Maryland poultry farms fined for reporting lapses

Nearly one in five large Maryland chicken farms has been fined recently, state regulators have disclosed, because the growers failed to file information required annually outlining what they did to keep their flocks’ waste from polluting the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

Since July 1, the Maryland Department of the Environment has issued notices of violation to 104 of the state’s 574 “animal feeding operations.” Those are farms that are regulated like factories because of the large volumes of manure generated by raising 37,500 or more birds at a time.

Of those sent violations notices, 89 were fined $250 each for submitting incomplete reports, according to Jay Apperson, a department spokesman. The other 15 received $500 fines for not reporting anything, he said.

The reports, required once a year, spell out how much waste was generated, how it was stored to keep rainfall from washing it into nearby waterways, and what was ultimately done with it. The waste is often spread on fields to fertilize crops, either on that farm or elsewhere.

The fines represent a new, tougher stance by the state. Until recently, regulators say, they have sought to cajole and work with growers to comply with the paperwork requirements of five-year-old regulations that many farmers bitterly opposed — and still don’t think are warranted.

“This is the first time we’re reaching out in enforcement,” said Hillary Miller, deputy director of MDE’s land management administration. “They really don’t get sent these notices until we’ve tried and tried and tried to get these reports worked out with them.”

The farmers cited had more than a year to catch up, as the citations issued in recent weeks are for failure to submit required information due in March 2013.

Miller said some of the growers’ problems may have stemmed from confusion over a change in reporting requirements that was actually intended to ease their paperwork burden. Officials directed farmers to start reporting on one form information they used to have to submit in two separate filings, she said.

By comparison, in the previous year, five animal-feeding operations were cited for significant violations of state regulations and 34 for minor infractions, according to data on MDE’s web site.

The recent spike in enforcement activity comes as the state moves to renew for another five years its permitting requirements for “animal feeding operations,” the vast majority of them chicken-growing operations on the Eastern Shore.

State officials say they’re proposing mainly minor changes to what regulated farms would have to do, and that the requirements in the new “general discharge permit” are at least as stringent as those now in force.

One proposed change is aimed at easing a backlog in processing growers’ permits, dropping a requirement they submit a “comprehensive nutrient management plan” spelling out waste handling and conservation measures on their farms.  A shortage of consultants qualified to prepare those plans has led to lengthy delays in completing farmers’ permit applications. Under the new state permit, officials say, farmers could instead submit two other plans they have to prepare which contain essentially the same information.

Another change would ease a requirement for the vast majority of growers to make weekly inspections of their manure storage facilities to ensure rainfall and snow melt can’t carry waste into nearby ditches and streams. The small number of farmers with large cattle, dairy or hog herds would still have to make weekly checks of liquid manure impoundments to see that they’re not leaking. But poultry growers with sheds storing “dry” bird litter — manure mixed with wood shavings — would only have to inspect them once a year under the new state rules.

Poultry industry representatives and advocates for farmers have urged the state to drop other requirements, including a new provision allowing regulators to mandate additional runoff control measures if officials decide the existing ones aren’t doing enough to prevent pollution.

“It’s not fair to change the rules during the game,” Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., argued in a letter to MDE. He contended for the sake of growers, any changes found later to be needed should be postponed until the next scheduled renewal of the permit in five years.

Growers and industry representatives also are pressing the state to forget about charging permitting fees, arguing that they’re a hardship and unnecessary.

The state’s existing regulations call for growers to pay $250 to $1,200 a year, depending on the size of their operation. In a bid to get farmers to comply with the new permitting requirement five years ago, state officials waived collecting the fees. The new rules still call for fees, and MDE spokesman Apperson said the agency is weighing public comments on whether to collect them this time around.

Colby Ferguson, government relations director for the Maryland Farm Bureau, said growers still think the permits and regulatory oversight are unnecessary. But as long as they don’t have to pay for the extra paperwork, he said, they can basically live with it.

“We’re complying with it, we’re going through the process. It’s working,” said Ferguson. “Having the fees waived makes it more amenable and more digestible.”

