How's your community's water treatment?

@mberigan, where do those things go - is a good question.  I would suggest asking the person who does the septic pumping where the contents of the truck gets dumped.  I suspect that this will be peeling the first layer of the onion.

This is hazardous waste and if this is just dumped somewhere - anywhere - without processing, this would be a clear indication of where changes can start on a small scale.

Another way to figure out who or what the culprit is - to start collecting samples and analyzing those.  I am not sure what method the health folks use to determine what is healthy or not.  If there is a scientific method of analyzing the method applied that can clearly determine what are and the level of contaminants, then this will provide information to the health agencies to "go upstream" of the problem.

Not an easy solution as the problem comes from multiple sources.

Keep us posted on what you find.

Even a municipality like Santos-SP comes up with the occasional "Beach Alert, unsuitable for bathing" public warning.   

As matter of  fact, if you wander through the City's front coastline, you will notice the canal subdivisions, which is meant to allow excess rainfall to be let out to the sea.   

And they had those subsea ducts too let the sewer out, way before the city got their approved sweage treatment facilities. 

And Santos has a strong tax base ( IPTU, State and Federal Money, Collected levies other than property tax ).  The Port Authority is located by Santos Proper ( Valongo and Downtown ), while the coastline collects a lot of property tax revenue.

Rio de Janeiro has the Guandu Water Treatment facilities, if memory does not escape me.  Yet the city has swelled, and there are informal settlements all over town ( aka favelas ). They pay less than their fair share of Water and Sewer.

In a way, the sell off of public utilities to private entities is supposed to make things worse.  They are copying what American Private Equity Firms are doing in acquiring Smaller Water Resource Authorities across the US. 

These folks, they do not invest in upgrades and increase handling  capacities.  They just milk the revenue for what these assets are worth.  No reinvestment, no public Muni bond offering.

Monkey see, monkey do.  Your typical middle and upper class Brazilian folk  will clamor for privatization, not caring for the unintended consequences.  See the controversy in selling off the SABESP in Sao Paulo.  It is supposed to get worse, so Federal, State, and City Governments intervene and declare the service a public utility, therefore assuming ownership.

But the Br

05/31/24 @mberigan.  An interesting question, Matt.

We live at the top of a high rise in the Historic Center of Manaus, and we can see a modern treatment plant from our windows.  It's on the point where the Educandos River, which collects several igarapés (creeks) from the southeastern part of the city, meets the Rio Negro, a few miles from where the Negro meets the Solimões to form the Amazon Proper.  The state is clearly very proud of this plant:  it seems to be modern and well-maintained, and has painted on the wall, "A Work of the State of Amazonas.  The Largest Sewage Treatment Plant in the North of the Country". 

Still, I've always wondered about it.  For one thing, "the largest treatment plant in the North of the country" only seems to cover the area of about one city block; maybe it's super-efficient.  For another, the placement seems strange to me.  The bairro of Educandos is densely populated but not very large, and surrounded on three sides by water, so I wonder where the plant draws from, and how.  Maybe those igarapés that flow into the Educandos.

Manaus, like all of Amazonia, is crisscrossed by igarapés.  In 1960, the city had about 343,000 residents, and my in-laws say that people were able to swim in a lot of those igarapés, particularly the ones more than 2 or 3 km from Centro.  Since then, the city has grown enormously to the north, northeast, and northwest (Centro and Educandos are now the very tip of Zona Sul), and is home to over 2.1 million people, the seventh largest city in the country and the largest by far in the North.  Nobody swims in those igarapés anymore, and sewage is the main reason.  Someday I really should research how many other treatment plants we have besides the showpiece between the rivers.  If that's the only one, it's woefully inadequate.

The main swimming beach of the city is in Ponta Negra, on the Negro well northwest of Centro, and alleged to be clean most of the time.  However, Ponta Negra has become an affluent neighborhood of "Shoppings" and high rises, And where do all the effluents from those buildings go?  Who knows?

One Christmas Eve (no kidding!) in the early years of  the 21st Century, the Prefeitura passed a law requiring every multifamily building to have a pre-treatment plant for sewage and requiring older buildings to retrofit.  The law never got any publicity, and clearly was enacted "for the English to see".  Periodically, though, it resurfaces briefly.  It did at Christmastime last year, and sent a thrill of horror through our condominium, which was built in the late 1960s, and has nowhere to retrofit any kind of pre-treatment plant.  Then it disappeared again, so once more, who knows?

I live on an island, and there are no mains sewerage facilities, so there is nowhere for it to go.

Therefore, by law, every house has its own septic tank (fossa), frequently linked to a soak away tank (sumidouro). These are infrequently emptied - maybe every 10 years or so, depending on use and size.

This system seems to work pretty well, and the vast majority of the 18km of beaches are "blue flagged" as having clean water, and are regularly tested, although there are occasional warnings in certain small beach areas.

    I live on an island, and there are no mains sewerage facilities, so there is nowhere for it to go. Therefore, by law, every house has its own septic tank (fossa), frequently linked to a soak away tank (sumidouro). These are infrequently emptied - maybe every 10 years or so, depending on use and size.    -@Peter Itamaraca

Do you know where those trucks dump all those?  I remember a case in California where those were being dumped in an old mineshaft - which was obviously not legal as this will pollute the underground aquifer.

   
    I live on an island, and there are no mains sewerage facilities, so there is nowhere for it to go. Therefore, by law, every house has its own septic tank (fossa), frequently linked to a soak away tank (sumidouro). These are infrequently emptied - maybe every 10 years or so, depending on use and size.    -@Peter Itamaraca
Do you know where those trucks dump all those?  I remember a case in California where those were being dumped in an old mineshaft - which was obviously not legal as this will pollute the underground aquifer.
   

    -@Pablo888

By law you have to use a licensed company with specialist equipment to empty your fossa, and it is then taken to a sewerage treatment plant on the mainland.