Water levels fall; drought fears on rise

The lawn is scorched, the saplings are shriveled, and the local ponds and streams are lower than usual.

It's not as bad as Malibu, Calif., Atlanta, or the Great Lakes, but Massachusetts is suffering from drought.

"It's a developing drought," said Linda Hutchins, a hydrologist for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. "I'm concerned where we would be in the spring if it does continue. While it's not a real big water-supply crisis now, if we go through the winter dry and start next spring and summer like this, we're going to be sorry."

Throughout the area, even communities that restricted outside water use this summer still show signs of drought, specialists say. The consequences of scant precipitation well into next year could be shrinking water supplies for residents, industry, and agriculture, as well as forest and brush fires.

"Hopefully the situation will ease," said Kerry Mackin, executive director of the Ipswich River Watershed Association, a nonprofit working to protect and restore the chronically low watershed and river, which provides water supplies to 13 communities, including North Reading and Wilmington.

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The Delta's Endgame

The delta - that labyrinthine confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the biggest and most biologically significant wetland on the West Coast - is going belly-up like a sick carp.

True, it has been moribund for a long time, but that doesn't make its imminent demise any more tolerable. When the first white explorers entered the Central Valley, they found a horizon-to-horizon marshland of tules, sedges and willows where the two great rivers conjoined before debouching into San Francisco Bay. The waters teemed with chinook salmon, steelhead, green and white sturgeon and lesser fish, such as Sacramento perch, Sacramento blackfish, starry flounder and Pacific lamprey. The sloughs were choked with ducks and geese, vast flocks that blackened the dawn sky when they rose en masse to feed. Tule elk, beaver, grizzly bears, river otters - they were all here, in numbers unimaginable in our now populous and altered world.

Things began changing in the 19th century, when farmers reclaimed much of the region with an ambitious - if fragile - system of levees. The great marshes were drained, and the rich peat soils planted with everything from grains to orchard fruits. The tule elk and grizzlies were extirpated.

But the waterfowl still swarmed down from the north during the winter migration, and salmon still churned up the Sacramento and San Joaquin; in many years the fish were so plentiful they were pitch-forked out of the spawning redds and used as hog feed.

But as California grew, so did demands on the delta. Large-scale appropriations of water began in the 1950s, with the completion of the major dams anchoring the federal Central Valley Project, a mammoth system of reservoirs, aqueducts and pumps. The State Water Project, largely finished in the 1970s, diverted roughly equal amounts. Today, the two projects annually extract as much as 6 million acre-feet of water from two massive pumping stations located in the delta near Tracy.

The freshwater yield of the Sierra's snowmelt once surged through the delta and out the Golden Gate, creating a fluctuating brackish zone that sustained a vast food web, from plankton to the once-ubiquitous, now nearly extinct delta smelt, to salmon and steelhead. But with the completion of the government projects, the water went through home taps and San Joaquin Valley irrigation canals instead; the essential biological productivity of the delta wavered, and then dipped.

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3 States Compete for Water From Shrinking Lake Lanier

No gauges are necessary at Lake Lanier to measure the ravages of the Southeast's drought.

Wooden fishing docks tower 10 feet over dried mud that used to be squishy lake bottom. Boat ramps begin at the parking lot and end in sand. New islands emerge from shallows.

"If the water drops another foot, I don't know that anyone will be able to get a boat in," said Mike Boyle, 64, a resident who has long trolled the lake for spotted and striped bass.

The waters of Lake Lanier, funneled through federal dams along the Chattahoochee River, sustain about 2.8 million people in the Atlanta metropolitan area, a nuclear power plant that lights up much of Alabama, and the marine life in Florida's Apalachicola River and Bay.

Now, amid one of the worst droughts on record, all three places feel uncomfortably close to running dry. That has prompted a three-state fight that has simmered for years to erupt into testy exchanges over which one has the right to the lake's dwindling water supply and which one is or is not doing its share to conserve it.

The dispute, which some experts say provides a glimpse of what uncontrolled growth could mean for the future, has reached all the way to the White House as the Republican governors of Alabama, Georgia and Florida have appealed to President Bush for larger shares of the flow.

