Flooding revives debate over levees

Pacific Mayor Herbert Adams knows the roiling floodwaters of the Meramec River will return. It's just a matter of time.

The murky brown water can rise just as quickly as it retreated last week, and there's nothing to keep it from swamping the low-lying, southern part of his city.

"That is why I keep saying that we are acting like a big bird with our head in the sand. It is predictable," Adams said. "My prediction is that every day that we get up without some kind of protection, we're one day closer to the next flood."

So when the Meramec broke free of its banks this last time — damaging 180 homes and 30 businesses in his town alone — Adams implored state and federal leaders to provide a levee or some other form of flood protection to shield Pacific from another watery mess in the future.


The latest wave of river flooding has rekindled debate over levee building on eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois waterways. Throughout the St. Louis region, 89 federally recognized levees and flood protection systems have been erected along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and their major tributaries.

Collectively, they're counted on to protect vast tracts that include residential neighborhoods, factories and interstate highways. But critics say levees are an expensive fix that have spawned widespread development on historically flood-prone land and have lulled people into a false sense of security.

Conservationists and some local university professors say levees alter the natural flows of rivers, making flooding worse for some unprotected tracts.

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Experts Seek Answers on Water Footprint

It's not only our carbon footprint we should worry about. Experts are looking for solutions to our growing water footprint, as urban populations explode and the demand for biofuels adds stress on water for farmland.

Nearly half the people on Earth, about 2.5 billion, have no access to sanitation, many of them in urban slums. The world's cities are growing by 1 million people a week, and soon their aging water systems will not cope.

"What we are doing now can't keep up with the issues we already have," says Carol A. Howe, an expert working for a UNESCO-led water development project called Switch.

"Something needs to change. It needs to change quickly, and it needs to be fairly dramatic," she told a symposium of journalists Wednesday.

The threat of climate change has drawn attention to carbon footprints, the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity. Now scientists have begun calculating a water footprint, the amount of water needed to produce goods or services.

A report published this month by UNESCO-IHE, the Institute for Water Education in Delft, says it takes 70-400 times as much water to create energy from biofuels as it does from fossil fuels.

It said the production of crude oil requires slightly more than one cubic meter of water for one unit of energy, compared with 61 cubic meters to grow biomass in Brazil _ mostly sugar used for ethanol _ for the same amount of energy. The water footprint of biomass grown in the Netherlands is 24 cubic meters, the report said.

Engineers are experimenting in a dozen cities from Lima to Beijing to find ways to ease the pressure on water resources.

The pilot projects, run by the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization and funded by the European Union, range from turning rooftops into gardens, capturing and recycling rain, recharging underground water reservoirs with waste water, and swapping traditional flush sanitation for dry toilets.

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Poison rivers may be grim legacy of flood disaster

DANGEROUS chemicals released during centuries of heavy industry could be polluting Yorkshire again after being dredged up in last summer's floods, new research reveals.

Academics at a three-day conference looking at the effects of last June's torrential downpour warned that flooding would become an increasingly important issue in the years and decades to come – and that only widescale change to the way we live will help mitigate the devastating impact.

Floodplains need to be abandoned, new lakes created, hill farming scaled back, new homes built to the highest environmental standards and woodland regrown as Britons stop waging war with nature and allowed the country to return to its natural state, they argued.

And farmers need to be made "custodians of the countryside", being adequately compensated for allowing flood waters on to their land to ruin their crops in order to save towns and cities further downstream, the academics said.

Most pressing of all, however, could be dealing with the long-term effects of the recent floods.

Sheffield Hallam University academic Ian Rotherham, who co-ordinated the conference, said: "Our research has shown that extreme floods can release dangerous pollution locked up in valley-bottom sediments from centuries of heavy industry.

"In some parts of the country like South and West Yorkshire this may mean heavy metals and other pollutants released from deposits to be spread far and wide across floodlands downstream.

"These could be farming or housing lands and clearly raises concerns."

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In salmonella-stricken Alamosa, every tap could spill out poison

Randy Wilhelm, along with the 10,000 or so other residents of this isolated agricultural crossroads, is caught in a hygiene dilemma.

Dirty dishes are piling up in his apartment. He dares take only the briefest of showers, and he has sprouted an unkempt goatee because he hasn't shaved for a week. And, starting today, he can't use municipal water for any purpose other than to flush his toilet. No laundry. No dishes. No coffee.

