From Toilet to Tap

In January, public officials and residents of Orange County, California, toasted the culmination of a water supply project more than a decade in the making. But at these festivities champagne took a backseat to the beverage of choice as celebrants lifted glasses of recycled sewage water.

More than a billion people worldwide lack clean drinking water. While demand for freshwater access continues to increase—after tripling in the last 50 years—global supplies are becoming scarcer. Major rivers vital to surrounding populations are in danger of drying out. Groundwater reserves face a similar fate. The situation threatens to grow worse in the future as extreme droughts occur more often, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the United States more than 2.1 trillion gallons of water are flushed down toilets every year. What most people think of as sewage is a freshwater reserve that, with a few steps of treatment, could provide drinking water for millions. Recognizing this, Orange County’s water and sanitation districts have begun recycling sewage into drinking water at the world’s largest plant of its kind, the $487 million Groundwater Replenishment System. The treated water, which exceeds state and federal heath standards, is being used to recharge the underground aquifer that feeds the taps of more than 2.3 million residents of the region. Other municipalities in California, Texas, Florida, Singapore, and Australia are exploring similar projects.

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Is water becoming ‘the new oil’?

Public fountains are dry in Barcelona, Spain, a city so parched there’s a €9,000 ($13,000) fine if you’re caught watering your flowers. A tanker ship docked there this month carrying 5 million gallons of precious fresh water – and officials are scrambling to line up more such shipments to slake public thirst.

Barcelona is not alone. Cyprus will ferry water from Greece this summer. Australian cities are buying water from that nation’s farmers and building desalination plants. Thirsty China plans to divert Himalayan water. And 18 million southern Californians are bracing for their first water-rationing in years.

Water, Dow Chemical Chairman Andrew Liveris told the World Economic Forum in February, “is the oil of this century.” Developed nations have taken cheap, abundant fresh water largely for granted. Now global population growth, pollution, and climate change are shaping a new view of water as “blue gold.”

Water’s hot-commodity status has snared the attention of big equipment suppliers like General Electric as well as big private water companies that buy or manage municipal supplies – notably France-based Suez and Aqua America, the largest US-based private water company.

Global water markets, including drinking water distribution, management, waste treatment, and agriculture are a nearly $500 billion market and growing fast, says a 2007 global investment report.

But governments pushing to privatize costly to maintain public water systems are colliding with a global “water is a human right” movement. Because water is essential for human life, its distribution is best left to more publicly accountable government authorities to distribute at prices the poorest can afford, those water warriors say.

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Drought turning futures to dust

Longtime oysterman Keith Millender sees every shower taken or car washed in metropolitan Atlanta as a small threat to his family, which has harvested seafood from northwest Florida's Apalachicola Bay for generations.

The Apalachicola River — which carries water more than 300 miles from Georgia's Lake Lanier into the bay, providing the delicate balance of freshwater and saltwater oysters need to thrive — is running dry.

Despite recent rainfalls, Georgia remains in a drought and months of above-average rain are needed to fill its reservoirs. Lanier, which provides most of metro Atlanta's water, is less than 60 percent full.

"They are misusing their water — they are using it for lawns, swimming pools, even in some bathrooms they are flushing twice," Millender says of Atlanta's growing thirst for water. The metro area's population has doubled since 1980, surpassing 5 million residents.

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has said his state's demand for the water comes down to "man vs. mussels." Atlanta needs water for its survival, he has said in making a case to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allow Georgia to take more water from Lanier.

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In Colorado River Delta, waters -- and prospects -- are drying up

Fighting a fierce north wind and cresting waves, a dozen Cucapa Indian fishermen were in trouble before they were halfway home, their small boats and balky outboard motors overmatched by the roiling estuary of the Colorado River Delta.

"Malo viento," muttered Julio Figueroa, as he nosed his boat slowly through the wind-whipped waves, his feet submerged in 10 inches of standing water. Boats have capsized and men have drowned in these waters, where river and sea collide. Many others have drifted out to sea after waterlogged motors stalled.

