To Rake or Not To Rake

by Gene Franks

October’s leaves were dancing ’round

like angels dressed in robes of Red and Gold

but November’s come and gone now

and they’re lying in the gutter out along the road

They’re gonna make their way out to the ditch or someday to the sea,

they’ll get to where they’re going without the help of you or me

and if each life is just a grain of sand

I’m telling you man, this grain of sand is mine.

Iris DeMent, “The Way I Should.”

Serious water issues from cyanobacterial blooms to dead spots in the ocean are regularly blamed on excessive nutrients, specifically nitrogen and phosphorous, that humans put into the water. These result mainly from fertilizers, animal manure (both from feedlots and companion animals), and overflows from sewage treatment plants.

But now comes a report by the U.S. Geological Survey telling us that failure to remove leaves from areas where they can be swept into stormwater collection systems can spike stormwater with phosphorus and nitrogen and greatly compromise water quality.  In fact, leaf removal studies performed in Madison, WI, seemed to show that, at least during the time of year when leaves are most abundant,  “. . .timely leaf removal reduced total phosphorous loads by 84 percent and nitrogen loads by 74 percent.” The conclusion was that phosphorous in wastewater could be greatly reduced if the city would collect leaves and clean streets weekly and before “rain events” between early September and mid-November.

Clearly, the Madison experiment is about big-time leaf harvesting by city crews, not about requiring individual tree owners to clean up after their trees the way that pet owners are now supposed to pick up after their dogs.  At least, as a confirmed non-raker, that’s what I hope it means.

The issue seems to be that, as one writer puts it, “. . .when water managers have run out of other levers to pull, [leaf removal] is an effort that should be prioritized.” I would put it more bluntly: Since we can’t get profit-driven corporate farmers to adopt saner and more earth-friendly growing methods, and we can’t expect people to cut back on the meat and dairy diet that is burying us in animal feces, and we can’t ask people to give up their pets, and since we certainly can’t ask people to pay a bit more for water or to agree to increase their taxes so that our ancient sewage treatment plants can be upgraded, we should concentrate our efforts on picking up leaves.

While we have to applaud any effort to keep water clean, leaf management seems like a pretty tricky business.  For example, if leaf collecting becomes a national nutrient reduction strategy, what are we going to do with all the leaves we collect? Landfills are already bulging. Are we going to inject them into deep wells, like fracking waste, or haul them to leaf disposal sites in the desert? Will we eventually try to genetically engineer leafless trees, or trees whose leaves are permanently attached?

Keeping the streets clean is an essential part of wastewater management. It is certainly better to sweep up contaminants before they get into the water than to remove them from the water later. But on the broader leaf issue, I’m still a non-raker. As Iris DeMent says in her great anthem to personal freedom, leaves should be left to “get to where they’re going without the help of you and me.”

So there!

Reference: The Fall of Water Quality: Blame It on the Leaves.

See also: Street Sweepers Clean More Than the Streets.

By Peter Chawaga

Well before Hurricane Harvey brought torrential winds and stormwater into Houston, the city had a reputation for ambitious construction and sprawling development.

In a project that demonstrates this city’s spirit, Houston will soon be home to the world’s largest water purification facility, which broke ground earlier this month.

“The Northeast Water Purification Plant Expansion is currently the largest water treatment project on the planet — not just in the State of Texas, not just in the United States, but on the planet,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, according to the Houston Chronicle. “Can you imagine this plant just a couple of weeks ago was submerged under water, yet we are still here today?”

The city invested nearly $1.5 billion in the project, which includes the building of a high service pump station, ground storage tanks, and treatment facilities. It is expected to increase treated water capacity in the area to 320 MGD.

“The project includes the design and construction of a new raw water facility, which includes an advanced three-level intake, pumping, and conveyance to withdraw water from Lake Houston and deliver it through two new 108” pipelines to the treatment facilities located about 1.5 miles from Lake Houston,” per Construction Equipment. “The undertaking involves moving water three miles over a ridge and into a 23-mile canal that will feed Lake Houston, then pumped through 17 miles of pipe large enough to drive a car through.”

The ambitious project is expected to meet a growing need for clean drinking water in the area.

“The Greater Houston Water Department says that by 2025, surface water — rather than groundwater — must supply at least 60 percent of the water used by the area,” Construction Equipment reported. “That percentage will rise to 80 percent by 2035. The reason is that with the rapid expansion of the Houston area, groundwater being pumped in Harris, Galveston, and Fort Bend counties has reached a point where the ground has sunk several feet, causing flooding. Some wells in the area have hit salty water and other have hit water that smells like sulfur.”

The project is expected to be complete by 2024.