"How do you not shower?" said Wilhelm, 40. "I can't wash my dishes. My house stinks."

Salmonella has contaminated the city's water supply, sickening more than 200 people since last week. For everyone else, the inconveniences are immense.

Bottled water is scarce, with most residents relying on public distribution centers. Businesses have closed. Today the city will begin flushing its pipes with chlorine, making it risky for anyone to come in contact with tap water. Even boiled water will not be safe.

Officials say it could be several weeks before the system is cleaned out.

How the water source became contaminated is unclear.

Alamosa -- in the heart of the vast San Luis Valley, about 200 miles southwest of Denver -- draws its water from deep wells that tap the aquifer directly. Because the drinking water comes straight from the ground, it is not chemically treated.

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Ancient legal doctrine stirs Delta water fight

A powerful state agency is coming under increasing pressure to apply an ancient, obscure and potent legal concept to sort out the state's untenable water mess and save the Delta's dying ecosystem for future generations.

The public trust doctrine, which has roots in the Roman Empire, could lead to sweeping revisions in the amount of water that may be taken from the Delta.

The doctrine, which has been buttressed in California's courts, says that certain values belong to present and future generations and that the state has an obligation to protect those values. In the Delta, for example, that could mean regulators might strike a new balance between the needs for Delta water and recreational fishing and water quality.

The idea is prompting fierce opposition from some of the state's largest water agencies, who fear water will be taken away from them for environmental benefits.

Several months ago, an independent panel appointed to make recommendations on water policy and the Delta concluded public trust and a related constitutional doctrine should become the foundation of decision-making about California water.

The chairman of that panel, former legislative leader Phil Isenberg, told the State Water Resources Control Board this week that the status quo must change, but he added that proposed changes will face stiff opposition.

"Most people want to be assured that what they're doing now, they can continue to do it, and it will be cheap," Isenberg said.

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Water: A long dry summer

The record-breaking European heatwave of 2003 did not come out of the blue. It was preceded by an unusually dry spring during which soils dried up across the continent. The lack of moisture resulted in strongly reduced soil evaporation and cooling, which in turn intensified the temperature extremes during the summer.

Climate scientists believe that in the second half of this century, extreme summer heat and drought could become the rule rather than the exception as global temperatures rise. In any case, rapid loss of soil moisture early in the year now seems to be a signal for subsequent summer heatwaves in Europe1. A feedback loop appears to be at work: as heat dries up the soil, the dry soil amplifies the heat.

Changes in soil moisture content may have other feedbacks, affecting soil erosion, surface runoff, soil nutrients and even cloud formation. But predictions of soil drying in response to rising temperatures are still very uncertain. For Africa and South America, climate modellers are not even confident about the sign of the simulated changes.

“We are told climate variability will increase and that it may get drier in some regions, but we really know too little about the details,” says Malin Falkenmark, a hydrologist and water-management expert at the Stockholm International Water Institute in Sweden. This uncertainty hasn't stopped Falkenmark, along with other hydrologists, from recommending changes to water-management practices in response to climate change, and to declare an end to the wait-and-see approach of the past.

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Dams: Deep trouble

Every schoolchild is told how the water cycle works. Most of us can even remember the diagram from geography lessons, showing water evaporating from the ocean, forming clouds in the sky and then falling back to the ground as rain, where it runs into streams and rivers and, finally, back into the sea.

The reality is more complicated, with scientists arguing over the finer points of balancing the "water budget" – how much water should stay on land, and how much should be left to flow into the sea. Now, suddenly, this debate has become of more than academic interest.

The reason for the sudden interest is a new study that attempts to calculate the effect of man-made dams and reservoirs on how much water returns to the oceans. The results are startling: so much water is now stored in dams that it's having a profound influence on the rate at which sea levels are rising.

Predictions for sea-level rises due to global warming affect hundreds of millions of people at risk from coastal flooding. The new research suggests that, over the past 50 years, new dams and reservoirs have held back some 10,800 cubic kilometres of water, which would have been enough to raise global sea levels by about 30mm. In other words, the rises we have seen so far due to global warming might have been considerably larger if it were not for the huge numbers of dams and reservoirs built from the 1950s onwards.

