A giant fatberg, potentially the size of four Sydney buses, within Sydney Water’s Malabar deepwater ocean sewer has been identified as the likely source of the debris balls that washed up on Sydney beaches a year ago.
Sydney Water isn’t sure exactly how big the fatberg is because it can’t easily access where it has accumulated.
Fixing the problem would require shutting down the outfall – which reaches 2.3km offshore – for maintenance and diverting sewage to “cliff face discharge”, which would close Sydney’s beaches “for months”, a secret report obtained by Guardian Australia states.
“The working hypothesis is FOG [fats, oils and grease] accumulation in an inaccessible dead zone between the Malabar bulkhead door and the decline tunnel has potentially led to sloughing events, releasing debris balls,” the report concludes.
“This chamber was not designed for routine maintenance and can only be accessed by taking the DOOF offline and diverting effluent to the cliff face for an extended period (months), which would close Sydney beaches.”
You would be amazed how often “the solution to pollution is dilution”. Can’t dump that raw chemical into the water/sewer, oh no. But if you dilute it with 5000 gallons of water? Oh well now it’s at “acceptable levels”. Notice how most regulations talk about “parts per million”(PPM). Well, it turns out that when most of your regulations are written such that you only have to “properly dispose” of something if it’s above a certain concentration, you can just dilute it below that level and BAM, “safe to dispose of”.
Well, yes. Dumping high concentrations will instantly kill everything in the waterway, diluting them and doing it slowly means they can handle it and survived.
Heck, the ocean is full of salt, but if you started dumping high-concentrated brine off a beach you’d kill every animal and plant on sight, just as you would kill yourself drinking said brine. But it would be quite hard to argue that you can’t safely put salt in the ocean, or add some to your food, once it is diluted to a safe level.
The question is how much of something total can the ocean handle before it becomes a problem. And for many things the answer is, quite literally, that it is just a drop in the ocean.
Yeah I get the point. But it doesn’t do anything about breaking those chemicals down or actually removing them. They just build up in the ocean instead. And then eventually you have rivers ON FIRE and you have to create the EPA.
Technically, you could mix 100 “toxic” chemicals into a soup where each one is below its PPM and that would be considered “safe”.
It’s like telling everyone they can only pee a little bit into the pool. Just a little bit won’t hurt, right? But if everyone’s doing it, eventually you have a pool of piss.
And frankly, I don’t trust humans for shit when it comes to long term impacts. We are short-sighted AS FUCK. There is no reason to believe dumping waste into the ocean isn’t eventually going to fuck something up. Oh look, it happened in this very article!
It’s just retarded homeopathy nonsense to think dilution removes the chemical. It’s still there. Just in our oceans now.