DC Water unveils giant tunneling machine to help cut sewage spills during rainstorms

Water News in a Nutshell.

 by Katherine Shaver

In a Nutshell:  Big water problems sometimes require big solutions. When it rains, the nation’s capitol’s ancient sewage system quickly chokes, and rainwater/sewage spills into waterways and basements. A machine of “gee-whiz enormity” is digging a massive tunnel to contain the excess. Imagine a machine 26 feet in diameter and longer than a football field. 

It will eventually stretch longer than a football field and, when finished, will have burrowed through four miles of clay beneath the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, leaving behind a tunnel so big it could hold two tractor-trailers stacked on top of each other.The enormous tunnel-boring machine, nicknamed “Lady Bird,” made its debut Tuesday at the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, where DC Water officials heralded it as part of a plan to significantly reduce the amount of raw sewage that flows into local rivers and basements during rainstorms.

Enormous tunnel-boring machine called Lady Bird. It will eventually be longer than a football field.

The four-mile tunnel will start beneath the Potomac at the treatment plant just north of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and then dig beneath the Anacostia, ending near Nationals Park. It will become part of a 12.8-mile tunnel, scheduled for completion in 2022, that will serve as an enormous holding tank during rainstorms. The rain-sewage mixture that now overwhelms older sewer pipes and overflows into waterways and basements will instead be held in the big tunnel. Once the storm subsides, the rain-sewage mixture will flow downhill to the treatment plant.“We’ll capture all of it,” said George S. Hawkins, DC Water’s general manager. “This is the most significant improvement in water quality in the Anacostia, Potomac and Rock Creek in a generation.”DC Water officials say it will be the largest tunneling effort in the District since the Metrorail system was built. The work is part of DC Water’s $2.6 billion “Clean Rivers Project” to cut sewer overflows by about 96 percent by 2025.The problem stems from the fact that, as in some other older cities, one-third of the District’s sewer pipes also carry rainwater runoff. (In the rest of the city, stormwater is carried away in pipes separate from the sewer system.)

The District must reduce the sewer overflows as part of a 2005 consent decree related to a federal environmental lawsuit. The rain-sewage mixture also contains animal feces, oil, pesticides and other pollutants that run off lawns and roads, DC Water officials said.

A photographer caught this attention-grabbing picture of the backs of people’s heads at the Lady Bird dedication ceremony.

The first four-mile section is scheduled to operate in 2018. DC Water officials said the entire 12.8-mile tunnel will extend from the treatment plant to Sixth and R streets NW. They said it will provide permanent relief for neighborhoods such as Bloomingdale and LeDroit Park, where raw sewage has flooded into basements for decades.

The gee-whiz enormity of the project wasn’t lost on the dignitaries and hard-hatted utility crews who attended the tunnel-boring machine’s unveiling.

Standing in front of the circular “cutter head” spanning 26 feet in diameter, Mayor Vincent C. Gray told the crowd: “When you’re talking about a piece of equipment that’s longer than a football field, it’s just hard to fathom something of that magnitude. . . . It’s just an unbelievable engineering feat.”

The tunnel-boring machine was named after Lady Bird Johnson as a tribute to her environmental activism. But the machine also has a notably modern flair. It can be followed on Twitter: @LadyBirdTBM.

Source: Washington Post

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Israel Joins Other Advanced Countries in Ending Compulsory Fluoridation of Water

Water News in a Nutshell.

The debate over the fluoridation of water for the purpose of preventing dental caries has gone on for decades.  Most industrialized nations have dropped compulsory fluoridation of water, with the US being the one of the few advanced countries that still support the practice. Israel just took a strong step toward ending compulsory fluoridation via drinking water this month.

Israel’s Health Minister Yael German announced in April that municipalities and local authorities would in a year no longer have to fluoridate their drinking water.

German,  a former mayor,   who has in the past stated opposition to forcing residents to take a fluoride treatment with every drop of water  they drink,  said there were more effective and safer ways to protect children’s teeth – such as fluoride pills, toothpastes and education.

She said she signed new regulations for stricter supervision of water supplies that included canceling mandatory fluoridation. German then even appealed to the High Court of Justice against the Health Ministry’s requirement – since 2002 – that water be fluoridated in every authority with at least 5,000 residents.

As expected, there was strong protest and promise of overthrow of German’s ruling by the usual proponents of fluoridation, including the World Health Organization.

Israel’s Health Minister Yael German announced in April that Israel will end compulsory fluoridation of water and that the High Court of Justice will be asked to rule on the legality of compulsory fluoridation.

Source: Jerusalem Post.