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Drought eases, water wars persist

It's raining again in the Southeast. Much of the drought-parched region has been deluged recently by winter downpours, including weekend storms that battered the downtown business district and a swath of north Georgia.

The drought has not ended, but it has eased across most of the region, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor and the National Weather Service.

Lake Purdy, the main drinking water supply for Birmingham, Ala., is at normal levels for the first time in almost a year. From Jan. 1 through Sunday, Birmingham received 12.09 inches of rain, just below the average of 12.78.

Some Alabama farmers are finding fields too wet to prepare for spring planting. North Carolina dropped recently from 39 to zero counties in the worst category of drought.

Here in Atlanta, where stark pictures of a drier-by-the-day Lake Lanier pushed the drought into the national spotlight last fall, the drought is essentially over, says Pat Stevens, chief of the environmental planning division of the Atlanta Regional Commission.

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Man-Made Chemicals May Put Strain on Fish

The Potomac River contains an array of man-made chemicals that could play havoc with animals' hormone systems, federal scientists have found in their best glimpse yet of the river's problems with a mysterious new class of pollutant.

The research, unveiled at a conference last week, found more than 10 of the compounds, including pesticides, herbicides and artificial fragrances. Through an accident of chemistry, formulas designed to kill bugs or add smell to soap might also interfere with vital signals in fish, amphibians and other creatures.

The scientists said they hoped this new research might explain one of the Potomac's most bizarre discoveries: Some male fish have begun growing eggs. Scientists said there was no evidence of a threat to human health.

Taken with a recent report that drinking water samples from the river contain traces of drugs, the results provide troubling evidence about the river's health. People living along the Potomac, the results showed, have widely tainted it with pollutants that scientists are just beginning to understand.

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Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast "Dead Zones"

The water in brooks, streams and creeks from Michigan to Puerto Rico carries a heavy load of pollutants, particularly nitrates from fertilizers. These nitrogen and oxygen molecules that crops need to grow eventually make their way into rivers, lakes and oceans, fertilizing blooms of algae that deplete oxygen and leave vast "dead zones" in their wake. There, no fish or typical sea life can survive. And scientists warn that a federal mandate to produce more biofuel may make the situation even worse.

Researchers led by aquatic ecologist Patrick Mulholland of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee report in Nature that streams and other waterways are losing their ability to filter excess nitrates from fertilizers and sewage. They discovered this by releasing a concentrated nitrate solution carrying an unusual isotope of nitrogen into 72 different streams—ranging from heavily altered urban waterways to pristine rivulets—and then tracked the isotope to find out how much made it downstream. The amount at the end indicated each stream's ability to naturally remove the pollutant—a measure of its health.

"We found that they continue to take up nitrate, but they remove a smaller fraction of the overall nitrate as you overload them," Mulholland says. "This is probably the reason we're seeing hypoxia [low oxygen levels] and other problems in coastal waters."

Typically, bacteria remove excess fertilizer from water through a chemical process known as denitrification, which enables them to convert nitrate to nitrogen that is then released into the atmosphere as a gas. The team found, however, that bacteria in the streams they studied only eliminated an average of 16 percent of the nitrogen pollution; bacteria in the most undisturbed streams performed the best, removing as much as 43 percent.

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The energy-water nexus: deja-vu all over again?

With US policymakers struggling to contemplate a future where oil pipelines sputter and water wells come up empty, panellists at the recently concluded American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston urged a rethink of the connection between these two crucial resources.

The link between energy and water, commonly called the energy-water nexus, was once a cornerstone of Project Independence, an initiative in the administration of Richard Nixon that aimed for domestic energy self-sufficiency. Intervening discoveries of domestic oil and less fractious relationships with global energy suppliers caused interest to wane, however, and the project was shelved.

Flash ahead to 2008, and concerns over climate change have thrust the energy-water issue back into the spotlight. The burgeoning global population's ever-increasing need for fresh water is at odds with a warming world that is already squeezing water availability in some regions. And things will only get worse, according to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as current water-management practices are unlikely to quell demands. At least in the US, the energy-water nexus is creeping back onto the national stage.

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Water Cleaning Presents Challenges

Shivaji Deshmukh drinks water extracted from raw sewage. He knows the water is clean because his job is to help make it so as an engineer at the Orange County Water District.

"It's an efficient, cheap water supply — and it's the best quality," says Deshmukh, amid the hiss of machines at the state-of-the-art facility.

