Received Friday, this Meeting Notice:
Announcement Date: March 1, 2019
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS AND PARTIES:The Suwannee-Satilla Regional Water Planning Council
will hold a council meeting at the following date, time and location:Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Registration: 10:00 A.M. – 10:30 A.M.Meeting: 10:30 A.M. – 2:00 P.M.
41 AND Main
343 Main St. S,
Tifton, GA 31794For additional information Continue reading
Valdosta has fallen down to only monthly water quality testing, instead of their former weekly schedule.
They’ve also dropped their two state line stations, so the GA-FL Line trace on this graph ends in December 2018.
Readings have risen since their January sampling, with Valdosta’s US 84 sampling station above the Georgia state limit at 265 cfu/100 ml of E. coli. Continue reading
Online today and in the paper Gainesville Sun this coming Sunday. To paddle the most-affected stretch of the Withlacoochee River, join us this Saturday morning.
A December upsurge of raw sewage spills from the city of Valdosta, Georgia, has a dozen downstream counties organized into a task force, demanding action from Florida state legislators. But what action?
I recommend first getting a grip on the extent of the problem, keeping that picture up to date and then funding fixes.
![[Water]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2019-01-06--wwals-troupville-testing/20190106_152703.jpg)
Photo: John S. Quarterman of Sara Jay, Water Temperature, TGroupville Boat Ramp, Little River, 2019-01-06
Valdosta spilled not just twice, but two dozen times in December, totaling more than 6 million gallons of raw sewage. Spills also happened in Tifton, Quitman and Lowndes County, Georgia.
We know this because Continue reading
Update 2019-01-25: Added an HTML table of all spills in the Suwannee River Basin in Georgia since the beginning of 2015.
WWALS Science Committee Chair Tom Potter made this committee report to the WWALS Quarterly Board Meeting of January 2019:
The Science Committee has focused on monitoring sewage spills from Municipalities in the region. The primary data is the online database provide by the GA EPD. The agency regularly compiles spill volume, date, and, location across the state and posts the information on-line.
WWALS played a central role in convincing EPD to provide this data in a timely manner and has regularly posted spill data on the WWALS website, wwals.net/issues/vww/ga-spills/. This a substantial improvement over prior reporting systems and is contributing to timely reporting of conditions that may adversely impact water quality and recreational uses of streams and rivers.
The following graph summarizes reported spill data in Quitman, Tifton and Valdosta and Continue reading
Three weeks in a row! The Valdosta river water quality testing data WWALS obtains through a weekly open records request shows all stations tested below the Georgia state limit last Wednesday.
However, like the week before, there are no data for Continue reading
A month ago at Beatty Branch:
“Everything in this area depends on groundwater,” said John Quarterman, the Suwannee Riverkeeper in Lowndes County, where Moody is located. “I’m not saying that Moody necessarily did make enough contamination to be a problem, but I can’t tell from this report, and I don’t think it’s our responsibility to determine that they didn’t.”
![[Photographer Hyosub Shin and Reporter Meris Lutz]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2018-12-07--ajc-moody-afb/20181207_125050.jpg)
Photographer Hyosub Shin and Reporter Meris Lutz,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
online today and in Sunday’s Atlanta paper newspaper,
Contaminated groundwater, a toxic legacy of Georgia’s air bases,
3 January 2019.
Moody Air Force Base tested their own wells, and found them clean. Which is good, but
![[Figure 2 AFFF Area Locations]](https://www.wwals.net/pictures/2018-12-07--ajc-moody-afb/Moody-site-inspect-PFOA-PFAS-0081.jpg)
Figure 2 AFFF Area Locations
PDF
their wells are much deeper than the wells the rest of us use in the country around here. Moody did not test any of those wells; Continue reading
No new spills reported in the Suwannee River Basin in Georgia! We do have some clarifications on old spills, some even with raw sewage totals.
Since the Sewage Spills Report GA-EPD posts each day replaces the previous one, WWALS has started picking up those reports daily and parsing out differences.
This has revealed a total for a Quitman report, some Smithbriar Drive spelling corrections, a total for one Valdosta spill location, and where it goes (spoiler: into the Alapaha River Basin).
We don’t see any new spills in the past two weeks in the Suwannee River Basin in Georgia.
We also don’t see Continue reading
There’s good news in response to the weekly open records request from WWALS to Valdosta: all stations reporting are well within the Georgia state limit for bacterial levels. There’s also some puzzling news.
The puzzling news is that Continue reading
The irony: Valdosta’s warning sign is still up at Troupville Boat Ramp after its six spills weekend before last, yet Valdosta’s own weekly water quality testing stations almost all measured below the state limits for Fecal coliform and E. coli.
The exception was at Continue reading
Not just Valdosta: Tifton spilled two places, and Quitman one, in the most recent rains. Those cities were not in the data available online from GA-EPD yesterday, but they are in the online data today.
But Valdosta spilled the most sewage and from the most locations: six places, not just the one Valdosta told the public. Plus we finally have a total for the previous WWTP spill, and all the others from the beginning of December, and those totals are not pretty.
Photo: Julie Bowland, of Valdosta sewage spill sign at Troupville Boat Ramp, 21 December 2018.
That Valdosta sewage spill sign is stuck loosely into a hole WWALS dug to plant our Withlacoochee and Little River Water Trail (WLRWT) signs, which someone has yet again pulled up and thrown into the river, but I digress….
First let’s look at the city people in Florida ignore: Tifton, Georgia, the second largest city in the Suwannee River Basin (that’s right: in both Georgia and Florida). Tifton had Continue reading