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Fear of Frogs

by Janice Kaspersen, Editor, Stormwater

It’s not unusual to read about lawsuits over stormwater runoff, particularly in cases where water flows onto someone’s property as a result of construction, new development, or diversion.

That was the case recently with a New York homeowner, who received a $1.6 million settlement after a developer mistakenly diverted water onto his 40-acre property, turning it into a “wetland,” according to the suit. This case has a twist, however: Instead of just the usual claims of property damage or loss of use of the property, the owner cited his frog phobia as a reason to collect punitive damages.

Although in the end he didn’t get the $250,000 in punitive damages he was seeking, the town of Clarence, NY—which had given the developer permission to divert the water—will be digging a drainage ditch to help remove the water and will pay $1.3 million in damages, with the rest of the money coming from the developer. An error by the town’s engineer, who approved diversion of the runoff into a channel that turned out to be too small to accommodate it, led to the flooding of the property.

As this article from the Daily Mail reports, the homeowner traces his phobia to an unfortunate childhood experience involving bullfrogs. “I’m petrified of the little creatures,” he’s quoted as saying, adding that he sometimes had to call family and friends to come chase the frogs away from his door so he could get into and out of his house.

Homeowner’s land was turned into wetland, and he was awarded $1.3 million.

A lower court had originally awarded him the $250,000 as well, but that was overturned by an appeals court, which said that since the developer had not acted maliciously, punitive damages did not apply.

Source: Stormwater.

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A Fee Is Being Considered In PA for the Extraction and Removal of Water

Introductory Note:  A friend once said that water isn’t really “wasted” unless it is sent off of the planet.  He meant that water is ultimately always recycled, so when we use it we’re just borrowing, not consuming.   That’s what the Pennsylvania official in the AP story below has in mind by suggesting that we should classify the ways water is used and charge for it accordingly.

Using water to water a lawn is one thing, but doing something with it that takes it out of circulation, out of Nature’s recycling system, is something quite different.  There are, of course, many subtle distinctions be be considered here.  For example, the official would levy fees on companies that bottle water and take it out of the state, but one could argue that if a man in Virginia drinks the water and sends it through the wastewater  treatment system from which it arrives at a Virginia lake from which it is evaporated and formed into a cloud, it might well fall as rain on Scranton, PA.  It’s harder to make such a case for the oil company which injects water deep into the earth, but, time is long, and who knows whether in a few eons the water will make its way back to PA.–Hardly Waite, Pure Water Gazette.

PITTSBURGH – The head of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission says he’s considering seeking a new fee on water extracted by industry and permanently removed from the environment.

Commission executive director John Arway said that with a $9 million budget shortfall expected in 2017 at the agency, which is funded mostly by anglers and boaters, he’s “searching high and low” for alternative funding, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Officials say a fee on “consumptive use” of water, with revenues going to the commission and the state Department of Environmental Protection, may have legal precedent and tentative bipartisan support.

“When people drink water or take a shower, it’s returned through the sewage system,” Arway said. “When farmers irrigate fields it drains back into the ground. The Pennsylvania Constitution says we, the citizens, own the water. Some of these companies take it out of the environment, use it for free and it’s gone, never returned to Pennsylvania’s environment.”

The bottled water industry, for instance, pays nothing to remove the water that it treats, packages and mostly ships out of the state. The Marcellus Shale natural gas industry also extracts water for free, since the process of hydraulic fracturing pumps water so far below the water table it is rendered unusable. There are other industries that make similar permanent use of water, Arway said.

“That’s our water they’re taking for free,” Arway said. “They’re stealing the resource from us, and that makes me mad.”

While land ownership in the western United States usually includes water rights, rules dating back to English common law in the eastern states including Pennsylvania reserve most flowing water and its aquatic life in a trust owned by the citizens of the state. Arway cites a 1940s state law requiring dredging companies that remove sand and gravel from the Allegheny and Ohio riverbeds to compensate the state as a precedent for a new regulation that would compensate the state for permanent extraction of water.

A resolution introduced in the state Senate would allocate money to study the issue and recommend a fee structure for permanent use and degradation of water.

Chris Hogan of the International Bottled Water Association said that while the industry supports regulation of industrial use of water, the trade group oppose the kind of state fees Arway has proposed.

“The consumptive use of water for bottled water is arguably one of the highest and most appropriate consumptive uses of water in a product, since it quite literally is then directly consumed by consumers,” Hogan said. He said bottlers are already subject to permit and inspection fees and taxes, and since much of the product is returned to the environment the industry is actually a “net importer of water into states in the region.”

