re: #338 Patricia Kayden

Eek.

The biggest issue with any pesticide is not spraying it on crops, but runoff and groundwater contamination.

The worst offenders aren’t farmers though, they’re lawn owners.

[water operator hat on]

You know those poison sprayers you can attach to a hose? They have a little bottle with some poison in them and through Bernoulli’s Principle and the Venturi Effect sucks the poison out of the bottle and sprays it with the water?

When the hose is turned off without first cutting off the poison supply, poison is sucked back into the hose. In a pressure drop in a public water supply, the poison is drawn into the public water supply. (That’s why those garden sprayers are illegal in my village, and we periodically remind people why.)

Yards sprayed with poison (even water system safe sprayers such as positive pressure pumps) also create massive amounts of poison runoff. [/hat]