Monthly Archive for June, 2011

California Coalition Seeks Suit Over Water Pollution

Published on 06/30/2011 in agriculture, clean water act, contaminated water, management, policy, rivers and wastewater. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Photo retrieved from: www.lakescientist.com

“The district, located in San Joaquin Valley, receives an estimated five inches of rain per year, according to the Columbia University blog State of the Planet. Such little rainfall would not be adequate to transport noxious levels of selenium, boron, and chromium, which are found naturally in the soil.

However, the agricultural runoff caused from pumping more than one million acre-feet of water annually for irrigation carries high levels of the chemicals into the San Joaquin River and its secondary waterways.

In limited doses, the three chemicals are beneficial. For example, boron aids in construction of sturdy bones and muscles. The highest level of boron human adults can ingest without negative effects is 20 mg, according to Medline Plus. Higher dosages can cause impotency headaches, tremors, and diarrhea.

High levels of the chemicals have had an adverse effect on animals as well. During the 1970s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began receiving reports of deceased and malformed birds and fish. In 1983, birds at the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge perished in droves due to selenium poisoning, according to the Napa Valley Register.”

Read more: Lake Scientist

 

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House Fast-Tracks Bill to Limit EPA Power Over Mountaintop Coal Removal

Published on 06/30/2011 in aquatic ecosystems, clean water act, mining and policy. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Photo retrieved from: www.thesietch.org

“WASHINGTON—Conservationists knew that new GOP anti-regulatory muscle in the 112th Congress would be intent on debilitating landmark legislation such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

But they’re still taken aback by an attempt to incapacitate the latter in one fell swoop.

Next week, the full House is expected to vote on a fast-moving bipartisan bill that would elbow the federal government aside and elevate the power of state-level rules covering mountaintop-removal mining, waterways and wetlands. Even if it passes, however, the bill isn’t expected to gain traction in the Senate.

Reps. Nick Rahall, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia where mining is king, and John Mica, a Republican from Florida where water pollution standards are less than well-defined, are swiftly shepherding the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011 (H.R. 2018) through their chamber.”

Read more: Reuters

 

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Lake Erie Water-Use Bill Deserves A Veto

Published on 06/30/2011 in bottled water, groundwater, lakes, policy, privatization and tap water. 0 Comments Tags: .

Photo retrieved from: www.cleveland.com

“The legislation — pushed by Cleveland-area State Sen. Tim Grendell, of Chesterland, and by a Northwest Ohio lawmaker who heads a bottling company — would discard current safeguards and let any business withdraw up to 5 million gallons of water a day from Lake Erie and up to 2 million gallons daily from inland rivers and groundwater aquifers without any permits or other restrictions.

That’s purely irresponsible and a grave threat to the region’s prime asset, jeopardizing the drinking water of more than 3 million people and a $10 billion-a-year tourism industry.

It also violates the spirit and possibly the letter of the binding 2008 Great Lakes Compact – a bipartisan pact to protect the world’s largest freshwater lake system that was signed by all eight Great Lakes states and two Canadian provinces, ratified by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush.”

Read more: Cleveland.com

 

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Water wars: 21st century conflicts?

Published on 06/29/2011 in climate change, displacement of people, drought, floods, hydrology, peak water, policy, rivers, tap water, water rights, water wars and world water supply. 0 Comments

Photo retrieved from: www.treehugger.com

“Water scarcity is an issue exacerbated by demographic pressures, climate change and pollution,” said Ignacio Saiz, director of Centre for Economic and Social Rights, a social justice group. “The world’s water supplies should guarantee every member of the population to cover their personal and domestic needs.”

“Fundamentally, these are issues of poverty and inequality, man-made problems,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Of all the water on earth, 97 per cent is salt water and the remaining three per cent is fresh, with less than one per cent of the planet’s drinkable water readily accessible for direct human uses. Scarcity is defined as each person in an area having access to less than 1,000 cubic meters of water a year.

The areas where water scarcity is the biggest problem are some of the same places where political conflicts are rife, leading to potentially explosive situations.

Some experts believe the only documented case of a “water war” happened about 4,500 years ago, when the city-states of Lagash and Umma went to war in the Tigris-Euphrates basin.”

Read more: Aljazeera

 

 

 

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Ga. Claims ‘Total Victory’ In Tri-State Water War

Published on 06/29/2011 in lakes, policy, tap water and water wars. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Photo retrieved from: tinapeacock.files.wordpress.com

“ATLANTA — Georgia is claiming “total victory” in the fight to keep Lake Lanier as metro Atlanta’s primary source for water.

A federal appeals panel on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling and said the 3 million people around metro Atlanta can continue to draw water from Lanier.

In 2009, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson ruled that Lanier was never meant to be metro Atlanta’s prime source of water and ordered Georgia, Florida and Alabama to hammer out some kind of mutual water-sharing agreement by July 2012, or water withdrawals from Lanier must be reduced to 1970′s levels, something metro Atlanta leaders saw as potentially catastrophic for the region.”

“This is a great victory, a total victory for the state of Georgia,” said Gov. Nathan Deal’s spokesman Brian Robinson. “We had a gun pointed to our head with the Magnuson ruling. That’s been removed. This is a common sense ruling, which is why Georgia was saying all along that Lake Lanier was built for water use. It just makes sense.”

