SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: No punishment for RVs dumping raw sewage in our water

Oct 24, 2019, 10:46 AM | Updated: 10:47 am

aurora avenue, RVs...

RVs parked at a vacant Sam's Club off North Aurora Avenue. (KIRO 7)

(KIRO 7)

There was a good op-ed in The Seattle Times on Wednesday from the executive directors of the Sodo Business Improvement Area and Ballard Alliance about the RVs in their neighborhoods.

The  piece talked about how the RVs dump their raw sewage, including black water, directly into the city’s storm drains. That means untreated sewage is going straight into our local waterways, including Salmon Bay and the Duwamish River. This can add up to that as many as a million gallons.

Remember when they had that spill at the Westpoint Treatment Plant in July? That time, 3 million gallons of raw sewage went into the water. They had to close beaches all throughout the county for safety.

But for vagrants in RVs, dumping a million gallons in our waterways is fine. It’s totally OK for kids to get exposed to fecal contamination while swimming at the beach. As we’ve already seen in LA, fecal contamination can lead to the return of history book diseases, like TB and typhoid fever. And who cares about the wildlife exposed to these contaminants? We’ve got to protect the drug addicts.

Woman mauled by dogs at RV camp begs Seattle City Council for help

We’ve got a bunch of people who claim to care about the environment — so much so that if you wash your car in your driveway and your soapy water trickles down into the gutter, you can get a ticket. But there’s no punishment for the raw sewage. Why is that? It’s all about revenue. You’ve got a car, you’ve got a home, so you can pay the fine.

We have two systems of justice in this region — one for the taxpayers and one for the takers.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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Dori: No punishment for RVs dumping raw sewage in our water