Military Water Pollution–A National Disgrace

“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” said John D. Dingell, a soon-to-retire Michigan congressman who served in World War II. “Lejeune is one of many.”

Over the years, the US military has been the unquestioned leader in water pollution.  Newsweek for 7-25-14, cover pictured above, features an excellent study by Alexander Nazaryan of the military’s environmental crimes over recent decades, concentrating on Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.   As the article points out, however, Camp Lejeune is only a small part of an ugly picture of the US military’s war on the environment.

These military sites form a sort of toxic archipelago across the land: Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, where the Air Force allegedly dumped trichloroethylene (TCE) into the soil, part of what some residents call a “toxic triangle” in south-central Texas; McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, California, which includes not only fuel plumes and industrial solvents but also radioactive waste; Umatilla Chemical Depot in the plains of northern Oregon, where mustard gas and VX nerve gas were stored; Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a onetime sarin stockpile just north of Denver; the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod, poisoned by explosives and perchlorate, a rocket fuel component that is emerging as a major Pentagon pollutant. But because Camp Lejeune’s abuses and betrayals are more flagrant, it has become a test case for whether the military can defend our soil without ruining it.

Here is an excerpt from a detailed study which we urge you to read in its entirety.  It focuses on one of many health problems, male breast cancer,  caused by the military’s lack of environmental concern.

Men With Mastectomy Scars

Camp Lejeune, built in 1941, is 240 square miles in area, making it the largest Marine base east of the Mississippi River, and the second largest in the nation after Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. Situated at the swampy mouth of the New River, it is an ideal training ground for the sorts of amphibious assaults that are the Marines’ favored means of arriving at the war dance. From here, leathernecks shipped out to the Pacific theater of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The Marines killed in the 1983 terrorist bombings of a barracks in Beirut had also come from Lejeune; a memorial to them sits in a wooded glade at the camp’s edge.

In the decade before Camp Lejeune was built, the chemical industry saw the advent of the “safety solvents” TCE and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). These were chemical cleaning agents of the organochlorine group: TCE was a degreaser for machine parts; PCE was used in dry cleaning.

A military base is rife with machines. This sounds obvious, but it’s quite striking when you see all those tanks and airplanes and amphibious vehicles that seem perfectly poised for battle, even on a humid North Carolina afternoon when overseas wars might as well be waged in another galaxy. Part of that readiness is cleanliness, which your average military mechanic would have achieved, until very recently, by washing grease-covered parts in TCE.In 2004, a former Marine named Joseph Paliotti decided to clear his conscience. He was on the verge of perishing from cancer, and he suspected that Camp Lejeune had something to do with it. He had spent 16 years working on the base. “We’d come down there, we used to dump it: DDT, cleaning fluid, batteries, transformers, vehicles,” he told his local television station. “I knew sooner or later something was gonna happen.” Several days later, Paliotti died.

The cleaning of clothes might seem like a more innocuous matter, but that’s only because most people don’t have much of a notion of how a dry cleaning enterprise works. You surrender your clothes; they return immaculate. Magic! As it happens, the chemicals that cleanse a shirt are about as carcinogenic as those that cleanse an airplane engine.

One of the places at Camp Lejeune that could care for your uniform was ABC One Hour Cleaners, which sits just a few yards from the edge of the base. The dry cleaners, which started operation in 1964 and ended on-site cleaning service in 2005, did nothing different from what thousands of other dry cleaners did around the United States: It used PCE as a cleaning solvent. Some of the PCE sludge was used to fill potholes, while much of the liquid waste ended up in the ground, just like the TCE used to clean machines across the road, behind the barbed wire.

The TCE and PCE percolated through the sandy soil of Camp Lejeune and into the shallow Castle Hayne aquifer, from which the base drew its water. Also flowing into the soil was benzene from the Hadnot Point fuel farm. A component of gasoline, benzene is an aromatic hydrocarbon. Its name does not mean that it is pleasantly pungent. Instead, the deceptively alluring adjective refers to the strong carbon-hydrogen latticework of the compound. Like other aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene is a carcinogen that readily enters the body.

An Associated Press report found that as “late as spring 1988, the underground tanks at Hadnot Point were leaking about 1,500 gallons of fuel a month—a total of more than 1.1 million gallons, by some estimates.” Eventually, the leaked fuel would form an underground layer 15 feet deep, a carcinogenic band essentially covering the aquifer from which the drinking water was drawn.