Environmental advocates contend the state shouldn’t exempt poultry growers from paying for the costs of overseeing their operations, as permitting fees are routine in almost all other regulated industries. The fees would generate about $400,000 over five years a year, they estimate, money sorely needed by an agency that has seen its overall workload expand without commensurate increases in budget or staff.

Agricultural runoff is the largest single source of nutrient and sediment pollution fouling the bay, environmentalists point out. And animal farms in Maryland produce enough manure in a year to fill Ravens stadium twice, said Samantha Kappalman, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Clean Agriculture Coalition, a collection of environmental groups.

Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform, argued that MDE is showing favoritism to the poultry industry by not charging fees, when the agency requires some environmental groups to pay to see documents they’re entitled to under the state Public Information Act.

“These are basically groups that represent the average citizen,” she said. “And they’re letting [animal feeding operations], which are businesses, not pay the most nominal of fees, which were authorized by the legislature to support MDE’s work.”

But Horacio Tablada, MDE’s land management administrator, said whatever other budget restraints the agency has, officials have seen that the animal-feeding oversight is adequately funded. State officials say they’re are able to inspect about 20 percent of the regulated farms annually.

Delaware and Virginia do not charge permitting fees for regulating large animal-feeding operations. Pennsylvania does not charge fees under its general permit, either, according to a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. But for larger operations or those draining into sensitive water ways, there are fees ranging from $200 to $1,500, she said.

Factory raised chickens put out amazing amounts of feces and a good portion of this makes its way into water.

Source: The Baltimore Sun.

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The problem with America’s abandoned mines

by Rachael Bale

Taxpayer-funded efforts to clean up Oregon’s abandoned Formosa Mine, a federal Superfund site, could cost more than $20 million.

A mine plans its death before its birth. The leftover waste from mines is so hazardous that mining companies must figure out what to do with it decades in advance, even before they start digging.

That’s how it works today, at least. But in 1981, when the United States government began requiring mines to have rehabilitation plans, many operators simply up and left instead. The government has identified about 46,000 abandoned mines on public lands alone. Some of them are top-priority Superfund sites.

But most haven’t even been mapped. By some estimates, there are as many as half a million abandoned mines in the U.S. These sites have the potential to contaminate water, pollute soil, kill wildlife and sicken humans, to say nothing of the risks of falling down a hidden mine shaft. (This is a legitimate concern in some areas – in California, the state employs teams that scour the state looking for abandoned mines and plugging them up. There was even a “Dirty Jobs” episode about these folks.)

Last month, heavy rains from Hurricane Odile caused two abandoned mines in Arizona to leak orange and brown sludge, threatening a waterway that runs into Patagonia Lake State Park. With thousands of abandoned mines dotting the American landscape, particularly in the West and Southwest, just how worried should we be?

The problem with tailings

Minerals have to be separated from the rocks once they’re taken out of the ground. That process of separation creates a waste called tailings, a combination of ground-up rock, chemicals and heavy metals. This waste is often stored as a liquid in a pond, though sometimes it is dried and kept in a special building.

Today, a mine’s storage facilities for tailings are one of the most scrutinized parts of its construction plan. If a wall breaks, massive amounts of toxins would be released into the water and soil, causing what is considered an environmental catastrophe. This summer, a tailings pond spill at a mine in British Columbia was compared to an“avalanche” of toxic waste.

Abandoned mines don’t necessarily have the same level of protection around their tailings. Tailings can leach toxins up to 100 years after the mine is abandoned, and older abandoned mines weren’t necessarily as careful with their tailings as mines are today. There are several things about tailings that make them toxic:

Acid: Sulfides in the tailings turn into acid that drains into surface water, along with chemicals used during processing, like cyanide. Acid drainage makes the water more corrosive. Marine habitats become unable to support fish and plant life.

Heavy metals: As the newly created acid leaches, it allows heavy metals to escape. Arsenic, mercury, cadmium, lead and other metals wash into the soil and water supply. People in turn eat fish and drink water contaminated with heavy metals.

Paying for the cleanup

Basically, the public foots the bill.

Funding can come from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, Clean Water Act grants, watershed programs run by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, state sources and others. No single agency is in charge.