The Cucapa say that every year they must venture farther downstream, braving some of the highest spring tides in the world. Rough seas aren't the only hazard. It is illegal to fish here. The waters are part of a federal sanctuary created to protect several imperiled marine species. Although getting caught could cost them their boats, the Cucapa say they have little choice. Upstream, where the current is slower and the fishing legal, there is not enough water anymore and, consequently, not enough fish.

As U.S. scientists warn of a semi-permanent drought along the taxed river by midcentury, Mexico today offers a glimpse of what dry times can be like. Rationing is in effect in some areas. Farmers have abandoned crops they can no longer irrigate. Experts fear that the desert will reclaim some of the region's most fertile land.

The Cucapa are a tiny portion of the 3 million people in northern Mexico who depend on a meager allotment of Colorado River water that was not enough when it was granted by treaty in 1944, and is far from enough now. Traversing 1,440 miles, through seven of the most arid U.S. states, the Colorado River arrives here as an intermittent stream laden with sewage, fertilizer, pesticides and salts leached from farmland.

The Cucapa and their ancestors have been living in the Colorado River Delta for 1,000 years, sustaining themselves on what once were lush wetlands. As the river and its surroundings dried up, most of the Cucapa went elsewhere. Today, the handful who remain -- fewer than 200 -- cling to a water-starved environment that is as imperiled as they are.

Every year at this time, the Cucapa head for the "zono nucleo," the core of the marine reserve where the river meets the Gulf of California. Playing cat and mouse with police patrols, the Indians net corvina, a commercially popular fish that can bring them as much money in a month as they can earn in a year working in fields or doing other manual labor.

This spring day, the Cucapa fishermen would have had unusually good luck if the weather hadn't turned against them. The corvina were plentiful and the patrols nowhere in sight. But the wind didn't let up, and by midafternoon many of the overloaded Cucapa boats were riding precariously low in the choppy water.

As they retreated upriver, one boat lodged on a sandbar, forcing its crew to dump a third of its catch before the men could free their boat. Then another boat -- with Figueroa's stepson aboard -- began to go down, its bow slowly submerging as the two-man crew yelled for help and the pilot frantically tried to guide the boat to shore before the motor gave out.

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Dead water

Too much nitrogen being washed into the sea is causing dead zones to spread alarmingly
NEW life generally flourishes in the spring, unless it is marine life in the Gulf of Mexico. Every spring the coastal waters turn into a scene of devastation and death. Known as a “dead zone”, this vast oxygen-depleted area extends along the coast between Louisiana and Texas.

Hundreds of the world's coastal regions have dead zones. They mostly occur when spring rainfall gathers on land, makes its way into streams and rivers, and eventually tumbles down to the ocean. The rivers carry with them a cargo of nutrients, in particular nitrogen, from farms in the watershed. When this nitrogen reaches the sea it causes a brief frenzy of algal growth which depletes the water of oxygen. Fish, clams, shrimp, crabs, entire mussel reefs and other bottom-dwelling animals can be wiped out.

Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist from Oregon State University, says this nutrient run-off from land is increasing the number, size, duration and severity of the dead zones. This is mainly because the use of fertilisers in agriculture is increasing. Sometimes the waste from animals or human sewage worsens the blight.

Nitrogen, which, makes up about 78% of the Earth's atmosphere, is an inert gas but it has more reactive forms. One of these comes from making fertilisers, using the Haber-Bosch process which converts nitrogen gas into ammonia. Although some of the fertiliser used on fields is taken up by plants and then by the animals that eat them, most of it accumulates in the soil before being washed to the coast and eventually even to the deep ocean. Another source of nitrogen pollution comes from fossil fuels, which produce nitrogen oxides when they are burnt. These oxides are released into the atmosphere and they can fall back to earth as acid rain.