Among those who drank that water was Mike Partain, who was born on base. His father was a Marine, as was his grandfather. He lived in the same housing complex where the Ensmingers conceived their daughter Janey. He joined the Navy but was discharged because of a debilitating rash that would overtake his body without explanation. Eventually, Partain ended up in Tallahassee, Florida, where he was a teacher and, later, an insurance adjuster.

Then married with four children, Partain was in good health until the age of 39. (He has since divorced; “my marriage didn’t survive Lejeune,” he told me.) Toxins, like terrorist sleeper cells, are patient. As he would later write for the website of Semper Fi, a documentary about Camp Lejeune, in April 2007 “my wife gave me a hug before bed one night. As she did, her hand came across a curious bump situated above my right nipple. There was no pain, but it felt very odd.” Partain went for tests, which revealed an almost incredible diagnosis: breast cancer.

Male breast cancer is rare enough in the general population, especially for someone like Partain who has no history of the disease in his family. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, only about 7 breast cancer victims out of 1,000 are men. Yet it turned out that many other men who’d lived on Camp Lejeune had developed breast cancer: Partain told me that he knows of 85 victims. Several of these aging men, showing mastectomy scars, posed for a 2011 calendar.

Coincidences do happen, even in cancer epidemiology. What looks like obvious causation to some may be just cruel fate, but the overall infrequency of the disease, combined with its relatively high frequency among the men of Camp Lejeune, as well as the other ailments plaguing those who lived on the base, made clear that there was a connection. “This has all the characteristics of a male breast cancer cluster,” the noted epidemiologist Richard Clapp said at the time. Camp Lejeune is, in fact, now widely believed to be the largest known cluster of the male variant of the disease.

Source:  Newsweek.

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 Twin Tank Water Softeners Are the Most Efficient Softeners Made

One of the most underrated “green” products available is the twin tank water softener. Although the initial cost is more, twin softeners can pay for themselves in water and salt savings. They also offer the satisfaction of being the most environmentally friendly of conventional water softeners.

A twin softener is essentially two identically-sized water softener resin tanks joined and controlled by a single softener valve. The control valve can be either a timer or a metered regeneration style, with metered being strongly preferred for this type softener.

To dispel a common misconception about twin softening units, the two tanks work one at a time. That is, you don’t get double softening. A single softener tank is more than adequate to reduce the hardness of most residential water to virtual zero. The twin unit operates by keeping one of its tanks in reserve. When the capacity of tank one is reached, the control valve immediately puts tank two into service, so that there can never be a time when hard water is being sent to the home, as can happen with single tank softeners. Even when a tank is being regenerated, soft water is being delivered to the home. And, unlike the single tank unit, twin units use soft water for regeneration.

Since the switch from one tank to the other can be made at any time of the day or night, no “reserve” needs to be programmed into the softener. With conventional one-tank units, a certain amount of the tank’s capacity–usually about one day’s expected usage–is always held in reserve. This is accomplished by simply programming the softener to regenerate a day early. By conservative estimate, this “reserve” requirement is responsible for about 15% of the salt and water used by a single-tank softener. Simple arithmetic tells you that if a softener that regenerates once a week always regenerates one day early, in a year it will simply throw away 48 days worth of its softening capacity. And what is really being tossed away is water and salt.

Applications

Twin tank units are especially good for applications that require a long, uninterrupted supply of soft water. For example, if a softener is used to pretreat hard water for a large reverse osmosis unit, it is difficult to assure that the reverse osmosis unit will not demand water when the softener is regenerating. A twin tank unit solves this problem by providing a never ending supply of soft water.

One of our local customers is a yogurt store that needs to protect its expensive yogurt machines from scaling. Yogurt machines run around the clock and it would be very impractical to turn them off so that a conventional water softener can regenerate its resin bed. A twin softener is a perfect solution. It provides an endless supply of treated water with fully automatic operation with no need to maintain a “reserve.”

Twin softeners are the most water and salt efficient softeners made. They regenerate less frequently because no “reserve” capacity has to be calculated. They have the added advantage of performing the regeneration with softened water, assuring a cleaner and more complete regeneration. Twin softeners are especially useful for applications requiring long service cycles that need an uninterrupted supply of soft water.

 Acute water crisis looms in Gaza, aid agencies warn

by Stephanie Nebehay

Editor’s Note: One of the very dirtiest forms of warfare is to attack civilian populations  by destroying water infrastructure.  If the report below is correct, Israel appears to have sunk as low as the US and Great Britain, who in the years preceding the first US attack on Iraq destroyed the country’s water infrastructure with bombs, then purposely prevented repairs by sanctioning the import of parts needed to fix water and sewage plants as well as such essential water treatment items as chlorine.  As a result, tens of thousands of Iraqis, and especially Iraqi children under five, died of easily preventable waterborne diseases.  Warfare of this type is simply an indirect application of biological warfare, which civilized nations claim to abhor. See “A Prayer for Water & Children” which is archived on the Gazette’s old website.–Hardly Waite.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are without water after Israeli air strikes that have wrecked the water and sewage system and the whole strip is threatened with a water crisis within days, aid agencies warned on Tuesday.

