'Dead zone' strategy rattles farm interests

The fight over the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" - a problem scientists say can be traced in large part to Iowa and its sister farming states - has ramped up as the Obama administration considers a regulatory attack on the problem.

Suzanne Schwartz, who directs a division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working on the dead-zone issue, said the federal government and Louisiana researchers are checking to see whether the pollution violates water quality standards.
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If it does, "Louisiana could set standards for what comes in," using the legal authority of the Clean Water Act, Schwartz said at a news conference this week. "That is not a short-term, immediate action but something we are looking at."

Said Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: "This is an issue we take seriously."

The possibility drew immediate fire from Iowa agricultural interests, which pointed out that this year's dead zone is far smaller than predicted and among the smallest in recent history.

The dead zone is an area left largely lifeless in summer as algae fed by a mixture of Midwestern fertilizers, sewage and dead plants from the Mississippi River watershed die off, consuming oxygen. Biologists call this hypoxia. There are at least 200 such zones worldwide.

The U.S. Geological Survey has said that nine states - Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi - are responsible for 70 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus running into the Gulf of Mexico. At issue is not only water quality in those states but disruption of Louisiana's lucrative shrimping industry.

New attention on the issue will include a meeting of the federal Gulf Hypoxia Task Force in Des Moines Sept. 23-24. Details are pending.

The Clean Water Act machinery often leads to new pressures on polluters to limit contamination, though farming has largely escaped that kind of regulation in the past.

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U.S. "dead zone" smaller but more severe: NOAA

The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area choked by low oxygen levels that threatens marine life, is smaller than expected this year but more deadly, the government said on Monday.

The zone, caused by a runoff of agricultural chemicals from farms along the Mississippi River, measured about 3,000 square miles or about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware, compared with estimates that it would measure up to nearly 8,500 square miles, scientists said.

"Clearly the flow of excess nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fields in the Mississippi drainage basin continues to wreak havoc with life in the Gulf," said Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters in a teleconference.

Unusually strong winds and currents stirred the waters and brought oxygen back in, making the zone smaller than anticipated.

But Nancy Rabalais, a scientist from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, who helped measure the zone during a week-long expedition, said it was more severe because the low oxygen levels are closer to the surface than in recent years.

The dead zone threatens Gulf fisheries worth nearly $3 billion per year.

Now marine life that normally feed close to the sea bottom, including eels and certain kinds of shrimp and crabs, are being found closer to the surface.

The dead zone is caused by fertilizers and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that wash off crop lands into the Mississippi, leading to the overproduction of tiny organisms such as algae in the Gulf of Mexico.

If the organisms are not eaten, they die and fall to the bottom of the ocean where bacteria rots them, sucking oxygen from the water.

The average size of the dead zone during the past five years has been about 6,000 square miles, or nearly the size of the state of Connecticut.

Federal and state agencies have worked together in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force since 2001 to control growth of the zone. It wants to cut it to about 2,00O square miles by 2015.

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Boom in hydropower pits fish against climate

The Rocky Reach Dam has straddled the wide, slow Columbia River since the 1950s. It generates enough electricity to supply homes and industries across Washington and Oregon.

But the dam in recent years hasn't produced as much power as it might: Its massive turbines act as deadly blender blades to young salmon, and engineers often have had to let the river flow over the spillway to halt the slaughter, wasting the water's energy potential.

The ability of the nation's aging hydroelectric dams to produce energy free of the curse of greenhouse gas emissions and Middle Eastern politics has suddenly made them financially attractive -- thanks to the new economics of climate change. Armed with the possibility of powerful new cap-and-trade financial bonuses, the National Hydropower Assn. has set a goal of doubling the nation's hydropower capacity by 2025.

Expanding hydropower is fraught with controversy, much of it stemming from the industry's history of turning wild rivers into industrialized reservoirs struggling to support their remaining fish. The emerging boom in hydroelectric power pits two competing ecological perils against each other: widespread fish extinctions and a warming planet.

The issue has been particularly contentious in the Pacific Northwest, where some are calling for actually breaching dams on the Snake River in an effort to bring back the declining salmon and steelhead.

"Hydropower does have pretty significant and serious impacts on rivers. We know that. The industry knows that," said John Seebach, director of the Hydropower Reform Initiative launched by the conservation group American Rivers. "It also provides some pretty significant benefits in terms of power production. So it's a tricky balance to get those benefits while trying to minimize those impacts."

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Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachian Streams

Laurel Branch Hollow was once a small West Virginia mountain valley, with steep, forested hillsides and a stream that, depending on the season and the rains, flowed or trickled down into the Mud River about 200 yards below. The stream teemed with microbes and insect life, and each spring it became a sumptuous buffet for the birds, fish, and amphibians in the valley.

