Urban Water Thread

[M II A II R II K]

Texas Slow To Prepare For Future Water Needs


Read More: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...728666&ft=1&f=

On paper, at least, Texas is well-prepared to meet the water needs of its rapidly expanding population — even when Mother Nature lays down a harsh and lengthy drought. The price tag on the plan: $53 billion. State money allocated: $1.4 billion. If there were funds, Texas would be able to build the dams, reservoirs, pipelines, wells and other infrastructure that would ideally avoid tight water-use restrictions imposed on residents, farmers and ranchers during times of drought while also guaranteeing there would be enough water for the state's rapidly growing population — even in 2060.

- Instead, now, more than four years after the latest blueprint was published, deadlines have passed with some work barely begun, and many projects never started. Meanwhile, lakes are shrinking, rivers are drying up and temperatures are rising. "The longer you delay implementation, the costs are going to go up," said Carolyn Brittin, a planning official at the Texas Water Development Board, which must publish a revised plan by January.

- Three years of dry winters that started in 2008 left populous Southern California and the agriculturally rich Central Valley desperate. Officials could not deliver more than 50 percent of the water needed by cities and farmers. In the Midwest, water levels since the 1990s have dropped at times on Lakes Huron and Michigan, causing millions of dollars in losses. The arid Southwest has struggled for decades. In Texas, which is experiencing one of its most severe droughts on record, officials know exactly what to do to guarantee water for future generations — in fact, Texas spends $16 million every five years to plan ahead.

- The West Texas town of Robert Lee has struggled with water issues for so long it was unprepared for the current drought. Now, town officials are tapping private loans in a rush to build a $1.5 million pipeline to draw water from nearby Bronte, said Eddie Ray Roberts, the city's water superintendent. "It surprised me that they let it get this bad. It's a funding issue," Roberts said, explaining that the state won't give communities money until January, when it flows in from Washington.

- The region that includes Dallas and Fort Worth, for example, had 59 major projects recommended at a cost of more than $13 billion to provide water to a population that is expected to nearly double by 2060. Of those projects, 16 are in various stages of planning or completion, Hardin said. And the agency only knows about projects it funds, making it more difficult to track.

- Water projects, especially reservoirs, have always been expensive. It cost $30 million in the mid-1960s — or what would be $227 million now — to create Lake Meredith in the Texas Panhandle. Today, the cost of a large reservoir could exceed $500 million. But sometimes other factors, including stringent environmental regulations and bureaucracy, can stymie a project. In North Texas, the Lower Boisd'arc Reservoir project has half the land it needs. Planners hope to have the lake operational by 2020. But the permitting and legal obstacles could delay it.

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[Matthew]

I think a city to watch for future fast growth in the southeast United States is Winston-Salem. It's a clean and beautiful city with two lakes and a river. It also has short commutes, plans its growth in the city and suburbs to reduce ugly sprawl, has no beltways/loops, has won several best cities to live-work-play awards and has several excellent historic neighborhoods. Winston-Salem has enough water for a city several times larger and made several smart decisions to add to its water supply during the 1950s and 1960s. During the droughts of the last ten years, Winston-Salem was the only city in North Carolina without any water restrictions. Winston-Salem was also selling water to neighboring cities to help fund economic development projects. It's worth noting Winston-Salem has never used its largest water supply (W. Kerr Scott Dam and Reservoir). Winston-Salem also recently updated its water plants to supply enough water for a city three or four times larger. It's ready for fast and large scale growth in a time when water is moving to the top of site selectors lists. I'm actually surprised Winston-Salem isn't growing faster.

[M II A II R II K]

Dust bowl looms if US Southwest drought plans fail


Read More: http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ef=online-news

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Climate models indicate that the Southwest will get drier in the coming decades, threatening water supplies already under pressure from a growing population and ageing infrastructure. The most alarming projections come from a team led by Richard Seager of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. They ran 19 climate simulations, averaged out across the entire Southwest, and came to a stark conclusion: that conditions matching the 1930s Dust Bowl and the multi-year droughts of the 1950s "will become the new climatology of the American Southwest" within decades.

- Water infrastructure can be overhauled, and this is what some states - Texas included - are planning. But their proposals mostly do not allow for what climate change may bring. The latest draft of the Texas State Water Plan, for instance, assumes that between now and 2060 the most severe drought it will face will match the worst on record, from 1950 to 1956. Texan officials argue that climate models do not give sufficiently reliable projections, at the level of individual river basins, to warrant planning for even more severe droughts. "I really can't adapt the planning assumptions," says Carolyn Brittin of the Texas Water Development Board.

