If it spills into sewage plants, waste could flow untreated into the river.

NPR: Floodwaters Rising After Storms Deluge Heartland

In February, prosecutors accused the director of Mayak, Russia's main waste processing plant in the Ural Mountains, of allowing tons of radioactive nuclear waste to flow into a nearby river.

NPR: Russia Plans Nuclear Power Expansion

These New Yorkers have seen other communities in neighboring states like Pennsylvania run over by an industry that promised them heaps of cash, but instead the communities report groundwater contamination, contaminated flow-back waste, road-ripping truck traffic and clouds of cancer-causing chemicals.

CNN: Don't let America get 'fracked'

Rather, as a consequence of injecting water and sand into the shale formation to crack the rocks so gas and oil will flow, massive amounts of waste water comes back to the surface with significant amounts of contaminants as a result of leaching out salt, heavy metals and trace amounts of radioactive materials from the rock formation itself.

FORBES: U.S. Energy Independence - So Close, Yet So Far

The treatment "draws out metabolic waste and impurities from the body that lets water flow through better, " Tracey says.

CNN: Think before you get all wrapped up