Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome. It's an okay place to live if you
don't breathe the air or drink the water.
Cinnical advice once given to tourists traveling abroad may now apply to domestic life, while
some say our water is better than anywhere in the world, others say, test before you drink.
And a forceful approach to gardening and the great salt lake.
The aesthetic value of the great salt lake be now in the old barren oak lifelapse with
thousands of birds flying around you and snope on a cap mountain in the background.
It's one of the most beautiful areas I've ever worked at.
But are we creating North America's own Dead Sea?
The Environment Show and National Production made possible by Hemmings Motor News, the
National Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington for Mont, called 1-800-CAR-HRE.
From by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York, and this is Bruce Robertson.
During the great flood of 93, several key water treatment plants were knocked out by the
raging Mississippi River, citizens in the area, Des Moines, Iowa, and St. Joseph, Missouri,
or without clean drinking water.
Earlier in the spring we sat up and took notice when a massive epidemic swept through the
water in Milwaukee, crypto-spiridium filled thousands to a flu-like illness.
Many died.
The story has been repeated since in other communities in Carrollton County, Georgia, in Gastonia,
North Carolina, in New York City.
In fact, a recent massive report issued by the Natural Resources Defense Council is titled,
Think Before You Drink.
Other reports have appeared as well in recent editions of Time Magazine and the Environmental
Journal Garbage.
It was after the flood episodes this summer that Jerry Tone, president of National Testing
Laboratories, began to speak out.
N-T-L, based in Cleveland, Ohio, is the nation's largest independent water testing lab.
Tone says our drinking water supply may be contaminated by at least three very poisonous substances.
The presence of elements such as arsenic, which is contributed by just by the land itself,
has risen as a major contaminant.
There were some studies done in California relating to that.
Then in addition, just the very addition of chlorine to water supplies, which significantly
reduces the possibility of bacterial contamination, increases the possibility of a formation
of trihalomethrines, which are themselves carcinogenic.
Lead is also found coming from the pipes leading to and in and around our house, lead in
the pipes or in the solder used in the fittings.
But citing the example of the state of Ohio alone, Tone says there is another source of
this deadly poison in our drinking glass.
In the state of Ohio, we have about 300,000 buried fuel tanks, these are tanks which
hold gasoline or diesel fuel or heating oil.
Some are abandoned, some are still in use, but in any event, somewhere between 20 and
25 or 30 years, those eventually leak and it spills into the sand or into the ground
surrounding the tank, whatever is in the tank, and the water as it passes down through
the soil to get to the aquifer, dissolves the gasoline or the fuel oil into benzene,
toluene, xylene, and that sort of thing.
And they are carcinogenic and we just didn't look for those until actually the passage
of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
This congressional legislation from the 1970s is up for renewal, which accounts in part
for the renewed interest in the quality of our drinking water at this time.
The original act targeted industrial discharge and says Tone has done a fairly good job controlling
this type of pollution.
What the act does not do, however, is address these other more insidious sources of pollution.
We'll hear more from Jerry Tone in a moment, but first, are we right to be concerned?
And is there a panic factor here?
No, and no, says Joan Dent of the American Water Works Association.
The association based in Denver represents water treatment facilities.
He says we in America drink some of the finest water in the world.
There has been a regulation, the Safe Drinking Water Act, which basically sets standards
for the safety of public water that comes out of the tap.
And that has actually been an effect since 1974.
So even though most people may not know this, water suppliers have been working sort of
behind the scenes in testing the water and making sure that it meets the federal standards,
and also in putting in new treatment technologies.
But what has happened is that we can now detect traces of substances at incredibly small
levels, like some things we can detect at like a part per trillion.
But if we could not see these agents before, neither were we getting sick and dying.
The citizens in Milwaukee may not have been able to see the cryptosporidium, but they
were very sick indeed.
What about the charges that the laws on the books are fine as long as they are enforced,
which they are not, and as a result, many treatment facilities are becoming lacks in their
standards and testing?
Dent defends the system.
Some of the actually the cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee, I think one of the controversies
right now on the Safe Drinking Water Act is that cryptosporidium is not something that
utilities were required to monitor and treat for.
Basically there's not a regulation for that.
So that was not a matter of the utility being out of compliance with the regulation.
However there are utilities that have been testing for it and treating for it.
So the Milwaukee case is a very, very unfortunate one where climatic conditions and more turbidity
in the water and it's just a very, very unfortunate case of a lot of things coming together
to make that happen.
Dent acknowledges there are statistics on the books that list certain facilities in
certain communities as being out of compliance.
