Ancient "Megadroughts" Struck U.S. West, Could Happen Again, Study Suggests

Much of the western U.S. may be headed into a prolonged dry spell—a "perfect drought," scientists say, that could persist for generations. The West already has been dry for six years and is looking to be dry again in 2007, said Glen Macdonald, an ecology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

But that's nothing compared to what has happened in the region in the past, according to Macdonald and other scientists.

In a study published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team from Arizona and Colorado found that the Southwest suffered a six-decade megadrought from 1118 to 1179.

For 62 years mountain snows—one of the area's main sources of water—were frequently diminished, reducing the river's flow during the heart of the drought by an average of 15 percent.

And for an extended period there were no high flows at all, said Connie Woodhouse, a study co-author from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

This is grim news for today's Westerners, who rely on wetter years interspersed through a drought to fill reservoirs, the scientists said.

more from National Geographic News

Sin City's Continuous Flow

You could almost hear the clang of jackpot bells in Pat Mulroy's office. In late April, the tenacious water czar of southern Nevada chalked up another win in her two-decade crusade to satisfy Las Vegas's unquenchable thirst. This time it was thanks to a state water regulator's thumbs up on a plan to pump almost 20 billion gallons of water from a vast underground aquifer near the state's east central ranchlands, sucking water from deep beneath its hayfields and sending it 285 miles south to the quarter of a million homes served by Mulroy's Southern Nevada Water Authority.

he decision was followed days later by an even bigger coup: a historic agreement to rejigger the way Colorado Riverwater is divvied up among Nevada and the six other western states that share the lifeline. Swapping the current use-it-or-lose-it annual system for a more flexible, market-style approach, the hard-fought deal among the states marks the biggest change in the controversial "Law of the River" since it was inked some 80 years ago. It lets downriver states like Mulroy's create liquid bank accounts, allowing them to save up surplus water in wetter years, in reservoirs for instance, to use during later periods of drought, and also lets them bolster their water supplies, in part, by paying for other states to conserve, so more water might be available for Nevada—a scheme that is expected to win final approval from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne by year's end.

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A World of Thirst

Over the course of the past 40 years, north Africa's Lake Chad has shriveled to one tenth its earlier size, beset by decades of drought and agricultural irrigation that have sucked water from the rivers that feed it—even as the number of people whose lives depend on its existence has grown. In 1990, the Lake Chad basin supported about 26 million people; by 2004 the total was 37.2 million. In the next 15 years, experts predict, the incredible shrinking lake and its tapped rivers will need to support 55 million. "You don't have much room for error at this point," says hydrologist Michael Coe.

The population growth has coincided with a 25 percent decrease in rainfall, with global warming very likely a factor. As oceans store more heat, the temperature difference between water and land dissipates, sapping power from rainmaking monsoons. At the same time, desperate people are overusing wells. Coe recently concluded that water supplies in the basin are "stretched to their limits, and future needs will far outstrip the accessible supply."

Lake Chad, with its confluence of troubles, is emblematic of a burgeoning water crisis around the world. While the western United States faces serious water problems, American money and know-how can at least soften the blow. Not so elsewhere. Worldwide, 1.1 billion people lack clean water, 2.6 billion people go without sanitation, and 1.8 million children die every year because of one or the other, or both. By 2025, the United Nations predicts 3 billion people will be scrambling for clean water. There are myriad problems: industrial contaminants flooding waterways, wasteful irrigation, an exploding world population, political corruption and incompetence, and a changing climate—to name a few.

In a report issued in November, the United Nations declared water "a global crisis," announcing that 55 member nations are failing to meet their water-related Millennium Development Goal target, agreed upon in 2000, of halving the proportion of people without clean water and sanitation by 2015. The real crisis, experts say, is not a lack of water but a lack of water management. Water doesn't always appear in the right places, or at the right times. And it has to be cared for. "It's a terrible situation around the world," says Peter Rogers, a Harvard environmental engineering professor, "but it doesn't have to be."

