everybody wins!

Storm water going to GSB to be filtered:

"The Village of Babylon plans to install filters at every village outfall pipe that leads to the Great South Bay.

'We're doing 93 of them,' Mayor Ralph Scordino said at a news conference yesterday next to a canal at Green Avenue, where the village installed a prototype two years ago.

The plan addresses one of Long Island's biggest water quality problems: contaminated runoff from heavy rains that washes oil, chemicals and animal waste off the land and into creeks and bays. Funneled via storm drains, the polluted runoff can temporarily close bathing beaches and make shellfish unsafe for human consumption."

Let me be the first to applaud Suffolk County and the Village of Babylon for doing something great. Putting in these filters all across the village may seem expensive but when you consider the long-term damage to the shellfish and beach industries they seem pretty cheap. And even without considering the financial implications, it's the right thing to do for the health of the Bay.

I'm more of the "build schools, not prisons" kind of guy so what I'd like to see is some legislation, at any level of government, that helps ease the need for the filters: ban the most dangerous pesticides; limit the use of certain kinds of fertilizers (fertilizers have been blamed as one of the causes of this summer's Brown Tide); and encourage recycling of all kinds of plastic bottles by passing a comprehensive Bottle Bill; and county/town/village pickup of garbage at places like Hemlock Cove, where any feeling of government services is nonexistent.

And here are the two companies who designed and built the filters: AbTech and Fabco.