Source: Water Online.

Tap Water Problems Found To Be More Prevalent In Poor, Minority Communities

by Sara Jerome

Tap water problems and shoddy water infrastructure are rampant in poor African-American communities, according to a report published by the Center for Public Integrity.

Campti, LA, is one example.

“Like many poor African-American communities, Campti’s poverty is a significant impediment to making crucial improvements to the town’s infrastructure — including its old water system,” the report said.

More than half of Campti’s population lives in poverty, and the median income is under $16,000 the report said.

Lifelong resident Leroy Hayes said the water often smells like bleach or takes on a brown hue.

“The water system in Campti is more than 50 years old, according to an audit from the Louisiana legislative auditor. Near the end of 2016, the water tank sprang several holes, some of which were temporarily plugged with sticks. A new tank was built in March, but residents still don’t trust that the water is safe,” the report said.

Former Campti Mayor Judy Daniels explained that local water problems “get worse after a storm or power outage because the water pump does not have a backup generator,” the report paraphrased.

Uniontown, AL, is another example.

“Black residents blame a swell of gastrointestinal complications on the waste from a nearby catfish farm they say pollutes their drinking water. In parts of North Carolina, impoverished African-Americans sometimes rely on contaminated wells for drinking water — though public water systems run just a few feet from their homes,” the report said.

Jacqueline Patterson, the director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said communities of color are “disproportionately affected by polluting industries because they are more likely to be located near low-income neighborhoods.”

The recent report by News21 noted that water violations occur at systems in every part of the country. But there are clean patterns governing which areas are hardest hit, the report said.

“Drinking water quality is often dependent on the wealth and racial makeup of communities, according to News21’s analysis. Small, poor communities and neglected urban areas are sometimes left to fend for themselves with little help from state and federal governments,” the report said.

Manuel Teodoro, a researcher at Texas A&M University, cited a “bias” when it comes to water safety.

“These are not isolated incidences, the Flints of the world or the Corpus Christis or the East Chicagos,” Teodoro said. “These incidents are getting media attention in a way that they didn’t a few years ago, but the patterns that we see in the data suggest that problems with drinking water quality are not just randomly distributed in the population — that there is a systemic bias out there.”

The crisis in Flint, MI, helped highlight the problem of lead contamination. Mother Jones reported that the problem is a particular threat to minority communities.

“Economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today,” the report said.

Source: WaterOnline.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Carbon Filters Galore

We just counted.  In the “Cartridge Menu” at purewaterproducts.com there are more than fifty separate carbon filter cartridges, and that’s just in the four standard sizes.  These range from carbon blocks to granular carbons, many with specialty additives like calcite and KDF.  There are coconut shell carbons, bituminous carbons, and lignite carbons; there are carbon filters enhanced to remove lead and cysts, to prevent scale buildup, to inhibit bacterial growth, to remove fluoride, to reduce tannins, to raise pH. There are carbon filters that target VOCs and others that offer fantastically long and effective chlorine reduction.

In addition, there are “proprietary” carbon filters for a number of brands (Microline, Hydrotech, or example), inline carbons (from Pentair and Omnipure), aftermarket knock-offs (Multipure), and several ceramic candles with carbon cores.

Filter carbon is the central core of most modern water filtration systems. For some 90% of the water contaminants monitored by the EPA, carbon filtration is the preferred treatment. We hope you’ll look over our carbon collection. Our “Cartridge Menu” offers extensive information on all the carbon filters that we sell, including pictures, performance summaries, and links to manufacturers’ brochures.

Dams, reservoirs, canals and safe drinking water matter for absolutely everyone

By Sean W. Fleming

Gazette’s Introductory Note: We strongly support President Trump’s frequently stated plan to spend heavily on national infrastructure. Nothing could be more important, and such a project is long overdue. We’re way behind on fixing bridges, pipes,  and drainage networks. There are estimated to be over 55,000 US bridges that are badly in need of repair or replacement. We hope that these items can take precedence over walls and jails. The Scientific American article that follows suggests some directions that the president’s plan could take.

What implications will Trump administration policies have for America’s rivers?

When I was first asked this, I felt like a school kid caught daydreaming in class by the teacher. It was during the Q&A following a public talk I’d given at the Smithsonian a few months ago on the science of rivers, and I didn’t have a ready answer. I’m a science geek, not a policy wonk. The talk had been about things like why rivers run where they do, how the same river can experience drought one year and spill its banks the next, and how the amazing universality of mathematics leads to the same equations being used for operational flood forecasting and Wall Street derivative pricing models.

