The Great South Bay’s main issue is water quality. What’s polluting it? Scientists claim that 69% of the excess nitrogen in the bay is …
Tag: water quality
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Lets Have a REAL Ban on High Nitrogen Lawn Fertilizers in Suffolk County!
Organic Lawn care is crucial to protecting our drinking water, our groundwater, rivers, ponds and streams. Excess nitrogen is killing all our bays and contaminating our drinking water. Let's not be spreading it on our lawns.
Who Wants To Do A 90 Second Video On A Long Island Water Issue For My Show, Water Matters?
Step up on The Soap Box -- have your 90 second video say about what water issue on Long Island most frustrates you, or is under reported. Speak to those who wouldn't ordinarily hear you.
Suffolk County, Thwarted Once, Seeks to Raid $30 Million in Environmental Funding Again
Chalk one up for the environmentalists. EXCEPT now the County is looking to raid $30 million dollars in funds meant for land protection, which plays a crucial part in our efforts to protect our drinking water. As we live on top of our drinking water, with Long Island as a 'sole source aquifer,' we must preserve our open spaces, that is those few we have left.
Not surprisingly, Suffolk County and the Legislature did not give us much notice to act. They are after all looking to gut another environmental fund to pay for the fact that they couldn't gut the first. The budget votes are Tuesday, Oct 7th.
Can Long Island Be Saved? Part VI – An Interview With Professor Christopher Gobler
Chris and his team helped link septic tank seepage to the nitrogen fueled algal blooms around Long Island. Today, we know that we need to deal with the 500,000 septic tanks on Long Island if we are to save our bays, rivers, ponds, and marshes, and preserve our drinking water. Today, as various scientific experts and public officials grapple, along with our environmental non profits and the public with the question of how we address our water quality issues, Gobler's work is essential in charting the right path.
Can Long Island Be Saved, Part V: Cuomo’s Initiative to Improve Water Quality and Coastal Resilience
he die offs of vegetation (marshes, eel grass, sea grass) and wildlife (fish, shellfish, birds, insects, amphibians and reptiles) have been stunning. Whole habitats are vanishing before our eyes. At the same time, that nitrogen is seeping ever more deeply into our drinking water into the aquifer that sits below us, with water deposited there by glacier melt eons ago.
Not only are nitrogen rates rising, but the rate of the rise is too, as the plume of nitrogen created by the explosive population growth on Post War Long Island, much unsewered, has generated a plume of nitrogen that is now making its way downward into our drinking water.
Can Long Island Be Saved, Part III — An Interview With Carl LoBue of The Nature Conservancy
We knew that if The Great South Bay was to be saved, it was going to have to be through bringing science to the problem. The people of The South Shore of Long Island needed to understand what the issues with the bay were, what was causing them, and what solutions were possible.
A couple of calls pointed me in Carl's direction, and soon he was sharing his knowledge and passion with the group, and helping us to understand what it would take to achieve our mission - to bring back the shellfish, the fish, the eelgrass, the marshes, the habitats that decades of neglect and decay had all but removed.
Suing The Suffolk County Legislature For Diverting $33 Million in Water Protection Funds
It is only legal and proper that these funds be returned so that Suffolk County, including Steven Bellone's office, can focus on the enormous task of dealing with Long Island's water quality issues. With 360,000 septic tanks leeching nitrogenous waste into our ground water, billions will need to be spent on sewering and on modernizing a 19th Century infrastructure. As it stands, our drinking water is threatened, and the polluted ground water is systematically killing all our bays, ponds, and rivers by triggering massive algal blooms. The County cannot ask the public for more money -- a lot more money - on one hand while on the other taking that money out to paper over budget shortfalls. It marks a violation of public trust.
An Open Letter to Steven Bellone: Thank You For Highlighting How Long Island is Under Threat From Ground Water Polluted by Septic Tanks
We of Save The Great South Bay applaud your leadership in helping to shine a light on the major issue threatening all of Long Island's bays, rivers, ponds, its very drinking water, and with that our way of life. With the release of The Comprehensive Water Resources Management Plan, the public at large, the 1.5 million people who live in Suffolk County and the 1.35 million in Nassau County, can begin to understand the collective threat we face from nitrogenous waste in our groundwater.
The public release of the report was truly a watershed moment. It was also a call to action. The now over 1100 members of Save The Great South Bay are ready to do their part to raise awareness about the threats our waters face, and to seek, in partnership with local officials and other environmental non-profits, solutions that would help preserve Long Island as a desirable place to live for our children and grandchildren.
SCERP: Nitrogenous Waste From Groundwater Polluted By Septic Tank Seepage and Lawn Fertilizer Creating Seasonal Dead Zones in Waters All Around Long Island, Especially The Long Island Sound
Anything in red, orange or yellow on this map is a dead zone
We frankly have no choice but to address this issue, if not for our waters, for our drinking water. We are living right on top of it. The same thing that is polluting and killing our bays -- the waste water, the pesticides ( 117 of them ), the pharmaceuticals we throw out bu tend up in our ground water, the toxic plumes from Superfund clean up sites, and from household hazardous waste like cleaners, paints, and heavy metals -- is also threatening our drinking water as the polluted water above seeps down into our aquifers and literally poisons our wells.
News12 What’s in The Water? : Town Hall Meeting
News12 continues its series "What's in The Water?" with an hour Town Hall discussion -- aired 9/27/13
9-10-13: The Long Island Clean Water Partnership Launch Covered by the Wall Street Journal
Long Island environmental groups are banding together to stem the flow of nitrogen into the region’s groundwater and bays.
The initiative announced Tuesday follows what environmentalists are calling the worst year on record for ecological problems related to nitrogen, a nutrient that feeds algal blooms blamed for devastating much of the island’s marine life over the last three decades.