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Abul Hussam

Abul Hussam calls the poisoning of drinking water with arsenic "one of the worst natural disasters on earth," and he is not the sort to stand idly by in the face of it. After decades of research, this associate professor of chemistry at George Mason University in Virginia has come up with a deceptively simple device to address the problem. It could save countless lives among the estimated 137 million people around the world whose water supply is contaminated with high levels of the colorless, odorless and tasteless metal, which accumulates in the body to cause sores, nerve damage, cancer and, too often, death.

Arsenic poisoning was no abstract issue for Hussam. As a graduate student in the U.S., his work on electro-analytical chemistry led him to discover dangerous levels of arsenic in the groundwater in his home district of Kushtia in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, other researchers were finding similar results elsewhere in the vast Ganges-Brahmaputra delta region of Bangladesh and in the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal.

Hussam set about working on an affordable, effective and environmentally sustainable way to make water arsenic-free. The result: his SONO filter, which uses a "composite iron matrix" that can be manufactured locally from cast-iron turnings, along with readily available river sand, wood charcoal and wet brick chips. The filter's humble housing in a stack of three buckets belies its power to change lives. It removes 98% of arsenic content as well as other mineral impurities that make water hard. A $35 unit serves two families and lasts at least five years.

Hussam's device won this year's inaugural Grainger Challenge Prize from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and most of the $1 million prize has gone to a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization that produces and distributes the sono filter. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis are benefiting already, and there are plans to take the SONO filter to India and Nepal and even further to South Africa. "People tell me how their symptoms of arsenic poisoning have been eased or even reversed with use of the SONO filter," says Hussam. "I even hear that women now prefer to wash their hair with filtered water as it makes it softer." No wonder Hussam gets a hero's welcome whenever he returns to Kushtia.

from Time

Transgenic crops may hurt aquatic ecosystems

The U.S EPA declared in 1996 that transgenic Bt corn is unlikely to harm aquatic organisms. The corn contains a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which makes a toxin that kills pests, and the agency had tested the corn's impact on water fleas—organisms not closely related to the insects that Bt targets. Now, a new study published October 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. shows that the Bt toxin enters streams adjacent to cornfields and impedes the growth of caddis flies—a group of aquatic insects very closely related to the crop's pests. The study sheds new light on the potential environmental impacts of transgenic crops.

Bt corn targets the European corn borer and other closely related pest species and is a popular choice among farmers throughout the U.S. To evaluate its impacts on aquatic ecosystems, Emma Rosi-Marshall of Loyola University and colleagues examined the transport of crop litter—leaves, pollen, and cobs—in 12 streams near a heavily farmed region of Indiana. They found litter washing into streams, suggesting a pathway for Bt toxin to reach the water.

The streams were full of leaf-shredding and filter-feeding caddis flies that thrive on such agricultural wastes. When fed crop litter in the lab, these insects grew only half as much as those on a toxin-free diet. In addition, very high doses of pollen in the water were shown to kill as many as 43% of the insects.

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The Future Is Drying Up

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

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Climate change: What's in the rising tide?

Colossal bridges bestride the waters of Narragansett Bay. Towns, interstate highways and suburbs sprawl along its shores and its waves are studded by thousands of pleasure boats. Yet the estuary retains a quiet beauty that befits the pious settlers who, 350 years ago, named the islands within the bay Prudence, Hope and Patience.

Extending its briny fingers through much of Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay has long juxtaposed man and nature, pollution and purity. Industrialization in the nineteenth century led to the rapid growth of cities such as Providence, a port at the bay's north end. The area now supports about a million people, all flushing their waste into the pastoral watershed. Reactive nitrogen compounds from treated sewage, industrial waste and fertilizers have poured in for decades, but remained at a relatively constant level for the past 25 years. Nevertheless, set against this steady background, a silent microbial and biochemical transformation has occurred in the bay that could have devastating ecological effects. The cause is pollution, but of an indirect sort — the changes seem to be down to global warming.

For the past three decades, the bottom sediments of the bay have mopped up much of the reactive nitrogen that humans have dumped into it. Although the fraction sequestered had been falling, this valuable natural sink has been protecting the bay and the coastal oceans from the effects of nitrate runoff. But last year the sediments abruptly stopped performing this service. Worse than that, they went into reverse. In a single summer, the bay switched from being a net sink to a net source of nitrates1.

