Places becoming less livable

[vox_mundi]

Congress to Halt Military Use of Toxic Foam Contaminating Drinking Water
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-congress-halt-military-toxic-foam.html

Congress has reached a deal on a spending bill that would require the military to stop using firefighting foam containing toxic chemicals linked to cancer, but would abandon efforts to place stronger regulations on the chemicals.

The bill, called the National Defense Authorization Act, has been the focus of intense negotiations for months. House Democrats saw it as their best chance to force President Trump's Environmental Protection Agency to increase its oversight of a class of chemicals, called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances—commonly known as PFAS—that have contaminated drinking water sources across the country.

Senate Republicans resisted these measures, wary of forcing chemical companies and the Defense Department to undertake extensive cleanups.

But when hopes of a compromise faded last week, Democrats were left with little choice but to agree to significantly weaker provisions or kill the entire defense spending bill.

The bill that emerged out of a joint House-Senate committee this week had been stripped of measures that would require the EPA to designate the chemicals as "hazardous" and set a nationwide safety standard for PFAS in drinking water.

A proposal requiring contaminated sites across the country to be cleaned up under the Superfund program had also been removed, as had one that would limit how much PFAS chemical manufacturers could dump into water supplies.

... The military would also be barred by 2021 from giving service members ready-to-eat meals packaged in containers treated with PFAS.



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Background:

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,428.msg189529.html#msg189529

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,428.msg189625.html#msg189625

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... Each Republican Senator & Congressman should be forced to drink a quart of this shit as a token of appreciation on behalf of a grateful nation.

[nanning]

Queensland school runs out of water as commercial bottlers harvest local supplies

Parents have been told to consider keeping Tamborine Mountain state school students at home, while trucks take local water to bottling plants for companies including Coca-Cola


https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/12/queensland-school-water-commercial-bottlers-tamborine-mountain
  by Ben Smee


Water miners in the Mount Tamborine area supply roughly 130m litres of water each year to commercial bottling operations. Now the local bores are running dry.

“I was staggered,” one local resident, Craig Peters, told Guardian Australia. “It was more or less the final straw for me. The school’s bore is 50 metres deep and has never ever had these issues before.”

“At the conclusion of that ceremony they said give serious consideration to not sending kids to school for the rest of the week because of the lack of water.

“Now the government is buying water back from Coca-Cola to bring here, which is where it came from in the first place.”

The situation seems to fall into a regulatory void, with no mechanism to halt commercial operations in times of severe drought or ensure that local water is allocated to locals.

[wdmn]

NSW (Australia) considering evacuating up to 90 towns if they run out of water


https://www.thefifthestate.com.au/articles/day-zero-might-mean-tough-choices-for-90-towns-looking-at-new-locations/?fbclid=IwAR25QQJBmeKnL08TrWC-H_OzLZgWwi5x9zhuznP8YRkWr01zhDC3AvQMB3w

"The NSW state government is considering evacuating the residents of as many as 90 towns that are seriously affected by drought if they completely run out of water.

For months, many towns in rural NSW have been relying on water being trucked in but that is only a short-term solution, and bore water is only available to some towns.

Prime7 News Central West late last month reported that the government would make the drastic move of relocating populations from towns without any water supply.

.......

Asked by Prime TV how many towns were facing the prospect of completely running out of water, the state’s regional town water supply co-ordinator, James McTavish, said: “We have about 90 towns and communities that we have substantial concerns about now”."