By Heather Burns-DeMelo
The thought of swimming around in chlorinated water has never sounded like a good idea to me. The smell of my skin off-gasing well after returning home from a day at the pool has often left me uneasy, and I much prefer a day at the beach. While I've often had a nagging feeling that fresh bodies of water weren't as clean as I'd like, this article posted on the Connecticut Fund for the Environment has me considering spending the next steamy day cooling off in my bathtub.
According to the article, "the federal government and the state of Connecticut promised the state's citizens clean and healthy water 30 years ago, yet much work remains. That early commitment calls for stopping the 2 billion gallons of raw sewage that enters our waterways each year by separating combined sewer overflows and restoring the “Dead Zone” in Long Island Sound by removing about 60 percent of the nitrogen discharges from the sewage treatment plants in the state.
While the regular legislative session adjourned in early June, it did so without passing a budget or bond package, leaving key components like the Clean Water Fund stuck in limbo.
Despite years of great progress, the Clean Water Fund — the primary mechanism for funding those wastewater treatment and sewer projects in Connecticut — began to fall apart when the legislature decided to shift that money to other non-water related purposes in 2002."
What can you do? Email Jodi Rell and ask that she make cleaning up our water--or at least stop making it a toilet--a priority.
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