The release of reactive nitrogen into the environment has a “cascade” effect, according to two papers published in the latest issue of Science. James Galloway of the University of Virginia, the lead author of one of the papers, says that every single atom of reactive nitrogen can cause a cascading sequence of events which can harm human health and ecosystems.

In the lower atmosphere the oxides of nitrogen add to an increase in ozone and small particles, which can cause respiratory ailments. The reactive nitrogen in acid rain kills insects and fish in rivers and lakes. And when it is carried to the coast it contributes to the formation of dead zones and in the creation of red tides (a kind of toxic, algal bloom that can form in the sea). It is then converted to nitrous oxide which adds to global warming.

According to Alan Townsend, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, humans are creating reactive nitrogen at a record pace, and moving it around the world as never before. People create about 190m tonnes of reactive nitrogen a year, compared with 90m-120m tonnes from natural processes, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and lightning strikes.

Some of this man-made nitrogen helps to grow food and biofuels, but the nitrogen uptake by plants and animals is so inefficient that only 10-15% of the reactive nitrogen created for food production actually ends up being eaten as food. The rest of the nitrogen goes into the environment. What is worrying is that the production of reactive nitrogen is set to increase according to most predictions.

Doug Capone, of the University of Southern California, says that the increased levels of reactive nitrogen are now responsible for about 3% of the biological production of new marine life in the open ocean. Because there is only a limited supply of nitrogen out in the open ocean, additional amounts of it can have a huge stimulating effect.

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Los Angeles Eyes Sewage as a Source of Water

Faced with a persistent drought and the threat of tighter water supplies, Los Angeles plans to begin using heavily cleansed sewage to increase drinking water supplies, joining a growing number of cities considering similar measures.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who opposed such a plan a decade ago over safety concerns, announced the proposal on Thursday as part of a package of initiatives to put the city, the nation’s second largest, on a stricter water budget. The other plans include increasing fines for watering lawns during restricted times, tapping into and cleaning more groundwater, and encouraging businesses and residents to use more efficient sprinklers and plumbing fixtures.

The move comes as California braces for the possibility of the most severe water shortages in decades.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, which supplies about a third of Los Angeles’s water, is short of expectations. At the same time, the Western drought has lowered supplies in reservoirs, while legal rulings to protect endangered species will curtail water deliveries from Northern California.

Worsening the problem, Los Angeles is expected to add 500,000 people by 2030, forcing the city to examine new ways to meet demand. One option off the table, Mr. Villaraigosa said, is a repeat of the city’s troubled history, fictionalized in the movie “Chinatown,” of diverting a distant river southward to slake the city’s thirst.

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Removing salt to supply a nation's water

Despite lingering doubts over the costs and environmental impacts of desalination, a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee predicts that desalination plants will satisfy a portion of future U.S. water demand. However, in the new report released April 22, the panel's engineers and water scientists call for more federal funding for research into water sources and energy requirements.

Desalination "will be a part of the U.S.'s water future," says Amy Zander, the head of the committee and an environmental engineer at Clarkson University. But lack of information on groundwater resources and future energy requirements is "going to remain an issue," she and the committee members emphasize. In addition to boosting federal funding, the NAS committee encourages detailed mapping of groundwater resources and their characteristics, such as salinity, underground flow, and recharge rates.

Groundwater resources in particular have gone largely unmapped in the U.S., and finding low-salt or brackish waters remains key to desalination's success inland. Reductions in energy consumption may have plateaued: reverse osmosis, the best established desalination method, is "already very close to the thermodynamic minimum needed to get salt out of water," Zander says. "There's not much further we're going to go in reducing energy in desalination." But thermal desalination, which taps waste heat from another energy source, may be worth pursuing.