Steve Forde, a spokesman for the Marcellus Shale Coalition, said that in 2011 in Pennsylvania drilling operations used 8 million to 10 million gallons of water per day, among the least used by water consuming industries. Fracking operations accounted for 0.1 percent of 9.5 billion gallons of water extracted daily from the state, according to a 2011 U.S. Geological Survey report.

In addition, new cost-saving technologies developed in the past three years enable operators to reuse water used in fracking, reducing the industry’s need for water, Forde said.

“There’s a good business case to be made for reducing water withdrawal. Transporting it to the well and then disposing of it , it’s expensive,” he said. “In our business, hydraulic fracturing is where water is utilized, and the truth is we’re not using as much water as we did just a few years ago.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection department said the resolution is under review. Arway said the commission, which gets most of its money from license and permit fees and a federal excise tax on fishing and boating gear and fuel, will see a shortfall in four years due to employee pension obligations and growing infrastructure expenses, and water usage revenues would help make up the difference.

Source:  AP.

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Death Toll of Children from Water-Related Ailments

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

In a Nutshell:  Although fewer children are dying than before from diarrheal diseases linked to unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene, the numbers are horrifying.  Sometimes we become numb to large numbers, but when you put the numbers in schoolbus loads of children under 5 it drives the point home.

If 90 school buses filled with kindergartners were to crash every day, with no survivors, the world would take notice. But this is precisely what happens every single day because of poor water, sanitation and hygiene.–Sanjay Wijesekera, Head of UNICEF’s water, sanitation and hygiene program.

Nearly 2,000 children around the globe, under the age of five, die every day from diarrheal diseases linked to unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene, with 24 per cent of the deaths occurring in India alone, a UN report has warned.

Globally, an estimated 2,000 children under the age of five die every day from diarrhoeal diseases and of these some 1,800 deaths are linked to water, sanitation and hygiene, according to the report.

Measuring dead children by the schoolbus load drives home the point.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) child mortality data reveals that about half of under-five deaths occur in only five countries: India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Pakistan and China.Two countries – India (24 per cent) and Nigeria (11 per cent) – together account for more than a third of all under-five years deaths. These same countries also have significant populations without improved water and sanitation.

Of the 783 million people worldwide without improved drinking water, there are 119 million in China; 97 million in India; 66 million in Nigeria; 36 million in DRC; and 15 million in Pakistan.

The figures for sanitation are even bleaker. Those without improved sanitation in these countries are: India 814 million; China 477 million; Nigeria 109 million; Pakistan 91 million; and DRC 50 million.

As the world celebrates World Water Day today, UNICEF has urged governments, civil society and ordinary citizens to remember that behind the statistics are the faces of children.

Despite a burgeoning global population, these deaths have come down significantly over the last decade, from 1.2 million per year in 2000 to about 760,000 a year in 2011. However, UNICEF said that is still too many.

“Sometimes we focus so much on the big numbers, that we fail to see the human tragedies that underlie each statistic,” said Sanjay Wijesekera, global head of UNICEF’s water, sanitation and hygiene programme.

“If 90 school buses filled with kindergartners were to crash every day, with no survivors, the world would take notice. But this is precisely what happens every single day because of poor water, sanitation and hygiene,” Wijesekera said in a statement.

“The numbers can be numbing, but they represent real lives, of real children. Every child is important. Every child has the right to health, the right to survive, the right to a future that is as good as we can make it,” said Wijesekera.

Wijesekera said the progress already made since 1990 shows that with the political will, with investment, with a focus on equity and on reaching the hardest to reach, every child should be able to get access to improved drinking water and sanitation, perhaps within a generation.

Source: Hindu Business Line.

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Does Fracking Really Deplete Water Supplies?

Jesse Jenkins writing in the Wall Street Journal takes an in depth look at the question in the title.  Since what we hear about fracking are the big round numbers like four million gallons of water per well and billions upon billions of gallons consumed per year, it is easy to look at hydraulic fracturing for the purpose of energy production as an environmental disaster.

Jenkins’ article takes a close look at water usage involved in fracking and makes some interesting points that aren’t often considered.  For example,  the degree to which water is a local issue.  Using four million gallons of water in thirsty south Texas is a much bigger deal that using four million gallons in rainy Pennsylvania.  Also, how much water is actually saved by fracking if the energy harvested is used to replace coal.

Jenkins’ informative article is long and filled with lots of facts and graphics. Here I’m going to produce only his chapter summaries:

Summary: All shale gas wells drilled and completed in the United States in 2011 consumed on the order of 135 billion gallons of water, equivalent to about 0.3 percent of total U.S. freshwater consumption.

