How do they clean industrial waste spills from water sources?
Recently, we had an incident in which thousands of gallons of chemical and oil laden fracking waste were dumped into our river. There is a criminal investigation and authorities are conducting a “clean up,” but how does that work? I can somewhat understand how they might remove oil from the water, since oil floats, but as for the actual wastewater and chemicals and heavy metals, how will that be removed? Will it?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
8 Answers
As far as I can tell it’s difficult and expensive and often not completely done.
They’ll do things like dredge up contaminated soil from the bottom of the river and dump that is a hazardous waste fill. But that’s very expensive to do and the impact of digging up the bottom of the river can be arguably worse than letting the contamination lie.
@dabbler well that’s not comforting at all. :)
@DigitalBlue The answer @dabbler provided is largely true, and that is why environmental groups oppose projects despite all the assurances from the polluters that nothing can possibly go wrong and they have contingency plans in place for every possible disaster. They are basically saying they know how to unring a bell, and we all know when they say such things they are lying.
Here’s an article on the tar-sands spill in Michigan. Two years after the original spill, it still isn’t cleaned up and may never be.
@ETpro it isn’t that i disbelieve @dabbler, in fact, I am not surprised. Just disappointing.
@DigitalBlue We have the same thing going on with Onondaga Lake. It’s heavily polluted and they are dredging the bottom and piping the contanimated soil to clay landfill cells. Only one problem, it’s making people near the landfill cells sick.
http://www.lakecleanup.com/
I’m not an expert, I just do industrial engineering but we could go a long way towards improved regulation is there was a strict wall between the regulators and industry. Unfortunately, in all branches of government regulators and industry representatives move easily between working for the industry and working for the government. I would like to see well trained government inspectors regulating industry and finance in a more adversarial way. One way to do this is to offer scholarships to engineers that work strictly on regulation. They should be well trained and well paid. Any collusion between the regulators and industry must have heavy penalties attached. I would like to see life sentences handed out to people responsible or major industrial damage.
@Ron_C Actually, that’s a great idea.
@ETpro thanks, I think it’s a great idea too but it would never fly with the present Congress. The left wing would go for it but the right wants no regulation and they see nothing wrong with a guy being a regulator one week and regulated the next.
The problem is that both sides are dishonest and stay too long in Washington. We need better regulators and we need better legislators.
Answer this question 
This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.
