pre treatment LCA plant in Macungie. Furthermore, that plant is accepting tanktrucks of porta potty waste and chemical waste from New Jersey. What the
MC article doesn't mention is that the flow to the Delaware, by way of the Lehigh, goes through the Little Lehigh, a source of Allentown's water. We have become New Jersey's slop bucket, their bedpan.
Safe sewage treatment plants should never be placed on a river or stream, the whole idea is that when it become inoperative or overworked the results will disappear down the river. There are plans for different approach to sewage treatment but they would be a very costly solution for most cities, but the idea should be to have new plants be of a different approach and gradually phase out these present obsolete systems.
ReplyDeleteWe should stop the transportation of sewage, garbage and other waste across state lines, Let these states that often tout themselves as the saviours of environment deal with their waste in their own state.