To clean up the estimated 500,000 abandoned mines, taxpayers face a price tag of $32 billion to $72 billion, the Department of the Interior predicted. And that’s just for “hardrock” mines, which require mining that involves separating metals and minerals from ore.

The Superfund program, for example, puts a handful of former mine operators on the hook for part of the costs. To clean up just the 63 top-priority mine sites, the bill could top $7.8 billion. The public would pay about $2.4 billion of that, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Coal mines are treated separately. Current coal mine operators pay into the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program, which then distributes money to states to clean up and rehabilitate abandoned coal mines. So far, it has spent about $7.6 billion.

Uranium mines, too, are treated separately – a select few get Superfund money, but most are handled by the Department of Energy. In 1998, it estimated a cost of about $2.3 billion to clean up tailings sites, an amount that didn’t include the additional costs of cleaning nearby water.

Where are they?

There isn’t a comprehensive list or map of identified abandoned mine sites – there are just too many federal agencies involved. Which agency is in charge depends on the type of mine, its location and the level and type of pollution.

The Bureau of Land Management, for example, takes the lead on abandoned hardrock mines on public lands. Most are in Western states, concentrated in Nevada, Colorado and Arizona. Abandoned uranium mines, on the other hand, are most often on tribal lands, especially in the “Four Corners” of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.

Even so, cleaning up toxins isn’t the end for abandoned mines. The ultimate goal is to reclaim the land, allowing natural ecosystems to re-establish themselves and erase evidence of the mine almost entirely.

Source: The Center for Investigative Reporting.

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London “Super Sewer” Approved

The Thames Tideway Tunnel will be 15 miles long.

The Government has given the go-ahead to start building London’s ‘super sewer’ which will tackle the sewage pollution in to the tidal River Thames.

The 25km tunnel will run underground from Acton storm tanks in West London, and travel roughly the line underneath the river to Abbey Mills Pumping Station in East London, where it will connect to the Lee Tunnel.

The sewage collected from the 34 most polluting discharge points along the tidal river in Central London, will then be taken via the Lee Tunnel to Beckton sewage works for treatment.

Last year, 55 million tonnes of sewage polluted the tidal River Thames, far higher than the average 39 million tonnes that discharges in a typical year.

This was due to the exceptionally wet weather, which caused the combined sewerage system that London has, collecting rain water and sewerage water from drains, to fill up and pour into the river even more than normal.

With the weather of 2014 already proving to be wetter than a typical year, the amount of sewage which is going into the river is likely to once again be above average.

Andy Mitchell, Chief Executive of Thames Tideway Tunnel, said: “If the tunnel had been in operation last year, it would have captured 97% of the sewage that poured in to London’s river. Hardly a week goes by when untreated sewage is not pouring in to London’s river and we are pleased that we can now start to tackle this archaic problem.

“This is a huge project but it’s a huge problem, and we can now get on with tackling it. It’s no easy task, but we’re confident that we can deliver this project and still achieve our aim of minimising the impact on our customer bills.”

The Thames Tideway Tunnel will take seven years to build, and main construction can now start in 2016 as planned.

Source: Stormwater.

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More about the very interesting Thames Tideway Tunnel.

A lifetime of sugary sodas may be 4.6 years shorter

By Lindsey Bever

You knew that drinking sugary sodas could lead to obesity, diabetes and heart attacks — but, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, it may also speed up your body’s aging process.

As you age, caps on the end your chromosomes called telomeres shrink. In the past several years, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, have analyzed stored DNA from more than 5,300 healthy Americans in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from some 14 years ago. And they discovered that those who drank more pop tended to have shorter telomeres.

The shorter the telomere, the harder it is for a cell to regenerate — and so, the body ages.

“We think we can get away with drinking lots of soda as long as we are not gaining weight, but this suggests that there is an invisible pathway that leads to accelerated aging, regardless of weight,” psychiatry professor Elissa Epel, senior author of the study, told CBS San Francisco.

According to the research, drinking a 20-ounce bubbly beverage every day is linked to 4.6 years of additional aging. You get the same effect by smoking, said UCSF postdoctoral fellow Cindy Leung, lead author of the study. About 21 percent in the sample said they drank at least that much soda per day. However, researchers say, a link does not mean causation.