The eight-day assault has caused massive damage to infrastructure and destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said.

“Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement.

If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis”, he said.

“Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

Several municipal water engineers have been killed in the conflict and Gaza’s water service provider has suspended all field operations until the safety of its staff can be guaranteed, according to the ICRC, an independent aid agency whose teams have helped with emergency repairs.

“Water is a problem and it can quickly turn into a catastrophe,” ICRC spokewoman Nada Doumani told a news briefing.

At least 184 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting, the worst flare-up in two years. The stated purpose of Israel’s bombing is quieting cross-border rocket fire from Hamas militants fired into southern Israel.

UNTREATED SEWAGE

UNRWA said the destruction compounded the effects of eight years of Israel’s blockade of the enclave.

“The water and sewage network is barely functioning, and with the sustained bombardment of the past 8 days, it’s as good as destroyed,” UNRWA spokesman Sami Mshasha told the briefing.

“We’re looking at 90 million litres of untreated sewage that flows into the ocean every day because there is no electricity to treat it. Ninety percent of the drinking water is not fit for human consumption.”

The World Health Organization (WHO), a U.N. agency, warned last week that health services in the occupied Palestinian territory were on the brink of collapse among severe shortages in medicines and fuel for hospital generators.

Hamas militants fired volleys of rockets from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, drawing a threat by Israel to abandon an Egyptian-proposed truce it had unilaterally accepted.

“We are extremely worrried as UNRWA that if the ceasefire being negotiated today does not succeed, then the much-talked about ground offensive might unfold and we might see an Israeli military incursion into Gaza,” Mshasha said.

If there is a truce, the ICRC hopes for better access to the increasing numbers of casualties, spokeswoman Doumani said.

The ICRC is “documenting violations of international humanitarian law” in the conflict, she said.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay on Friday voiced serious doubts that Israeli’s military operation against Gaza complied with international law banning the targeting of civilians, and called on both sides to respect the rules of war.

Source: Chicago Tribune News.

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Where Contamination on Beaches Comes From

Editor’s Note:  Recent water news has been filled with stories about polluted beaches in the US and around the world.  Most of  these report the bad news but do little to explain the causes.  We’ve excerpted some information from an excellent article by  Andrea Gelfuso Goetz that appeared in the Denver Post  that gives a good explanation of the how and why of the nation’s dirty beaches. –Hardly Waite. 

A study conducted by the environmental organization NRDS found that as many as 10 percent of U.S. beaches are unsafe for swimming, contaminated with storm-water runoff and sewage overflow that cause illnesses like “stomach flu, skin rashes, pinkeye, respiratory infections, meningitis, and hepatitis.”

How does raw sewage end up on U.S. beaches?

Every time it rains, water running over lawns picks up fertilizer, pesticides and animal waste. Water running over streets and parking lots picks up oil, gas and spilled chemicals. In cities, storm runoff is channeled into sewers that discharge polluted water directly into water bodies, including the river your dog likes to splash in.

While some municipal storm water is pumped into sewage treatment plants, they are overwhelmed by heavy storms, so storm water is discharged, untreated, into rivers and lakes. On the coast, storm water is discharged into the ocean, polluting U.S. beaches, sometimes making swimmers sick.

Doesn’t environmental regulation protect us from water pollution? The Environmental Protection Agency sets water quality standards for U.S. waters based on the intended use of each water body. For example, water used for drinking has to meet the toughest standard. Water used for swimming and fishing has to be clean enough so people don’t get sick.

The Clean Water Act regulates “point sources” of pollution (water pollution that comes out of pipes), but only weakly regulates “non-point” sources, pollution that is created when water runs over the ground. So we end up with polluted beaches.

But untreated storm water affects more than beaches. The EPA tracks water-quality data for all types of water bodies, including rivers and streams, lakes and reservoirs. Compared to other water bodies, beach water quality is just ducky. While 90 percent of U.S. beaches meet EPA standards, less than half of U.S. rivers and streams are safe for swimming and fishing. What’s worse, only 28 percent of U.S. rivers and streams have been assessed — so we don’t know whether 70 percent of U.S. rivers and streams meet the standards.