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Water Woes

The nation's hidden water problem rushed into the basement apartments of 51st Street in West New York, N.J., last February 9, shortly after 4 a.m. That's when a 2-foot-wide pipe ruptured under Bergenline Avenue, New Jersey's longest commercial thoroughfare. Water burst through the asphalt with the force of a geyser, then cascaded downhill. "It came down the street like rapids," says Anthony Avillo, the deputy fire chief on the scene. Families were awakened by water cresting over the sides of their beds or by neighbors screaming.

In the 18-degree cold, North Hudson Regional Fire and Rescue crew members lowered themselves chest-deep into the drink and deployed life rafts to help people escape. "We had one woman holding a baby and offering it up from the water like Moses," Avillo recalls.

Miraculously, no one was seriously hurt in the deluge, but 31 people, including 14 children, were forced from their homes—some for almost a month. And as is often the case with a major water-main break, the impact rippled far beyond the uprooted families. Water service abruptly stopped for 200,000 people in five of the nation's most densely populated towns, directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Even when taps began to flow again, residents were warned to boil water because a main break can be a gateway for harmful bacteria. "It was really a nightmare, and it was dangerous," says Christopher Irizarry, chief executive of the North Hudson Community Action Corp., which assisted the stranded residents. The worst fear was that a fire would break out, because hydrants were dry. Water tankers were called in from miles away to stand by.

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Obstacles to peace: Water

The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land - and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land.

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute - moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel's main source of drinking water.

Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water.

A country needs water to survive and develop.

In Israel's history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants.

Therefore, on the margins of one of the most arid environments on earth, the available water system had to support not just the indigenous population, mainly Palestinian peasant farmers, but also hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

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A river gasps for life

"What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else," Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Hal Boule once said. This statement, however, no longer holds true as some of the world’s greatest rivers, including the Ganga, are no longer assured of reaching the sea unhindered, says the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Human greed, expanding population and climate change have together ensured that.

In the years to come the northern plains, heavily dependent on the Ganga, are likely to face severe water scarcity. Together with the onslaught of industrial and sewage pollutants, the river’s fate stands more or less sealed.

"Among the categories dead, dying and threatened, I would put the Ganga in the dying category," says WWF Programme Director Sejal Worah.

The other heavyweight to join in the list from the Indian subcontinent is the mighty Indus. The Indus, too, has been the victim of climate change, water extraction and infrastructure development. "In all, poor planning and inadequate protection of natural means have ensured that the world population can no longer assume that water is going to flow forever," WWF says, adding that the world’s water suppliers—rivers-on-every-continent are dying, threatening severe water shortage in the future.

The other rivers of the world are at the mercy of over-extraction, climate change, pollution, dams and over-fishing are the Yangtze, the Mekong-Lancang, the Salween-Nu, the Danube, the La Plata, the Rio Grande, the Nile and the Murray-Darling. The bottomline, therefore, is that rivers are no longer assured of reaching the sea unhindered.

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One cleanup shapes another

Lessons learned from the partial cleanup of one of the Willamette River's most toxic spots are being applied to planning for work on a heavily contaminated site nearby.

This week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its blueprint for designing cleanup of Arkema Inc. The 54 acres in North Portland, home for decades to the chemical manufacturer and its predecessors, are steeped in DDT, rocket propellant, hydrochloric acid, ammonia and other pollutants.

The EPA, frustrated by a lack of progress by Arkema and its agents, took over planning an initial cleanup last fall as part of a Superfund action spanning six miles of the river. The resulting work plan made public this week doesn't dictate precisely how Arkema should proceed, but does signal that the agency will take a harder line to prevent river contamination during cleanup.

In 2005, during dredging of a tar body by Northwest Natural Gas Co., highly toxic levels of benzo(a)pyrene were released into the river. The chemical can quickly kill aquatic life and cause cancer in humans.

NW Natural's use of a dredge bucket stirred up the chemicals, which escaped into the river through an experimental silt curtain. Delays in lab results from water testing allowed the danger to go unnoticed for days.

The Arkema work plan suggests a harder look at more expensive dredging alternatives such as a hydraulic dredge, which cuts into the riverbed and pumps sediment through a pipe.

