Word: grounding
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...Ground water is not exposed to the natural purification systems that recycle and cleanse surface water; there is no sunlight, for example, to evaporate it and thereby remove salts and other minerals and chemicals. Nor can ground water be counted upon to clean itself as it moves through the earth, for it scarcely "flows" at all. Says Eckardt C. Beck, the EPA's assistant administrator for water and waste management: "Ground water can take a human lifetime just to traverse a mile. Once it becomes polluted, the contamination can last for decades...
...past, ground water was kept pure because the soil at the earth's surface could be counted on to act as a filtration system, a kind of geological "kidney" that would scrub out bacteria and other insoluble contaminants placed on or in the ground before they could seep down to the water table, the ground water's upper limit. But this filtration system does not reliably screen out the waste chemicals cropland now leach into the soil from a variety of sources, including cropland that has been sprayed with pesticides, and industrial dumps like the pools into which...
...located 181,000 such "lagoons" at industrial and municipal waste agency sites around the country. In a study of 8,200 of them, the agency found other 72% were just holes in the ground, not lined with concrete or other materials to prevent the chemicals from leaching into the soil; 700 of these unlined lagoons were within a mile of wells tapping ground water...
...most serious cases of ground-water pollution confirmed so far have been in the Northeast states, where the problem is largely the result of surface dumping of industrial wastes, and in California from agricultural chemicals. But awareness of the vulnerability of ground water is still so new that EPA officials do not really know how far the fouling of the aquifers has spread. Says Costle: "We cannot even begin to say how much of our drinking water, actual or potential, may have been contaminated. We are going to be doing a lot of detective work...
...food barn. There are no sweepstakes or eye-catching displays to attract customers. The store, moreover, charges 25? if people pay for groceries with a check, and grocery bags cost 3? each. Large yellow arrows on the aisle floors direct customers to Maxwell House coffee at $2.99 per lb., ground beef at $1.29 per Ib. and a 5-Ib. box of Tide at $2.58. All are substantially cheaper than at competing markets. On nights and weekends, when the store is most crowded, the atmosphere is akin to the running of the bulls down the streets of Pamplona. Bobbi Rice...