Are so-called flushable wet wipes actually safe to flush? TODAY 2 days ago Lindsay Lowe
When plumber Rex Kinney gets a call about wet wipes, he knows the job is going to take a while.
Kinney, a master plumber with Jersey Plumbing Service in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, has spent countless hours dredging up wet wipes from blocked sewers. He and his crew often spend three or four hours snaking one sewer, using a cable to drag up soggy clumps of wipes, pulling the wipes off the end and then sticking the cable back down into the muck.
“It s a fair amount of work and it s not too pretty looking,” Kinney told TODAY.
Emergency crews in Manatee County, Fla., are using pumps and vacuum trucks to drain a leaking wastewater reservoir in an effort to prevent a full-fledged
Listen • 1:04 Governor Ron DeSantis said he deployed the National Guard to provide pumps to help drain the Piney Point reservoir.
Governor Ron DeSantis and members of the Florida Department of Emergency Management on Sunday toured a leaking phosphate processing pond in Manatee County where the threat of a larger breach could send hundreds of millions of gallons of water into the neighboring area and Tampa Bay.
DeSantis issued a state of emergency on Saturday and sent in the National Guard to provide pumps in an attempt to drain the reservoir before the hole in the earthen dam becomes larger.
Authorities had stated on Saturday that such a breach was imminent and could send a wall of water into the surrounding area, which is south of Sun City near the Hillsborough County line.
Second breach may have been found in Florida wastewater pond that threatens to break
Officials say drones may have detected a second breach in a Florida wastewater reservoir containment wall that could collapse creating what the governor has called a “real catastrophic flood situation.”
“At approximately 2 a.m., an infrared drone identified a signature that could indicate a second breach” in the Piney Point wastewater pond, Manatee County Public Safety Director Jake Saur said Monday at a news conference.
“Engineers from the Department of Environmental Protection are back out at the site now and they’re reassessing that,” Saur added.
â50,000 bags of fertilizer:â What could Piney Point do to Tampa Bay?
Scientists are trying to forecast what comes next. Environmentalists fear algal blooms and fish kills.
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Updated 1 hour ago
The focus for emergency teams at the old Piney Point phosphate plant property is stopping a flood from surging out of an enormous, leaking reservoir of polluted water.
Success on that front could mean pumping
a majority of the 480 million gallons of wastewater into Tampa Bay, posing an ecological danger to the treasured estuary that clean water advocates say may endure for weeks or months.
âThatâs like dumping 50,000 bags of fertilizer into the bay all at once,â said Ed Sherwood, director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, on what a full drain of the pond could mean.