Sean Sheldrake, an EPA project manager, said Arkema also will need to consider installing an expensive and rigid system of steel sheets in the river -- a coffer dam -- to better contain dredged chemicals.

"Given the high levels of DDT at the Arkema site, all of those options are going to be on the table, and the bias is going to be heavily toward higher levels of containment," Sheldrake said.

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Thirsty world needs higher water prices: OECD

Governments must put a higher price on water to help tackle growing shortages in a world threatened by climate change, the head of the OECD said on Monday.

Higher prices would encourage investment in technology and infrastructure and discourage people from wasting water, Angel Gurria, secretary general of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development told the OECD forum in Paris.

"Water is generally underpriced and sometimes practically given away as a free good and that leads to waste. Yes it's a right, but that doesn't mean it has to be free... because it's scarce," Gurria said.

"Pricing water so that there is capacity for reinvestment, making consumers of the water pay for the cost of water supplies is an effective public policy instrument to encourage responsible use."

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Development Rises on St. Louis Area Flood Plains

Miles and miles of bigger and stronger levees have been built along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers since the deadly floods of 1993, and millions of dollars have been spent on drainage improvements.

Yet as the rush of water that caused the Missouri River to overflow its banks and submerge dozens of towns last week rolled toward St. Louis on Monday, attention was turned to a metropolitan region that since 1993 has seen runaway residential and commercial development in the rivers’ flood paths.

About 28,000 homes have been built and more than 6,000 acres of commercial and industrial space developed on land that was underwater in 1993, according to research by Nicholas Pinter, a geologist who studies the region at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Building is happening on flood plains across Missouri, but most of the development is in the St. Louis area, and it is estimated to be worth more than $2.2 billion. Though scientists warn about the danger of such building, the Missouri government has subsidized some of it through tax financing for builders.

“No one has really looked at the cumulative effect,” said Timothy M. Kusky, a professor of natural sciences at St. Louis University, who calculates that there has been more development on the Missouri River flood plain in the years since 1993 than at any other time in the history of the region.

The good news for St. Louis right now is that forecasters say the two rivers will crest well below their 1993 levels by Tuesday, sparing the area significant flooding. But many scientists remain concerned that the effect of the new construction, should a levee break, could eventually be even more severe flooding.

Levees constrict a river’s path and raise its water level, which causes higher, faster flow. A flood plain, conversely, exists in nature to absorb a river’s overflow.

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Move to clean city’s rivers

There is water everywhere, but thirst scorches the throats of Nairobi residents. With nine rivers flowing through the city and its suburbs, there should be enough water for its three million residents.

However, years of unchecked pollution have turned them into death traps flowing with poison. Studies show that these rivers, which form what is known as the Nairobi river basin, are highly polluted with waste from industries.

An initiative to clean up the rivers has dragged on for eight years. Launched in 1999, Nairobi River Basin Project brought together people convinced that the rivers could again flow with clean water to quench the city.

But now, there is excitement in the initiative, coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep), as industries could be forced to stop discharging waste into the rivers. This follows the publication, last year, of a raft of regulations prohibiting discharge of waste by industries, failure to which they face fines of up to Sh500,000 (see separate story).

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Can Madison clean its lakes?

In July 1832, writing of his passage through Madison during the Black Hawk War, Surgeon's Mate John Allen Wakefield described the Madison lakes as "the most beautiful bodies of water I ever saw.'' The water, he wrote, was crystal clear.

Today, though Madison's lakes remain perhaps the defining feature of the cityscape, they show evidence of years of neglect and abuse. It has been many decades since anyone accurately used the word "clear'' to describe these lakes.

This spring, however, some community leaders are asking why,

With all the science at our disposal, and all the money that has been spent over the years, and all the agencies and governments involved, why aren't the lakes cleaner?

This is among the questions that will be posed at a major conference on the Madison lakes on Saturday, May 18, organized by the Yahara Lakes Association and the UW-Madison's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

The gathering is an opportunity to foster public discussion on new approaches to lake management, participants say.