Robinson “Wally” Fulweiler, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and her colleagues at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, were among the first to notice the turning environmental tide. If Narragansett is typical of other bays, they argue, it could be the harbinger of a new threat. Shifting the effect of anthropogenic nitrogen loading beyond the immediate coastal zone could destabilize ocean ecosystems by acidifying the waters, exacerbating harmful algal blooms, killing fish and shellfish, or perhaps even powering a vicious new cycle of global warming. The studies are currently hard to interpret and some say the system is poised to rebalance itself. But if they are wrong, global warming may do more to the oceans than make them rise.

more from Nature

Environmental groups offer new plan to save LA coast

When the state released its proposed master plan for flood protection and coastal restoration earlier this year, scathing comments at a series of public meetings forced officials to rewrite large sections of the plan and redraw maps.

Still, that failed to satisfy representatives of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. In another example of intensified public activism since the flood, the two environmental groups went far beyond mere objections and put together a coalition of scientists and engineers to draft an entirely separate plan, one based on a comprehensive "multiple lines of defense" strategy.

The new report provides uncommonly broad and detailed recommendations for building levees; restoring wetlands, historic ridges and barrier islands; changing or protecting evacuation routes; and improving building codes and zoning regulations to reduce the risk of flooding from major hurricanes.


"The more we thought about what we wanted to say, the more we realized we needed more detail, a more in-depth discussion," said Mark Ford, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

The report is written by the Multiple Lines of Defense Assessment Team, which is led by scientists and engineers who are members of the lake foundation and the coalition. Its strategy has roots in proposals by John Lopez, the lake foundation's science director and the study's lead author, which date to before Hurricane Katrina.

The alternate plan differs from the state's plan in the following key ways:

--Fewer levees that would block off a smaller area of wetlands;

--Wetlands would be restored to the way they looked more than 80 years ago.

The environmental groups believe the state plan relies too much on levees that they say could exacerbate coastal erosion by cutting off marshes from the freshwater and sediment that sustains them.

The state had rushed to complete its own plan, getting it approved by the state Legislature in March. That's because the state hoped its plan -- which depends largely on federal financing -- would influence the more critical plan being submitted to Congress by the Army Corps of Engineers that, if approved, ultimately would guide the long-term rebuilding of the state's flood protection system.

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In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself

Lake Tai, the center of China’s ancient “land of fish and rice,” succumbed this year to floods of industrial and agricultural waste.

Toxic cyanobacteria, commonly referred to as pond scum, turned the big lake fluorescent green. The stench of decay choked anyone who came within a mile of its shores. At least two million people who live amid the canals, rice paddies and chemical plants around the lake had to stop drinking or cooking with their main source of water.

The outbreak confirmed the claims of a crusading peasant, Wu Lihong, who protested for more than a decade that the region’s thriving chemical industry, and its powerful friends in the local government, were destroying one of China’s ecological treasures.

Mr. Wu, however, bore silent witness. Shortly before the algae crisis erupted in May, the authorities here in his hometown arrested him. In mid-August, with a fetid smell still wafting off the lake, a local court sentenced him to three years on an alchemy of charges that smacked of official retribution.

Pollution has reached epidemic proportions in China, in part because the ruling Communist Party still treats environmental advocates as bigger threats than the degradation of air, water and soil that prompts them to speak out.

Senior officials have tried to address environmental woes mostly through pulling the traditional levers of China’s authoritarian system: issuing command quotas on energy efficiency and emissions reduction; punishing corrupt officials who shield polluters; planting billions of trees across the country to hold back deserts and absorb carbon dioxide.

But they do not dare to unleash individuals who want to make China cleaner. Grass-roots environmentalists arguably do more to expose abuses than any edict emanating from Beijing. But they face a political climate that varies from lukewarm tolerance to icy suppression.

more from the NY Times

Pollution pouring into nation's waters far beyond legal limits

More than half of all industrial and municipal facilities across the country dumped more sewage and other pollutants into the nation's waterways than allowed under the Clean Water Act, according to a report released Thursday by an environmental group.

California was among the 10 states with the highest percentage of facilities leaking more pollutants into waterways than their Clean Water Act permits allow, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency obtained by the environmental group, U.S. PIRG.

California also had the dubious distinction of having the most large-scale violations - or "exceedances" - of Clean Water Act permits of any state. The large-scale violations are those that exceed the permitted level by at least 500 percent.

Environmentalists said the figures show that industrial plants and municipal wastewater facilities continue to flout the law because of insufficient policing by federal regulators.