She faults the system for not distinguishing degree.
You stand in the checkout line designated for seven or fewer items and you have eight in
your hands.
The cashier will not let you through any more than the person who has a full shopping
cart.
The facility says Dent may be only a fraction over the limit on a given substance and it
is considered completely out of compliance.
She also says facilities are required to test for substances regardless of geographical
location, regardless of whether there is any chance at all of that substance showing up
in the water in that region.
Rather she says the law should be adapted to fit the particular needs of a particular region.
Regardless of where you live and how clean you think your water is, Jerry Tone says chances
are you are one of the 130 million Americans with lead in your water.
130 million Americans drink lead contaminated water every day.
This is a huge number.
Our laboratory, we find lead in about 25% of all the drinking water samples that we analyze.
As we mentioned before, the culprit is the pipes in your house or the solder fittings
of those pipes.
Citizens of rural communities or houses in the country ought to test for lead as well.
To correct the situation Tone says you can and should do one of two things, filter it
out of your drinking water by using a filter at the tap or you can and should replace the
offending pipes.
If you suspect the source is outside your house, Tone suggests contacting your local water
board or the health department or both, the same goes for the other contaminants, you cannot
correct a problem until you know it exists and know it's source.
So before you wet your whistle the next time with a tall glass of water or even steam
your vegetables, stop, look, test.
This is Bruce Robertson.
You remember that dairy product commercial a few years back warning us that quote, it's
not nice to fool mother nature.
Well Larry Sompke, the environmental gardener considers himself a nice person, not one
to do bad deeds, at least not knowingly.
In fact he argues that in this age of heightened environmental awareness it goes without saying
that we all should be living in consonants with the ways of mother nature.
But Larry says there is a fun and harmless way to fool around.
And well, okay let's see if Larry's home in cities and to do some planning of flowers
but he's indoors here.
Hey Larry.
Bruce, are you home Larry?
I am, I'm out here in my sun room.
Your sun room?
Yeah I'm out here in my, this is where I like to plant up all my stuff whether I'm
transplanting indoor stuff or working with my house plants I like to bring everything
in here to the sun room.
I know you said you were going to do some planting but I sort of assumed you'd be planning
outdoors but you've got everything laid out here, what's happening?
Well I'm planting bulbs for indoors.
I'm going to be forcing a lot of bulbs, a lot of Holland bulbs that we normally have come
up in the spring, well these are going to come up in the spring but I'm going to grow
them indoors and have and and and force them and kind of push them into blooming a little
prematurely.
So tell me what you're doing?
Well first of all I planted up all the bulb there's there's two types two ways to force
bulbs because there's two different types.
This is, these are the paper white highestsens.
Now these I just plant in a in a container, this supplies to container about four inches
high, you fill it about halfway with potting soil.
That's what I have here of potting mix and you just put them down in there.
I've got about five or six of them in about a six inch wide pot and then make sure you
place them with the pointy tip up and the roots down.
Then you just cover those up with some more of this mixture just so their little tips
are pointing out.
And you just push that down and just just a little bit like that and then naturally give
them a real good drink of water.
Now with these I'm going to start forcing these right away and only the paper whites you
can do that with.
I'm going to just put them in a nice cool room and start giving them light and they're
going to start growing and in about six to eight weeks I'm going to have daffodils blooming.
So right in the dead of winter I'm going to have daffodils blooming in my house and
it's going to be absolutely beautiful.
So there's, let me move this over.
That's one style.
That's one style.
Now here's the other style.
This I have a terracotta pot about the same height about four to five inches tall and
about six to seven inches in diameter.
We don't want a real deep pot.
We want a shallow kind of a flat squat pot.
Is there incidentally, is there any difference between using the plastic pot and the terracotta
pot?
No, there's no difference at all.
No, no, no, no.
Okay, so in this case you just happen to be using the terracotta pot.
Okay, so what are you doing?
Now then I'm going to, and then I put some other types of daffodils.
These are ordinary king alphard yellow daffodils that would normally go outside and I've
planted these already where I've filled it up halfway, put them in there, covered them
up just so the little tips are sticking out.
And now I've done the same with high ascents, tulips and crocuses.
I've done the same with all of those and now I'm going to water those very deeply and
then I'm going to take those down to the basement or if I had an attached garage and unheated
garage I would put them in there because they need to go through a chilling period of
about 12 to 14 weeks.
They need to go downstairs so it's pretend winter for them into a cold area.
Some people use a refrigerator, an unused refrigerator and just put them in there.
