State still lets Central Florida's sludge foul Everglades, critics say

The foul waters of Lake Okeechobee, the failing health of the Everglades and even sick dolphins along the South Florida coast might seem like troubles so distant they could hardly be the Orlando area's responsibility.

Yet a Florida law — which environmentalists say is being thwarted by state officials — says otherwise, banning a decades-old practice set in motion when a toilet is flushed or a kitchen sink is drained in Central Florida.

Treatment of that watery waste produces sludge, which local sewage utilities at least partly disinfect and dispose of as fertilizer. A lot of that fertilizer winds up on cattle ranches and citrus groves south of Orlando, where rain runoff and flooding can release chemicals that poison the wetlands and waterways from here to Florida Bay.

The Florida Legislature passed a law two years ago that environmental activists took as a victory that calls for an end to spreading of sludge within a vast area that drains into Osceola County's large lakes and then south to the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades and the coastal estuaries of South Florida.

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Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says

Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.

But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels.

As a result, the loss of thousands of additional square miles of marshland is “inevitable,” the scientists report in Monday’s issue of Nature Geoscience.

The finding does not suggest it would be pointless to divert the muddy water into the marshes, one of the researchers, Harry H. Roberts, said in an interview. “Any meaningful restoration of our coast has to involve river sediment,” said Dr. Roberts, a coastal scientist.

But he said officials would have to choose which parts of the landscape could be saved and which must be abandoned, and to acknowledge that lives and businesses would be disrupted. Instead of breaking levees far south of New Orleans, where relatively few people live, Dr. Roberts said, officials should consider diversions much closer to New Orleans, possibly into the LaFourche, Terrebonne or St. Bernard basins.

“It’s going to be an excruciating process to decide where that occurs,” Dr. Roberts said of the levee-breaking.

Sediment carried by the Mississippi built up the marshes of Louisiana over thousands of years, but today inland dams trap at least half of it, Dr. Roberts said. He pointed out that there were 8,000 dams in the drainage basin of the Mississippi.

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Justices Say Waste Can Be Dumped in Lake

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Clean Water Act does not prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from allowing mining waste to be dumped into rivers, streams and other waters.

In a 6-to-3 decision that drew fierce criticism from environmentalists, the court said the Corps of Engineers had the authority to grant Coeur Alaska Inc., a gold mining company, permission to dump the waste known as slurry into Lower Slate Lake, north of Juneau.

“We conclude that the corps was the appropriate agency to issue the permit and that the permit is lawful,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

The corps permit, issued in 2005, said that 4.5 million tons of waste from the Kensington mine could be dumped into the lake even though it would obliterate life in its waters. The corps found that disposing of it there was less environmentally damaging than other options.

Environmental advocacy organizations sued, saying the Bush administration was violating 30 years of tradition under the Clean Water Act in which such waste was regulated under the much more stringent standards of the federal Environment Protection Agency. In 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, agreed and invalidated the permit.

The Supreme Court overturned that decision Monday in Coeur Alaska Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, No. 07-984, saying there was nothing in the Clean Water Act that prevented the corps from making the decision.

Dissenting were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens.

Environmentalists said they worried that the ruling would set a precedent for dumping by mining and other industries.

“If a mining company can turn Lower Slate Lake in Alaska into a lifeless waste dump, other polluters with solids in their wastewater can potentially do the same to any water body in America,” said Trip Van Noppen, president of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, whose lawyer argued the case before the court.

But mining interests and their advocates said the decision simply reaffirmed longstanding practice.

“The idea that this spells the end and every industrial producer will start dumping waste is just untrue,” said Matthew D. McGill, the lawyer representing Coeur Alaska.

The Environmental Protection Agency said it was reviewing the decision to see if it affected its ability to safeguard the nation’s waters.

from the NY Times

Pine Beetle Infestation Threatens Water Source for U.S. Southwest

The destruction of 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain forest because of a pine beetle infestation could threaten the water supplies of 33 million people, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Rick Cables, chief forester for the Rocky Mountain region, told a congressional committee that the dead and dying forest at the headwaters of the Colorado River could burn extensively and reduce water supplies to residents in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson, Ariz. Roughly 25 percent of the water piped to these cities originates in national forests in the Rockies that have suffered extensive damage from infestations of pine bark beetles, Cables said. He said that the loss of the trees and subsequent wildfires would “literally bake the soil” and lead to excessive runoff and rapid snowmelt, both of which reduce flow to the Colorado River. The fires also could destroy reservoirs, pipes, and other infrastructure, Cables said. Outbreaks of pine beetles — which scientists attribute to warmer winters that fail to kill beetle larvae — have destroyed 8 million acres of trees in the western U.S. and 22 million acres in Canada.