“The extremely high dose of sugar that we can put into our body within seconds by drinking sugared beverages is uniquely toxic to metabolism,” Epel told Time.

Scientists found no link between cell aging and drinking diet sodas or fruit juices. But Epel said the results might be different with more modern data.

“We think that the jury’s still out on sugared beverages — theoretically they’re just as bad,” she told Time. “But 14 years ago, people were drinking a lot less sugared beverages. … They were mostly drinking soda.”

The authors said the study looked at each participant at only one point in time; it did not track them. The participants, ages 20 to 65, had no history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease.

But, with or without sodas, telomeres naturally shorten over time.

Source: Washington Post.

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The Kissimmee: A River Recurved

by Amy Green

Kissimmee Straightened by the Army Corps of Engineers 

Click for larger view.

It sounds almost superhuman to try straighten a river and then recarve the curves.

That’s what federal and state officials did to the Kissimmee River in central Florida. They straightened the river in the 1960s into a canal to drain swampland and make way for the state’s explosive growth. It worked — and it created an ecological disaster. So officials decided to restore the river’s slow-flowing, meandering path.

That billion-dollar restoration — the world’s largest — is a few years from completion. And so far, it’s bringing signs of new life, especially on a man-made canal that was dug through the heart of the river.

“Birds are back, both wading birds and ducks. They’re all over the place,” says Paul Gray of Audubon Florida. “The oxygen levels in the river are better. There’s a lot more game fish in the river like bass and bluegill and stuff. Most of the biological perimeters, the goals of the restoration we’ve already met.”

The man-made canal begins near Walt Disney World in Central Florida and flows 50 miles south. “It messed up our water management infrastructure,” Gray says. “Now we drain so much water that when it’s dry we don’t have enough water for our human needs. We over drained, and so now we’re trying to rebuild the system where we’re going to catch water instead of wasting it when it’s wet.”

For decades, piles of dirt dug for the canal have remained heaped on its banks. Now bulldozers are pushing the dirt back into the waterway, filling it and making way for the river’s old meanders to recarve their historic path. Five dams controlling the waterway’s flow are being blown up, allowing the water to flow naturally.

The 20-year restoration effort is expected to be complete by 2017.

Defending The Water

The Kissimmee also is the backbone of the Everglades. It supports farming and the drinking water for 6 million south Floridians. The problem is now central Floridians are looking to the Kissimmee.

“Groundwater is not an infinite resource,” says Joanne Chamberlain of the Central Florida Water Initiative, a group of state agencies, cities and utilities who together are examining how much water the region needs.

The group estimates by 2035 Central Florida’s demand will exceed its supply, which it gets mostly from an underground aquifer. So the group’s members are considering other sources. One possibility they’ve identified is the Kissimmee’s headwaters.

“There’s opportunities under certain situations that water can be used — high-water level situations where that water could be taken, stored and used for other purposes,” Chamberlain says.

She means during the summer wet season, when Florida receives the bulk of its rain.

“Florida is not like any other state in the union. We revolve around our water so greatly, not just as a drinking source but as a source of recreation and as source of tourism,” says Chuck O’Neal, chairman of the natural resources committee of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

The group supports a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would put more money toward land and water conservation, including the Kissimmee.

Other environmentalists hope to protect the Kissimmee’s water with a unique legal tool called a water reservation, which would set aside a certain amount of water so utilities can’t have it for consumer use.

“The future is going to be trying to defend the water, to make sure the river has the proper hydrology,” Gray says.

Cynthia Barnett, a Florida author who writes about water issues. “The key for the future is to learn from those past mistakes and now do things differently. Instead of clashing all the time the idea is to work together to use less.”

She says the Kissimmee is a lesson, that Floridians don’t need more water but that environmentalists, utilities and farmers together can work toward a future of conservation.

The restoration’s goal is to put as much of the Kissimmee as possible back to the way it was. This photo shows the river after restoration.

Click for larger view.

Source: National Public Radio.

