OTR Orientation

Yesterday we moved in to the apartment in Over-the-Rhine. We live near Washington Park and across from City Music Hall. This morning we spent some time getting to know the neighborhood, cashing our stipend checks, and then a group of us went to Kroger and a group went to a produce stand to buy fruits and vegetables for the week. We also stopped by the public library to get information about library cards.

After lunch, we went with Dr. Hedeen, a former ecology professor at Xavier, to Mill Creek Valley for a tour. (I'm going to try to recall a little bit of what we learned.) Mill Creek is the river that made Cincinnati the area along the Ohio that people decided to settle. When the Ohio River floods, it backs up into Mill Creek Valley, which made a lot of the land uninhabitable until they built a levee to contain the floods into only a part of the Mill Creek Valley. It's a design similar to that of the levees in New Orleans, although the levee is not operational full-time, only when the Ohio River floods. Then we went a little way up the Mill Creek and learned about the sewer system. The first sewer systems were created before Dr. Crapper (yes, that's true) invented the flush toilet, so they were solely storm drains. (This is true for all major cities, by the way.) When the flush toilet came around, people still didn't know what to do with the water and waste from their toilets, so they just hooked them into the city sewer systems. Then not only rainwater, but sanitary waste, went into the local rivers, in the case of Cincinnati, Mill Creek. Once people realized this was creating a problem, they put pipes in that intercepted all of the stuff that goes through the combined sewer system and take it to the water treatment plant. But when it storms, the pipe that transfers this waste to the treatment plant fills up and can't handle any more water, so it overflows into the river anyway. Which makes the river basically a cesspool, although not as bad as before they learned to take the water to the treatment plant. So after around 1920, cities realized that this was a problem and began to make different sewer systems for sanitary waste and storm water.

While these separate sewer systems help, there are still many problems. Runoff from streets includes gas and oil from leaks as well as other things. Since regular asphalt doesn't let the water penetrate, these things just run off the top into the storm sewers and into the rivers. It would be better for the water to percolate through the soil and stuff. There are many organisms that love to feed of the carbon-based products, specifically algae and bacteria, that harm other ecosystems. So it's much better for water to run into the grass than into a storm sewer (or to use bricks or penetrable asphalt rather than regular asphalt). It's amazing how much our habits affect nature in ways other than simply the whole global warming issue. Even air quality is an issue outside of global warming. I don't care if you believe in global warming or not, we are still destroying some pretty amazing things in nature. If we all made a little change to our every-day activities, we could make a huge difference.

I've gotten some great encouragement from people at home, and it means a lot. I also have had several people tell me they are praying for me. That's another great source of comfort. So thanks to those awesome people who are offering up prayers. I would love for anyone who's interested to continue reading my blogs. And please respond with any criticisms or ideas as well. I think discussion of these issues can really motivate us to help improve these issues.