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Destroying Levees in a State Usually Clamoring for Them

In the 1960s, a group of businessmen bought 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland along the Ouachita River in northern Louisiana and built miles of levee around it. They bulldozed its oak and cypress trees and, when the land dried out, turned it into a soybean farm.

Now two brothers who grew up nearby are undoing all that work. In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804.

“I really did not know if I would ever see it,” said Kelby Ouchley, who retired last year as manager of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge, which owns the land. He pursues the project as a volunteer consultant in coordination with his brother Keith, who heads Louisiana operations for the Nature Conservancy, which helped organize and finance the levee-busting effort.

The idea goes against the grain in Louisiana, where people have battled river flooding since colonial days. European settlers were often required to build levees to establish homesteading claims; in recent decades, landowners built levees to create farmland by the hundreds of thousands of acres. Hurricane Katrina brought a clamor for more and stronger levees to protect people and buildings farther south.

Yet at the same time, there is a growing awareness that Louisiana’s levees have exacted a huge environmental cost. Inland, cypress forests and wetlands crucial for migrating waterfowl have vanished; in southern Louisiana, coastal marshes deprived of regular infusions of sediment-rich river water have yielded by the mile to an encroaching Gulf of Mexico. Some scientists have suggested opening levees south of New Orleans so the Mississippi River can flow normally into the swamps.

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Tainted Cuyahoga River sees sporadic return of recreation

Mike Larkin's snub-nosed kayak has just been shot from an unseen underwater cannon.

The lightweight and slender one-man boat springs out from a craggy jumble of rocks, then appears to briefly hover above unruly waters.

When the little, red plastic craft smacks loudly into the frothy pool at the bottom of the rapids, Larkin whoops and waves his paddle. A few fellow kayakers holler their appreciation along with several whitewater watchers on a ledge high above the banks of the Cuyahoga River.

That's right, the Cuyahoga River.

That's right, whitewater kayaking.

And in The Year of the River -- marking the 40th anniversary of the June 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga and its ongoing ecological recovery -- Larkin's leap is much more than a brief but wild ride down Cuyahoga rapids.

It's also high-flying evidence of advances along a much lengthier journey: restoration of recreation on a river known mostly to outsiders for its fires than its waters.

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Vegetation may not slow wave erosion

One assumption behind attempts to restore coastal wetlands as natural buffers against storms and floods may be wrong, a study suggests.

Experts believe that wetland vegetation could have helped to resist the coastal erosion caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and other recent disasters, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and Cyclone Nargis, which hit Burma last year.

Rusty Feagin of Texas A&M University in College Station and his team devised some experiments that he expected would demonstrate one way in which wetland plants could do this — by resisting the erosion caused by waves beating at the land's edge. He was surprised to find no such effect. It turned out that soil type is much more important, and that the presence or absence of vegetation doesn't make much difference.

Feagin suggests that the conventional wisdom took hold because of studies that show that plants can build wetlands by trapping sediment that would otherwise flow out to sea. "I think we have taken this idea that wetlands can build themselves and jumped to the conclusion that vegetation can prevent erosion," he says. He adds that vegetation may well have other protective effects, such as calming a storm surge that rolls right over a land edge and heads inland.

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Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch!

The West remains one of the fastest growing regions of the country, and that continues to put pressure on scarce water supplies.

So, Colorado recently made it legal for some homeowners to capture and collect the raindrops and snowflakes that fall on their own roofs. That had been considered stealing because the water would flow into a stream or aquifer, where it belonged to someone else; Utah and Washington state have similar bans.

The change in Colorado may seem minor, but this could signal the beginning of a water-law revolution.

Water law in the West is different than in the East. In the West, there's essentially a long line for water rights; those who signed up for rights first are in front. And in some cases around the West, Native Americans are near the front of the line because they've lived there for so long.

For five years, Karl Hanzel "took cuts" in that line because he illegally collected water from the snow that fell on his home outside Boulder, Colo.

"I struggle to understand the argument for these laws. It doesn't really make sense to me," says Hanzel. "The water that I'm detaining here, I'm not exporting it to Mars … We have a leach field; we water the garden; that water is still returned to the earth … We're just holding some of it for awhile."

Colorado takes this sort of illegal harvesting of precipitation seriously. If caught, Hanzel could have faced fines of up to $500 a day. Luckily for him, a law recently passed legalizes his collection system. It's a narrow exception to the ban for people who would have to dig a well or have water trucked in.

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