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Dissolved Oxygen: An important Constituent of Water

by Pure Water Annie

Gazette Technical Wizard Pure Water Annie Explains How Oxygen Gets Into Water and Why It Needs to Be There

Our atmosphere consists of around 21 percent oxygen.  Water, however, has only a fraction of 1 percent.

Oxygen dissolves into water at the point where water and air meet.

Dissolved oxygen, called DO, is made up of microscopic bubbles of oxygen gas in water.  This dissolved oxygen is critical for the support of plant life and fish.

According to one authority, “DO is produced by diffusion from the atmosphere, aeration of the water as it passes over falls and rapids, and as a waste product of photosynthesis.  It is affected by temperature, salinity, atmospheric pressure, and oxygen demand from aquatic plants and animals.”

Dissolved oxygen is measured as percent saturation or as parts per million (ppm) or milligrams per liter (mg/L).   As the chart below indicates, oxygen dissolves easily into cold water, not so easily into warm, and not at all into boiling water.

In water treatment, a high level of dissolved oxygen can make water taste better, but it can also make water corrosive to metal pipes. Dissolved oxygen is a necessary ingredient of many water treatment processes.  The use of catalytic carbon to remove iron, for example,  requires a minimum of about 4.0 ppm of dissolved oxygen in the source water, and Birm, the popular iron removal medium, will not work without sufficient dissolved oxygen.

Oxygen can be added to water by simple aeration techniques which involve exposing the water to air.  Ozone is also used in water treatment to greatly increase the oxygen content of water.

Glasses show how oxygen leaves water.  Milky water on left with high level of dissolved oxygen.  On the right, the air has gone back to the atmosphere and the water is clear.  Often a film will be left at the surface or “skin” at the top surface of the water.  When cloudy water clears from bottom to top. the discoloration is harmless air.  Water cloudy from silt clears from top to bottom and leaves residue at the bottom of the glass.

Drought Of 1934 In North America, During The Dust Bowl, Was The Worst In Thousand Years: Study

This photo shows a farmer and his two sons during a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936. The 1930s Dust Bowl drought had four drought events with no time to recover in between: 1930-31, 1934, 1936 and 1939-40.

The drought of 1934 in North America was the driest and the most widespread of the last millennium, according to a new study based on a reconstruction of North America’s history of drought over the last 1,000 years.

In the study, published in the Oct. 17 edition of Geophysical Research Letters, researchers from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, used a tree-ring-based drought record between the years 1000 to 2005, as well as modern-day records, to determine that the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the next worst one in 1580. The study also found that the 1934 drought extended across 71.6 percent of western North America while, in comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent.

“It was the worst by a large margin, falling pretty far outside the normal range of variability that we see in the record,” Ben Cook, a climate scientist at NASA and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

The 1934 drought was one of four similar events that occurred in sequence over a period of 10 years. The droughts of 1930-31, 1934, 1936 and 1939-40 are together called the Dust Bowl. According to scientists, two sets of conditions led to the severity and extent of the 1934 drought — while a high-pressure weather system over western America affected normal rainfall patterns, poor land management practices caused dust storms in the spring of 1934.

A dust storm approaches Stratford, Texas, in 1935.

“In combination then, these two different phenomena managed to bring almost the entire nation into a drought at that time,” Richard Seager, professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the study’s co-author, said in the statement. “The fact that it was the worst of the millennium was probably in part because of the human role.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a recent report that climate change is expected to make North America’s droughts worse, with the southwest likely to become significantly drier. The researchers believe that an analysis of the last thousand years could help them better understand the natural variability of droughts.

Although dust storms like the ones from the Dust Bowl are unlikely to occur in North America today, farmers still need to pay attention to the changing climate and adapt accordingly, the scientists said.

Source: International Business Times.

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If Columbus deserves a “day,” so, too,  do Hitler and Jack the Ripper

by Tiger Tom

I, Tiger Tom, seldom get to write for the Gazette or the Occasional because I so seldom write about water.  But since they taught us in school that Columbus was the brave sailor who sailed the ocean blue in 1492 in his three merry ships whose names we had to memorize, his connection with water makes him fair game.

