Conservation is seen as key to dealing with state's water woes

Katie Martin grew up with a set of water commandments. No lingering in the shower. Turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Don't flood the yard.

Until she left for college this fall, the 19-year-old lived with her family in a typical California stucco house with a lawn. But when it comes to water, neither the Martins nor their town, San Luis Obispo, is typical.

Katie, her parents and little brother use roughly half the water on a per-person basis as the average single-family household in Los Angeles used last year.

"The community is just like that," Martin said.

As climate change, environmental constraints and growth continue to tighten the valve on California's water supplies, the rest of the state is going to be more like that too. Not just during droughts but all the time.

The reason is simple. Compared to building new reservoirs, recycling or seawater desalination, conservation is one of the cheapest, quickest and least environmentally damaging ways for the state to get more water.

"I think we have a water crisis in California, and I think conservation is the only solution that can be implemented in time," said Kevin Wattier, general manager of the Long Beach Water Department.

Water demand in Southern California has remained essentially flat the last two decades, despite the addition of 3.7 million people.

Similarly, L.A. used slightly less water last year than in 1990, even though there are a million more Angelenos now.

Much of the lid on demand has been achieved through gadgetry. Utility rebates and plumbing ordinances have put low-flow toilets and shower heads in millions of buildings and homes. Water agencies promote high-efficiency washing machines.

But it hasn't been enough, said Timothy Brick, chairman of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the region's water wholesaler. "I think we have a long way to go."

Ramping up the Southland's conservation efforts could save more water annually than the combined demand of Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach, his agency estimates.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year called for the state to cut urban per-capita water use 20% over the next decade. Wide-ranging water legislation approved this month in Sacramento mandates the drop.

"It can be done. But people have to want to do it," said UC Berkeley professor Michael Hanemann, director of the university's California Climate Change Center. "Urban water agencies have to get religion."

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U.S. group sees worsening coastal flooding threat

Fast-melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica will lead to a much sharper rise in sea levels than previously estimated, touching off flooding that will radically alter U.S. East Coast cities from Miami to Baltimore, according to a new study.

Climate change will cause a rise of at least 1 meter (39 inches) in sea levels by the end of this century, according to a review of scientific data by Clean Air-Cool Planet, an environmental group that calls itself nonpartisan.

The projection is in sharp contrast to a 2007 study by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said world sea levels could increase 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) by 2100.

"We are on our way to radically changing what the coasts look like," said Jim White, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who worked on the study. "Norfolk could replace New Orleans as the poster child" for coastal flooding, he told reporters on Thursday.

Norfolk, Virginia, situated near the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean, is home to the world's largest naval base.

The group said it based its conclusions on a study of ice melting by Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The 2007 U.N. study linked most of its projected sea level rise to a natural expansion of water as it warms. But newer scientific data has focused more on the added impact of ice sheets sliding into oceans.

Gordon Hamilton, an associate professor at the University of Maine, said satellite data shows that Greenland is shedding ice at an accelerated rate, pushing more and more of it into the ocean.

"Icebergs are being calved off the ice sheet at a rate three times faster now than just a few years ago," he said.

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Sewage Industry Fights Phosphorus Pollution

Tucked away in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, three massive metal cones could help address the world’s dwindling supply of phosphorus, the crucial ingredient of fertilizers that has made modern agriculture possible. The cones make consistently high-quality, slow-release fertilizer pellets from phosphorus recovered at the Durham Advance Wastewater Treatment Facility, less than 10 miles from downtown Portland. By generating about one ton of pellets every day, they are changing the view that such recycling could not be done efficiently. Ostara, the firm that makes the reactors and sells the pellets as Crystal Green, thinks that Durham is one of hundreds of facilities that could use the technology.

Humans excrete some 3.3 million tons of phosphorus annually. In fact, phosphorus from domestic sewage, in addition to fertilizer runoff, has traditionally been a nuisance, because it triggers blooms of algae that deplete local waters of oxygen. In some wastewater plants the element can also bind with ammonia and magnesium to form a mineral called struvite, which keeps phosphorus out of waterways but clogs pipes at the facilities. The growing recognition that cheap supplies of phosphorus will grow scarce in the coming decades has led some nations to consider conservation. Sweden has mandated that 60 percent of phosphate be recycled from wastewater by 2015. In 2008 China slapped a 135 percent export tariff on phosphate.

These pressures have made struvite a hot topic in sewage circles. Japan has been recycling struvite for a decade, but the cost-effectiveness and quality of the pellets varied, according to Don Mavinic, professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) and co-inventor of Ostara’s technology. “There’s always been a problem of struvite removal,” Mavinic says. “I wanted to build a better mousetrap.”

