December is upon us and we're in a GIF-giving mood.
Share your best water- or sanitation-related GIFs with us and we'll post them here to see and share all holiday-season long. Tag us on Twitter with @neorsd or #h2oGIFexchange and share the clean-water meme love.
What better way to show someone you care. About clean water.
Your toilet can't take an extended holiday. Which is one of many reasons our shift workers like Christen don't either.
Christen Wood is an Operator at our Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant and she was working on Thanksgiving with a number of her colleagues. She sent us this video after dinner, not only thanking her own family and co-workers who live the shift life, but thanking you, our customers.
We're proud to serve you all year long, holidays, weekends and snow days included.
Some people have a habit of flushing things they shouldn't flush: Disposable wipes, paper towels, wrappers, cotton swabs, and a whole lot more. And when you're entertaining guests this holiday season, if you don't know their habits, they might be flushing something in your bathroom that could cause a problem.
Here's something that might come in handy. Download and print one of our 5x7 inserts [PDF], find a frame around the house, and place your new reminder somewhere near your bathroom sink or toilet.
Let us know if you put one to use. Happy holidays.
November 19 is World Toilet Day, drawing attention to the sanitation and clean-water challenges that affect 1 of every 3 people on earth. The statistics bear this out, and the facts are worth talking about. Here are 6 ways to do so without words.
"We expected this year's bloom to be a 9 (out of 10). It was actually a 10.5."
That was how Jeffery Reutter, Ph.D. introduced his November 11 City Club presentation on Lake Erie's hazardous algal blooms, a challenge that has affected water quality in recent years. But a mystery this year is why the toxicity was not as extreme as the off-the-scale metric would have indicated.
"This was the worst [algal] bloom we've had in our history," he continued, "but it only produced about a quarter of the toxin that we expected. That's a huge challenge for us to understand right now." Reutter is a special adviser to the Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory at The Ohio State University, and he indicated this will be an important area of research following the 2015 algae season.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, phosphorus from wastewater treatment plants was a key contributor to algae because it is key to the growth of hazardous blooms. But since treatment plants significantly reduced their phosphorus output, the biggest contributor now is fertilizer-laden runoff from agriculture all around the Great Lake.
"If we can take the appropriate actions, we can greatly reduce the amount [of nutrients in stormwater runoff]. The weakness in that argument is climate change; if we keep getting more and more frequent storms and more wet spring periods, we'll see things that are worse."
Ruetter offered recommendations to improve water quality on personal property which would reduce have a beneficial impact on runoff entering streams and storm sewer systems. Listen to or view the complete City Club presentation.
We're hosting our first-ever Sewer University (SewerU) presentation to a capacity crowd of nearly 120 guests on November 10, and if you haven't registered, you'll be able to follow the discussion on Twitter @neorsd#SewerU.
The goal is to bring the underground and often misunderstood sewer network and its function to the surface to better explain how our lives are affected by this critical infrastructure. Here are 5 topics we'll cover that may interest you.