- Nevertheless, some water resource managers are prepared to take climate change into account. The most ambitious such project is being run by the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal government body which manages dams and reservoirs across the region. Its Colorado River Basin Water Supply & Demand Study is considering 112 different climate "futures" for a watershed that supplies some 30 million people across seven states. On average, these scenarios suggest that total water flow into the upper Colorado basin will fall by about 9 per cent between now and 2060.

- In Colorado, Denver Water, which supplies about a quarter of the state's population, has used tree-ring records and downscaled climate models to build up a picture of possible future flows in rivers and streams in its catchment area. The tree-ring work shows that natural climate variability is likely to throw up worse droughts than those experienced since European settlement. Assuming warming of about 2.75 °C by 2050, the models also suggest there will be a water supply shortfall of 15 to 20 per cent, even if precipitation does not decline.

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[M II A II R II K]

There Doesn’t Have To Be A Water Crisis


Read More: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678729/t...a-water-crisis

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According to a report appearing in the peer-reviewed journal, Water International, we have more than enough to sustainably double food production in the coming decades. Yet we may still be running out of it. Why? The "sleeping giant" of water challenges is not scarcity, argues scientists from the agricultural research group CGIAR's Challenge Program on Water and Food, who spent five years gathering data from 30 countries for the study, but the inefficient and inequitable distribution of water from key rivers such as the Nile, Ganges, Andes, Yellow, Niger, and Volta. "Yes, there is scarcity in certain areas, but our findings show that the problem overall is a failure to make efficient and fair use of the water available in these river basins," says Alain Vidal, director of CGIAR's water and food program in a statement. "This is ultimately a political challenge, not a resource concern."

- Modest improvements could increase food production two to three times above today's yields. In Asia and Latin America, production is more than 10 percent below its potential. In the Indus and Ganges river basins of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, and Bangladesh, about one quarter of fields are only producing half of what they could sustainably yield. The key is looking to smart management of rain-fed agriculture, not withdrawals from rivers and dropping aquifers, to meet agricultural needs. A second approach is the basin-wide management of water resources--for food, fisheries, livestock, and human use--rather than the "complete fragmentation" of the systems that researchers observed in many places. The study, available here, finds river basins with "dead spots" for agriculture development and points to "bright spots" of water efficiency in places like the Ganges, Nile, and Yellow River basins, where farmers and governments have responded to development challenges by vastly improving the amount of food production for a given amount of water.

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[M II A II R II K]

The energy, and expense, of bringing water to the Southland


Read More: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...835,full.story

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The Julian Hinds Pumping Plant is one of the hydraulic hearts of California's vast water supply system, built early in the last century to push water from where it is to where it isn't, no matter how many hundreds of miles of desert, mountains and valleys are in the way. Defying geography on such a grand scale takes energy. A lot of it. It's also expensive. And it's going to become more so, driving up Southern California water rates and forcing the region to consider more mundane sources closer to home.

- The volume of water propelled uphill on one recent day at Hinds weighed the equivalent of more than four World Trade Center towers and required six 12,500-horsepower motors driven by electricity, much of it from Hoover and Parker dams on the Colorado. But the federal contract that allocates more than a quarter of Hoover Dam's hydro-generation to the MWD expires in 2017. The water agency expects to lose 5% of its Hoover electricity under a new pact that will accommodate additional customers by trimming sales to longtime users.

- The twin forces of energy prices and climate-change regulations are threatening Southern California's long love affair with imported water, increasing the allure of local sources such as groundwater, rain and recycled supplies. "It will further encourage retail water suppliers to use less imported water," said Edward Osann, a former federal water official who is a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's that simple." The 242-mile-long Colorado River Aqueduct is a monument to 20th century grandiosity, when Southern California's power brokers thought nothing of rearranging nature to serve their urban ambitions.

- No one expects Southern California to stop importing water. But energy pressures, combined with environmental problems that are undermining the long-term reliability of imports, are reshaping policies. The California Energy Commission is promoting water conservation and more efficient appliances to save electricity and cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions. "If you save water, especially in certain parts of California where you're really dependent on imported water resources, that actually has a benefit to the energy sector as well," said Lorraine White, a senior specialist with the commission.