The first thing you need to know about Christopher Columbus is that he was a mediocre sailor but a skilled con man.  Above all, he was unimaginably greedy and as cruel as a snake.  Personally, Columbus was described by one historian as “an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing— not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting Biblical scripture— to advance his ambitions….”
Those are his good qualities.

Here is how historian Howard Zinn describes Columbus’ interaction with the native Anawak:

Now, from his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. American Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.  (Zinn, Howard,  “A People’s History of the United States”.)

This is mild in comparison to some of the accounts by the great man’s contemporaries.  For example, the author of the multi-volume History of the Indies, the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas,  who observed the region where Columbus was governor, recounted countless atrocities committed by Columbus and his followers.  Las Casas describes Spaniards driven by “insatiable greed” — “killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples” with “the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.”  He describes how systematic violence was aimed at preventing “[American] Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings.”  The Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing the natives by tens and twenties and cutting slices from their bodies to test the sharpness of their blades.” Las Casas said, “My eyes have seen acts so foreign to human nature that I now tremble as I write them.”

But he did, as we like to say, “discover America,” so we have given him a “day” on our calendar.  I vote that we take it back.

A Landmark Event in the Understanding and Control of Waterborne Diseases

by Pure Water Annie

Gazette technical writer Pure Water Annie describes a landmark moment in the history of water’s role in disease.

Waterborne diseases like infectious hepatitis,  bacterial dysentery, cholera, and giardiasis were common until fairly recently.  Throughout the world, health impacts were staggering. Entire villages in Europe were wiped out by plagues in the 11th and 12th centuries.   In 1848 and 1849 in a single cholera epidemic alone, 53,000 people died in London.

 Dr. John Snow’s 1854 Pump Study is a landmark in the development of epidemiology (the study of infectious diseases).

The Broad Street Pump Findings

Dr. John Snow, a London obstetrician,  became interested in the cause and transmission of cholera after witnessing severe outbreaks of the disease in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1849 he published a pamphlet that suggested that cholera was transmitted by contaminated drinking water.  Many theories about the cause of cholera were in circulation at the time, and Dr. Snow’s polluted water theory was not widely accepted. The then-dominant theory was the miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera or the Black Death were caused by a noxious form of “bad air.” This was a short time before Pasteur’s “germ theory” became popular.

In 1854 Dr. Snow carefully plotted the locations of the illness and compared his findings to the subscriber lists of two private companies that provided water for London. His research showed that cholera occurred with greater frequency among the customers of one of the companies–the one that drew its water from the lower Thames river which was contaminated by London sewage. The other company used upper Thames water, which was less polluted.

Dr. Snow’s maps indicated a strong correlation between cholera cases and the proximity to the intersection of Cambridge and Broad Streets. The obvious conclusion was that the main cause of the cholera epidemic was the water drawn from a community pump on Broad Street.

Although few at the time believed Dr. Snow’s theory, the handle was removed from the pump to prevent further use of the water and the plague of cholera was broken.

Both the pump and its handle are on public display today and Dr. Snow’s discovery remains a landmark achievement in public health.

Reference: Thomas V. Cech: Principles of Water Resources: History, Development, Management, and Policy. (John Wiley and Sons, 2005).

Texans Getting Creative With Water Conservation

WICHITA FALLS, Tex. — As this North Texas city struggles through one of the most severe droughts ever, saving water is no longer just about avoiding fines or staying in the good graces of one’s neighbors.

Since the city raised water rates by 53 percent in October, it is also about saving money.

“We have big buckets in our showers that catch the cold water as it warms up, and we carry those out and pour them on trees or bushes or whatever,” said Katie Downs, who lives with her husband and 8-year-old daughter near the edge of town.

Wichita Falls’s hefty rate increase is unusual, and it is in part because extraordinary conservation efforts by residents have meant that the utility was selling less water and needed to make up for lost revenue. Water and sewer bills are going up substantially across Texas and in many other places around the country as utilities struggle to maintain aging infrastructure, deal with drought or come to grips with the rising costs of a scarce resource while searching for new supplies. 