How about lakes and ponds? Nationally, only 43 percent have been assessed. Of those, 67 percent are “impaired” and don’t meet public health standards.

Most disturbing, of the U.S. lakes, reservoirs and ponds used to raise fish for food, 74 percent are impaired.

To see water quality information for all U.S. water bodies, go to the EPA’s website,  click on the science and technology menu, and the waters tab.

Source :  Denver Post.

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Golf is a big water user, but so is growing lettuce

The grass doesn’t stay green automatically.  The average golf course gulps down 10,000 gallons of water per day.

According to a report by the United States Golf Association:

There are an estimated 1,504,210 acres of maintained turfgrass (greens, tees, fairways, rough) on golf facilities in the U.S. An estimated 1,198,381 acres or 80 percent of maintained turfgrass are irrigated.

Approximately 80 acres of an average 18-hole golf course’s 100 acres of maintained turfgrass are irrigated.

From 2001-2005, an estimated total of 31,877 acres of irrigated turfgrass were added to existing golf facilities in the U.S. The greatest net gain in irrigated acreage 

From 2003-2005, the average water use for golf course irrigation in the U.S. was estimated to be 2,312,701 acrefeet per year. That equates to approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for golf course irrigation in the U.S. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000”  report,approximately 408 billion gallons of water per day are withdrawn in the U.S. Golf course irrigation accounts for 0.5 percent of this total. 

Water use varies significantly by agronomic region. An average 18-hole golf facility in the Southwest region 
uses an average of 4 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year. An average 18-hole golf facility in the 
Northeast region uses an average of 0.8 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year.

Sources of this water?

52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

46 percent use water from on-site wells.

17 percent use water from rivers, streams and

14 percent use water from municipal water

systems.

12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.

creeks.

Gazette’s conclusion:  Golf courses use oceans of water, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared with total water usage.  Agricultural irrigation is, of course, the biggest water user by far. Ironically, golf uses more water than water polo.

Source:  USGA.

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A Relentless Drought Is Forcing Las Vegas to Take Extreme Measures

by Arnie Cooper

 Editor’s Note.  The dire water shortage facing Las Vegas is hardly news, but this Newsweek piece does a fine job of providing perspective. Drought isn’t new to the area, but drought plus overpopulation plus increasing temperatures have created a much more complicated scenario than that faced by the Anasazi  who lived in the area a thousand years ago.  The article below offers a particularly good overview of the problem and possible solutions. — Hardly Waite.

The Colorado 

When a 60-year drought slowed the mighty Colorado back in the 12th century, it didn’t much matter. The river had to feed only local wildlife and not the millions of people who have since settled in sprawling and hugely water-dependent metropolises like Las Vegas.

Today another dry spell is blistering much of the Southwest. Of course, no one can say whether this 14-year-event will become a decades-long megadrought, but the city is taking no chances. Counter to its reputation, Las Vegas has been one of the country’s most progressive municipalities when it comes to water conservation. Despite explosive population growth, per capita water use has dropped 40 percent in the past two decades, water recycling is up, and homeowners are pulling up their sod in record numbers to save H2O.

But it’s still not enough. Which is why the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is rushing to complete a new intake pipe for Lake Mead, Las Vegas’s main water source.

Initiated in 2008, the project was originally slated for completion in 2012. But the $817 million venture has not gone smoothly. In July 2010, work on the three-mile tunnel was cut back when crews struck a geographical fault, releasing water and muck into the construction area. Attempts to stabilize the area failed, forcing the team to begin excavating in a different direction. The project is now expected to be finished in July 2015. “We’re trying to get this done before the lake drops low,” says Erika Moonin, the engineering project manager for Vegas Tunnel Constructors. “We start seeing water-quality impacts at low lake elevations with our existing facilities.”

According to Moonin, every summer a thermocline—a distinct layer of warmer water, which traps wastewater and contaminants within it—forms near Lake Mead’s surfaces. As the lake level falls, that layer gets closer to the intake pipes, making it more difficult and more expensive to treat drinking water.

And it’s not just Lake Mead and Las Vegas that must cope with the drought. The 1,450-mile Colorado River irrigates nearly 4 million acres of land and provides water to 30 million people in seven states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California. (Mexico and 23 Native American tribes also share water rights.) The area’s driest two-year-period on record spanned from 2012 to 2013, and the entire river system is now 50 percent full (or empty, depending on how you choose to view it).