I also felt wary about speaking to political issues on behalf of all science, especially at a time when folks are unusually polarized, sensitive, and ornery; the credibility and influence that science holds with leaders and the public relies on scientists being seen as neutral third-party technical experts. But then again, water resource science isn’t quantum loop gravity. We’re practical people engaged in a practical science, and it’s not like my colleagues and I never contemplated the intersection between hydrologic science and society.

So I offered the audience this fundamental, if vague, response: if we want to maintain forward momentum irrespective of whichever party wins any given election, it’s important we build a wide base of support by rejecting the increasingly common—and false—notion that there can only be two ways of viewing the world, one which is protective of water, rivers, and the environment, and the other not.

I also posited that this should not be too hard to accomplish, because while there are different ideas on how to best manage water, just about everyone agrees it’s important, regardless of whether you live in the city or the country, on the coasts or in the interior of the continent, in a blue state or a red state.

But if I was asked that question again today, I’d add this key corollary: the Trump administration;s drive to renew America’s infrastructure offers powerful, if perhaps unexpected, synergies with pushing water resource science forward. At first glance, infrastructure renewal may seem less about science and more about the tough but wise decision to allocate funds for long-term investments that in most years don’t seem like an immediate priority. But if we’re going to repair America’s increasingly rickety water infrastructure, let’s do it right, making focused investments in the applied scientific R&D needed to ensure a new generation of infrastructure is designed to support the needs of the American people and the American economy for another hundred years.

Rivers and their infrastructure, like dams, reservoirs, and canals, matter for absolutely everyone. Examples range from the obvious to the surprising. Rivers deliver drinking water, irrigation water for growing food and brewing beer, and the large amounts of water required for industrial processes ranging from building cars to building computers. Rivers drive hydroelectric turbines, keeping the lights on and the economy in motion. Flood control infrastructure keeps us safe, and healthy rivers generate recreational, tourism, and fisheries dollars.

Rivers provided the transportation pathways by which early America was explored and through which it developed its own unique culture: think of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Mississippi gambling steamboats, and Huckleberry Finn. Even victory in WWII and the ensuing Cold War owed much to river infrastructure: aluminum used to build fighting aircraft, and uranium and plutonium in the first atomic bombs at White Sands and over Imperial Japan and subsequently in the growing US nuclear arsenal, were produced using copious hydroelectric power generated by Columbia River dams in the west and the Tennessee Valley Authority in the east. Harnessing and effectively managing water has been, and will continue to be, central to the economy, defense, and psyche of America.

While tremendous technical prowess and monetary investments went into our current water systems when they were first built–think of marvels like the Hoover Dam–today, much of our water infrastructure is old and either failing or otherwise not performing at the level America requires in the 21st century. The Oroville Dam incident and associated evacuation last winter is a potent reminder. There are many other examples: silting up and end-of-design-life for many dams nationwide; difficulties with fish passage and aquatic habitat, with implications to ecological health and therefore recreation, tourism, and commercial fisheries dollars; the ongoing saga of flooding in New Orleans, tied in part to Mississippi flows and the sometimes controversial control structures on it; and above all, the insufficient capacity to match the water and power needs of growing populations and economies, especially in the west. Cleary, renewing America’s rivers is a fantastic direction for the infrastructure investments President Trump wants to make.

To do this right, we need not only concrete and pipe but also a focused, goal-oriented investment in developing the science and engineering knowledge needed to ensure these rejuvenated systems do their job effectively and safely for a long time to come. We need to better understand both the natural and human-induced hydroclimatic variability of river systems so that infrastructure and associated decision support systems can be designed to better handle both flood and drought. We need to develop and test new principles for water infrastructure and river management that return the natural ecological functioning so important for tourism, fishing, and other industries. We need to discover new approaches that minimize the future maintenance budgets required for that infrastructure, and to invest in technologies that contribute to water conservation, ranging from fixing and updating leaky water distribution lines to promoting water-efficient manufacturing and agricultural processes.

We must enhance flood and water supply forecasting systems to further improve the efficiency of reservoir planning and management. Diversify the water portfolio; innovative work with desalinization plants and groundwater production from brine aquifers in California and Texas may provide an example. Ensure that every city in America has the infrastructure it needs to provide its citizens with a clean and safe drinking water supply; don’t let Flint happen again. And following the established pattern of history-making federal government-led successes, from the Apollo program to winning the Cold War, spread these investments in innovation across organizations and sectors, including academia, government, NGOs, and the private sector.

So, what will be the implications of the new administration for America’s rivers? That depends. If President Trump plays his cards right with his planned infrastructure investments, he could leave a tremendously positive long-term legacy around rivers, science and the economy.

Source: Scientific American.