Lower ground

In Bethel Heights

Water seeks the lowest level, which means runoff eventually finds its way into streams and lakes. Vast waterbodies such as Beaver Lake in Northwest Arkansas often provide an entire region’s water supply rather than a single community.

That’s all we need to know when any town’s sewage-treatment methods spend years out of compliance with state environmental regulations, creating one open sewage pool after another to seek the lowest ground.

That’s been the most bewildering aspect for me concerning the stream of news stories this year on the woes of Bethel Heights, the 52-year-old community of almost 3,000 sandwiched between Springdale and Lowell. Even worse, I can’t see how this town can ever climb out of its serious environmental dilemma the way things stand today.

While the city administration denies accountability and pretends grazing cows on nearby pastures are mostly to blame for the mess, the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality finds otherwise, saying the city’s sewage-treatment facility has been in violation of its permit for about five years. Hefty fines have been levied on the town accordingly.

You know it’s gotten beyond bad when the state asks neighboring Springdale, which provides water service to Bethel Heights, to cut off service to new construction in the community until its sewage problem is resolved.

Surrounding property owners have repeatedly complained about standing sewage. One landowner has asked (perhaps begged) Springdale to annex some 73 acres safely into its confines, believing adjoining Springdale could resolve the chronic problem.

The treatment method Bethel Heights has used for years forgoes individual septic tanks in favor of the town regularly gathering liquid waste from community septic tanks and dumping the results into the town’s drainage system that then fans out beneath the soil, which is supposed to cleanse the potentially dangerous releases. But instead of staying underground to become clean enough to be harmless, neighbors and the state contend the foul liquid bubbles to the surface and stands in puddles.

If all this weren’t bad enough, the state is investigating why a firm hired to haul about 117,000 gallons of this wastewater from Bethel Heights and apply it on property east of Springdale did so without a permit. The latest investigation involves White River Environmental Services and property in the White River watershed.

A news account the other day quoted a policy adviser for the Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of Water Quality saying the agency has no record of a permit that allows that firm to discharge wastewater there or anywhere else. As I write, the state has requested records from both the city and the hauler, saying it was too early to determine who was at fault for disposing of all that nastiness without first acquiring a permit.

My purpose today isn’t to rehash the unsettling facts of this ongoing malodorous mess. I simply felt moved to opine on the nature of accountability and how unacceptable it is for any community (especially in such a booming region) to operate a woefully inadequate sewage-treatment facility for years.

Of, by, for dollar

It was President Abraham Lincoln in his compelling remarks at Gettysburg, when such qualities as honor, loyalty and integrity were in vogue, who said our “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Bouncing along in a golf cart, friend Ed Thiel of Harrison, a retired public school teacher and administrator, observed that in light of today’s political environment and self-absorbed behavior by those we elect to wade in the foul D.C. swamp teeming with lobbyists and corruption, Lincoln today might as well have changed his message to: Our “government of the dollar, by the dollar, and for the dollar.” Anyone care to argue?

It’s second chapter

With all the hoopla about Stephen King’s three-hour box-office blockbuster sequel, It Chapter Two, we had to see for ourselves what the buzz was about. I’m certainly no movie critic, but I gotta tell you I left dazed and confused by what I’d just seen. And I wasn’t alone.

I watched computer-generated creatures from someplace unknown inexplicably jumping up out of seemingly nowhere, and a man’s head growing crab legs and scampering menacingly to and fro. If that weren’t enough, Pennywise, King’s infamous monster clown, sprouted his own set of telephone-pole-sized crab legs to create mayhem and murder.

Between numerous flashbacks to the adults’ childhood encounters with Pennywise and scenes of a decayed home, sewers, caves, closets, an eerie carnival and a beyond clownish ending that left me astounded by the destructive power of simple name-calling and curse words in Hollywood reality, I left uncertain whether I could ever look at delicious king crab legs in the same way again.

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