Wisconsin Water Threatened, Scott Walker Provides Protection for Polluters

Clean, safe water - Worth protection

Update:  See Algae formed from vast quantities of nutrient runoff from Wisconsin farms overwhelm countless Wisconsin lakes (Bergquist, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

"There are approximately 160,000 public drinking water systems and more than 16,000 publicly owned wastewater treatment systems in the United States. Approximately 84 percent of the U.S. population receives their potable water from these drinking water systems, and more than 75 percent of the U.S. population has its sanitary sewerage treated by these wastewater systems."

The Water and Wastewater Systems Sector is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including contamination with deadly agents, physical attacks such as the release of toxic gaseous chemicals and cyber attacks. If these attacks were realized, the result could be large numbers of illnesses or casualties and/or a denial of service that would also impact public health and economic vitality. Critical services such as firefighting and healthcare (hospitals), and other dependent and interdependent sectors, such as Energy, Food and Agriculture, and Transportation Systems, would suffer negative impacts from a denial of service in the Water and Wastewater Systems Sector."
— U.S. Department of Homeland Security

If one were to alert the media of intentions to inject into local waterways and aquifers over 150 pathogens— including E coli, Listeria, Salmonella and super Bacteria—one would hope a federal investigation utilizing all federal protection assets would be mobilized.

Unfortunately, for Wisconsin—America's Dairyland—we have homegrown sociopathic extremists right here in our midst: They're called mega farmers, CAFO Dairy owners (for concentrated agricultural feeding operations) and they are carrying out attacks against our water.

They do not care how many people will be poisoned by the millions of tons of their cows' waste dumped into the environment as though it were an infinite sewer; or even if a four-year-old girl and her family were to be poisoned by E coli and nearly killed as occurred in 2004 in Kewaunee County in northern Wisconsin when manure-borne E coli from a local CAFO struck a family.

Anybody, any CAFO, any farmer, who dumps untreated wastewater into the environment should in the words of Gordon Stevenson, DNR chief for regulation runoff from 2001-2011, be treated as "Public Enemy Number One."

People have warning about this for years. Last year, the state's largest paper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, called for an open discussion of the topic.

Its an election year in Wisconsin and dumping massive amounts of cow manure will not become a topic in America's Dairyland; candidates for governor are avoiding this sacred cow like a swim in a liquid manure lagoon.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's project of turning the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) into a machine inserting "certainty" into corporations' (specifically Big Ag) plans to devastate the water, the air and the land has been largely completed, damn the consequences to families' health, the environment, tourism and recreation.

The Wysocki Family of Companies (a big CAFO operator hiding in plain site) is smiling, suing local communities in central Wisconsin and working with the DNR to finalize its plans to build a massive CAFO in the Town of Saratoga abutting four counties in central Wisconsin.

Citizens there don't like it. The Wysocki corporation doesn't care.

For this type of polluter, the EPA is the enemy; the Army Corps of Engineers is a nightmare, and the Clean Water and Air Acts are dangerous.