- Officials in Los Angeles, which gets about half its supplies from the MWD, have calculated that it takes more than twice the power to ship water from Northern California than to recycle local wastewater with a sophisticated treatment process. Jim McDaniels, senior assistant general manager of the L.A. Department of Water and Power, said the agency is scrutinizing the cost and associated carbon production of imported water versus local sources, including storm-water capture and cleaning up contaminated groundwater in the San Fernando Valley. The city's strategic water plan calls for conservation and recycling to meet new demand, not more imports.

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[M II A II R II K]

U.S. EPA approves new water quality standards for Chicago River System


Read More: http://eponline.com/articles/2011/11...er-system.aspx

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved the State of Illinois' new and revised water quality standards for five segments of the Chicago and Calumet Rivers. "In May of this year, US EPA notified the State of Illinois that upgraded water quality standards were necessary to protect the health and safety of the increasing number of people who use these rivers for recreation," said EPA Regional Administrator Susan Hedman. "We are pleased that Illinois acted quickly to adopt new standards, which will help to further the transformation of the Chicago river system from sewage canal to valuable recreational and economic asset." "Illinois' rivers and lakes are some of our most important natural resources, and families should be able to enjoy activities like boating, fishing and swimming," said Governor Pat Quinn. "I am pleased that portions of the Chicago and Calumet Rivers will now be more available to people for recreational use, and we are committed to continuing our work to make Illinois' waterways clean and safe for the public."

"Chicago is a world-class city that deserves a world-class river," said U.S. Senator Dick Durbin. "I am glad that the EPA's notification earlier this year was met with swift action by state and local officials. By raising water quality standards, we can improve the waterways in and around Chicago and make them more accessible for future generations." "The city of Chicago should have a safe, clean river that can be enjoyed by residents and tourists alike," said U.S. Senator Mark Kirk. "These revised water quality standards are a step in the right direction for making the Chicago River as healthy as any in America. I applaud our state and local officials who acted upon the EPA's May notification." "The Chicago River has been polluted for far too long," said Attorney General Lisa Madigan. "These new standards will clean it so that it can be a vital natural resource enjoyed by people throughout the Chicago area."

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[M II A II R II K]

What Rainy Cities Can Teach (And Learn) About Stormwater


Read More: http://earthfix.opb.org/communities/...-about-stormw/

PDF Report: http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/...toriversII.pdf

A report released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council highlights strategies Portland and Seattle are using to divert rainwater from sewers as a model for new federal standards. Instead of sending rainwater into the sewer system where it could eventually pollute waterways, the group advocates redirecting it into living plants on eco-roofs, in people’s yards or along roadways.

NRDC did 14 case studies to illustrate six ways cities can develop more of this “green” infrastructure to manage stormwater and encourage residents to do the same. According to the report, “Rooftops to Rivers II,” Philadelphia takes the cake for employing all six strategies. Portland has nailed down five of the six, and Seattle is doing three of them.

Here’s a look at the cities that stand out when it comes to:

• Dedicating a portion of sewer and stormwater fees to developing green infrastructure. (Portland and Seattle)

• Requiring developers to consider installing green infrastructure first instead of concrete or other pollution and storm-water controls. (Portland)

• Requiring new developments to capture and treat a large portion of runoff on site, which is an incentive to consider letting nature do the work. (Portland)

• Providing incentives for private property owners to plant trees, install ecoroofs, or reduce pavement. (Portland and Seattle)

• Offering do-it-yourself guidance for creating green infrastructure at home. (Portland and Seattle)

• Having a comprehensive plan for installing green infrastructure citywide. (Philadelphia only)

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[zilfondel]

^ Rain harvesting systems are also great. Just direct roof water through a filter, collect in tanks, and there you go - free water. Works best in suburban homes as they have more roof area.

[Centropolis]

The midwest also works great, I guess it's not cool.

[jodelli]

The Detroit River just got a little cleaner:

Retention basin keeping river cleaner


By Craig Pearson, The Windsor Star November 17, 2011

Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/Retention...#ixzz1eEkPiJMF


Windsor's new $67-million stormwater retention treatment basin opened this week and with it a rejuvenated riverfront, complete with a beach.

The massive environmental project, which began in December 2009, sits mostly underground - designed to retain most of the 1.8 million cubic metres of overflow sewage water that would otherwise flow annually into the Detroit River.

"There are only a handful of these facilities," Sergio Mannina, the city's pump-station supervisor, said Wednesday. "It's a state-of-the-art retention treatment facility."