Summary: Shale gas consumes about 0.6-1.8 gallons of water per million BTUs of energy produced. If shale gas is used to generate electricity at a combined cycle gas plant and displace coal-fired power, the quantity of water consumed per unit of electricity generated could fall by on the order of 80 percent.

Summary: All shale gas wells drilled and completed in Texas in 2011 amounted to less than 1 percent of all water withdrawals in the state of Texas. That figure could grow roughly three-fold by 2020 as shale production rises, although other developments could reduce the amount of freshwater consumed per well.

Summary: Like politics, water consumption is a local issue. Fracking presents a major source of water consumption in arid locales like Dimmit County, Texas in the Eagle Ford shale region, where fracking represents on the order of one-quarter of the entire county’s water consumption. In contrast, in the more rainy Marcellus shale region of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, the water needs for an entire fracking operation represent about 17 days of average local rainfall in even the driest months of the year.

Throughout the article are revealing water statistics like “…total annual water consumption for fracking in the Barnett Shale, the largest play in Texas, is equal to about 9 percent of the annual water consumption of the city of Dallas.”

What the author does not address is the nature of the “use” of water.  It isn’t quite the same to use water in an urban setting where it is captured in a wastewater system, cleaned,  and recycled as it is to pollute it mightily then inject it into a deep well where it is taken out of nature’s hydrological cycle.

Source: Wall Street Journal

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Copper as a Water Contaminant

Copper is a reddish naturally occurring metal. In water it is typically dissolved as a divalent cation (Cu +2). There is lots of copper in the environment since it is  widely used to make copper pipe and tubing, and copper compounds are used as pesticides and herbicides.

The most common way for copper to get into drinking water is through corrosion from copper plumbing fixtures.

Native copper. As you would expect, it’s copper colored. It’s good to make wire with, but bad for your liver and kidneys if you ingest too much.

Health Effects of Copper

Copper is a necessary nutrient, but too much copper can cause nausea and vomiting, and long-term exposure can lead to liver damage and kidney problems.

Water Treatment for Copper

Copper can be controlled in whole house (POE) applications and plumbing fixtures protected by cation exchange (a water softener), pH control, and film-creating compounds such as polyphosphates. Water with low pH soaks up copper, and usually raising the the pH of the water cures the problem.

For point of use treatment, reverse osmosis removes copper handily—usually around 97%. Copper can also be removed by distillation and activated carbon adsorption.

Between the Tsunami and the Rats, the Fukushima Nuke Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

In a Nutshell:  Japan’s ill-fated Fukushima nuclear power plant seems to be a disaster waiting to happen. The plant’s problems range from the earthquake damage two years ago to a dangerous power issue caused by a single rat in March 1013. Contaminated water leaking into the environment and perhaps the Pacific is the most serious of its current problems, but the jury-rigged plant could turn into a nightmare at any time.

A rat causing a power outage by short-circuiting a temporary switchboard. Another blackout occurring as workers install anti-rat nets. Holes in the linings of huge underground tanks leaking radioactive water, APA reports quoting Associated Press. Japan‘s crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant has run into multiple problems recently that highlight its precarious state more than two years after its reactors melted down in the wake of a devastating earthquake and tsunami.A makeshift system of pipes, tanks and power cables meant to carry cooling water into the melted reactors and spent fuel pools inside shattered buildings remains highly vulnerable, Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka acknowledged Wednesday.In the latest development, three of the plant’s seven underground tanks are leaking. TEPCO reported the first leak early Saturday, hours after the plant’s second power outage. Within days, the damage spread to three tanks, paralyzing the plant’s storage plans for contaminated water.”Fukushima Dai-ichi is still in an extremely unstable condition, there is no mistake about that,” Tanaka said at a weekly meeting of the regulatory body’s leaders. “We cannot rule out the possibility that similar problems might occur again. Whenever a problem occurs, it halts the plant’s operations and delays the primary goal of decommissioning the plant.”

The problems have raised doubts about whether the plant can stay intact through a decommissioning process that could take 40 years, prompting officials to compile risk-reduction measures and revise decommissioning plans. The regulatory watchdog said Wednesday that it was increasing the number of inspectors from eight to nine to better oversee the plant.

Just over the past three weeks, there have been at least eight accidents or problems at the plant, the nuclear watchdog said.

The first was March 18, when a rat sneaked into an outdoor switchboard – which was sitting on a pickup truck – powering the jury-rigged cooling system and several other key parts of the plant, causing a short-circuit and blackout that lasted 30 hours in some areas of the plant. Four storage pools for fuel rods lost cooling during the outage, causing Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant’s operator, to acknowledge that it had added backup power only to the reactors, despite repeated concerns raised over a pool meltdown.