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Mystery of Bangladesh's mass arsenic poisoning solved

Researchers have pinpointed the source of what is probably the worst mass poisoning in history, according to a study published Sunday.

For nearly three decades scientists have struggled to figure out exactly how arsenic was getting into the drinking water of millions of people in rural Bangladesh.

The culprit, says the new study, are tens of thousands of man-made ponds excavated to provide soil for flood protection.

An estimated two million people in Bangladesh suffer from arsenic poisoning, and health experts suspect the toxic, metal-like element has caused -- and will continue to cause -- many deaths as well.

Symptoms include violent stomach pains and vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions and cramps. A large dose can kill outright, while chronic ingestion of small doses has been linked to a large range of cancers.

It has long been known that the arsenic comes from water drawn from millions of low-tech "tube wells" scattered across the country.

Ironically the wells were dug -- often with the help of international aid agencies -- to protect villages from unclean and disease-ridden surface water.

Tragically, millions of people continue to knowingly poison themselves for lack of an alternative source of water.

Earlier studies succeeded in filling in a few pieces of the deadly puzzle.

They showed that water with the highest concentrations of arsenic is roughly 50 years old, and that the organic carbon which, once metabolised by microbes causes the poison to leach from sediment, does not take long to filter down from the surface.

But the source of both the contaminated water and the organic carbon remained unknown until a team of researchers led by Charles Harvey of MIT in Boston, Massachusetts cracked the secret.

Working in the Munshiganj district of Bangladesh, the researchers analysed the flow patterns of surface and underground water in a six square-mile (15.5 square-kilometre) area.

They used natural tracers and a 3-D computer model to track water from rice fields and ponds, and tested the capacity of organic carbon in both settings to free up arsenic from soil and sediments.

"We saw that water with high arsenic content originates from the human-built ponds, and water with lower arsenic content originates from the rice fields," said Rebecca Neumann, a co-author and postdoctoral associate at Harvard.

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India Rain

Farmers in India do a lot of talking about the weather—especially, it seems, when there is no weather in sight. During the month of May, when the land heats up like a furnace and most fields lie fallow, when wells have run dry and the sun taunts from its broiling perch in a cloudless sky, there is no topic more consuming—or less certain—than when and how the summer monsoon will arrive. The monsoon season, which normally starts in early June and delivers more than three-quarters of the country's annual rainfall in less than four months, will begin gently, like a deer, the farmers say, and later it will turn into a thundering elephant. Or it will start as an elephant and then turn into a deer. Or it will be erratic and annoying right through, like a chicken. In other words, nobody really knows. But still, everybody talks.



This was the case one day in 2008 when an extended family of farmers from a village called Satichiwadi climbed up to the hilltop temple of their village goddess, planning to ask her for rain. It was mid-May and 106 degrees, and Satichiwadi, a village of 83 families that sits in a parched rural valley in the state of Maharashtra, about a hundred miles northeast of Mumbai, hadn't had any significant rainfall for seven months. Most of India at this point was caught in an inescapable annual wait. In New Delhi, the heat had triggered power cuts. Dust storms raced, unmitigated by moisture, across the northern states. Tanker trucks clogged the rural highways, delivering government-sponsored loads of drinking water to villages whose wells had run dry. Meanwhile, radio newscasters were just beginning to track a promising swirl of rain clouds moving over the Andaman Islands, off the southeast coast.

All day, villagers had been speculating about those distant clouds. It was gambling time for rain-dependent farmers across India. In the weeks leading up to the monsoon, many would invest a significant amount of money, often borrowed, to buy fertilizer and millet seeds, which needed to be planted ahead of the rains. There were many ways to lose this wager. A delayed monsoon likely would cause the seeds to bake and die in the ground. Or if the rain fell too hard before the seedlings took root, it might wash them all away.

"Our lives are wrapped up in the rain," explained a woman named Anusayabai Pawar, using a countrywoman's version of Marathi, the regional language. "When it comes, we have everything. When it doesn't, we have nothing."

In the meantime, everyone kept scanning the empty sky. "Like fools," said an older farmer named Yamaji Pawar, sweating beneath his white Nehru cap, "we just sit here waiting."