One likely subject will be whether the community should create an independent body with authority to coordinate management of the entire Yahara chain of lakes and to track how lake management programs are working.

"Do we need institutional change?'' asked Doug Bach, vice president of the Yahara Lakes Association, and a member of the Dane County Lakes and Watershed Commission.

A speech given by David Mollenhoff, a Madison author, historian and a civic activist, at last year's national meeting of the National Association of Lake Management Society prompted the Yahara Lakes Association to organize the Madison conference. In his speech, Mollenhoff pointed out how complicated our current approach to lake management is. He cited the confusingly large number of local governments and agencies that are involved.

"I think we need a new vision for Madison lakes,'' said Mollenhoff, who will speak at Saturday's conference. "There are so many dots that need (to be) connected and that haven't been connected in the past . . . We need a coherent new strategy.''

more from the Wisconsin State Journal

On the Snake River, Dam’s Natural Allies Seem to Have a Change of Heart

The wheat Bryan Jones grows in Eastern Washington begins its journey to Asia on barges along the lower Snake River. The river, once a wild, muscular torrent, was made barge friendly a quarter-century ago by four of the nation’s most controversial hydropower dams.

A tame river keeps Mr. Jones’s business viable. So why is he is spending time with the guides and fishermen who want to remove the dams? In part, because he feels the tug of environmentalist arguments that the dams will endanger wild salmon that, even more than wheat, are the region’s natural bounty.

“I always believed dams were economically too big of a hurdle to attack,” said Mr. Jones, who is 52. “But I began to realize that we are potentially losing runs of salmon” along this tributary of the Columbia River.

It is still a relatively rare phenomenon, but one becoming more noticeable: some members of the dams’ natural constituency, like farmers, are talking to their downriver antagonists about a future that might not include the four lower Snake River dams. There is talk of reconstituting a regional rail system to deliver Mr. Jones’s wheat to Portland, Ore. There is talk of a wind farm to replace the electricity — enough to power most of Manhattan — generated by the four dams.

The conversations are still in their early stages, and political support for the dams remains strong. Congressional ties to the Bonneville Power Administration, which provides electricity from the dams to regional utilities and businesses, are many, and few politicians want to back an action that could raise electricity bills and cost jobs. At best, wind power is intermittent and expensive; in 2005, regional electricity costs were more than 25 percent less than the national average.

But the pressures on the hydrosystem’s traditional operations are accumulating, and conversions like Mr. Jones’s have taken on an enhanced significance. As former Gov. John A. Kitzhaber of Oregon said in an interview, “by not talking to each other, not trying to figure out the real economic issues, we’re setting up a situation where someone else is going to figure out our future for us.”

more from the NY Times

Yellow River is 10% sewage: Official

In the past 12 months, some 120 million tons of household sewage, mostly untreated, have been released into the Yellow River in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu Province in Northwest China, a report by China Central Television (CCTV) said on Wednesday.

Lu Shaowen, director of the pollution control office of the Lanzhou environmental protection bureau was quoted by the station as saying that only about 3,300 tons of the effluent had been treated, and even that failed to meet quality standards because of the city's out-of-date sewage treatment facilities.

Tests showed that the levels of nitrogen and coliform in the water were, respectively, 2.4 times and 42 times higher than the standard allows, Lu said.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, a non-governmental organization based in Beijing, told China Daily yesterday that pollution levels in the Yellow River had been a hot topic for many years.

Between the 1980s and 2005, the volume of wastewater flowing into the river increased from about 2 billion tons to 4.3 billion tons. It now accounts for about one-tenth of its total volume, Ma said.

more from China Daily

Broken levees great for swamp, bad for businesses

Weeks after floodwaters receded from most of North Jersey, a corner of the Meadowlands is still swamped -- and the source of a conflict between local officials and a leading environmentalist.

Call it a tale of two floods.

The April 15 nor'easter opened several breaches in levees along the Hackensack River in Carlstadt. To conservationists, it's been a godsend. In one blow, the storm jump-started efforts to restore 600 acres of degraded marshlands.