"The bottom line is the Bush administration isn't doing enough enforcement of the Clean Water Act," said Christy Leavitt, clean water advocate for U.S. PIRG, a federation of state Public Interest Research Groups.

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Three Gorges Dam could be environmental disaster

China plans to relocate 4m people from the hillsides around the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest, in an unprecedented effort to stave off an environmental disaster.

he huge project will take between 10-15 years to complete, but was necessary as the area's "ecological safety" was at risk, according to senior officials.

The announcement comes in the wake of increasingly panicked reports of the environmental effects of the £13bn dam, one of the world's most ambitious infrastructure projects, whose first stage opened in 2003.

It has enabled container shipping to reach all the way up the Yangtze River from Shanghai to Chongqing, the biggest city of south-west China, and its hydro-electric turbines will eventually generate as much electricity as 18 nuclear power stations, but at huge cost.

The river is silting up due to the reduced flow of water, while the residue of human and industrial waste gathering behind the dam is causing water quality to deteriorate.

Of most immediate concern is erosion, with the hillsides suffering a series of landslides and the Three Gorges Reservoir's shoreline collapsing in more than 90 places, according to one study.

Last week, a government report admitted: "There exist many ecological and environmental problems concerning the Three Gorges Dam. If no preventive measures are taken, the project could lead to catastrophe."

more from the Telegraph

Shrinking The Dead Zone

TO SHRINK THE dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. may need to reform agricultural subsidies and financial incentives for corn-based ethanol, according to a draft report from EPA science advisers.

The gulf's dead zone, characterized by extremely low levels of oxygen, or hypoxia, grew to a near-record 20,500 km2 this summer. When final, the report is expected to influence a federal-state task force that is updating an action plan to minimize the dead zone.

To shrink the dead zone to its historic size of 5,000 km2, the draft report recommends cutting the amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus carried by the Mississippi River into the gulf by at least 45%. These plant nutrients encourage excessive growth of phytoplankton, which eventually die and are eaten by bacteria that consume much of the oxygen in the water, leading to hypoxia.

The draft report warns that U.S. agricultural subsidies and the economic incentives favoring corn-based ethanol "are at odds with the goals of hypoxia reduction." It identifies five "significant opportunities" for reducing the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus entering the Mississippi. One is for farmers in the Midwest to convert to crops for producing cellulosic ethanol, which require less fertilizer than corn, or rotate corn with other crops. Another is helping farmers better manage fertilizer use to curb runoff. A third involves use of conservation buffers to capture nutrient-laden runoff before it enters surface water.

In addition, wastewater treatment plants need to lower the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus they discharge, the draft report says. A fifth recommendation is to construct or restore wetlands, which can absorb nitrogen and phosphorus before they get to the river.

EPA's Science Advisory Board was scheduled to vote on approval of the draft report last week. But the advisers delayed their decision until December to allow for technical revisions to the draft.

Virginia H. Dale, corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and chair of the board's Hypoxia Advisory Panel, tells C&EN she expects no substantive changes to the draft report's recommendations before it is finalized.

from Chemical and Engineering News

Release of Reservoir Water Puts Drought to the Test

In an extraordinary measure aimed at determining whether the Washington region truly is in a drought, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a torrent of water yesterday from a dam in far Western Maryland to test how long it will take the water to reach this region.

The release of 200 million gallons of water a day through tomorrow from the Jennings Randolph reservoir will allow experts to fill in a crucial data point they say is missing from their drought predictions.

Despite the desiccated cornfields and front lawns, the declarations from political leaders and this fall's unseasonable heat, water experts remain uncertain whether the region's dry spell will ultimately lead to a drought for the water supply.

The Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin is predicting there is only a 1 percent chance that major water suppliers will have to tap backup sources through the end of the year. Without the water flow data from the dam, though, it doesn't know for certain.

"It's very rare to have full reservoirs late in the season with low flows [in the river], so we are taking advantage of it to test the time of travel from the reservoir to the intake," said Erik Hagen, the commission's director of operations.

In 1992, the last time the Corps of Engineers tested water flow from the reservoir, about 150 miles northwest of the District, it took nine long days to go downriver to the Potomac basin. That was one of the worst dry spells the region has experienced recently, a year when the water flow in the Potomac could not sustain the region's water supply needs. The nine days become something of a benchmark: If it takes longer for the water to get downstream this week, experts could decide that they have a problem.