 This Wichita Falls Nursery Specializes in Plants that Don’t Need Much Water

“People have been hit on both sides,” said Jeff Hughes, director of the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The rates have been increasing higher than inflation, but also, salaries and wages have gone down in many regions.”

Those increases are causing people to get creative. Ms. Downs said her family saved the last 2 ounces in bottles of drinking water for houseplants or their dog. Other residents in the city of 100,000 spoke of taking “Navy” showers — quick showers taken on ships with limited water supplies — or replacing water-intensive lawns with drought-resistant plants.

The popularity of such plants has been a boon for Paul Dowlearn, who owns a nursery and sells plants that can withstand drought, like red yucca and Texas sage. “I’m selling plants that can live on the rainfall, and I’m not talking cactus and gravel,” Mr. Dowlearn said, standing in the nursery’s small indoor area, where two large rainwater collection bins are surrounded by brightly colored plants.

One reason for rising water rates is simply the need to catch up, Mr. Hughes said. Most water utilities, which are government-owned, have been loath to raise rates enough to keep pace with the cost of maintaining old and expensive infrastructure — until breakdowns and staggering debt force increases.

“We have about $5 billion worth of infrastructure, and you’ve got a lot of things you need to do,” said Terry Lowery, assistant director of business operations for Dallas Water Utilities, which plans to raise rates 3 to 6 percent each year for the next five years. “Moving water is expensive.”

In the Dallas area, invasive zebra mussels that clog water intake pipes have caused spikes in water rates. And the fast-growing region’s search for new supplies, which could include a hotly contested multibillion-dollar reservoirin Northeast Texas, is likely to send rates even higher.

In San Antonio, the city’s water system is considering a pipeline project that would cost $3.4 billion, bringing in groundwater from 140 miles away. That would add 16 percent to current water rates, the utility estimates. On top of that, more rate increases are needed to pay for repairs to an aging sewer system that has had multiple failures in the past several years, contributing to a forecast from the utility that combined water and wastewater rates in San Antonio will increase 41 percent over the next five years. (The San Antonio Water System is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)

Representing a San Antonio coalition of congregations, schools and unions, Diane Duesterhoeft told the City Council at a hearing last week that low-income and middle-class families would be hit hardest. “It doesn’t take a lot of courage to spend someone else’s money,” Ms. Duesterhoeft said. “It does take courage to face the public and gain their informed consent on such a critical decision.”

The San Antonio Water System said it had long offered discounts of close to 25 percent to people whose incomes fall near or below the poverty level. About 20,000 customers a month took advantage of that last year, the utility said. Another program offers one-time payment assistance financed by private donations for those struggling with their bills.

The programs are not common, and most government assistance for households is focused on electricity bills, which are generally significantly higher than water bills. Thousands of households in both Dallas and San Antonio — about 1 to 1.5 percent of ratepayers — have water service cut off for not paying, both cities’ utilities said. They send out multiple notices over a few months before cutting off someone’s water.

“We’ll still maintain our position as one of the lowest rates in the state,” said Greg Flores, a spokesman for the San Antonio Water System. He added that the utility was considering establishing a lower water rate for those using less than 3,000 or 4,000 gallons a month — more than someone living alone in an apartment would use, and perhaps barely enough for a family of four that did not have a lawn.

In Dallas, water rates have risen much more slowly for households that use low amounts of water, and the bigger increases have been reserved for those who use a lot of water, Ms. Lowery said.

Wichita Falls does not have any city-funded programs for water bills. But Jim Dockery, the city’s chief financial officer, said some nonprofits helped those in need, and the city was considering printing messages directly on billing statements that encouraged customers to donate to the cause or ask for help.

Mr. Dockery said he expected things to get better once the drought ends, but rates would still have to be high. That is because the habit of conservation is likely to continue, which means the utility will keep selling less water.

“A lot of customers have installed water conservation measures that they will likely continue using after the drought is over,” he said. “The price is going to continue to be high.”

But Mr. Dowlearn, the nursery owner, is not worried. He had rainwater collection systems at work and in his home long before the drought started.

“My wife and I have not paid a water bill in over 25 years,” he said.

Source: Texas Tribune.

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