Other problems are inherent to the technology, including what to do with the removed salts and the removal of other unwanted components with potential environmental or human-health impacts. For example, naturally occurring boron can be removed by more costly configurations of reverse-osmosis membranes. The World Health Organization sets boron limits in fresh drinking water at 0.5 milligrams per liter. Seawater and some groundwater sources in coastal areas contain much higher levels of boron, and the human-health effects remain unknown.

from ES&T News

Army Corps says Condition of many levees a mystery

Across America, earthen flood levees protect big cities and small towns, wealthy suburbs and rich farmland. But the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees levees, lacks an inventory of thousands of them and has no idea of their condition, the corps' chief levee expert told The Associated Press.

The uncertainty, amid an unusually wet spring that has already caused significant flooding across many states, is creating worry even within the corps.

"We have to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who's watching over them, what populations and properties are behind them," Eric Halpin, the corps' special assistant for dam and levee safety, said in an interview last month. "What is the risk posed to the public?"

Critics are troubled that the government doesn't know the answer.

Robert Bea, a University of California at Berkeley levee expert, said many levees are old, with rusting infrastructure and built to protect against relatively common floods - not the big ones like the Great Flood of 1993, when 1,100 levees were broken or had water spill over their tops.

"Once they do get an inventory," Bea said, "I think we're not going to like what we find."

Residents along the Mississippi River have been fighting floods with levees since the 19th century. After a devastating 1927 flood, Congress got involved, approving construction of levees and reservoirs along the Mississippi and Missouri river basins.

Today, about 2,000 levees are either operated by the corps or by local entities in partnership with the corps, generally protecting major population areas such as St. Louis and New Orleans.

Thousands of others - no one is sure how many - are privately owned, operated and maintained. The majority of those are "farm" levees keeping water out of fields, but some protect populated areas, industries and businesses.

For example, flooding in March breached private levees near the southeastern Missouri towns of Dutchtown and Poplar Bluff.

In 2006, prompted in part by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans the year before, Congress provided funding for the corps to inventory the levees it maintains or helps fund. That initial inventory is complete, Halpin said.

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Sacramento prepares for the worst -- massive flooding

California's capital city may be best known for politics, but it has another claim to fame: It's America's most flood-threatened city not named New Orleans.

A recent state report predicts that the right combination of unlucky weather conditions could put some parts of the city under more than 20 feet of water, causing a $25-billion disaster that would cripple state government and ripple through the California economy.

Authorities are racing against time to strengthen the earthen levees that ring nearly the entire city to hold back the swollen American and Sacramento rivers.

"Every winter we hold our breaths and hope this isn't the year something happens before we can finish the work," said Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson. "There is a sense of the clock ticking."

When heavy rain begins to fall, folks here peer nervously at the sky and riverbanks. And Stein Buer -- the person perhaps most responsible for their fates -- frets and prepares.

"I never sleep during storms," said Buer, executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, which is working with the state and federal governments in a multibillion-dollar effort to avert catastrophe. "It's the nature of my responsibility."

Worst-case scenarios project 500 dead, 102 square miles flooded, 300,000 people uprooted, an international airport and state agencies under water, and years of recovery.

To avoid that outcome, Buer has plotted strategy, navigated bureaucracy, even joined crews tossing sandbags.

He isn't going it alone. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the federal Bureau of Reclamation have all stepped up prevention efforts since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005. State flood experts and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, are pushing to buttress the Central Valley's 1,600 miles of levees.

The aim, with the help of nearly $5 billion in state bond money approved in 2006, is to double Sacramento's flood protection over the next decade.

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Singapore water makes global waves

Singapore's water shortages have always posed a major challenge.

"Although we're on the equator and we've got lots of rain, we have nowhere to naturally store water," explains Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of the city-state's Public Utilities Board, or PUB. "We have no groundwater."

For years, water has been imported through three pipelines from neighbouring Malaysia - an expensive and geopolitically troublesome solution that has long irked the Singaporean government.

The issue is becoming increasingly acute ahead of the expiry of two long-term supply deals that guarantee deliveries of Malaysian water for less than one cent per 1,000 gallons - some until 2011, some until 2061.

