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by poorman 721 days ago
I'll admit I'm not up to speed on the affect of the aggressive logging of Seattle on the hydrological cycle. From the little time I've spent there, I managed to gleam one small fact, that by the 1950's the Seattle city sewage system was dumping up to 50 million gallons of sewage into the Puget sound (per day).

I'm only a software engineer and have no understanding of hydrological cycles, but I suspect the evaporation and precipitation of that alone would have an impact on the nearby watersheds used for drinking water.

2 comments

> by the 1950's the Seattle city sewage system was dumping up to 50 million gallons of sewage into the Puget sound (per day).

Seattle started building water treatment plants in 1961 and they entered service throughout the 1960s: https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dnrp/waste-services/wastewate...

Meanwhile, Victoria, BC (Canada) continued to dump raw sewage into the ocean until 2021: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/victoria-sew...

You'd be mostly wrong. The Sound is salt water and not a source of drinking water. Other bodies of drinkable water flow into the sound, not out of.

Pollutants don't evaporate with water. They're left behind. Acid rain was from pollutants in the air mixing with water droplets.