But then next spring after this 12 or 14 weeks goes by, I'll bring those upstairs and expose
them to a little bit of light and then I'll have more beautiful daffodils and tulips
and everything else, blue and next spring.
Well, it's a beautiful way to continue your outdoor garden indoors.
That's right.
And apparently this is not harming them by forcing them.
No, because then after they've done their forcing then you can take the bolts outside, plant
them, right?
You know, next spring after everything else is dead, plant them and then the following
spring they'll come back and they'll bloom again so you can always put these back outside.
And it's a great way to keep gardening all winter long.
It's a lot of fun to watch them come up and it's beautiful.
It makes the house beautiful and in color and in fragrance.
It's curing up in the middle of the winter.
That's right.
Well, Larry, I look forward to seeing them bloom and come by sometime when they're in bloom
or let me know.
I'll talk to you later.
All right.
Thanks for coming.
Bye.
Bye.
Larry Somsky, the environmental gardener, author of beautiful easy gardens.
His methods of gentle persuasion work wonders around his home in Hollowville, New York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
The golden spike, uniting the central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroads, was driven
at promontory point near the North Shore of the Great Salt Lake.
The year was 1869.
Today, the Salt Lake City area of Utah is among the fastest growing regions in the nation.
Lake affects snow in the rugged rockies make it one of the winter sports mechas of the
world.
This along with low crime rates, a pleasant climate and a strong industrial brace, draw new
residents from all corners of the continent and worldwide.
The lake itself is one of the reasons people come.
The surviving remnant of a much larger body, Lake Bonneville, that at one time 16,000 years
ago covered half the state of Utah and stretched north into Idaho.
The lake, the Great Salt Lake today, is about 80 kilometers long by 100 kilometers wide.
And with rivers running in, but not running out, the lake is indeed a salty lake, the world's
largest saline lake.
If you were to look at the ocean, the ocean is about 3% salinity and the great salt lake
can be as high as 24% salinity.
Here, Peyton is a doctoral graduate student at Utah State University and part of a research
team working on the National Biological Survey with the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service.
The high salinity is fun to float in if you are a swimmer, however, it supports a very limited
range of organisms.
In the water lives a unique brine shrimp, along the shores live the brine fly.
These along with shorebird species comprise the biological diversity of the region.
The ocean says even though the diversity is limited, the lake is critical to the health
of the planet.
That's extremely important because, especially for migratory birds, which I'm interested
in, because there's so much food there, the brine shrimp and the brine fly, and some
of the other organisms too.
Many thousands, tens of thousands of birds stop here to nurse themselves to migrate further
north or south to canine, if it's spring or fall.
If you consult any wildlife migratory map, you will see that all flyways between North
and South America, along the west coast, pass through the salt lake area.
Peyton says the great salt lake is especially critical to the snowy plover.
The world's largest concentration of snowy plovers can be found on great salt lake.
About 10,000 birds.
There's many snowy plovers around the great salt lake if there are in California, Oregon
and Nevada and Washington combined.
Because the great basin does a such a dynamic ecosystem, lakes and ponds are constantly
either getting filled up with water or evaporating.
Things are always changing here.
At certain points in time, certain lakes become very important to a lot of shorebirds.
When there's a lot of food around, there's a lot of water than the shorebirds use that
area.
At some point in time right now, great salt lake is being used by more avocets and spilts
which are two large shorebirds and anywhere else in the great basin desert.
It could be over time that eventually the lake will re-seed to the point or either get
flooded out so the habitat is available in the shorebirds or you've other lakes scattered
throughout the great basin desert.
There's more and more of these lakes throughout the great basin desert getting eaten up by
that development, agriculture, the waters no longer that ecosystem.
There's few refuges for these birds to concentrate on given the dynamic nature of the area.
So over time, as we develop the great basin desert, the great salt lake becomes more and
more important.
In 193, Southern Pacific Railroad constructed a wooden piling tressel across the middle
of the lake.
This was replaced by a rock and earthen dike in 1959.
The northern part of the lake was thus cut off from the southern section.
In time, with no freshwater rivers flowing in, the northern part has become much saltier
than the southern lake.
In 1984, a 300-foot hole was blasted in this dike to allow water to exchange.
Effects are being monitored.
Meanwhile, the southern section is also becoming saltier than it used to be as the three major
freshwater rivers emptying into the southern lake are diverted for industry and agriculture.
Carlos Lindo, professor of biology at Utah State University in Logan, says the increasing
salinity is not the only cause for alarm.
There are also pressures due to pollution, mainly heavy metals by industries in the Salt
Lake Valley.