"The main Malaysian demand has been for a much higher price of water, which has varied from 15 to 20 times the current price," observes Cecilia Tortajada in her report Water Management in Singapore.

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Algae found in E China lake, water for 320,000 threatened

Blue-green algae has been discovered in Chaohu Lake, which is China's fifth largest body of fresh water and the drinking water source for about 320,000 people, an environmental official said.

The lake in Anhui Province has been severely polluted in recent months.

Following a long stretch of hot, dry weather, patches of algae were found in the western part of the lake, and traces of algae also cropped up in the eastern part, said Xiao Pu of the Anhui environmental protection bureau. Xiao said the lake supplies drinking water to about 320,000 people on its eastern banks,

"Normally, algae need a proper proportion of nitrogen and phosphorus, continuous temperatures above 25 degrees centigrade and strong sunlight for at least three days," to thrive, Xiao said. "Although there are no signs of a massive bloom of algae in the lake, current conditions are conducive to algae growth."

Xiao attributed the situation to the heavy snowfalls early this year. "When the snow melted, the water carried fertilizers and other nutrient runoffs to the lake, bringing the volume of nitrogen and phosphorus to a higher level."

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Oxygen-poor ocean zones are growing

Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.

Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing grounds, researchers have found.

The low-oxygen, or hypoxic, zones may also be connected to the Pacific coast invasion of the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid. These voracious predators, which can grow 6 feet long, appear to be taking advantage of their tolerance for oxygen-poor waters to escape predators and devour local fish, another team of scientists theorizes.

Researchers believe these phenomena are linked to subsurface layers of hypoxic water in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans that have been thickening over the last 50 years, according to the analysis published today in the journal Science.

The study, led by Lothar Stramma at the University of Kiel in Germany, warns that the spread of hypoxic waters that suffocate marine life is consistent with climate models forecasting what would happen as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.

The trend, the study points out, eerily echoes a scenario that unfolded about 250 million years ago, when 95% of life on Earth went extinct after heat-trapping carbon dioxide spewing from volcanoes warmed the planet and the oceans became stripped of oxygen.

"If you warm waters, they hold much less oxygen," said coauthor Gregory C. Johnson, an oceanographer with the federal Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. "That's the same as a bottle of soda water. If you open it warm, it'll fizz all over the place. If you open it cold, it will slowly fizz out as it warms."

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Georgia Wetlands Offer Cure for Drought

For the last couple of years, the Southeastern U.S. has faced one of the most severe droughts on record. In Georgia, you couldn't water your lawn. You couldn't wash your car in your driveway. The state even talked about shutting down swimming pools this year, and some worried the area would run out of drinking water.

But one community has not had to worry. Nearly two decades ago, Clayton County began building a unique water treatment system that includes wetlands and reservoirs.

"I like to say it's raining everyday in Clayton County because we're putting right now about 10 million gallons back in our water supply," says Mike Thomas, general manager of the Clayton County Water Authority.

Thomas says the reservoirs here are full and have never been in danger of being too low. That's because back in the 1980s, folks realized there wasn't enough water to support the growth, so they decided to build a system of wetlands and reservoirs that would help them save water.

Clayton County Wetlands

Amid the 4,000 acres of wetlands in Jonesboro, Ga., are graded pools used to filter water. The water is pumped in from a treatment plant and flows into these ponds, which are filled with all kinds of thick vegetation, including cattails, native grasses and water lilies.

"You can see right down here where the water's bubbling up," Thomas says, pointing to one of the ponds.

The treated wastewater enters the wetlands and gradually works its way through several pools. Thomas says that gives it plenty of exposure to the plants and animals that help remove any additional pollutants or nutrients.

The water in the ponds looks clear and doesn't smell bad. There have been complaints from neighbors not about the odor but about something else entirely: frogs.

"At night when they really get active, it can really get noisy because there are so many frogs," Thomas says.

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