But over the past decade, the Hobet 21 mountaintop removal coal mining operation has obliterated 25 square miles of surrounding highlands. From the air, the mine is a 10-mile-long, mottled gray blotch among the green, crisscrossed by trucks and earth movers, appended by black lakes of coal sludge.

The Caudill family has owned a house at the mouth of the hollow since the early 1900s. Many of their neighbors left, but the Caudills fought and blocked an attempt by Hobet to force them to sell their property. Unfazed, the mining operation simply steered around their land, and dumped a mountain’s worth of rocky debris into the Laurel Branch up to their property line.

Anita Miller looks out at a mining operation in Berry Branch, W.Va., not far from her family’s home.
have to go somewhere, and the most convenient spots are nearby valleys. Mining operations clear-cut the hillsides and literally “fill” mountain hollows to the brim — and sometimes higher — with rocky debris. At the mouth of the hollow, the outer edge of the fill is typically engineered into a towering wall resembling a dam.

As I visited Laurel Branch recently with family members Anita Miller and her mother, Lorene Caudill, two bulldozers crawled back and forth over the peak more than 200 feet above us, sculpting it into a steep, three-tiered sloping form. When it can reach no higher, the coal company will seed the slope with grass and move on. But the valley fill’s impact on the environment will last much, much longer.

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Smart tech could save billions of liters of water

Americans can save some of the 225 billion gallons of water (852 billion liters) wasted each year through over-watering by installing smart systems which deliver just the right amount of moisture.

Homeowners and companies over-water their grass and plants by between 30 and 300 percent, said Chris Spain, chief sustainability officer at water management company HydroPoint, citing a report by the American Water Works Association.

"The reason for the waste is because of dumb technology," Spain said. "There are 45 million irrigation systems in the U.S. (controlled) by simple timers. They do a great job of keeping time but a lousy job of irrigating to what the land requires."

City landscaping, or "urban irrigation," makes up 58 percent of urban water use, Spain said, adding that the water wasted generates over 544,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.

Smart irrigation systems are programed to optimize water use based on parameters including plant and soil types and amount of sunlight, and also feature weather sensors that monitor soil moisture levels following rainfall.

"U.S. water-related energy use is at least 521 million megawatt hours a year -- equivalent to 13 percent of the nation's electricity consumption," said a River Network Carbon Footprint of Water report published in May.

"The carbon associated with moving, treating and heating water in the U.S. is at least 290 million tonnes a year."

Climate change also affects water levels, with western states experiencing their driest years since records began.

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Study of Missouri River to expose differing visions of its future

Chance Norton cruises his speedboat along the straight-banked river, oblivious to the big debate looming over its future.
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"It's another day in paradise," Norton said, beer in hand, several friends aboard. "I'm a river rat. It's always a good thing, especially the sandbars. We'll camp all night and boat all day."

Like Norton, thousands of Americans take for granted the Missouri River, long a source of drinking water, electricity, commerce, recreation and tourism. But the day is coming when the nation's longest river will command much more attention.

An exhaustive five-year, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study of the Missouri begins in October. The $25 million study is expected to set up another round of battles among states, tribes and organizations with competing visions of the historic waterway.

At issue: everything from future drinking supplies and cooling water for power generation, to flood control, barge traffic, habitat protection, untapped recreational opportunities and potential economic gain.

The future of the oft-forgotten treasure affects not only the seven states along the Missouri's main channel, but many others along the Missouri-fed Mississippi.

"It's one of the great rivers of the world, and we aren't reaping the benefits," said Bernard Hoyer, assistant to the director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. "We've destroyed the river. As it is, it's just a big ditch."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which runs the nation's dam and reservoir systems, plans to ask all Americans to offer their hopes for the Missouri, said Paul Johnston, corps spokesman for the Omaha, Neb., office. Iowans' hopes will wash up against those of other states as upstream interests in recreation and irrigation compete with lower-state calls for more water to be released downstream for barges and tribes' water supplies.

Al Sturgeon, a Sioux City lawyer who represents Iowa on the Missouri River committee, said a key will be restoring the river, long neglected compared with the heavily traveled Mississippi. Sturgeon believes a healthier river would mean more tourism, especially to areas such as Iowa's geologically unusual Loess Hills in the state's western border.

from the Great Falls Tribune (IA)

Feds document shrinking San Joaquin Valley aquifer

California's San Joaquin Valley has lost 60 million acre-feet of groundwater since 1961, according to a new federal study. That's enough water for 60 Folsom reservoirs.

This is among the findings in a massive study of groundwater in California's Central Valley by the U.S. Geological Survey. It helps shed light on the mysteries and dangers of California's groundwater consumption, which is mostly unregulated.