In the underground control room, a touch-screen displays a digital version of the basin. The facility is controlled automatically by computers at the Lou Romano Water Reclamation Plant, which cost $120 million to upgrade in 2008 at its site by the Ojibway Parkway.

The new riverfront basin is sectioned into 12 compartments, and is roughly the size of a two-storey-high football field. It measures 60 by 40 metres, with an average depth of five metres and, with the tunnels that lead to it, can hold 14,400 cubic metres of water.

It required 7,000 cubic metres of poured concrete to build.

It opened Monday and promptly dealt with overflow stormwater. The basin did not fill higher than a metre.

Officials estimate the facility will capture between 90 and 93 per cent of the dirty water that used to flow into the river from between Caron Avenue and Pillette Road - though the Detroit side will still allow storm water into the international waterway.

Riverfront strollers may have to get used to a slight sewage odour escaping through vents above the basin during storms, though even if the huge containers filled to the top, it would take no more than eight hours to pump them out for treatment.

But park users will not see the mechanics of the retention treatment basin. They will see the sprucing up on top, which includes a parking lot, plantcovered "live roofs" over the basin, new lights to match the ones around the Riverfront Bistro, and a lookout over the Detroit River, complete with benches and a decorative pergola.

To the east, the mountain of dirt that sat for two years in what was then a construction storage yard has been spread out across the newly graded slope.

Some 17,000 metric tonnes of rock have been placed on the shoreline, creating new fish habitats. A new path snakes its way along the shoreline. And the piece de resistance: a new rock beach that has wheelchair access to a concrete pad at the front, creating an urban oasis with the Detroit skyline as a backdrop.

"It's going to look great when it's all landscaped next spring," project administrator Jake Renaud said. "I think people will be pleased."
© Copyright (c) The Windsor Star

[M II A II R II K]

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lq5yy0pYoQ" target="_blank">Video Link

[M II A II R II K]

The Windy City will, at last, clean up its filthy river


Nov 26th 2011

Read More: http://www.economist.com/node/21540279

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Until recently the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD)—the agency responsible for dealing with the city’s sewage and storm water—had always insisted that the river was little more than a series of canals for shipping and drainage of storm water and municipal effluent. The previous head of the MWRD fought long and hard against tough and expensive water-quality standards. Most memorably, he once argued that if the water were made cleaner, accidental drownings would increase. In the end sense prevailed and Chicago will finally lose the unwelcome distinction of being the only big American city that fails to disinfect its sewage. The MWRD, one of the world’s largest wastewater treatment agencies, with a budget of around $1 billion, has agreed to clean up. Disinfection technology could cost it $250m to build and run over 20 years.

- For many this is a turning-point for a river that has been gradually clawing its way back to life. The timing is no accident. The river is increasingly seen as an environmental and economic resource. A decade of investment has set the scene for demands to improve water quality. Downtown, a new riverside walk brings tourists and allows office workers to stretch their legs. New waterfront restaurants, and developments such as Chicago’s Trump Tower, have been popping up. David Spielfogel, head of policy for the mayor, says that the city already has a spectacular front yard for tourism and recreation in the form of Lake Michigan, and now wants the same thing along its river. The city plans to get more people to use the river by building boathouses. But in the longer term water quality must improve enough for swimming. Debra Shore, a commissioner at the MWRD, says disinfection is one of a host of expected new water-quality measures.

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[M II A II R II K]

How The "Internet Of Things" Is Turning Cities Into Living Organisms


By Christopher Mims

Read More: http://www.fastcompany.com/biomimicr...into-organisms

With a little help from what's called the Internet of Things, engineers are transforming cities from passive conduits for water into dynamic systems that store and manage it like the tissues of desert animals. By using the Internet to connect real-world sensors and control mechanisms to cloud-based control systems that can pull in streams from any other data source, including weather reports, these efforts enable conservation and money-saving measures that would have been impossible without this virtual nervous system. Marcus Quigley, principal water engineer at the infrastructure engineering firm Geosyntec, has been tackling this problem using hardware from Internet of Things company ioBridge, whose Internet-connected sensors have been used in everything from location-aware home automation to tide gauges that tweet.

