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April showers bring ... sewage back-ups
April showers don't only bring May flowers: in a city with sewage infrastructure in desparate need of expansion and repair, they also bring sewage into local streams, city streets, and even people's homes.
Two years ago, Baltimore City signed a new Consent Decree, the agreement among the city and state and federal regulators that governs how the city must address sewage overflows. This modified consent decree, written after the city did not meet the original 2016 deadline for repairs to be completed, commits the city to making major infrastructure repairs to the Back River Wastewater Treatment
Septic Legislation in 2019
Septic systems are a decentralized way to treat human waste. In most cases, an individual home has its own septic system and drain field.
Waste from a home is sent to a box, which holds it for awhile, then it slowly trickles out into the yard in a drain field, where the microbes in the soil further break down the waste. In a conventional system, a functioning septic system does a good job at breaking down bacterial and viral harms from the waste, but it does not address nitrogen pollution. In an advanced treatment unit (or Best Available Technology aka BAT), there is an additional step of
Keep Those Antibiotics Effective, Maryland!
In 2017, after years of work in coalition and thousands of grassroots comments from Marylanders like you, Maryland became the second state in the nation to pass a law limiting the use of antibiotics being fed to healthy animals.
This was a critical step in safeguarding medically-important antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is growing worldwide, and some of that resistance is attributed to the widespread use of low-dosage, medically-important antibiotics being fed continuously to healthy farm animals. Many producers have gotten behind no longer feeding their healthy animals antibiotics
The Monocacy River deserves a better Monocacy Plan
For the past two years, Frederick and Carroll Counties have been debating the Monocacy Plan: an advisory document meant to guide both counties on improving the health of their shared Monocacy River. But between 2017 and 2018, drastic changes were made to the Plan that gutted its value for protecting and improving the Monocacy's water quality and environmental health. We're urging the Frederick County Council to reject the 2018 Monocacy Plan - a position the Frederick County Planning Commission just unanimously agreed upon, as well. For more on our position, read our coalition letters to the
Stormwater Practices Need Inspection and Maintenance
In November, Jennifer and I had the opportunity to take a storm water tour with Richard Klein, of Community and Environmental Defense Services. In off and on rain, we looked at the health of two different sections of streams and looked at two different storm water facilities.
We first went to a section of the Jones Falls, where it is one of the healthiest and most vibrant sections of stream in Maryland. We looked for macroinvertebrates in order to sample stream health. Macroinvertebrates are organisms without a spine that are big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Specifically, we were