According to the study, groundwater pumping continues to cause the valley floor to sink, a problem known as subsidence. This threatens the stability of surface structures such as the California Aqueduct, which delivers drinking water to more than 20 million people.

The Central Valley is America's largest farming region; it's also the single-largest zone of groundwater pumping. About 20 percent of groundwater pumped in America comes from under the Central Valley, said Claudia Faunt, the study's project chief.

In the Sacramento Valley, the study found groundwater levels have remained stable. Virtually all of the groundwater loss has occurred in the San Joaquin Valley, where aquifer levels have dropped nearly 400 feet since 1961, she said.

The current drought has aggravated this problem.

"In most years, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, the groundwater pumping exceeds the recharge," said Faunt, a USGS hydrologist. "With recent times, those groundwater levels have dropped back down close to historical lows."

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California Gives Desalination Plants a Fresh Look

Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water.

The $320 million project, which would be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, was held up in the planning stages for years. But a protracted drought helped propel the project to its approval in May -- a sign of how worried local authorities are about water supplies.

"Water is going to be very short until you have a new source," said Carlsbad Mayor Claude Lewis. "And the only new source is desalination, I don't care what anybody says."

The desalination plant would use water that flows by gravity from the ocean across a manmade lagoon and into the facility through 10 large pumps. The plant would then blast it through a filter, extracting fresh water and leaving behind highly pressurized salty water. The process would provide enough water for 300,000 people each day.

Government agencies have opposed desalination because of the process's energy consumption. The desalination plant would use nearly twice as much energy as a wastewater-treatment plant available in Orange County. Environmental groups also object because fish and other organisms are likely to be sucked into the facility.

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Tucson rainwater harvesting law drawing interest

Long dependent on wellwater and supplies sent hundreds of miles by canal from the Colorado River, this desert city will soon harvest some of its 12 inches of annual rainfall to help bolster its water resources.

Under the nation's first municipal rainwater harvesting ordinance for commercial projects, Tucson developers building new business, corporate or commercial structures will have to supply half of the water needed for landscaping from harvested rainwater starting next year.

Already, the idea has become so popular that at least a half-dozen other Arizona communities are looking to emulate Tucson's approach.

"What we learned frankly is that we're wasting a lot of water. It's been our tradition here to shove it into the streets and get rid of it as soon as possible," said David Pittman, southern Arizona director of the Arizona Builders' Alliance.

Rainwater harvesting is also catching on nationwide, with Georgia, Colorado and other states legislating to allow or expand use of various types.

From Portland, Ore., and Seattle to San Francisco and Austin, Texas, voluntary rainwater harvesting is irrigating plants or being used in other ways instead of merely falling onto roofs, parking lots or pavement and being drained into sewers as wastewater.

"There's only so much water. Unfortunately, Americans are terribly, terribly wasteful with water, and we're running out," said Tim Pope, who builds harvesting systems in the San Juan Islands near Seattle and heads the American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association.

Water supplies from the Colorado River are likely to diminish from effects of global warming and increasing demands from other states in the West. And groundwater is carefully managed to prevent overpumping the water that supplies the 1 million people who live in growing metropolitan Tucson.

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Despair flows as fields go dry and unemployment rises

Water built the semi-arid San Joaquin Valley into an agricultural powerhouse. Drought and irrigation battles now threaten to turn huge swaths of it into a dust bowl.

Farmers have idled half a million acres of once-productive ground and are laying off legions of farmhands. That's sending joblessness soaring in a region already plagued by chronic poverty.

Water scarcity looms as a major challenge to California's $37-billion agricultural industry, which has long relied on imported water to bloom. The consequences of closing the spigot are already evident here in rural Fresno County, about 230 miles north of Los Angeles. Lost farm revenue will top $900 million in the San Joaquin Valley this year, said UC Davis economist Richard Howitt, who estimates that water woes will cost the recession-battered region an additional 30,000 jobs in 2009.

Standing in a parched field in 104-degree heat, valley farmer Joe Del Bosque pointed to cracked earth where tomatoes should be growing. He didn't bother this year because he can't get enough water to irrigate them. He's cultivating only about half of the cantaloupe and asparagus that he did in 2007. He has slashed his workforce, and his bills are mounting.

"We can't survive at 10% of our water," said Del Bosque, 60, a white cowboy hat, long sleeves and jeans protecting him from the blistering sun.

Desperation is rippling through agricultural communities such as Mendota, 35 miles west of Fresno, where an estimated 39% of the labor force is jobless. It's a stunning figure even for this battered community of about 10,000 people, which has long been accustomed to double-digit unemployment rates.

