What Would It Take to Clean Up The Bay by 2010?

To deliver on the pledge to save the Chesapeake Bay in three short years, you could start by digging up a million lawns to fix septic tanks that pollute too much.

Then ask 80,000 farmers to make expensive changes in the way their farms work. Overhaul hundreds of sewage plants, each project with a price tag that could run into the millions.

And find about $28 billion -- enough for six aircraft carriers -- to pay for it all. Right now, authorities are at least $14 billion short.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency said efforts to restore the bay's health need to be accelerated to meet a 2010 deadline. It turns out that "accelerated" might be understating it: Experts say meeting the goal would require widespread sacrifices from individuals and unprecedented funding from government sources. And even then, it might not be enough.

For now, no such shock-therapy campaign has been proposed. But environmentalists say the bay project's many shortfalls are a lesson: After 19 years, the Chesapeake cleanup is struggling to produce results on par with its promises.

from the Washington Post

Michigan is ground zero in groundwater war

In a quaint, quiet home along the bank of the Muskegon River, Valerie Duer counts wildlife, trout and a giant multinational food and beverage corporation among her nearest neighbors.

The critters were the desired part of the deal when Duer and her husband, Paul, moved to Big Prairie Township in rural Newaygo County near Michigan's west coast from Grand Haven seven years ago.

But Duer has spent most of those years fighting to oust Nestle Waters North America, a corporation that pumps and sells some 107 million gallons of spring water annually from wells that draw water from the Muskegon River watershed.

"I'm worried that they will never stop. They'll just keep plunging holes in the ground," said Duer, 59, who is retired. "There's just no way to stop them. And all they are concerned about is the bottom line, the profits."

Despite a 2001 lawsuit from the grassroots Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation against Nestle that lingers at the Michigan Supreme Court, the company has sunk an additional well in Osceola County, further infuriating those who claim another well will suck the life out of the Muskegon River watershed.

Environmental groups and residents fear that the removal of water will lower the levels of the state's rivers and lakes, trigger higher water temperatures -- both of which could harm fish and other aquatic life -- and drain wetlands.

from the Detroit News

Spin the (water) bottle

Americans spent an estimated $11 billion last year drinking 8.3 billion gallons of bottled water, according to Beverage Marketing Corp., the leading compiler of facts and figures about the beverage industry.

That means the average American consumed almost 28 gallons of Aquafina, Dasani, Evian or hundreds of other brands that comprise the up to $100 billion global market for bottled water.

So great is our thirst for the stuff that Americans now drink more bottled water than any other commercial beverage except carbonated soft drinks -- more than milk, more than coffee, more than beer.

And the trend shows no sign of abating. Both the amount spent last year on bottled water and the amount consumed represent nearly 10 percent increases from 2005.

from the San Francisco Chronicle

'Extreme' water crisis plan under fire

Emergency measures to secure water supplies in drought-ravaged south-eastern Australia by banning external watering in some towns, creating a temporary weir on the Murray and draining wetlands could be enforced this year.

A contingency plan, jointly released yesterday by the federal, Victorian and South Australian governments, seeks to urgently address water shortages for towns and cities in the parched region.

They include Adelaide, which draws up to 90 per cent of its supplies from the Murray River, and Victorian towns including Kerang, Swan Hill, Mildura, Echuca, Yarrawonga and Wodonga.

Blanket stage 4 water restrictions for all towns supplied by the Murray and a review of the Snowy Hydro electricity scheme are also proposed in the plan, which is yet to be endorsed by the NSW Government.

Acting Prime Minister Mark Vaile said yesterday there were "severe concerns" about the lower Murray-Darling Basin system's ability to supply water.

"There are over two and a half million people in that part of Australia who could be adversely affected," he said.

from The Age

Polluted Waters Stain D.C.'s Shining Vision

The Anacostia River, planned as the scenic centerpiece of massive redevelopment in the District, remains heavily polluted by sewage, trash and toxic chemicals, environmentalists say -- and it might be years before the river's health catches up with its new cachet.

In the city's plans, the Anacostia will soon be surrounded by a necklace of new stadiums, office buildings, condominiums and parks. A river that has come to symbolize neglect, both of its water and of the neighborhoods near its banks, will become a new hub of urban life.

But that bright vision is hard to square with the Anacostia of the present. Its channels are choked with mud and floating debris. Its catfish have tumors on their livers and lips. And, dozens of times a year, it actually stinks, from human waste dumped out by the District's sewer system.

Now, activists wonder whether a dirty river will start to hold this development back. Or maybe, they hope, all this building will speed the Anacostia's recovery by making activists out of people who are seeing its plight for the first time.

"You really cannot build a world-class city on a wrecked river," said Thomas Arrasmith, a leader at the Anacostia Watershed Citizens Advisory Committee. "You cannot have a world-class city with a sewer running through it."

