Every year in Florida summer rolls around and we can always count on our daily dumping of rain from the skies above. Often during this season, we are tempted to cancel our sweeping services for our parking lots. Sure its a pain in the butt to try and maneuver sweepers when the ground is more “soggy” and with the promise of rain almost everyday in the summer, busting out the sweeper is hardly appealing. However, if sweeping services are cancelled during rainy seasons there could massive consequences…
The consequences:
Even if you can’t see it, there’s a lot of waste in any given parking lot. Beyond the occasional piece of trash there is also a lot of oil, fuel, grease, metals and other harmful chemicals that can be found in a parking lot thanks to our cars! Think about it, every time it rains all these nasty chemicals are picked up by the rain water and then carried into our drainage and runoff systems. When this happens, pollution and contamination happens.
- Pollution: When harmful chemicals from our parking lots end up in our drainage / runoff systems it directly affects our local lakes and beaches here in Florida. When these systems eventually dump off this chemical-filled water into our lakes and beaches it cause the water we swim in to be filled with those chemicals. Do you really want to be swimming in contaminated waters? Also this greatly affects the ecosystems in these areas. When the chemicals get in our waters it means sick fish and wildlife.
- Contamination: When fish and wildlife get sick, it potentially means the seafood we want to enjoy gets contaminated. Restaurants obviously can’t serve contaminated fish! Meaning, this terrible parking lot runoff can affect our local seafood businesses too. However perhaps the worst thing that could happen in all of this is our drinking water becoming contaminated. It’s one of the more drastic things that could partake, but it’s not impossible. Contaminated drinking water would cause widespread issues in any community.
The solution:
It’s simple: keep sweeping parking lots even during rainy season! It’s worth the hassle to keep our waterways clean and our ecosystems and drinking water safe. If it’s raining on the day of your scheduled sweeping, it’s okay to cancel on the day of the sweeping, but you must reschedule! We should never cancel our sweeping services for our parking lots. There are far too many consequences when the solution is so simple. So if you’ve already called off the sweeping services for your parking lot this season, be sure to pick up the phone right now to reschedule them. Your parking lot will not only look better, but so will our community.