- It may sound like a trivial problem, but the EPA estimates that the U.S. has $13 billion invested in wastewater infrastructure alone. More importantly, the majority of America's largest cities--more than 700 in all--dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains, because their sewer and stormwater systems were designed a century ago. These overwhelmed cities include New York City, Detroit, Boston, Portland, St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, many other cities, mostly in the Rust Belt and New England. With the notable exception of Los Angeles, almost every major urban center in the U.S. is in need of a way to soak up rainstorms rather than dump them straight down the drain in a desperate attempt to prevent flooding.

- "The conventional way to build a city is you build what you want, and then you get rid of water as quickly as possible," says Quigley. Historically, that's meant massive projects to redirect all the water sluicing down impermeable streets and concrete and into the Moria-like recesses of a city's sewer system. Green infrastructure tries to control runoff on-site, rather than sending it below, through the use of "bioretention cells" and rain gardens, which absorb and filter the water into collections of plants and artificial wetlands. High-performance green infrastructure takes things a step further, by anticipating demand for water storage and preparing a system accordingly. For example, in seven projects deployed in St. Louis and one in New Bern, North Carolina, Geosyntec integrated a building's rainwater catchment system with software that uses weather predictions from the Internet to know when a basin should be partly emptied to accommodate incoming stormwater.

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[M II A II R II K]

As ‘Yuck Factor’ Subsides, Treated Wastewater Flows From Taps


February 9, 2012

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/sc...king.html?_r=1

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A new report from the National Academy of Sciences said that if coastal communities used advanced treatment procedures on the effluent that is now sent out to sea, it could increase the amount of municipal water available by as much as 27 percent. San Diego’s success, 12 years after its City Council recoiled from the toilet-to-tap concept, offers a blueprint for other districts considering wastewater reuse.

- For most of the four decades beginning in 1970, the arid West was the fastest-growing region in the country; the population of Nevada quintupled in that period while Arizona’s nearly quadrupled. Continued population growth, unmatched by growth in water storage capacity, makes this a “new era in water management in the United States,” the science group’s report said. “The pressures on water supplies are changing virtually every aspect of municipal, industrial, and agricultural water practice,” it said.

- Funneling reclaimed water into water supplies is being considered in a variety of communities like Miami and Denver (which has experimented with the technology), as well as in drought-ravaged municipalities in Texas like Big Spring. The tiny mountain resort town of Cloudcroft, N.M., mingles reclaimed water with local well water. In Northern Virginia, reclaimed water has flowed into the Occoquan Reservoir for three decades. Still, just one-tenth of 1 percent of municipal wastewater nationally was recycled into local supplies in 2010. Only a handful of systems replenish their reservoirs or groundwater basins with treated wastewater.

- Funneling reclaimed water into water supplies is being considered in a variety of communities like Miami and Denver (which has experimented with the technology), as well as in drought-ravaged municipalities in Texas like Big Spring. The tiny mountain resort town of Cloudcroft, N.M., mingles reclaimed water with local well water. In Northern Virginia, reclaimed water has flowed into the Occoquan Reservoir for three decades. Still, just one-tenth of 1 percent of municipal wastewater nationally was recycled into local supplies in 2010. Only a handful of systems replenish their reservoirs or groundwater basins with treated wastewater.

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[M II A II R II K]

Managing a Water System with Savvy — and Verve


Feb 19 2012

By Neal Peirce

Read More: http://citiwire.net/post/3231/

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The consequences are extreme: untreated discharge flows directly into the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, upstream from the imperiled Chesapeake Bay. Hawkins is under a $2.6 billion federal consent decree to curb the outflow. The first part of the fix will be a construction engineer’s dream — a massive cement tunnel, 23 feet in diameter, dug by a machine the size of a football field. Constructed over 100 feet under the surface (deeper than the D.C. Metro system), it will run 13 miles from Northeast Washington to DC Water’s Blue Plains treatment plant at the southernmost tip of the District

- The tunnel itself will be a huge reserve container for the tainted stormwater. But at Blue Plains, the water will be intercepted by a 16-story deep treatment and storage structure with concrete walls able to resist the rushing torrent force during a storm — and then, gradually straining out the refuse, push the vast volume up to the surface for treatment. Hawkins boasts about that project. But he questions whether a similar “big pipe” would work best to carry stormwater to Blue Plains from Washington’s Northwest Rock Creek and Potomac River sides.

- The essence of Hawkins’ green plan: absorb the water in place. That means an array of projects — green roofs, bioswales along the streets, grassy alleys, porous pavement for parking lots and the streets themselves. The idea isn’t altogether original: It’s being proposed in Philadelphia, itself under federal pressure to stop sending untreated sewage into local rivers and streams. The idea — to let rainwater seep back into the ground, rather than gush into aged sewer systems to be mixed with raw garbage.