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Southeast cuts back amid drought

From the shriveled cotton fields of northern Alabama to the browned lawns of suburban Atlanta, the Southeast is wilting under one of the most severe droughts in its history.

In Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida, there has been less rain than at any time since records began in 1894. Farmers, who face the brunt of the drought, are harvesting parched fields of damaged corn, peanuts, corn and soybeans. Cattle producers are selling their stock because they cannot afford to pay for feed. Tobacco hanging in barns is not curing because it is too dry.

As the drought intensifies, the water shortage is hitting urban and suburban residents too.

Hydropower plants are raising rates, watering bans are being imposed, and almost everyone in this rapidly developing region is being called on to exercise self-restraint.

Even the seemingly sacrosanct is not exempt: Georgia Tech's groundskeepers may not water their football field with city water. Homeowners cannot water their prized St. Augustine lawns. And Stone Mountain Park has stopped creating artificial snow for its 32,000-square-foot Coca-Cola Snow Mountain in time for Christmas. The Atlanta theme park's snow-making equipment uses 38 gallons of water a minute.

With lakes drying to record lows -- and scientists predicting a particularly warm, dry winter -- many officials across the region are wondering whether they will be able to supply residents with enough drinking water.

In Monteagle, Tenn., the town's water is just days from running out, and officials are exploring mobile filtration and treatment units to produce drinking water.

In Alexander City, Ala., water is so low in Lake Martin, the town's only water supply, that pumps are shutting down and engineers are floating a barge to install pumps deeper into the Tallapoosa River.

"This is unheard of," said Eugene Mahan, superintendent of water treatment for the system in Alexander City. "Now we're really in a hustle; we're really in a rush to pump water. We just don't know how low this lake is going to go."

In Atlanta, a lake that provides most of the water to more than 5 million metropolitan residents is 12 feet below full pool, and it's falling 5 feet a month. Tensions are running high.

more from the LA Times

When water goes missing, who you gonna call?

The creek was there for as long as anyone in this leafy Clayton County suburb could remember. A real estate listing even advertised the charms of its trilling flow.

Recently, sophisticated sonar equipment pinpointed a leak in a nearby 6-inch-diameter main. Utility crews patched the pipe. To everyone's surprise, the stream – complete with gravelly banks, a gully, and mud critters – dried up.

Though finally solved, the mystery of the creek that was a leak is an example of how utility districts in the US can't account for 6 billion gallons of drinking water each day. If all that lost water were collected over the course of a year, it would fill Gatun Lake, the huge reservoir that feeds the Panama Canal.

There are signs that some utilities are tightening the screws on water loss, especially in places confronting extended drought or a development boom.

Georgia recently began requiring counties seeking water-withdrawal permits to first check their waterworks for leaks. Three other states, including Tennessee, are tightening water audit requirements, and the American Water Works Association (AWWA) has persuaded 300 communities to take part in a public-service campaign called "Only Tap Water Delivers," in part prompted by mounting water losses.

Communities here in the South, one of the most water-rich corners of the US, are starting to put "leak detectives" on missing water cases.

According to the AWWA in Denver, the nation needs to spend some $250 billion in the next 20 to 30 years to upgrade its tap-water delivery systems, which were built primarily in three phases – the turn of the 20th century, the roaring '20s, and right after World War II. Most of that cost is likely to show up on consumers' water bills.

more from the CS Monitor

Chemicals threaten wildlife in San Francisco Bay, scientists say

Scientists are closely monitoring flame retardants and commonly used pesticides in San Francisco Bay, as rising levels of toxic chemicals threaten birds, fish and marine mammals, according to an annual regional monitoring report set for release today.

Mercury, PCBs, dioxin and invasive species remain at the top of the most-wanted list of nasty threats to the bay, says the "Pulse of the Estuary 2007" report prepared by the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a nonprofit science group in Oakland. Scientists have long recognized that these problems in the bay impair the quality of its fish and wildlife and affect the working of the food chain.

Yet, over the last several years, the concentrations of bromine-containing chemical flame retardants known as PBDEs have risen in both water and soil on the bay bottom, the report said.

The state Legislature banned two forms of flame retardants, "octa" and "penta," effective in 2008. A third form, "deca," which is widely used in electronic products, hasn't been banned.

State health officials have found the chemicals in the bodies of marine mammals and in bird eggs and dead embryos and are concerned that the chemicals will interfere with reproduction, a danger observed in laboratory animals.

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