https://www.cleanwaterfuture.org/projects/save-the-spoonerville/
Project Details:
Our Project – Save the Spoonerville
Spoonerville Brook, North Springfield, Vermont
Photo: Black River Action Team
A small, clear brook tumbles along, weaving its way through the village of North Springfield, Vermont. There is an immediate and urgent need to begin monitoring the water quality of this stream: a new biomass incinerator is being planned for this community, and its waste water leach-field is sited very close to Spoonerville Brook. Concentrated levels of metals, salts, treatment chemicals, and other elements are expected to be a major component of this “concentrated groundwater.” At least 129,000 gallons of waste water is to be injected into the leach field DAILY, roughly 500 feet from Spoonerville Brook. The goal of this project is to purchase a hand-held meter that will allow the Black River Action Team to monitor the temperature, pH, and metal levels of the brook from now until the incinerator is built. If we can build a bank of base line data, then we will be better able to detect any impact on the water quality. The sampling site is near the mouth of Spoonerville Brook, on the property of a concerned landowner.
Spoonerville Brook empties into the Black River less than 1,000 feet from the proposed impact, and the town’s only drinking water supply (the Gilcrhist wellfield) is less than a mile downstream. Water quality is of prime importance for the aquatic organisms living in the brook and the river, but also for the safety of the drinking water of Springfield and North Springfield residents.
Your investment in this project will protect the water quality of Spoonerville Brook and the Black River.
Investment Needed
We need only $200! Although the budget for this project is $1,200, the Black River Action Team is seeking only $200 through Clean Water Future. This is the amount needed for the purchase of a multi-parameter hand-held water meter.
Volunteers will help with monitoring. Their labor amounts to a $500 in-kind donation to the project. Other grants and donations cover $500 worth of data collection and analysis, community outreach, and volunteer training.
Monitoring Plan
The value of baseline data is that it describes water quality conditions that exist prior to the construction and operation of the biomass incinerator or other future activities in the Spoonerville Brook watershed. With continued monitoring, scientists can identify changes in water quality that might be attributable to those activities. If for some reason, the incinerator is not constructed, the meter will still be a valuable tool in the larger volunteer water quality monitoring program throughout the rest of the watershed.
The Black River Action Team will be sharing monitoring results with the State of Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources for their information and for any further action if deemed necessary. BRAT will also be conducting annual “bug hunts,” collecting and identifying aquatic insect larvae to learn more about the condition of Spoonerville Brook. These bug hunts will involve and engage community members, school children, and hopefully a college intern or two.
BRAT Director Kelly Stettner will conduct all bug hunts; meter operation will be overseen and training will be conducted by BRAT volunteer Bill Manner, former Watershed Program Manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Data will be checked by Bill Manner before being shared with the Agency of Natural Resources. If needed, samples will be collected and tested by Aquacheck Labs, a state-certified water testing facility in Weathersfield.
Spoonerville Brook along the street
Photo: Black River Action Team
Contact
For more information about this project or other initiatives of the Black River Action Team, contact project leader Kelly Stettner, Director, Black River Action Team; 101 Perley Gordon Rd, Springfield, Vt; (802) 885-1533; moc.oohay
Thanks for posting this! We've got $40 pledged on the site so far, another $25 promised...let's keep it rolling! :-)
ReplyDeleteKelly
And the fearmongering begins.
ReplyDeleteSave Springfield. Support the Biomass plant!
ReplyDeleteBiomass! Biomass! GO! GO! GO!
ReplyDeleteSpringfield will make no money or jobs with a privately owned biomass plant, just lose our waters, and create air pollution. That will save Springfield alright!!! Go!!! Go!!! Go!!! that is great thinking. Dig your heads out of the sand. If you want some real fear go ahead and put this in brainetics.
DeleteLet's see, cooling water not involved in industrial processing which is probably purer than the water in Spoonerville brook discharged into a leachfield 1 and 2/3rd football fields away from the brook is going to contaminate it. Yeah, that sounds plausible. Why don't you just ask the developers to donate the equipment, you are probably doing them a favor.
ReplyDelete"brainetics"??? With creative spelling/vocabulary like that, I guess we won't have to worry about the biomass having a detrimental impact on the intellectual powers of its detractors!
ReplyDeleteI think we should look into storing spent nuclear fuel.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as it is safe to do so, most of the spent fuel at reactors should be put into dry casks. Fuel in dry casks is less likely to catch fire, and terrorists would have to break open many dry casks to release the same amount of radioactivity that a single wet pool could release.
To reduce the vulnerability of these dry casks, the NRC should adopt new "physical protection standards" that enhance the security requirements for dry cask storage so that the fuel will be protected against reasonably foreseeable threats that might emerge over several decades. The new standards should consider credible scenarios by which attackers could gain access to and release the radioactive material from the dry casks. Protection would involve a combination of operational measures and physical measures, such as putting spent fuel casks into enclosed buildings, using earthen berms, or erecting other barriers.
This could be a great way for Springfield to use the old shops J&L and or the Fellows buildings.