The best time of day to collect a wastewater sample is in the morning. That's according to Raul Gonzalez, an environmental scientist who's an expert on how people's hygiene habits intersect with the flow of sewage.
Gonzalez runs the wastewater surveillance program at the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, a Virginia Beach, Va., sewage treatment operation that processes waste for 20% of the state's population. He and his team were early adopters of wastewater surveillance – a way of tracking the concentration of viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases in sewage to watch for infectious disease outbreaks.
Public health officials in New York are planning an expansion of infectious disease monitoring in wastewater in order to detect more illnesses that may be otherwise quietly spreading through a community.
The state Department of Health on Monday announced its plan through $21.6 million in funding, including a $6.6 million grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Under a series of pilot programs, health officials will begin testing for Influenza A, RSV, Hepatitis A, Norovirus, and antimicrobial-resistant genes. The initial monitoring programs will begin in Erie, Onondaga, Jefferson and Westchester counties.
Lead levels in drinking water in the northwest Missouri town — population 5,609 — had spiked.
Over the next two years, one-quarter of the homes tested exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency's action level — 15 parts per billion — at least once.
The culprit, city and state officials believe, was the monochloramine. It likely corroded old lead pipes and caused the surge of lead in the drinking water. Because it hadn't detected high levels of lead in years past, Trenton hadn't been required to test for lead at residents' taps since 2014.
Until the city got test results, "we just thought maybe it was kind of like an isolated spot," said Ron Urton, the city administrator and utility director. "And then once we did the test and saw there [were] other elevated places, that's when we started, I think, kind of figuring out what was going on."
The 62 homes Trenton tested during that period have lead pipes, or service lines, running from the water mains, Urton said. But beyond that, very little is known about where lead pipes remain in the system with about 3,000 water meters.
Trenton has managed to get its lead levels back down again by adding a compound that reduces corrosion. But, experts say, the only permanent solution to stop lead from seeping into America's water is to remove the millions of lead pipes that remain 36 years after environmental regulators banned new ones from being installed.
Therein lies the problem.
Trenton — like many other water systems — doesn't know where all of its lead service lines are.
Corrosion control is essential when delivering city water.
CORTLAND COUNTY, N.Y. — The Cortland County Health Department, Broome County, and Village of Marathon were all notified Thursday to monitor their water sources after an overturned tractor-trailer on the Route 81 Northbound overpass spilled its contents into the roadway and into Tioughnioga River Wednesday night.
When Cortland Fire crews arrived on the scene near Yaman Park around 7:30 p.m., they found that three containers had been thrown from the wreckage into the Tioughnioga River.
Crews say they began to identify and contain the cargo while the driver was evaluated for his injuries and his dog was rescued from the wreckage.
The substances spilled by the tractor-trailer were found to be oil-based herbicides and a surfactant, which is used to help the herbicides spread and stick to surfaces.
Leaders in Kingsland, Ark., have spent years branding the town as the ancestral home of Johnny Cash.
They put up cast-iron signs welcoming drivers to the “birthplace of Johnny Cash.” They slapped his silhouette on the town’s water tower. And they’re working with his estate to build a heritage center that will highlight his roots in the community.
Cash thanked them by taking a leak on his hometown.
And he kept leaking.
Last week, a vandal fired a well-aimed bullet into Cash’s crotch, or rather the crotch of the silhouette that was painted on the town’s 50,000-gallon water tower, Kingsland Mayor Luke Neal told The Washington Post. Over the course of about six days, the water tower version of the Man in Black streamed roughly 180,000 gallons onto the ground below.
“It looks like he's peeing off a water tower — man, people are going wild with it,” Neal said.