A lot of effluent goes into the lake from industry.
And the thing that's a particular concern is that that lake is not slushed out.
It's a terminal lake.
There's no exit to the sea to wash the toxics out to the sea where I guess they would
accumulate eventually as well.
But everything bio-accumulates in these terminal basins so that if we have heavy metals like
cadmium and mercury, those sorts of things, those will just accumulate in the food chain.
And the branch ramp, I don't know about the branch lives, but the branch ramp are quite
capable of handling heavy toxic loads, but they'll pass on that toxic load to the birds.
And nobody has any idea how much of that is going on right now.
So what are the issues?
Tom Wharton is an editor of the Salt Lake Tribune and author of a series of special articles
and a comprehensively researched tabloid on the lake and the issues affecting it.
The Great Soul Lake is regarded by a lot of Utah residents.
There's nothing more than a smelly pond where industry is traditionally dumped.
It's refuge.
It's effulence into the lake.
And so it locally, the Great Soul Lake isn't held in especially high regard.
So there are a lot of threats to the lake.
For example, Davis County to the north of Salt Lake County would like to create a giant
freshwater lake out of an arm of the Great Soul Lake at a Farmington Bay.
A freshwater lake would change the ecology of it drastically if it's a very nice,
financial salt marshes that have been preserved by the nature of conservancy.
There are mineral companies that try to mine the vine for various minerals,
primarily potassium and magnesium and salt.
They are expanding their operation, which has an effect on the ecosystem of the lake.
Their branch from the branch from industry is a $30 million industry.
Their branch from people out and take millions and millions of branch from banks.
And they're really, they're enough branch from the branch from where they say,
hey, we're not hurting anything, but they really haven't been enough known about the lake
to know whether that's having an effect or not on the ecology of the lake.
There are the rooting of highways and the rooting of railroads and transportation systems.
For example, the Salt Lake International Airport is adding a third runway,
which is impacting to a great extent some wetlands just west of Salt Lake City.
They're having to do a massive mitigation project to replace those wetlands in a different area,
but there's some concern that you can replace in natural salt marsh.
So industry is attacking the Great Soul Lake,
and because it doesn't have a real natural constituency if people really think that,
hey, this is a neat and special place, the public is pretty apathetic about whether it's worth it
to save the salt marshes, which most of them will call as mud flats or, you know,
here all kinds of derogatory names for them.
Tom, let me ask you another angle on this, and it's a little bit delicate, I guess, to discuss,
but I'm sure it's a factor that you consider and that is considered whenever the issues are raised
and the solutions are proposed. What is the role of the Mormon Church and not only as a political body,
but as individual members of the Mormon Church? What is there, what seems to be the position
and the role of the Church and the people in either advancing these problems or finding solutions to them?
I round about way to maybe answer your question, as the local culture is,
the resources are to be used, whether you're talking about the public lands for cattle, mining,
or timber, whether you're talking like an asset of the Great Salt Lake, they tend to look for something
of value out of the, tends to be the local culture. Tom Wharton speaking to us from the busy
editorial room of the Salt Lake Tribune. Peter Payton says, for him, the lake has more than
scientific value, and perhaps this is one reason many of us too are drawn to this great salty lake.
Well, I've worked in a lot of different ecosystems. I've worked in the Old Girls' Red Witch Forest
of Northern California. I've worked in Tropical Rain Forest in Hawaii. I grew up in Colorado.
I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, but the aesthetic value of the Great Salt Lake,
being out in the middle of barren elk, a lifelapse with thousands of birds flying around you,
and snow cap mountains in the background. It's one of the most beautiful areas I've ever worked at
in the world, and it's an incredibly serene environment. It's a nice calm place to work.
Nearly everyone we spoke with in researching this piece agrees. The lake is in crisis,
but not beyond the point of no return. The biggest factor contributing to the crisis is lack of
public knowledge or concern about the lake's importance as an ecological habitat. They say those
especially from the east and west coasts who flock to the region for the skiing and the resorts
have no idea that their presence is creating an economy that in turn is creating the crisis that
may in the end destroy the very reason both residents, tourists, and industry are there in the first
place. This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's our report on the Environment Show this week. Thanks much for joining us and
be sure to tune in next week at this same time for another edition. For a cassette copy of the
program called 1-800-767-1929, ask for the Environment Show program number 203. The Environment Show
is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content. Dr. Alan Shartock,
executive producer, this is Bruce Robertson. We had helped this week from Tracy O'Connell.
The Environment Show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York and by Heming's
Motor News, the national Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington Vermont,
call 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