- Jobs would figure, too — gauging the slots, many for lower-skilled workers, in constructing and maintaining the new green infrastructure, lessening government spending for unemployment and welfare rolls. And then there’d be comparison with the $1 billion the tunnel would have cost, and perhaps underwrite a $200 million trust fund for long-term green maintenance, jobs included. And deciding, if the green steps fall a few points behind a tunnel collection of storm water, if the difference is significant.

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[M II A II R II K]

New York Plans Faster Sewage Alerts


February 16, 2012

By MIREYA NAVARRO

Read More: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/...sewage-alerts/

A rainstorm in New York City usually means raw sewage will reach surrounding waterways like rivers and creeks. When sewer and storm water carried by the same pipes overwhelm the city’s treatment plants during storms, the sewer system discharges a mix of wastewater and storm water — called a combined sewer overflow – into waterways from 423 outfall locations.

Now, officials with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection plan a pilot program in which they will install remote sensors at five of those outfalls this year to monitor sewer overflows and water quality. The sensors, which will measure the rate and direction of flow, should give the department a picture in real time of any developing emergencies and enable it to alert the public quickly. “These new sensors should give us that critical information so that we can better quantify the environmental impact and inform the public as soon as they happen,” the city’s environmental commissioner, Carter Strickland, said in a written statement.

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[M II A II R II K]

Atlanta’s Water War Is First in a Gathering Flood


Mar 20, 2012

By Peter Orszag

Read More: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...ing-flood.html

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Atlanta developed as a railroad hub. Since railroads tended to be built on ridges, the city wound up at a place where several ridges intersected, “on the drainage divide between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico,” according to the U.S. Geological Survey. As a result, it is the largest city in the U.S. that is not near a major body of water.

- Forty miles northeast, however, lies Lake Lanier, created in the 1950s when the Army Corps of Engineers built the Buford Dam. As chronicled in “The Big Thirst,” by Charles Fishman, Atlanta refused to finance the dam -- partly because, at the time, it wasn’t clear the city would ever need water from Lake Lanier. As Atlanta grew, its need for water from the lake became increasingly obvious. In 1989, the Corps of Engineers recommended that 20 percent of the water used for hydropower be diverted to Atlanta’s water supply. And therein began a war known as the tri-state water dispute.

- Alabama and Florida filed suit against Georgia and the Corps in 1990, arguing that diverting water to Atlanta was environmentally harmful and economically problematic, and that in any case it required congressional approval. As Alyssa Lathrop chronicles in an article in the Florida State University Law Review, the three states tried throughout the 1990s to reach an agreement, but their efforts finally collapsed in 2003. In 2009, a U.S. district judge ruled in favor of Alabama and Florida. He gave Atlanta a three-year grace period during which it could continue to draw water from Lake Lanier -- but ordered that by July of this year, it could no longer do so unless Georgia reached an agreement with the other two states. Atlanta currently obtains about three-quarters of its water from Lanier and has no plausible alternative source, so the judge’s order set the clock for a crisis.

- Our aging water pipes are another challenge. The U.S. has roughly 700,000 miles of these pipes, and most are more than 60 years old. Substantial investment is needed to fix or replace them. Keep in mind that pipes account for about 70 percent of the cost of a water system. So what can we do to preserve our access to fresh drinking water? One major need, as I have written about previously, is to address the pricing problem. The typical American uses 100 gallons of water per day, but in most places, prices aren’t adequately adjusted to usage. Prices that reflected usage would not only raise more money for addressing emerging water issues but also help raise everyone’s awareness of them. Today’s low interest rates offer an ideal situation in which to finance investment in new or replacement pipes. We also need to invest in new technology -- from desalination to strategies for water reuse. In future columns, I will explore ways to better price water -- and also discuss the global dimensions of water problems.

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[M II A II R II K]

Germany's careful toilet-flushing is a drop in the water-conservation ocean


18 April 2012

By Hanna Gersmann

Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...r-conservation

While Britain frets about the drought, Germany can't get enough of saving water. Germans are good at saving water, so good in fact that they have created a problem for their canalisation system: many pipes are clogged with grease, excrement and leftovers because they aren't being flushed sufficiently with water. Especially in the summer, gutters in German cities can reek horribly. In some parts of the country, water suppliers even have to flush their pipes artificially with hundreds of thousands of litres of water.