Performing the recycling transformation requires a battery of treatments.

Wastewater strained and disinfected at an adjacent sewage treatment plant is first filtered through tiny straws. Then, in a process called reverse osmosis, the water is forced across a spiraled sheet of plastic with holes so small that little else can slip through. In the final phase, the water is zapped with ultraviolet light.

The three-step operation is one of the most sophisticated cleansing systems anywhere. While the incoming water contains minuscule levels of prescription drugs, tests for any traces of a half-dozen pharmaceuticals, conducted as the treated water leaves the plant, detect nothing.

The end product supplies more than 500,000 Orange County residents for a year, nearly one-quarter of the district's potable water needs.

The cleansing procedure illustrates how difficult — and expensive — it is to scrub virtually every iota of contaminant from our supplies.

The standard ways of cleaning water are not designed to snare the tiny amounts of prescription drugs that survive digestion, and then, with a flush of the toilet, begin their journey toward America's taps.

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Mutated fish swimming in tainted water

Editor's note: Second of a three-part series.

On this brisk, glittering morning, a flat-bottomed boat glides across the massive reservoir that provides Las Vegas its drinking water. An ominous rumble growls beneath the craft as its two long, electrified claws extend into the depths.

Moments later, dozens of stunned fish float to the surface.

Federal scientists scoop them up and transfer them into 50-quart Coleman ice chests for transport to a makeshift lab on the dusty lakeshore. Within the hour, the researchers will club the seven-pound common carps to death, draw their blood, snip out their gonads and pack them in aluminum foil and dry ice.

The specimens will be flown across the country to laboratories where aquatic toxicologists are studying what happens to fish that live in water contaminated with at least 13 different medications — from over-the-counter pain killers to prescription antibiotics and mood stabilizers.

More often than not these days, the laboratory tests bring unwelcome results.

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Cities rarely release water test results

When water providers find pharmaceuticals in drinking water, they rarely tell the public. When researchers make the same discoveries, they usually don't identify the cities involved.

There are plenty of reasons offered for the secrecy: concerns about national security, fears of panic, a feeling that the public will not understand — even confidentiality agreements.

"That's a really sensitive subject," said Elaine Archibald, executive director of California Urban Water Agencies, an 11-member organization comprised of the largest water providers in California.
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She said many customers "don't know how to interpret the information. They hear something has been detected in source water and drinking water, and that's cause for alarm — just because it's there."

As The Associated Press documented in a five-month investigation, drinking water provided to at least 41 million people living in 24 major metropolitan areas has tested positive for trace amounts of pharmaceuticals.

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WATER RATION BRITAIN THREAT

A growing population and increasing demand for water means that the country is as much at risk as the Sahara Desert.

Overcrowded South-east England is already suffering “severe water stress”, putting it in the same bracket as Saudi Arabia, North Africa, India and eastern Australia. But analysts fear that within 20 years a “parched zone” will spread across the country from the Bristol Channel to the Norfolk coast and north of the Midlands.

The grim outlook led to water industry experts predicting that standpipes would become common across large swathes of the nation. Gary Smith, National Secretary for Water at the GMB union, said: “Rationing will depend on the pace of global warming. The next two years could be a crunch time.

“We could see standpipes. The wealthy will be able to insulate themselves to some extent. It will be ordinary families who will be hardest hit. This is about people not having an adequate supply of water.”

The Campaign to Protect Rural England also warned: “Rationing is definitely an option for water companies to take. But they would need to declare drought conditions to do it, and they would need to give us plenty of warning.

“The problem is that water companies do not have a long-term solution and measures like the hosepipe ban are symptomatic of this. There is little doubt there are more severe droughts on the way. With that in mind, we support rationing and better conservation.”

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Fluid Situation

The Tucson City Council may soon be forced to answer some difficult questions about the quality of water that Tucsonans will have to live with.

The stakes are high: Either we'll see a substantial decrease in our water quality, or a considerable hike in our water rates.

At the same time, a growing number of scientists and policymakers are warning that communities, like Tucson, that rely heavily on the Colorado River for water may not even be asking the right questions. With global-warming concerns on the rise, reports indicate that the river could have much lower flows in the future.

"We have built an unsustainable civilization in the Southwest," says Tim P. Barnett, a physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Barnett is also co-author of an article soon to appear in the journal Water Resources Research titled, "When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?"

