Valley authorities exhibit teamwork, expertise in response to fouled streams

One of the most visible trends of the administration of President Donald J. Trump over the past 20 months has been its success in loosening or gutting dozens of rules and regulations that aimed to protect the quality of this nation’s most precious and vital natural resources.

From chipping away at regulations designed to reduce air pollution and emissions to relaxing rules on major industrial toxic polluters to lifting limits on methane emissions to suspending rules designed to protect tributaries and wetlands under the Clean Water Act, the movement has generated mixed reactions.

Many big businesses have viewed them as productive and necessary tools toward ensuring corporate sustainability. Many environmentalists and public-health leaders have vilified the looser regulations as a misguided step back in time to when environmental protection did not play any serious role in the federal government.

In Ohio in general and the Mahoning Valley in particular, however, we’re pleased to see no such dilution, and the public sector’s commitment to the quality of our air and water remains strong and vigilant.

The proof is in two recent spills into waterways to which local authorities and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency responded quickly and professionally.

Late last month, some 250 gallons of sodium hydroxide leaked into the Bears Den Run stream – turning it a milky white – and eventually flowed to Mill Creek.

Officials from Youngstown’s health, water and fire departments as well as Mahoning County’s Hazmat unit and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency responded expeditiously and exercised solid teamwork to determine the source of the leak.

The OEPA cited Induction Iron Inc., a foundry in Austintown, with multiple violations of state water pollution and water quality standard laws by the foundry’s release of “untreated industrial waste water” into the stream, which is a tributary of the Mahoning River.

SIMILAR INCIDENT, SIMILAR EXPERTISE

Then similarly earlier this week, Ohio EPA investigators issued a citation against a car wash on Cardinal Drive in Canfield for discharging mud and soil from a nonpermitted drilling operation on property into Sawmill Creek.

Once again, efficient and speedy teamwork brought quick and pleasing results. Cardinal Joint Fire District, Mahoning County HazMat and Environmental Protection Agency responders worked through the night Monday to to determine the type and source of the substance.

The fire department flushed the stream, as Canfield City public works department workers vacuumed contaminated water from the stream while others placed filter dams along the stream behind the high school.

Taken together, the prompt and efficient responses to water pollutants in both Valley streams and the quick assessment of their causes should comfort our communities in the knowledge that their state and local authorities continue to consider environmental hazards as they should – as serious public-health business.