For nearby businesses, it has been the headache that won't fade. While waters had retreated considerably by the end of last week, companies on the edge of the marsh were still contending with flooded parking lots. Instead of delivery trucks, ducks and fish were navigating the loading docks along Barrel Avenue, Jomike Court and other roads.

"The place is a damn mess," said John Kindegan, who owns 15 industrial buildings in the area.

What to do about the levees -- and whether the wetlands and businesses can be saved at the same time -- could come to a head today. The Meadowlands Conservation Trust, the non-profit that owns the marsh, has called an emergency board meeting to discuss whether to plug the holes.

The storm broke dikes on two properties, one owned by the trust and a neighboring tract to the north owned by Williams, a natural gas company. A Williams representative said Friday that the company would fix its levee as quickly as possible.

But the chairman of the Meadowlands Trust isn't in any rush. Reopening the land to saltwater tides could go a long way toward achieving the group's main goal, said Bill Sheehan: killing off the weeds that now choke the marsh and restoring native plants, fish, fowl and other animals.

"Opportunities like this come along once in a lifetime," Sheehan said. "If they fix these levees and are committed to keeping them maintained, it'll be an uphill struggle the rest of my life to reopen them."

more from the Bergen County (NJ) Record

Southwest Water Woes

Every day, it seems, thousands of Americans pack up for the sunny skies of the Southwest, especially the booming cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix. The Southwest is a desert, of course, but thanks to the massive water projects of the 1930's it became hospitable for millions of settlers. But now there's trouble in the Southwest. The region is suffering through its eighth year of drought with little or no relief in sight. For much of its water the Southwest relies on the Colorado River to brings snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains. But snow patterns are changing and the Colorado is carrying a lot less water than it did a century ago. Overall it seems global warming is hitting the region harder than just about anywhere else in the country

more from National Public Radio's Living on Earth

Fish deformities elevate concerns over pollution

A $60 million upgrade to the plant that treats sewage from Binghamton, Johnson City and parts of Vestal is expected to come on line this month, ending more than a decade of planning, construction and a major flood-related setback.

The improvements will reduce flows of nitrogen into the Susquehanna River from the plant, addressing a problem that has been degrading water quality downstream to the Chesapeake Bay. But they will not address a newly discovered type of contamination: hormones and pharmaceutical compounds passing through the treatment process into rivers -- in some cases changing sexual traits of fish.

The discovery represents an emerging ecological issue that may lead to a new era of regulation, according to experts. That could mean more upgrades to sewage treatment plants locally and nationally, and more public funds necessary to pay for them.

While fish downstream of the treatment plant in Vestal have not been tested, researchers at Binghamton University have found traces of hormones and drugs -- including antibiotics, estrogen and aspirin products -- in the plant's effluent and downstream.

In the Potomac River near Sharpsburg, Md., researchers have found male fish who have developed eggs and other female traits -- a sign that a little-understood type of pollution is spreading downstream from West Virginia.

Transsexual fish also have been found and documented in the Mississippi River in Minnesota, Boulder Creek in Colorado and other waterways throughout the world.

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LA Plan to Reclaim Land Would Divert the Mississippi

Over two centuries, engineers have restrained the Mississippi River's natural urge to wriggle disastrously out of its banks by building hundreds of miles of levees that work today like a riverine straitjacket.

But it is time, Louisiana officials propose, to let the river loose.

To save the state from washing into the ocean at the astonishing rate of 24 square miles per year, Louisiana officials are developing an epic $50 billion plan that would rebuild the land by rerouting one of the world's biggest rivers. The proposal envisions enormous projects to provide flood protection and reclaim land-building sediment from the river, which now flows uselessly out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The cost of the project, which was initiated by the legislature after hurricanes Katrina and Rita revealed the dangers of the sinking coast, dwarfs those of other megaprojects such as the $14 billion "Big Dig" in Boston and the $8 billion Everglades restoration.

"This will be one of the great engineering challenges of the 21st century -- on the order of the Channel Tunnel or the Three Gorges Dam," said Denise J. Reed, a scientist at the University of New Orleans who has focused on the river. "What is obvious to everyone is that something has to be done."

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