Every year, the water manager at each reservoir along the river determines how much water can be sent downstream, based on how much precipitation has flowed into the system. Lake Powell, which sits on the Colorado on the border between Utah and Arizona, is the country’s second-largest reservoir. It dropped a combined 60 feet in 2012 and 2013. This year, because it currently sits so low, Powell will make its lowest water release since the basin started filling in the 1960s.

That means less water going into Lake Mead, the nation’s largest man-made reservoir, which sits farther down the Colorado, between Nevada and Arizona. That’s presenting a challenge for thirsty places like Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its supply from the lake.

In fact, with Mead at 40 percent capacity as of June and dropping, the city could be down to its last straw. Currently there are two intake pipes “sipping” the liquid gold out of the lake and into the city’s waterworks, but if the lake, now down to 1,084 feet, drops to elevation 1,065, serious problems will ensue. That’s because Intake 1, located at elevation 1,050, will no longer be able to effectively pump water. Projections made by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation predict that the lake will fall to 1,068 feet by June 2015. That would mean major difficulty pumping from Intake 1—not to mention water-quality concerns.

The new intake pipe was supposed to pick up the slack, but the economic crisis in 2009 forced the SNWA to postpone building its new accompanying pumping station. Instead, the authority opted for an emergency connection between Intake 3 and the two existing pipes. In June 2014, the connector tunnel was completed .

Bronson Mack, a public information officer for the SNWA, admits that the emergency connection won’t fully compensate for the loss of water should Intake 1 go down. “But it does buy us at least a few years of operation,” and, he adds, it will help them continue to defer the costs of building that third pumping station.

That may sound promising, but it only points to the extreme measures water utilities are going to need to take in a drier future to keep the taps flowing.

A millennium ago, when the Anasazi lived in the river basin, they simply moved to wetter regions when epic droughts hit. But that’s not an option today for residents of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. And, in 2014, human-caused climate change is making normal dry spells even worse. “You add warming temperatures to a drought, and it becomes even worse,” says Toby Ault, a climate scientist and assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.

One reason is that the heat tends to send more moisture into the atmosphere because of higher evaporation rates. A recent study by Benjamin Cook, “Global Warming and 21st Century Drying,” argues that this increase in evaporation could end up making a larger part of the West more susceptible to a megadrought.

In fact, Ault’s team at Cornell has come up with a frightening estimate of future megadrought risks: There’s an 80 to 90 percent chance of a 10-plus-year drought occurring this century, with a realistic threat of an epic 30- to 40-year dry spell. Unfortunately, water managers won’t even know if such a drought is happening until many years pass.

Connie Woodhouse, a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Tree Ring Lab, says droughts can be evaluated only by looking back. “It’s a little bit hard at this point to say, ‘Yeah, we’re at the beginning of a megadrought or we’re not.’ You have to watch as things unfold,” she says.

But it doesn’t take a crystal ball to realize just how serious the current Western dry spell is, and cities are starting to respond. Las Vegas uses a lot of water for its size (think of the fountains at the Bellagio), but it has made significant improvements in water efficiency. For example, the city now recycles 100 percent of the water it uses indoors (in bathrooms, kitchens, etc.). And despite a tripling of the population since 1989, per capita water consumption has decreased over 40 percent—thanks largely to the city’s Water Smart Landscapes program, which pays residents $1.50 a square foot to remove turf. “If you had an 18-inch-wide piece of sod, you could roll that piece of sod 85 percent of the way around the globe,” says John Entsminger, general manager of the SNWA. “That’s how much grass we’ve taken out.”

Doug Kenney, director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment’s Western Water Policy Program, at the University of Colorado Law School, also gives Las Vegas water management high marks. “People like to cast a critical eye on Las Vegas regarding water use, but in general, it has shown a lot of leadership in municipal water conservation, and it has been one of the strongest voices calling for improved management of the river as a whole,” he says.

As for those Bellagio fountains, if you were ever mesmerized by the 500-foot geysers, you can assuage your guilt, knowing they’re fed from an old well once used to irrigate the golf course at the Dunes.

Still, more than 50 percent of Vegas’s green carpets remain. Entsminger admits the area has plenty of work left to do. “We’re proud of our conservation plan, but we’re not declaring victory,” he says.

That said, with just a 1.8 percent allotment, Nevada has the smallest entitlement of the seven states that share the river. The real issue, says Kenney, is “the fact that the Law of the River promises more water to seven states and Mexico than exists currently and is expected to ever exist.” He’s referring to a series of agreements, laws and court decisions made since the original Colorado Compact of 1922, which determined how much water would be allotted to each of the states.