Sporadic food giveaways by churches and nonprofits draw hundreds of people. Enrollment in area schools has dropped by a quarter this year. Crime is up, so much, in fact, that the cash-strapped town voted in May to form its own police department rather than rely on the county sheriff.

On a recent afternoon, a dozen men in white T-shirts and jeans were leaning against a liquor store wall across from City Hall, hoping someone would hire them. Others, such as Candelario Torres, sat in the shade of Kiki's Pool Hall, playing cards and swatting flies. They, too, waited for the slim chance a farmer would employ them to weed tomato fields or pick cantaloupe.

"There's no water, so there's no work," said Torres, a 56-year-old father of three who doesn't have a car and can't go far to look for jobs. "Everyone in here is looking."

It's much the same in rural towns such as Firebaugh and Huron, whose jobless farm laborers helped pushed the Fresno County unemployment rate to 15.4% in May, above the California rate of 11.5% and up from 9.4% a year earlier.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month asked President Obama to declare Fresno County a disaster area to boost federal aid. But that's not what the farmers say they want. At a recent town hall meeting in Fresno, while some women in the audience knitted, men in baseball caps and T-shirts shouted down officials from the Interior Department: "We don't want welfare, we want water."

But climate change is intensifying competition for this resource and may well force changes in the way the valley has been farmed for decades.

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California water plan could help Puget Sound orcas survive

A plan to restore salmon runs on California's Sacramento River could help revive killer whale populations 700 miles to the north in Puget Sound, as federal scientists struggle to protect endangered species in a complex ecosystem that stretches along the Pacific coast from California to Alaska.

Without wild salmon from the Sacramento and American rivers as part of their diet, the killer whales might face extinction. That's what scientists concluded in a biological opinion that could result in even more severe water restrictions for farmers in the drought-stricken, 400-mile long Central Valley of California. The valley is the nation's most productive farm region.

The plan has faced heated criticism from agricultural interests and politicians in California, but environmentalists said it represented a welcome departure by the Obama administration from its predecessor in dealing with Endangered Species Act issues.

The Sacramento plan, they add, represents a sharp contrast to the plan for restoring wild salmon populations on the Columbia and Snake rivers in Washington and Idaho. That plan, written by the Bush administration, essentially concluded that the long-term decline in those federally protected runs did not jeopardize the killer whales' existence, because hatchery fish could make up the difference.

The 85 orcas of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population travel in three separate pods, spending much of their time roaming the inland waters of Washington state from the San Juan Islands to south Puget Sound. During the winter they have been found offshore, ranging as far south as Monterey Bay in California and as far north as British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands. Each whale has distinctive markings, which allow them to be tracked.

In the mid-1990s, there were nearly 100 orcas in the three Southern Resident pods. The population fell to fewer than 80 in 2001. In 2005, the whales were granted federal protection as an endangered species. The whales have been studied closely for only 30 years or so, but historically there may have been up to 200 Southern Resident orcas.

Researches believe the decline has resulted from pollution that could cause immune or reproductive system dysfunction, and from oil spills, noise and other vessel disturbances, along with a reduced quantity and quality of prey.

With the largest up to 27 feet long and weighing up to 10,000 pounds, orcas are constantly on the prowl for food. They have been known to hunt in packs. Their meal of choice - salmon, particularly chinook salmon.

By some estimates, the orcas eat about 500,000 salmon a year.

The Sacramento and American river systems combined were once among the top salmon spawning rivers on the West Coast, trailing only the Columbia and Snake rivers.

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Turkey plans to restart work on controversial dam project

Turkey today announced plans to resume a controversial £1bn dam project in the face of environmental protests that it would displace thousands of people, destroy habitats and drown priceless archaeological treasures.

The environment minister, Veysel Eroglu, said work on the Ilisu hydroelectric dam on the Tigris river in south-east Turkey would restart after a six-month funding suspension ends next week.

The announcement disappointed campaigners who believed that the project had suffered a potentially fatal blow last December, after German, Swiss and Austrian institutions announced they were withholding finance because fears about the dam's environmental and social impact had not been addressed. The governments agreed that 150 World Bank conditions on the environment, heritage sites, neighbouring states and human relocation must be met.

Turkey's government argues the dam – which is planned to generate 1,200MW of electricity – is an essential part of a £19.3bn plan to bring economic prosperity to the south-east, long blighted by armed conflict between the army and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK).

At a press conference in Ankara, Eroglu confidently said that the necessary funds would be made available, after declaring that "important work" had been carried out to bring the dam into line with international standards. The claim was not immediately confirmed by the project's backers. The [suspension] period lasts until 6 July. A spokesperson for the Swiss economy ministry told Reuters: "Switzerland is still examining the issue and will decide, together with Germany and Austria, how to proceed."

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