If the people of Satichiwadi once believed the gods controlled the rain, they were starting to move beyond that. Even as they carried betel nuts and cones of incense up to the goddess's temple, even as one by one the village women knelt down in front of the stone idol that represented her, they seemed merely to be hedgingtheir bets. Bhaskar Pawar, a sober-minded, mustachioed farmer in his 30s, sat on one of the low walls of the temple, watching impassively as his female relatives prayed. "Especially the younger people here understand now that it's environmental," he said.

more from National Geographic

Salt-loving algae wipe out fish in Appalachian stream

A salt-loving alga that killed tens of millions of fish in Texas has struck for the first time in an Appalachian stream that flows along the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Prymnesium parvum or “golden algae” caused the sudden death of thousands of fish, mussels, and salamanders in early September along some 30 miles of Dunkard Creek. University and government scientists fear the disaster could presage further kills in the region. Streams at risk due to high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) include portions of the northern branch of the Potomac River and 20 other streams in West Virginia, according to state scientists. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky also have many vulnerable rivers and streams, according to U.S. EPA scientists.
Dunkard Creek is a tributary to the Monongahela River, where last year high TDS levels fouled industrial equipment and ruined the taste of drinking water. Faced with projected increases in TDS as a result of the burgeoning and water-intensive natural gas hydraulic fracturing activity at the Marcellus Formation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) recently proposed TDS standards for end-of-pipe discharges of 500 parts per million (ppm) TDS and 250 ppm each for sulfate and chloride.
Despite historically high TDS levels, the creek was a good fishing stream with small mouth bass, muskie, mussels, and salamanders, according to biologist Frank Jernejcic with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. In just a few days the algal bloom wiped out the creek’s 18 species of fish and 14 species of freshwater mussels—the most diverse population of mussels in the Monongahela basin. “This is the worst fish kill I’ve experienced in 21 years in West Virginia,” says Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute at West Virginia University.

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The New Dust Bowl

When I meet Javier Vaca on a dusty strip of blacktop, he's been walking for three days. The skinny 18-year-old is being carried along in a procession of 7,000 farmworkers and farmers as it crosses California's Central Valley, his baggy jeans and hoodie standing out amid the work boots and button-downs. He's been told only one thing that matters: Marching 50 miles might earn him a job.

"I don't want to jack nobody," Vaca says, as though the thought had crossed his mind. When the housing boom imploded last year, he lost a $14-an-hour construction job, a job that had allowed this son of farmworkers to drop out of high school, buy a car, and rent an apartment for his young wife and baby in Fresno. It took him a month to find more work, this time picking peaches at less than half his previous wage. Then the worst drought in more than a decade hit, a court order to protect an endangered fish cut off water to the valley's farmers, and an area larger than Los Angeles went fallow. Vaca now works one day a week while his family survives on welfare and food stamps. "It's hard, man," he says. "Everybody's broke."

The spring morning chill becomes a broil as Vaca and his fellow marchers slowly follow a two-lane road through parched hills. A man squatting next to an ice chest on the median doles out carne asada burritos. "I'm hungry," Vaca says with a wan smile as he stuffs one into his pants pocket and bites into another. He passes an ATV draped in an American flag, where Sharon Wakefield, an almond farmer, is resting her feet. She says she believes that the Mexicans and Central Americans who have joined the California March for Water are basically no different from her mother, who fled Oklahoma during the Great Depression to earn a pittance harvesting hay and cotton in the valley. Except this time, the state has even less to offer them: "We've got no water, no food, no future," she says.

The Central Valley, the thin, fertile band running down the middle of California, has long boasted the world's richest agricultural economy, reliably producing more than a quarter of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables. But it's done so in defiance of ecological reality. The 70-year-old irrigation system that has pumped water into the otherwise arid valley is proving increasingly vulnerable to shifting weather patterns. It now appears that waterwise, 20th century California was an anomaly, a relatively wet period in the midst of a historical cycle of severe drought. And the changing climate will only magnify the problem: By the end of the century, scientists predict, Central California could experience temperatures rivaling Death Valley's and face the loss of 90 percent of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the region's main water source. "Business as usual won't work in the future," says Eike Luedeling, an expert in plant sciences at the University of California-Davis, whose research shows that higher temperatures will likely decimate the state's $10 billion fruit and nut industry. "Especially for tree crops, adapting will require huge investments that probably a lot of small guys can't make anymore."

The sudden collapse of the Central Valley's economy illustrates how climate change can push a fragile region over the edge. Already vulnerable from rampant housing speculation and a dependence on industrial agriculture, the valley never prepared for a prolonged spate of bad weather. In 2008, local bankruptcy filings jumped 74 percent—from about 15,300 to 27,000—a rate of increase twice the national average. Three of the valley's counties were among the nation's six worst for foreclosures, with nearly 85,000 houses lost. The drought is expected to dry up a billion dollars in income and 35,000 jobs, adding to a statewide unemployment rate that recently hit 11.9 percent—the highest since the eve of World War II. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked the federal government to declare the region a disaster area.

