Jeff Whitten

Columnist

I erred in a story last month, bless my heart. Stop the presses.

The story was on water and sewer in North Bryan and I reported that until the new wastewater reclamation facility in North Bryan is finished, Hyundai is sending its industrial wastewater to a nearby land application system. I reported that because that’s what I thought I read.

It wasn’t the gist of the story but merely a detail, but I was wrong and I apologize for the error, and I’m more than suitably embarrassed by it.

It bugs me. To no end. And here it is weeks later and I’m still bugged by it.

I would like to say that over a 30-year run as a hack reporter/editor I’ve made so few mistakes you could count them on one hand, but the truth is it would probably take me both hands and a couple feet to account for them all. Once, for example, under a deadline rush and working on three stories at the same time I killed a guy by announcing he’d been named to a hall of fame posthumously. Then I had to call him up and apologize, a conversation that got kind of interesting until I asked him if he’d rather I had been right.

Anyway, it’s no wonder some of my so-called friends call me Fake News.

In the meantime, until it hooks up to the new facility Hyundai is supposed to be sending its industrial wastewater via pipeline to a plant in Chatham County--only the Ogeechee Riverkeeper folks recently announced that they’ve learned the automaker is trucking the stuff elsewhere because it reportedly doesn’t meet criteria established by the facility in Chatham.

And that’s another story.

And the information dug up by the ORK has been reported by many of our fine area media outlets so it doesn’t need me to go back over it.

For the record, I’m a fan of the Ogeechee Riverkeeper and anybody else who’ll stand up for what’s left of the environment around here, as developers and government big shots and their kind look to turn Coastal Georgia into some sort of industrial suburban warehouse theme park dotted by strip malls and convenience stores and urgent care clinics and CBD vape stores and self storage units - but anyone who thinks our waters in general and the Ogeechee in particular weren’t threatened long before now hasn’t been paying attention.

One of the first stories I covered in 1995 was worries about saltwater intrusion into the Floridan Aquifer.

Simply put, too much freshwater was being pumped out and saltwater was seeping in. That was 30 years and probably a half million people ago, and it was way before Hyundai or probably two thirds of the cookie cutter subdivisions with vinyl siding melting in the sun ever got here. There’ve been high levels of mercury and a highly publicized fish kill and all sorts of other manmade problems for the river ever since.

And by the way, at least it appears the automaker is making every effort to do the right thing with its industrial waste. Too often, we see the results of individual people who leave their garbage in coastal waterways without regard for what it does to the environment or its inhabitants. People who are either too lazy or too ignorant to do right.

And then there’s the constant pressure on the aquifer and our environment from the ever-increasing number of subdivisions stacked one by another by another, all with toilets flushing and irrigation systems and stormwater washing the lawn fertilizers and worse into the river, and smoke from cars and trucks and wrappers and plastic bottles and fishing lines and everything else we 21st century humans like to share with nature.

And that’s not even counting all the permitted and treated wastewater going into the Ogeechee, a river that has long been inflicted upon by American mankind, in ways big and small and ever increasingly as more folks move here. It’s been suffering from paper cuts for generations.

Which is why, come to think of it, we need the Riverkeeper more now than ever. Long may they do their thing.

Now retired, Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.