Barnett believes cities like Tucson need to ask tough questions now--or risk potentially devastating consequences in the not-so-distant future.

"Currently, the outflow of the Colorado is greater than the inflow," Barnett comments in an interview. "Apparently, no one has ever looked at the way people keep the books on this river. There has been deliberate overdrafting, while minimizing climate change and infiltration and ignoring increased evaporation due to drought."

In the coming weeks, a more immediately pressing question before the City Council will deal with water quality: What level of minerals should Tucson Water be delivering to its customers?

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Plan to 'flush' Grand Canyon stirs concerns

The Grand Canyon is about to take a bath, and National Park Service officials who oversee the natural wonder are worried.

Federal flood control managers, led by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, this week plan to unleash millions of cubic feet of water from behind Glen Canyon Dam to "flush" the huge canyon bottom with a simulated springtime flood.

Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Geological Survey specialists say the 60-hour "blowout," followed by a series of smaller flows this fall, are needed to scour accumulated sand off the Colorado River bottom, then gradually restore sandy beaches and side pools for endangered species and campers.

The flows begin today, and a massive release is set for Wednesday in a media event with Kempthorne.

At its peak volume, 41,500 cubic feet per second of water will burst from tubes at the bottom of the dam, temporarily reducing flows to hydroelectric turbines. The experiment will not affect power or water supplies to customers, officials said.

National park officials said that 10 years of research at a cost of $80 million had shown that the flooding as planned could irreparably harm the national park's ecology and resources.

Grand Canyon National Park Supt. Steve Martin said he was given a day to formulate comments to a cursory environmental assessment of the project. In those comments, he wrote that statements by the Bureau of Reclamation used to justify the flows' timing were "unsubstantiated." Far from restoring crucial sand banks and other areas, the flows could destroy habitat, Martin said.

One flood was not enough, Martin said Monday. Holding off follow-up flows for months would leave endangered humpback chub fish, sandbars used by river rafting trips, and archaeological treasures at river's edge diminished "almost to the point of no return," he said.

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Future looks bleak for waterways of world's largest delta

The future of Bangladesh's famed rivers and waterways remains critically endangered as water management policies at home and abroad continue to pose a dire threat to the largest river delta in the world.

The result: rivers radically changing course in a matter of years, excessive siltation and an impossible scenario regarding flood control initiatives.

Domestic inertia has combined with ill-conceived policies to leave a network of badly designed drainage and irrigation structures, unfettered dumping of toxic industrial waste and other pollutants as well as ongoing encroachment.

River experts fear that without immediate and concerted action these factors will leave Bangladesh's river systems virtually lifeless. Director general of the Water Resource Planning Organisation, Muhammad Inamul Huq, told bdnews24.com that the Karotoa, Ichhamoti, Bhairab and Kaliganga rivers have almost totally dried up.

"This is largely because they changed their courses in the recent past. Such rivers now number about 12," said Huq. The WARPO director general said approximately 18 rivers today face extinction due to siltation at their sources.

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California's water fortune is told at Gin Flat

In deep winter, water scientist Frank Gehrke straps on his cross-country skis and trudges uphill in the thin, cold air to one of the most closely monitored frozen meadows on the continent, 7,200 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada.

To understand why his arduous, breath-sucking hike is important, stand still and listen to the snow. In the pale morning sun, the forest of pine and cedar comes alive with sound. Clumps of fresh powder fall with a thud or drip-drop from tree tops, quickening with the staccato of popping corn.

This place is like a Rosetta Stone for California's water supply. It's where the convergence of snow, sun and temperature enables scientists to predict floods or drought. It's where they have installed sophisticated equipment to help understand how climate change is altering snow melt in the Sierra, a source of water for millions of Californians.

"Gin Flat's always been the place where we try things and invest first," said Michael D. Dettinger, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Although the state oversees more than 300 survey sites, what makes Gin Flat unique is its location, an elevation in Yosemite National Park just above the point where rain commonly turns to snow. That makes it an ideal spot to test the premise that a warming climate will produce more rain at higher elevations -- a shift that would bring more flooding and less snowpack to fill California reservoirs in mid-summer.

These days, with water woes plaguing the state, readings at Gin Flat will ultimately help determine how much more it could cost Californians to drink a glass of water or take a shower, or if they can water lawns without restrictions.


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