Tag: water systems

Upgrading Tired Hospital Food

  • Two gourmet chefs managing the kitchen at St. Luke's Hospital in Duluth are adding organic vegetables to the menu. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Some hospitals are trying to heal the food that they serve. The GLRC’s Stephanie Hemphill takes us to one hospital that’s making efforts to spice up their menu:

Transcript

Some hospitals are trying to heal the food that they serve. The GLRC’s
Stephanie Hemphill takes us to one hospital that making efforts to spice
up their menu:


(Sound of elevator)


St. Luke’s is the smaller of Duluth’s two hospitals. Their motto could be
“we try harder.” Several years ago, the hospital put two chefs in charge
of the housekeeping, laundry, and food.


In the kitchen, there’s the usual industrial stoves and dishwashers, and a
long assembly line where workers fill the trays for patients, based on
what they’ve ordered.


“The patient fills out the menu, I’ll have this entrée and that salad and this
beverage; then as the tray moves down the conveyor belt, they look at the
menu and put on the appropriate products.”


Mark Branovan was a gourmet chef at restaurants in California’s wine
country. In that part of the world, they take their fresh fruits and
vegetables very seriously.


“We did very little of our produce buying from the big distributors; we
had local guys that would grow lettuce for us, and herbs for us, and tomatoes…
anything we wanted. So that just kind of rolled over for us into, if
we can do it for a restaurant, why can’t we do it for a hospital?”


It’s harder to do in this part of the country, where you can grow lettuce
for about half the year and you’re lucky to get a tomato at all. But
Branovan and his colleague, LeeAnn Tomczyk, decided not to let that
stop them.


Tomczyk was a chef in a trendy restaurant in Wisconsin before she took
the job at the hospital. She says when she first came here, she was
appalled at some of the things on the menu.


“YOu know the patient was able to pick a jell-o salad and a piece of cake.
Well, to me jell-o is a dessert but to them it was their salad and that
was their vegetable, and that wasn’t right.”


Tomczyk and Branovan started to add more fruits and vegetables,
including organic items, to the menu, but they learned to pick their
battles.


“When I tried to change some of the casserole dishes, and some of the
traditional northern Minnesota fare, I was met with some serious
resistance from our customers and our patients who said, ‘Yeah, we have
tater tot hot dish on our menu because we like it.'”


One of the first items to change was the milk. Now the hospital serves
hormone-free milk to patients in the rooms and workers in the cafeteria.
Tomczyk says she’s convinced hormone-free milk and organic food are
healthier. She says an organization devoted to helping people heal, like a
hospital, needs to think about healing in broad terms, even globally. She
says buying local food avoids long-distance transportation, with its heavy
reliance on polluting fossil fuels.


“And the introduction of pesticides and herbicides, and that getting into
our water systems, it’s that whole cycle, and we’re using more and more
these days, and I think it’s just got out of hand.”


The hospital is also committed to reducing waste. It freezes unused
portions and gives them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. It sends
its food waste to the city compost pile.


St. Luke’s is a member of a hospital buying group that negotiates prices
with big producers like Pillsbury. Each hospital is supposed to buy a
certain percentage of its food through the buying group. When Branovan
and Tomczyk asked the distributor for hormone-free milk, the distributor
didn’t carry it.


“We had to actually get a waiver that says they will allow us to buy off-
contract.”


Branovan got a similar waiver to buy organic fresh fruit, and greens for
the cafeteria salad bar. He hopes to add more organic and locally-grown
foods.


Branovan says St. Luke’s is the first hospital in the region to ask the
buying group to supply hormone-free milk and organic vegetables, but
hospitals and schools on the west coast and east coast are doing it on a larger
scale.


James Pond is editor of Food Service Director, a trade magazine.
He says the movement will grow.


“The pricing advantages will in some ways level out, where if it becomes
important enough to the clientele, the food service operators will respond
by providing products in this manner.”


Some hospitals organize a farmer’s market to serve their workers, as a
way to introduce them to organic and local foods. Then they add those
foods to the cafeteria and patient meals. At St. Luke’s, they feature
organic food at company parties.


For the GLRC, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Terrorist Threats to Our Water Supply

Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, things we used to take for granted as being safe are now being questioned. Resources essential to life can be used as vehicles for terrorists’ attacks. Even drinking water is among those things now considered vulnerable. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, things we used to take for granted as
being safe are now being questioned. Resources essential to life can be
used as vehicles for terrorists’ attacks. Even drinking water is among
those things now considered vulnerable. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


In Afghanistan, as U.S. intelligence agencies began sifting through the
material left behind by cells of the Al Qaeda network, the United States
government became more concerned. It looked as though the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon were just the beginning of targets in
America.