The Anacostia winds its entire course inside the Capital Beltway, beginning near Bladensburg and emptying into the Potomac River 8.4 miles downstream at the District's Hains Point. It is often out of sight, though, even to those who live near the river. People have been kept away by the U.S. National Arboretum, the Anacostia Freeway and other barriers -- and the historical perception that the river isn't worth visiting.

"One of the sad things about the Anacostia: It's been so dirty for so long that people shunned it," said Joseph Glover, a Southeast Washington resident who helps monitor the health of an Anacostia tributary, Pope Branch.

from the Washington Post

Groundwater pumping: When is it too much?

Gregory Fox crouched down to get a closer look at the percolating spring that gave rise to an unnamed brook, a tiny stream that snaked briefly through a pine and hardwood forest before reaching the White River.

Fox, who searches for new sources of spring water suitable for bottling under Nestle Waters' Ice Mountain label, gets excited by the sight of water bubbling out of the ground. It's a hint that he may be near the oil industry equivalent of a gusher.

Fox said this spring-fed stream northeast of White Cloud, and dozens of others like it near the headwaters of the White River, indicate there is abundant groundwater rising to the surface and flowing into the White, a state-protected trout stream.

Nestle hopes to pump spring water from that site in Newaygo County's Monroe Township and truck it to its Ice Mountain bottling plant in Stanwood.

"There are springs like this near the White River and many, many springs in the river," Fox said. "The question we're asking our scientists is, 'Is there an amount of groundwater that can be pumped that won't cause an adverse impact on the stream?"'

from the Muskegon Chronicle

A Revitalized Chesapeake May Be Decades Away

The multibillion-dollar cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, which government officials had pledged would succeed by 2010, will likely miss that deadline by a wide margin -- and, at the current pace, might drag on for decades more, an Environmental Protection Agency official acknowledged yesterday.

Rich Batiuk, an associate director of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, made that projection at a meeting of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group that includes state officials from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

His talk was a blunt, and public, admission of something that the EPA had conceded in an agency report last year. A pledge to "save the bay," made six years ago in the so-called Chesapeake 2000 Agreement, is falling drastically short. "If we go at the current rate that we're doing, we're talking about restoring the Chesapeake decades from now, a generation or two," Batiuk said.

from the Washington Post

Bill targets perchlorate in water

On the first day in 12 years that Democrats have controlled Congress, California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein chose to take on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by introducing bills to set standards on a rocket fuel chemical fouling water supplies nationwide.

The EPA has not regulated the chemical, perchlorate, and decided last month not to require testing of water supplies to detect it.

Boxer and Feinstein introduced two bills on Thursday that would require tests and regulation.

Perchlorate has tainted water supplies in Rialto, Colton, Glen Avon, Redlands, San Bernardino and other Inland communities, prompting water agencies to remove the contamination or rely on other sources for drinking water.

The chemical is used in rocket fuel, munitions, fireworks and other explosives, and is found in some fertilizers. In sufficient doses, perchlorate can impair the thyroid gland's ability to make hormones that regulate metabolism and guide brain and nerve development in fetuses and babies.

from the Press-Enterprise

A boy who makes a difference

One person can make a difference. Just ask Ryan Hreljac (pronounced hurl-jack), who is 15 and lives in Canada. Without his help, hundreds of wells that now provide fresh water for people in Africa, Central America, and India might never have been built.

Ryan is what you might call a water ambassador. He travels the world to tell people how they can help solve a big problem: the lack of safe drinking water in many developing countries.

"Everybody can do something," Ryan says.

Sometimes African-born Jimmy Akana - who is like a brother to Ryan - travels with him to explain how water changed his life. The story of the two boys is the subject of a new children's book, "Ryan and Jimmy and the Well in Africa That Brought Them Together," written by Herb Shoveller and published by Kids Can Press.

Ryan's efforts didn't begin in a far-off place, though, but right at home in Kemptville, Ontario. In 1998, when he was 6 years old, Ryan learned from his teacher that children in Africa often must walk miles each day to find water. Some even die from drinking bad water, his teacher said.

from the Christian Science Monitor

A Century Later, Los Angeles Atones for Water Sins

It may fall short of a feel-good sequel to “Chinatown,” the movie based on the notorious, somewhat shady water grab by Los Angeles that allowed the city to bloom from a semi-arid desert.

But in one of the largest river restoration efforts in the West, water is again flowing along a 62-mile stretch of the Owens River after a dry spell of nearly a century.

That part of the river had been left mostly drained when upstream water, fed by snowmelt from the towering Sierra Nevada, was channeled 233 miles south to fill swimming pools and bathtubs throughout Los Angeles.


The restored flow is among several long-awaited steps the city is taking to help make amends for the environmental consequences of its water maneuvering, most notably the drying up of Owens Lake, an area more than three times the size of Manhattan, here in the Owens Valley.

Los Angeles agreed in December to expand efforts to control toxic dust storms that erupt from what is left of the lake, a 110-square-mile body that emptied when the river was diverted to Los Angeles through an aqueduct opened in 1913.
from the Los Angeles Times