- We Germans have always been keen to be best in class when it comes to saving water. Our toilets have a special water-saver button for flushing after you have a wee, we switch off the tap when we brush our teeth, we try hard not to splash too much when we wash our cars. Last year Germany only used 124 litres of water per head per day – down from 144 litres in 1991. In Britain the current figure is 150 litres. That might be very impressive on Germany's part, and shaming on Britain. But the real question is whether small gestures like that really make a difference. In the long run, the few drops you save when drinking, cooking, flushing or washing up are of little importance.

- It is products, not activities that waste most water. Making a a 200g bag of crisps uses 135 litres, a beefburger 2,400 and a steak 4,000. A cotton T-shirt gulps up 4,100 litres, a brand new car as much as 450,000. Of course you can argue with the details here – there are always slightly greener alternatives. But you can't argue much with the so-called water footprint which shows how carelessly we treat Earth's most valuable resource. On average, every person on this planet is responsible for an incredible 1.4m litres of water usage per year: that's 8,600 bathtubs with 160 litres of water each. Ninety per cent of this is employed in agriculture: that's where proper water-conservation needs to happen.

- It's quite possible that there will be more frequent drought warnings in the future. National governments will have to find ways of dealing with the problem. The first step might have to be a fight with the farmers, industrialists and lobbyists, and not just those on their doorstep. And there are plenty of proposals on the table that politicians should consider: be it a water tax, whereby those who used rivers to cool their factories will have to cough up, using agricultural subsidies as rewards for careful water usage, or a water limit across the industry. Instead, environment secretary Caroline Spelman seems to be focusing on telling ordinary people to have fewer baths.

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[bnk]

Some links to a recent Great Lake project by SOM.



Intro

http://thegreatlakescenturyblog.som....rld-water-day/


Vision video in Viveo that I do not know how to post.

http://thegreatlakescenturyblog.som.com/vision-video


7 pages on the plan here.

http://thegreatlakescenturyblog.som....rld-water-day/

I have not read it yet.

[M II A II R II K]

Seeing Source of Electricity in Water Pipes


May 8, 2012

By JIM DWYER

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/ny...urce.html?_r=2

The water that comes out of taps in New York City runs downhill 125 miles from the Catskill Mountains, every last drop the product of 19th-century genius and scheming that made the modern metropolis possible. Now comes a new proposition for what is arguably the world’s greatest urban water system: people are trying to figure out if, on its way to your shower, the water can also drive turbines and make electricity.

- If it works out, and there are many reasons it might not, hydroelectric power harvested from the city’s water mains could be a renewable source of carbon-free power, like solar and wind. But unlike those sources, this one would be completely predictable. Powered only by gravity, nearly a million gallons of water rushes into the city every minute. From streams dammed in the hills and mountains north of the city, the flow moves with such force that even as it branches into pipes that run down every street, it rises to a height of six stories on pure momentum. Below that, most buildings need no pumps.

- As that pressure drops, energy is released. Now the city will study whether it can capture it and turn it into electricity, under a bill sponsored by Mr. Gennaro and signed into law last week by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The raw physics are seductive. Still, reality also gets a vote. No one doubts the tremendous power of that water flow, least of all the guardians of the water system in the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. But they are openly skeptical about whether there are practical uses for it. For one thing, the valves are in the middle of the streets. Electricity generated there would have to make its way to the grid, unless there was some use for it in the street.

- THE city’s water stewards have said that space is already very tight below the streets, with its honeycomb of subway tunnels, water pipes, sewage lines, electrical and fiber optic and other utility cables, transformers and assorted gizmos. “It does not seem prudent to encroach upon and deplete this valuable underground real estate for unproven benefit,” Anthony J. Fiore, a deputy commissioner, testified last year. Mr. Zammataro, 54, who grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, began thinking about water power after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the small wireless company he was working for downtown had to move temporarily to Times Square.

- Every drop of water that flows into New York City also flows out: unlike the clean water supply, the sewage plants require tremendous amounts of power, and some of it is coming from the methane gas released by the sewage. At least one of Mr. Gennaro’s estimates about potential power has been about 200 times too high, officials said. Still, he noted that the new study was agreed to by the mayor. It is due in 18 months. “We have a green administration, a green Council, and I want to make sure that when we leave, we have a lot of homework assignments for the next ones,” Mr. Gennaro said.

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