In recent
years, the community of Syracuse, New York and Honeywell International has been
making an effort to cleanup and depollute Onondaga Lake. For many years,
Onondaga Lake was thee most polluted lake in the entire United States of
America. There were two main reasons why the pollution started in Onondaga
Lake. The first reason was that the lake was used as place to drain sewage
wastewater. The second reason why the
lake became polluted was because of chemical dumping by Allied Chemical (now
referred to as Honeywell International). The water was contaminated with
mercury as well as other harmful chemicals and by-products. This dumping was
done for decades. There has been improvement with the contamination of the
lake. The Health Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are
starting to declare that the lake is in a good enough state that people are now
able to swim in it. Joseph Martens who over saw the project says he would jump
into the lake when it gets cleared by the Health Department and the EPA. He is
doing this because the people of Syracuse are taught that they should not even
go near Onondaga Lake because the water was so polluted and it can cause serious
health issues. He wants to show the residents of Syracuse that it is okay to
swim in the once extremely polluted lake. Another breakthrough that Onondaga
Lake faced is that the Health Department has deemed that some of the fish are
now edible. The Health Department says only some of the fish are okay to eat
and that men under the age of 15 and women under the age of 50 should not eat
them.
This issue and newspaper article
from the New York Times relates very nicely with our class discussions. One
thing that we have talked about is how human affect the surrounding
environment. Humans were responsible for the contamination of Onondaga Lake. We
have also talked about how the pollutants we produce and release into the
environment can harm other living organisms. The fish as well as other living
organism that require the lake have been severely harmed because of the decades
of chemical dumping and the dumping of sewage wastewater. Although we haven’t discussed the
conservation of certain environments, it is something can relate to the theme
of our class.
I agree
with the effort to cleanup Onondaga Lake. I might be a little bias because I am
from Syracuse. But growing in Syracuse, I use to plug my nose and hold my
breath because of the smell that the lake produced. The area is so nice and
it’s a shame that lake was polluted and because of that the park was never used
until recently. If I look at this issue from an unbiased position, I would
still agree that the lake should be cleaned up.
Sources- http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/nyregion/despite-pollution-warnings-an-official-will-jump-into-onondaga-lake.html
-http://blog.syracuse.com/graphics_impact/2008/09/0928_onondaga_honeywell_cleanup.jpg
It is so unfortunate that our beautiful natural water environments have become so polluted due to the toxic dumping of chemicals decades ago by companies that did not properly examine the future ecological and environmental affects. This reminds me of the Hudson River in our area, which because of the toxic dump of PCBs by General Electric, people got sick from eating contaminated fish.
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ReplyDeleteI find it very sad that our fresh water supply that provides us with so much are treated with such disrespect and disregard. I feel as though when companies or people dump something into the water they expect it just goes away, out of sight out of mind. But that is like pushing it under a carpet, not sustainably or intelligently disposing of one's waste. The effort to clean the lake is a promising one and hopefully because all of the dumping has such a negative effect that we can now see, it will deter others from just dumping there waste off somewhere.
ReplyDeleteI can side with you as I used to spend summers visiting family in Syracuse and I was taught to avoid the lake at all costs. Recently it has gotten much better, but it is still extremely disheartening to know that humans are creating this unsafe environment that has lasting impacts for decades to come.
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