Read more: wsbtv.com

 

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Water Desalination Plant Opens For Testing In Beckton, London

Published on 06/29/2011 in contaminated water, desalination, rivers, tap water and water technology. 0 Comments Tags: .

Photo retrieved from: www.guardian.co.uk

“Polluted water from the river Thames is being cleaned and put into London‘s water supply in Britain’s first large-scale attempt to artificially increase supplies using desalination.

The £270m Thames Gateway water treatment works in Beckton, east London, was commissioned last year but has only been fully tested in the last few weeks.

The 875m litres produced so far is said to be so clean it has to be treated with salts and other chemicals to make it taste roughly the same as tap water.

“We’ve been running the desalination plant intermittently at one-sixth output – not because we’ve needed to but rather as part of the testing of the works and the training of its personnel. It’s there if we need it,” said Simon Evans of Thames Water.

The technology, which is mostly used in water-stressed areas of the Middle East, was brought to London after Thames Water argued in a 2006 public inquiry that new sources were needed, with climate change threatening hotter, drier summers and an additional 700,000 people predicted to move to the capital by 2021.”

Read more: Guardian

 

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EPA Defends Its Study Of Fracking

Published on 06/29/2011 in contaminated water, fracking, groundwater, hydrology, natural gas drilling, policy and water technology. 0 Comments Tags: .

Photo retrieved from: www.epa.gov

“Energy Department task force studying natural gas drilling on a much shorter time frame, said Tuesday that the EPA is taking too long.

The “time scale is inconsistent with the public concern” about fracturing, Deutch said, during a daylong task force meeting.

A New York state draft of its ongoing review of hydraulic fracturing is expected soon.

EPA officials said they were examining ways to speed up the process, but they insisted that it would be impossible to more quickly wrap up such a detailed study.

“We are looking at how to, wherever possible, do things in parallel rather than sequentially to accelerate any time frame we can,” said Paul Anastas, EPA’s assistant administrator for research and development. Data and updates on the study will also be provided periodically during the next few years, Anastas added.

Oil and gas industry leaders separately have criticized the wide reach of the EPA study, which has been designed to evaluate the full lifespan of water in hydraulic fracturing — from its first injection to its mixture with chemicals and the management of fluids that are produced from wells. The study responds to swelling public fears that drinking water supplies can be contaminated by natural gas migrating from poorly secured wells or improperly disposed wastewater produced at the sites.”

Read more: Times Union

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Missouri River Flood Water Threatens Nebraska Nuclear Power Plants

Published on 06/29/2011 in floods, management, nuclear power and rivers. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Photo retrieved from: www.kcrg.com

“The rising Missouri River flood water continues to threaten the two power plants in Nebraska. To assess the situation, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko visited the Fort Calhoun plant on Monday morning.

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The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Station, located 20 miles north of Omaha, is one of the two nuclear plants in the state being monitored by the NRC because of the threats of inundation from the Missouri River.

The Fort Calhoun plant has been closed since April for refueling. Its parking lot is flooded, plant employees need to walk on a catwalk to reach the facility. An inflatable water-filled barrier that surrounds the plant was punctured by machinery on Sunday, but the plant operators assured residents that key areas of the facility are not in danger of submersion.

However, plant employees briefly switched to diesel backup generators to keep the nuclear fuel at the site cool because the flood water got too close to electrical transformers.

Read more: All Headline News

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800 Somali Kids Arrive In Kenyan Camps Daily

Published on 06/28/2011 in drought and water shortage. 0 Comments Tags: .

Photo retrieved from: www.middle-east-online.com

“An international aid group says over 800 Somali children arrive at Kenyan refugee camps each day to escape their country’s devastating drought.

Save the Children says that the children are part of the nearly 1,300 people who come each day to the overcrowded Dadaab refugee camps in northeastern Kenya.

The group said Tuesday that some families walk through sand and searing heat for more than a month looking for food, water and shelter.

The U.N. refugee agency says 20,000 Somalis have arrived in Kenya over the past two weeks alone, a sharp increase from last year when some 6,000 to 8,000 Somalis were arriving in Kenya each month.

Save the Children says the children arrive from Somalia exhausted, malnourished and severely dehydrated.”

Read more: Jakarta Post

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Agra plan to clean filthy Yamuna

Published on 06/28/2011 in contaminated water, management and solutions and outreach. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

“Uttar Pradesh officials have devised a novel method to clean up the highly-polluted Yamuna river: excavate 10 ponds to store waste water that was hitherto flowing into the river from 19 drains, treat this and then use it to create clusters of greenery along the river.

“This project envisages a series of 10 ponds along the river to store drain water for treatment. The plan will not only recharge underground reserves but help our greening efforts in a big way, plus of course prevent polluted water from flowing into the river directly,” District Forest Officer N.K. Janoo said.

“Around 30 million litres of water from the 19 drains will be treated every single day. Dirty water will be flushed into ponds using gravitational force. The size of the ponds will vary, according to the capacity and catchment area of each drain.

“The patches for the massive sapling plantation programme, along the river front in the city, have been identified, Janoo added. In the first phase of the project, about 2.5 km area from Hathi Ghat to the Lal Ghat area of the city will be used as pond and plantation sites.

“The plan has received general approval from the state government. Details have to be filled in, for which a series of surveys and strategising excercises are being conducted with the cooperation of related government bodies and NGOs.”

Read more: ndtv

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