Things would get a lot simpler if some serious rain could be counted on. There is a glimmer of hope in that regard, thanks to a possible return to El Niño conditions this coming winter. With above-average sea surface temperatures developing over much of the eastern tropical Pacific, the National Weather Service has indicated the potential for enhanced rainfall in parts of the West.

But even if next year turns out wet, that won’t be enough to fill those reservoirs. Dan Bunk, a senior hydrologist for the Bureau of Reclamation, says that would take an extremely wet period, like the one that occurred from 1982 to 1985. “If you were to simulate that four-year period in our models, you could fill the system back up in about four to five years. But you’re basically talking about repeating the highest four-year period on record,” Bunk says.

The chance of that happening is slim. Ault says we need only combine the long periods of aridity during the last few millennia with future climate models to understand we’re destined to face some serious droughts this century—thus increasing the need for water departments to tackle expensive, complex and time-consuming projects like Intake 3.

What’s more, Kenney points out that lowering intakes is just a coping strategy that doesn’t solve long-term water woes. “Make no mistake: If demands are allowed to continue exceeding supplies, then building a deeper straw only delays a day of reckoning. If a megadrought is on the horizon, then the money being spent by Las Vegas on the new intake is to buy time to find a solution; it’s not the solution itself.

Source: Newsweek. 

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Harper’s Findings: The Secrets of the Deep

by Gene Franks

When this month’s Harper’s came to my mailbox I did what I always do.  I went straight to the last page, where the “Findings” feature reports, usually in one-sentence summaries and without references, the important things we humans have found out during the past month.  This month’s issue (August 2014) was particularly rich in water-related discoveries.  Here are some:

A goldfish piloted a fish tank on wheels with its thoughts.

Octopuses possess  a chemical that prevents self-sucking, and can differentiate other octopuses’ severed tentacles from their own, which they rarely eat.

Piscivory was reported among spiders on all continents save Antarctica, as was numeracy among blind cavefish, who live under the Somali desert. (The fish cannot, however, distinguish between successive integers, expressed in sticks.)

Anxiety in crayfish was induced by French scientists using both electric shocks and injections of serotonin, then relieved with injections of benzodiazepine.

Sober zebrafish will follow the lead of a moderately drunk zebrafish and will speed up to keep pace; extremely drunk zebrafish will lag behind sober fish.

The windshield wiper fluid of some Arizona school buses was found to contain Legionnaires’ disease.

The ferrous metals from which hatcheries are built confuse the magnetic sense of young steelhead.

In the Marshall Islands, rising seas were carrying away Japan’s war dead.

Male Mientien tree frogs (Kurixulus idiootocus) use the concrete drainage ditches of  Taiwan to amplify their mating songs . . . .

Reference source:  Harper’s (August, 2014).

Why sewers got so costly, complicated

by Dan Horn

 Editor’s Note:  This description of how modern sewer systems operate should take the sting out of rising charges on your water bill. We really get a lot for our money.  We’ve cut off the final part of the article which consists of a chronology of the rising costs of Cincinnati sewerage costs. You can read the full article at Cincinnati.com.  I also took the liberty to add a couple of pictures to Mr. Horn’s article.–Hardly Waite.

Running a sewer system used to be so simple.

Connect a pipe to a building. Connect that pipe to a bigger pipe. Make sure it all flows downhill.

A federal court ruling here two weeks ago showed just how much that’s changed and how complicated the business of sewers has become in the 21st century.

The decision, which set rules for hiring contractors at Hamilton County’s sewer district, described an increasingly complex industry that now requires far more than gravity and a good pipe.

Anyone who washes dishes or flushes a toilet is paying for that new complexity through skyrocketing sewer rates. And anyone who cares about the health of the region’s rivers and streams is watching closely to see how the sewer district adapts to this complicated new world.

The Metropolitan Sewer District today is a sprawling, heavily regulated behemoth with almost 700 workers, 3,000 miles of sewers and a mandate to spend more than $3 billion on new construction.

Most city sewers are designed so that gravity alone carries wastewater to the treatment plants. However, sometimes low-lying areas like valley locations need pumping plants to push wastewater through pipes. A modern city often has to operate several pumping plants.

While the district is busy doing what it’s always done – digging trenches and burying pipe – it’s also immersed in environmental regulations, court orders, politics, labor conflicts and new “green” technology that powers buildings with methane captured from waste.

It’s a far cry from the 1950s and ’60s, when waste treatment was in its infancy and moving the stuff in the pipes from homes to the river was the main objective.

“It was a sleepy little utility,” said Hamilton County Administrator Christian Sigman. “Things are different now.”

So how did it get this way?

Like the sewer district itself, it’s complicated. But here are three big reasons:

Growth in suburbs means more waste

For most of the 20th century, Cincinnati ran its own sewer system, while a patchwork of smaller systems handled sanitary waste throughout Hamilton County. It was confusing and inefficient and sometimes, quite literally, smelly, but it worked well enough.

By the 1950s, though, the gradual outward push of Cincinnati’s population began. New homes started popping up in the suburbs, and local sewer systems quickly became inadequate. Something had to give. So in 1968, city and county officials cut a deal: The county would take charge of a regional sewer district, and the city would oversee day-to-day operations.

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati was born.

The arrangement made sense for both sides because the county needed a reliable, uniform system to encourage development, and the city had already signed contracts with smaller communities to handle their waste­water.

Geography played no small part, too. Because Cincinnati sits in a valley alongside the Ohio River, most of the waste from the suburbs was sure to find its way here eventually.

“Gravity knows no political boundaries,” Sigman said.

Other cities were doing the same thing. Some, like Cincinnati, focused mostly on their home county. Others, like Cleveland and Milwaukee, took a more regional approach and involved several counties.

“They evolved differently,” said Adam Krantz, managing director of government affairs for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. “There is no one-size-fits-all pattern.”

Although the structure of the new district made sense at the time, the deal planted the seeds of future problems. It didn’t matter in the 1960s that the city and county weren’t clear about who had final say on construction or hiring contractors. Everyone just did what needed to be done.

It would matter quite a lot when costs, regulations and legal problems began to escalate in the 1990s.

Public demands cleaner water, environment

The environmental movement of the 1970s changed the game for sewer districts across the country, and Hamilton County was no exception.

“What we used to do wasn’t adequate,” said Rob Richardson Jr., a market representative for the Laborers-Employers Cooperation Education Trust, which deals with contractors and workers who do sewer projects. “We had to stop the pollution. We had to fix the problem.”

Maintenance holes, often called man holes,  give city workers access to the sewers for periodic inspection and repairs. The city of Los Angeles’ wastewater collection system contains some 140,000 maintenance holes. 

The big problem here was “combined sewer overflows,” which occur when heavy rain overwhelms old sewer lines and causes storm and sanitary sewers to mix. The result was a nasty blend of raw sewage and stormwater flowing into creeks, the river and, in some cases, the basements of unhappy homeowners.

That might have been tolerated 100 years earlier. Not anymore. Not after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, approval of the Clean Water Act in 1972 and the rise of activist groups like the Sierra Club.

People expected more from the sewer district. So federal standards got tougher and treatment plants got better and more complicated. Technology improved and so did the expertise of wastewater engineers.

Still, the sewer district couldn’t keep up with the stricter rules or the decay of a system that was more than 150 years old in some stretches. By 2006, the district was under orders from a federal judge to clean up its overflows and repair its sewers at a cost of more than $3 billion.

Instead of managing a bunch of sewer pipes, then, the district found itself in charge of the largest construction project in county history. Before it’s over, the work will cost more than six times what it cost to build Paul Brown Stadium.

To make matters worse, federal money that once covered large portions of environmental-related work was drying up fast. The sewer district’s executive director, Tony Parrott, said that money might have covered as much as 70 percent of project costs 40 years ago. Today, it covers almost nothing.

“It’s a lot tougher now,” Parrott said. “We’re having to do it in an era when we don’t have any federal grant subsidy, so the true cost falls on the backs of ratepayers. It makes it tougher financially, and it makes it tougher politically.”

Rising sewer costs raise political stakes

The shortcomings of the original 1968 deal emerged in the 1990s and, even more, in the past decade as policymakers in the city and county grappled with the enormous sewer bill coming due.

Suddenly, disagreements couldn’t be resolved with a phone call or a handshake. Billions of dollars were at stake, and sewer bills were climbing fast. The average user now pays almost $800 a year in sewer rates.

“No one wants to see sewer rates go up,” Parrott said, “but it’s a Catch-22. You have to do it.”

Disputes between the city and county over how to manage the district’s expanding and expensive responsibilities landed them in court and halted work on projects for more than a year. The ruling two weeks ago tossed out a city plan, known as “responsible bidder,” that made training programs mandatory for contractors and, critics say, penalized nonunion companies.

The case was bigger than that, though. It also clarified the relationship between the city and county as it relates to the old 1968 agreement. The bottom line: The city runs the district, but the county is the boss.

The fight isn’t over, however, and the two sides are still trying to figure out how to work together. Just last month, county officials said lax project management by the city could lead to big cost overruns.

