Monday, March 22, 2010

Would Waukesha Want Wauwatosa To Dump Its Wastewater Into the Fox River?

Pretty good crowd Monday night at the Wauwatosa Public Library to see poster boards and hear details about Waukesha's plan to discharge its wastewater into Underwood Creek.


The discharge plan is a key component of Waukesha's Lake Michigan diversion scheme.

The Great Lakes Compact says the water has to be returned, and Waukesha has decided that piping it to Underwood Creek - - on average, 10.9 million gallons daily - - is less expensive that piping it all the way back to the Lake, or returning it in a pipe to the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage Commission.

Reviews and approvals for the many local and state and Great Lakes regional phases of the Waukesha diversion application process are years down the road, and it is too soon to say whether the return flow plan turning Underwood Creek into a wastewater tributary will pass muster at the DNR and in Wauwatosa.

I talked to a few Wauwatosa residents at the meeting, which was informational only and not a public hearing.

That will come later.

But it's fair to say they had major concerns about Underwood Creek being used as the discharge point for Waukesha's wastewater.

Turn the argument around:

Would Waukesha citizens have similar concerns if an out-of-county community, say, Wauwatosa, decided it was in its financial interest to dump all its wastewater into the Fox River as it ran through the heart of Waukesha?

I would think so. Correctly.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love how you turned it around on them. However, we can't forget the the Fox River, is extremely contaminated because they have no conpunction about polluting in the first place. They were fined back in the seventies, by the EPA, for the contamination levels of the Fox River, and were ordered to clean it up. The river is even more contaminated now than it was then. They have never made any attempts to clean it up. Thats why they have such a mosquito problem, there is nothing in that part of the river to eat the lareve. I have gotton sick, just trying to fish there. So if they didn't follow orders over thirty years ago, what makes anyone think they will follow protocol now ?