When President Bush gave his State of the Union address at the
beginning of this year, he told the public about some of the disturbing
evidence the members of Al Qaeda were holding.


“And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the
destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear
power plants and public water facilities.”


While the President revealed that water systems were a possible target,
the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency was
assuring groups that the nation’s water supplies were safe. Christie
Todd Whitman told a group of environmental journalists that with
everybody on heightened alert, it was unlikely a terrorist would be able
to contaminate a water source with chemicals or biological agents.


“It would be extremely difficult for someone to perform
this kind of act, taking a truckload – and that’s what it would be, a
tanker truckload – up to a reservoir and dumping it in, given the
heightened security we have today.”


But an expert on the risk of attacks on water supplies says it wouldn’t
have to take a tanker truck… or anything close to that given the nasty
nature of some of the contaminants available to terrorists.


Jim Snyder was a member of a presidential commission assigned to
look at infrastructure and its vulnerability to terrorist attacks.


“If you put a backpack or a couple of backpacks of that
material in a ten-million gallon reservoir, which would be a medium
sized above ground tank, you would kill half the people who drank one
cup.”


And Snyder says it wouldn’t even take that much to cause
wide-spread panic… to raise the so-called ‘fear factor.’


“You don’t have to put enough stuff in the water to kill people.
You have to put enough stuff in the water so that people can’t
drink or use the water. If somebody says they put something in your
water, you’re not going to drink the water.”


Still, the government tries to assure the public there’s not much to fear.
Again, EPA Administrator Whitman…


“The vast majority of contaminants about which we’re worried, we know
how to treat. We know what steps to take. And those where we’re not sure
of what we need to do, we’re working with the CDC to develop a protocol to
respond.”


But the tests conducted daily at a water purification plant don’t look
for the kinds of contaminants that a terrorist would likely use. Jim
Snyder says the first clue that anything was wrong with the water would
likely be sick or dying people.


While the EPA continues to reassure the public, the agency knows of
the shortcomings of security at the thousands of water systems across
the nation. But treating contaminated water would not be the
government’s first choice. It would rather try to prevent an attack.
That’s why it’s offering the water systems grants to figure out the best
way to make their systems less likely to be targeted by terrorists. Again,
Jim Snyder…


“So, right now, you’ve got water systems all over the country
performing or getting ready to perform fairly sophisticated
vulnerability analyses which lead to recommendations on which
components need to be secured and how they should be secured and
what kind of risk reduction one could expect from adding levels of
security.”


Some things are easy, such as locking access gates, and patrolling
lakes and reservoirs. Others are more expensive and challenging. They
might include changes in how the water plants operate, using less
volatile chemicals in the purification process. Jim Snyder says
probably it will take years to beef up security… but even then a
determined terrorist could still strike.


Another terrorism prevention expert, Peter Beering with the City of
Indianapolis, says people should not be too alarmed about the
possibility that their water source could be poisoned. He says of all the
things to attack, water is probably low on the list.


“The good news is that these are comparatively uninteresting targets to
an aggressor. And, as we learned, unfortunately, in New York
and in Washington, that certainly there are much higher profile targets
that are of much greater interest to people who are upset with the
United States.”


But, Beering notes that water systems across the nation still should
take prudent measures to protect the public’s water supplies… just in
case.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Walkerton Water Tragedy Revisited

The consequences of the tainted water tragedy in southern Ontario are still being assessed. Seven people died and more than two thousand were made sick nearly two years ago, when the bacteria E. coli was found in drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario. An inquiry into the tragedy lasted more than a year, and a preliminary report was released last month. It blamed the two men in charge of the public utilities commission in Walkerton. But it also pointed the finger at cuts made years before by the Ontario government. Environmentalists across the Great Lakes are concerned that unless the lessons of Walkerton are learned on both sides of the border, water supplies will again be placed at risk. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk reports:

Transcript

The consequences of the tainted water tragedy in southern Ontario are still being assessed. Seven people died and more than two thousand were made sick nearly two years ago when the bacteria, E. coli, was found in drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario. An inquiry into the tragedy lasted more than a year, and a preliminary report was released last month. It blamed the two men in charge of the public utilities commission in Walkerton. But it also pointed the finger at cuts made years before by the Ontario government. Environmentalists across the Great Lakes are concerned that unless the lessons of Walkerton are learned on both sides of the border, water supplies will again be placed at risk. The Great Lakes Radio Consortiums Dan Karpenchuk reports from Toronto:

Walkerton is a small community of five thousand people about 135 miles northwest of Toronto not far from Lake Huron. There’s some light industry, some tourism… but agriculture is the economic mainstay. The E. coli disaster put the town of Walkerton in the headlines, where it’s remained. Some still feel the effects of the tainted water through an assortment of medical symptoms and complications. Others won’t drink the water; no matter what assurances they’ve been given that it’s safe. Many, like Robert Cooney, remain bitter.

“People in this town are sick of the whole thing. Yes, they got compensation. But for the people that are on dialysis and the people that lost loved ones, we’re looking for something. Something went wrong.”

There was a lot that went wrong, according to the man who headed the inquiry into the tragedy. In January, Justice Dennis O’Connor released his report. He concluded that the brothers who ran the Public Utilities Commission contributed directly to the tragedy, first by failing to properly monitor the drinking water, then by trying to cover up the emerging catastrophe by actively misleading health officials, assuring them the water was safe.

But O’Connor also turned his criticism on the government of Ontario, saying cuts to the MOE, or Ministry of Environment, undermined its ability to deal with the problems in Walkerton.

“The provincial government’s budget reductions led to the discontinuation of government laboratory testing services for municipalities in 1996.”

Now six years later, those services still have not been reinstated.

“In implementing this decision, the government should have enacted a regulation mandating that testing laboratories immediately and directly notify the MOE and the medical officer of health of adverse results. Had the government done this, the boil water advisory would have been issued by May 19 at the latest, thereby preventing hundreds of illnesses.”

The Conservative government in Ontario reacted quickly to the allegations. Premier Mike Harris, who early on during the inquiry, maintained that his government’s policies were not to blame, now did an about face.

“I deeply regret any factors leading to the events of May 2000, that were the responsibility of the government of Ontario either prior to or during my tenure as premier.”

Harris went further in his attempts to limit the political damage. He said many of the recommendations made by Justice O’Connor would be implemented. They included continuous chlorine monitors for wells, increased inspections and better training for operators.

But many critics say they they’re not convinced. They say a week after the 700-page report was released, neither Harris nor any member of his cabinet, had read it.

Far from Walkerton, the political fallout is being felt most in Toronto, seat of the province’s legislature…. and home to many of Ontario’s environmental groups.

The Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policies says the problems in Walkerton have called attention to the broader issue of water quality in the region. Researchers say the amount of pollutants discharged into rivers and lakes more than doubled between 1995 and 1999. And over the same period the number of provincial water testing sites was cut by two thirds.

That could have serious implications for the province’s lakes and rivers…. and since those systems feed into the Great Lakes, the entire region is at risk.

Professor Louis Mallott was involved in the study….

“We concluded that Ontario is unable to assess the overall quality of Ontario’s inland waters that flow into the Great Lakes. And this is necessary to determine whether Ontario’s environmental policies are effective.”

Over the past year almost four hundred cases of bad water have turned up in Ontario. E. coli and other bacteria have plagued water systems in towns, trailer parks, schools, private homes and even a nudist colony. And that worries people like Paul Muldoon, the executive director of the Canadian Environmental Law Association. Muldoon says Ontario is also sending a clear message south of the border, and it’s not a positive one.

“I am convinced that if I was in the U.S. right now, I could at least legitimately raise the issue, saying lookit Canadians sure we cause stresses in the Great Lakes and there’s lots of issues here. But don’t talk to us until you get your act together and Walkerton is a glowing example, you do not have your act together. And since Walkerton there’s not a lot of evidence you’ve got your act together yet despite that wake up call, despite the depth of that tragedy.”

The Ontario government, however, insists the situation is improving.

But critics aren’t buying it. They say Ontario’s environmental problems have not only jeopardized the province, but could affect the entire Great Lakes region. They say there is a clear message to governments on both sides of the border…. that budget cuts and privatization could lead to more tragedies like Walkerton.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Dan Karpenchuk.

Public Water Systems in Need of Funding

A new study says we need to spend billions of dollars more on public drinking water systems. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports: