After fishing today I was walking from the ramp/docks to my truck and saw a Notice posted on one of the light poles. I didn’t read the whole thing as I was in a hurry(stayed fishing longer than I should have) but noticed that it had been posted for a couple of days. The long and the short was that Nucor (sp?) has applied for a permit to dump waste into the Cooper river. I’m sorry I should have taken the time to read it better or maybe take a picture I could have posted here or something but I needed to get moving to pick up my son. I plan to read it a little better next time I’m back fishing. But, I saw stuff about ground water testing, effluent discharge, and 30 days for objections. The notice was posted on the 13th of March.
Fishing for me is a hobby, a chance to get away, so I’m a release kinda guy. I don’t know how the discharge will affect fishing in that area but I figure the folks who fish there and keep some for dinner might want to know about this and take a look at that notice. I only saw the one posting and only noticed it because I walked right by on my way across the street. It’s posted right over by the handicaped parking spots. If I get back out in the next few days after the wind dies down I’ll see if I can use a scanner app on my phone and post the notice as a pdf.
Check it out if you’re interested.
This is one of the few things the EPA would be useful for. I’m all about building businesses and bringing in jobs, but if they are going to put anything into that river, it needs to be so heavily enforced that the company is SCARED SENSELESS to build here. Our rivers are already too polluted.
If it’s just coolant water, that’s entirely different and not a serious issue, but dumping anything labeled “waste” bothers me. I saw the crap dumped into the Catawba river by various industries and how the whole area smelled like horse $h1T because of it (not unlike the odor on the Mark Clark near that paper mill).
I’d like to know more about this. Someone please post a picture.
If it’s just clean hot water, that’s one thing, but if it’s something that’s going to make eating fish dangerous, we need to take some action and make some phone calls.
Semper Fi
18’ Sterling
115 Yamaha
Big Ugly Homemade Blue Push Pole
Somehow, some way, the powers that be need to figure out a way to get control of the cumulative effects of pollution by businesses that are individually within the legal boundaries.
Here is a picture of the notice… I can post a link to a full pdf if anyone wants to see the whole notice. I think the important part is in this picture though.
What have they been doing since 2008? dumping illegally?
Coal pile runoff and truck wash waste water are the ones that strike me as bad… the rest sounds like they have to process it before they can dump it into the river.
I’m pretty new to the fishing scene here in Charleston, where is cowbell branch? I’ve google mapped Nucor and recognize where the plant is in relation to the Cooper but don’t see any branches near there except pretty far up river from the plant.
None of it is any good. The cooling water could have oil residue in it due to it being contact cooling water. The worst thing about cooling water is, it’s warm or hot. You don’t want to be messing with the normal temperature of a body of water. Air compressor blowdown could have oil in it. Truck wash water is going to have sediment in it. The list goes on. The steelmill in Georgetown is permitted to discharge their cooling water into the water behind the plant. It is a ton of water. None of this is good. I don’t know any details about the facility, but I hope that any water being discharged is held in a holding basin to cool, skim off any oil residue, let sediment settle out and be tested for PH prior to discharge, then I might approve. Maybe this is what’s being done.??
Anyone who feels strongly about this, please draft a letter and send it off.
I just did. Who knows if it will make a difference, but it might at least get us a public meeting about it.
No problem. Just what they taught me in school, Read twice edit three times, As the cover wagons rolled over the fruited plains. Who knew that the fruits and nuts wound end up on the left coast or in government.
is it going to be as bad or worse then bushy park industrial complex’s effluent…not to mention mead-westvaco’s…or the new wire factory being erected at bushy as we type, they’re going to have ‘waste water’ as well…
I will call Melanie Townley from SC DHEC from the number listed and see if I can get hold of the ‘fact sheet’ tomorrow. I’ll see about posting it here after that. I’ve google mapped Nucor and they do have what looks like three ponds on site, but can’t tell of any outflow to the cooper river or to cowbell branch. Cowbell branch seems to be an off shoot of the cooper that runs very close to the southern most pond on the Nucor property.
I did a small amount of research on environmental controls for blast furnace and steel mills. This is a copy and paste concerning wastewater - “Wastewater treatment systems typically include sedimentation to remove suspended solids, physical or chemical treatment such as pH adjustment to precipitate heavy metals, and filtration.” Hopefully all that is happening at the very least. Also, I hope they are required to design there holding ponds to 100 year storm events… otherwise imagine if a hurricane washed all that sludge out into our river. yikes
I’m certainly not trying to hate on Nucor, I realize they are not the only ones dumping into the river system here. Just gonna be more stuff that may end up in the fish on some peoples tables at night. I wasn’t even aware of the article Vinman posted. I can not even come close to imagining what the cost would be to completely filter wastewater. Hopefully somebody is considering the cumulative effects of all the wastewater going into our fishery.
I once had a guy in the Navy tell me I was crazy to be an ET,that I would be absorbing all kinds of radiation from who knows what. I told him to stop crying, every time he stepped outside he was absorbing radiation from the sun… and to tell me how he planned to avoid that. Maybe I should just substitute ‘pollution’ for ‘radiation’ and ask myself how I plan to avoid pollution… if it’s not one form, it’s another? Now I need to go fishing and drink a beer.
I have a friend who works for Nucor, and he is going to check on it. His statement was that they have lots of controls in effect to control their waste outflow. Having helped open a mfg plant in Goose Creek myself I know that unless there was an accident, anything leaving that plant was clean. The carcinogens are coming from somewhere though!
They are required to seek public comment regarding the issuance of a new NPDES permit. I’m not sure what their permit cycle time period is but I pulled all the data from Nucor’s current cycle (as of March 2013 from EPA). This information is all publicly available via the internet. In the report it shows data related to metals, pH, biological index’s, etc. It is a massive amount of data but it is all there. The important thing to remember is that ALL permitted dischargers have to go through this exercise. It just so happens that someone placed a poster on Bushy Park (most notifications are on the web or in the papers). It is unfortunate that more people don’t keep up with this kind of stuff on a regular basis.