The cause of the outage wasn’t clear at the time, but TEPCO later released a photo of the electrocuted rat, which had fallen on the bottom of the switchboard outhouse. The most extensive outage since the crisis started after the March 2011 disasters caused some Fukushima residents to even consider evacuation.

Two weeks later, a new water processing machine designed to remove most radioactive elements temporarily stopped after a worker pushed a wrong button. The next day, one of the fuel storage pools lost power again for several hours when part of a wire short-circuited a switchboard while an operator installed anti-rat nets. TEPCO reported three other minor glitches on the same day, including overheating of equipment related to boron injection to the melted reactors.

Regulatory officials acknowledge that rats and snakes are abundant at the plant, and TEPCO has started to take steps to protect pipes and cables from rat gnawing. Replacement of parts and equipment to those of higher quality and long-term use is in progress.

TEPCO says none of the about 120 tons of radioactive water that leaked was believed to have reached the nearby Pacific Ocean. Experts suspect the radioactive water has been leaking since early in the crisis, citing high contamination in fish caught in waters just off the plant.

The contaminated water is by far the most serious of the recent problems because of its potential impact on water management and the environment.

The tanks are crucial to the management of contaminated water used to cool melted fuel rods at the plant’s wrecked reactors. The reactors are stable, but the melted fuel they contain must be kept cool with water, which leaks out of the reactors’ holes and ruptures and flows into basement areas.

“The contaminated water situation is on the verge of collapse,” Tanaka said. But he said there was no choice but to keep adding water, while trying to seek ways to minimize the leaks and their risks.

To address local outrage over the recent problems and TEPCO’s failure to detect problems earlier, company president Naomi Hirose traveled to Fukushima and apologized Wednesday for the problems. He promised to expedite the construction of steel containers and move all the water there from the underground tanks, at the request of Industry Minister Toshimitsu Motegi.

The underground tanks, all built by Maeda Corp., come in different sizes, including one the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool and similar to an industrial waste dump. They are dug into the ground and protected by two layers of polyethylene linings inside the outermost clay-based lining, with a felt padding in between each layer.

Regulators suspect a design problem with the underground tanks, which TEPCO allegedly chose over steel tanks as a cheaper option.

“The nuclear crisis is far from over,” the nationwide Mainichi newspaper said in a recent editorial. “There is a limit to what the patchwork operation can do on a jury-rigged system.”

Source: Global Post. 

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If there is no water in the dam, should we urinate into it? Ajit Pawar’s crass remark on drought in Maharashtra

A report from India Today.

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

In a Nutshell: There is great tension in the state of Maharashtra about the acute water shortage. When Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar made an apparently insensitive comment about his state’s  water shortage, tempers flared and he was called upon to resign.  

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his comments – laced with crass humour — ridiculing the acute water scarcity in the state .

Pawar ridiculed a farmer who has been on a fast for over 55 days, demanding the release of water from a dam for his scorched field. In an outrageous statement, Pawar said, “This person from Solapur by the name of some Deshmukh is sitting on a hunger-strike for 55 days demanding water be released from the dam. But if there is no water there what should we release? Should we urinate there? In times without water, even urine is hard to come.”

While Pawar’s supporters broke into hysterical laughter at his “joke”, the comment has been equated with the famous insult by a Russian princess who said, “If they don’t have bread, let them eat cake.” Incidentally, Pawar is the nephew of Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, who has been promising relief for farmers.

Ajit Pawar’s Comments on Water Shortage Caused Calls for His Resignation

Pawar was addressing a rally in Inapur in Pune when he cracked what was his “joke” on the water crisis in Maharashtra. Perhaps realising his blunder, Pawar immediately said, “I am sure you all are thinking that I am drunk in the day itself.”The NCP has refused to offer any explanation on the issue, but this remark has not gone down too well within the party that is embarrassed to speak on it.A senior NCP leader in the state said, “It is unfortunate that he ended up saying that. It is certainly not even a matter to joke about and this comment will have severe repercussions in the coming days as it has given the opposition enough ammunition to fire at us.”

The BJP called the comment ‘crude’ and said that it reflected the arrogance with which Pawar, who has recently been re-appointed as the Deputy CM, treats the water crisis. “This is the lowest one can stoop down in politics,” a BJP leader said.

Incidentally, activists are up in arms against the state establishment for bringing the state to this point in terms of water management. Activists claim that the draught, which is the worst in Maharashtra since 1972, is a man-made problem, especially created by politicians who have bungled up the irrigation projects.

At the helm of the scam allegedly, is Pawar himself, who was forced to resign as the deputy CM last year after revelations were made by then IAC activist Anjali Damania.

 

Source:  India Today.

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