On the west side of the valley, which is often last in line for deliveries from federal water projects, farmers are selling prized almond trees for firewood, fields are reverting to weed, and farmworkers who once fled droughts in Mexico are overwhelming food banks. In short, the valley is becoming what an earlier generation of refugees thought they'd escaped: an ecological catastrophe in the middle of a social and economic one—a 21st century Dust Bowl.

more from Mother Jones

California Water Overhaul Caps Use

California lawmakers on Wednesday approved a series of bills that would vastly overhaul the state’s troubled water system. The water package is the most comprehensive to emerge from the state since the 1960s, when California last upgraded its system for what was a far smaller population of users.

Prompted by a protracted drought — which has reduced water supply, harmed the fishing industry and contributed to crop loss — environmentalists and agricultural interests have agreed to broad concessions.

The plan calls for a comprehensive ecosystem restoration in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — a collection of channels, natural habitats and islands at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers that is a major source of the state’s drinking water.

It also calls for new dams, aggressive water conservation goals and the monitoring of groundwater use, which other Western states already do. And it paves the way for a new canal — once the third rail of California’s byzantine water politics — that would move water from the north of the state to the south.

The series of bills, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he will sign, include an $11.1 billion bond issue, which voters will be asked to approve next November. The rest of the roughly $40 billion project would be paid for by localities, largely through new user fees.

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More cities hit hard for sewer violations

For years, the city of Clinton dumped excessive amounts of damaging ammonia, copper and other pollutants into a backwater channel of a national treasure - the Mississippi River.

This year, the state got serious about making the city stop.

After issuing 28 sanctions for sewage permit violations and a couple of small fines, the state of Iowa filed a lawsuit in March against the city, alleging excess discharges dating back to at least 1991. As part of a court agreement with Iowa's attorney general, the city paid a $100,000 fine - one of the state's largest involving sewage offenses.

But that's not all: The state also required the city of just under 30,000 to build a new sewage plant at a cost of up to $66 million.

"It's going to have a big economic impact on Clinton," said Mayor Rodger E.J. Holm. "We're looking at a staggering increase in fees over the next few years."

When Iowa sewage plants have been found in violation of their state permits, the state typically has written a letter advising the plants to obey pollution limits in the future. Any fines assessed as penalties have tended to be minimal - a thousand dollars or so.

But steeper fines of $10,000 or more have become more commonplace in recent years, and the state is increasingly playing hardball in some of the worst instances of waterway pollution, said Dennis Ostwinkle of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources' environmental-protection staff.

Clinton's excessive dumping into Beaver Slough never killed fish or directly threatened human life. But it did worsen Iowa's already serious water quality problems and stands out as an egregious example of years-long resistance to the work needed to clean waterways, state and local officials said.

"We racked up quite a few violations for exceeding our permit - particularly in 2002 and 2003," said public works director Gary Schellhorn. "If you did that every day for 20 years at that level, you'd do some damage."

In 2008, the DNR issued 38 orders requiring improvements at plants across the state - many of which carried specific fines if deadlines are not met. The number was almost double the 20 issued in 2005.

The DNR is also preparing to demand tougher pollution-control requirements that will mandate more widespread improvements to Iowa's treatment plants. The move comes as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pushes harder to get states to comply with the U.S. Clean Water Act, including future limits in streams for certain chemicals like farm fertilizers, Ostwinkle said.

Already, many cities face schedules set by the state to expand plants or build new ones. Some of those are part of court agreements.

The state has been hesitant to levy heavy fines in the past because upgrades and greater compliance already will cost the plants and customers dearly. But it has been stepping up enforcement when offenses continue for years, cities continue to miss deadlines or they fail to warn the public of hazards.

more from the Des Moines Register

Chicken Litter: The Aerial Hunt for Poultry Manure

Retired Marine officer Rick Dove boarded the four-seat Cessna armed with cameras, binoculars and global positioning devices for his latest mission: chicken farmers. Or, more precisely, aerial reconnaissance of poultry droppings.

"Oh, man, that looks like a hot site," Mr. Dove said as the plane soared 1,000 feet over farms near the Chesapeake Bay. Peering through binoculars, he said, "That pile is at least two stories high." He whipped out his camera and started snapping pictures.

Mr. Dove, 70 years old, suspected the brown mound was chicken manure -- a potential pollutant of the Chesapeake Bay, the huge estuary nestled between the shores of Maryland and Virginia. Mr. Dove, a former military judge whose subsequent fishing business he believes was ruined by pollution, is among the activists who, along with federal regulators, are ratcheting up pressure on poultry farmers to clean up their litter.

Livestock and poultry operations generate about 500 million tons of manure each year, or about three times the amount of human waste in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of that waste goes untreated and sometimes can make its way into public waterways. Among other contaminants, manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus that in large quantities can cause algae blooms -- green, gooey splotches on the water surface that can deplete the water's oxygen, killing fish and other organisms. And in some cases, the runoff, which can contain E. coli and other bacteria, can threaten human health.

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