“It’s a slow-speed crash,” said Commissioner Greg Hartmann. “We can see the iceberg, but we’re still heading for it.”

In just four years, the city and county won’t have any choice. The 1968 agreement expires then, and policymakers will have to hash out a new deal.

Odds are good it will be more complicated than the first one.

Source: Cincinnati.com.

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Deadly Pig Virus Threatens Water Supplies

The New York Times reports that a deadly virus, porcine epidemic diarrhea, or PEDv, is estimated to have killed, on average, more than 100,000 piglets and young hogs each week since it first showed up in Iowa in May 2013, wreaking havoc on the pork industry and causing concerns for drinking water safety.

The fatality numbers are so staggering that environmentalists have grown worried about the effects of state laws requiring the burial of so many carcasses, and what that will do to the groundwater.

“We know there is a lot of mortality from this disease, and we’re seeing evidence of burial in areas with shallow groundwater that a lot of people rely on for drinking water and recreation,” said Kelly Foster, senior lawyer at the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group.

Waterkeeper wants to put a mass disposal plan into effect, and wants it to declare a state of emergency. On its website and YouTube, the organization has posted photos of dead piglets barely covered with earth and boxes overflowing with the bodies of young pigs, although it is unclear whether all were victims of the virus.

Arial Photo of Scarcely Buried Pigs

Precisely how many pigs have died from the virus, which causes acute diarrhea that is virtually 100 percent lethal for piglets two to three weeks old, is unknown. The Agriculture Department did not require reporting of the disease until June 5, and it does not collect data on how many pigs the virus has killed, instead referring the question to the hog industry — which does not like to talk about it.

Waterkeeper says that the sheer volume of dead animals poses an environmental threat.

“They’re very secretive about how many pigs have died in North Carolina, but we estimate that it’s about two million over the last year or so,” said Rick Dove, a retired Marine Corps lawyer who has taken aerial photos of pig farms for Waterkeeper’s North Carolina affiliate. “They can’t move those pigs off the farm because it will spread disease, so they’re being buried in ground along the coastal waterways where the groundwater level is high.”

State regulation requires the bodies to be buried at least two feet underground, which in many places means the dead pigs come into contact with groundwater, Mr. Dove said.

The virus does not infect humans. As the corpses decompose, however, they can become hosts for bacteria and other pathogens.

Each state has its own requirements for the disposal of carcasses. Iowa, one of the largest hog-producing states, has a set of disposal methods for use during emergency disease outbreaks. They range from burial and rendering to use of alkaline hydrolysis, a highly specialized process using chemicals and heat to break down tissues.

An Iowa State University publication describing various processes for disposing of carcasses during an epidemic estimated that it would take a pit six feet deep, 300 feet long and 10 feet wide to hold 2,100 pigs, and the pit would need to be covered with three to six feet of dirt in a site marked by GPS coordinates and regularly inspected.

North Carolina issued a warning to a pig operation for having an open burial pit on its property, Ms. Foster, the Waterkeeper lawyer, said. The organization brought the issue, which it documented with aerial photos of the farm, to the attention of the state agriculture department.

The North Carolina Farm Bureau contends that such photographs create unnecessary expenses for its members. “Third parties are making complaints to environmental regulators, and using aerial photography to document what they say are violations,” said Paul Sherman, director of the farm bureau’s air and energy programs. “The vast majority of those cases are unfounded, but farmers still have to deal with it, it eats up a good part of a day or two and often the same complaints come up multiple times.”

Reference:  The New York Times.

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One in 10 US beaches are dangerously polluted, report claims

Summer is the perfect time to relax on the beach — but it might be worth thinking twice before heading to some of the beaches included in the latest annual beach water report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Data included in the report shows that 10 percent of water samples collected at U.S. beaches failed federal safety standards, suggesting that swimming there might pose risks to public health.

Some of the beaches included in the list of contaminated waters are in the most popular tourist destinations, such as the Great Lakes region, making the news even more alarming.

The report revealed that the cleanest beaches were in Delaware, New Jersey and New Hampshire, which tied in top position, each recording a 3 percent failure rate. At the other end of the scale was Ohio, where 35 percent of samples fell short of safety benchmarks. Other states with relatively high failure rates were Alaska and Mississippi, at 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 3.5 million people each year fall ill with diseases caused by contact with polluted water. Most of these cases are caused by spilled raw sewage in beach areas, CNN reported. NRDC senior attorney Jon Devine explained that sanitary overflows and contaminated runoff can reach beaches even if they are located away from urban areas.

Source: WasteWater Processing.

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