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Water Troubles

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Azastan
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#301

Post by Azastan »

humblescribe wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 6:06 pm

They wouldn't be part of The Friends of Distinction, would they? :mrgreen: I could dig it; they could dig it.
Well now, I can just see Love Over Goldd (Joey, to his friends and admirers), doing a bit of soft shoe sliding as he neighs along with the chorus (he's a ham, that Joey), but the rest of the herd would just snort and blow as they stott around the pasture.
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#302

Post by RTH10260 »

A US city received $500,000 to remove lead pipes – and still hasn’t spent it
Troy, New York, has yet to remove a single lead pipe five years after getting the money. What went wrong?

Mike De Socio
Thu 6 Apr 2023 11.00 BST

In 2018, almost 30 cities across New York state received federal money to carry out a specific, urgent task: removing lead service lines that poison drinking water.

The city of Troy – which sits across the Hudson River and just north of Albany – was among them, receiving $500,000. But five years later, city leaders have failed to spend a single dollar of that money, and have yet to remove a single lead pipe.

The revelation blew up at a city council meeting this winter, raising all sorts of questions. Chief among them is why the city hasn’t spent the money.

Troy’s failure illustrates the challenges small cities face when trying to address environmental injustices like lead pipes. It’s not just a matter of finding the money - although that is often a significant hurdle. Weak city leadership and good old-fashioned bureaucracy can also get in the way of ensuring the money gets used for its intended purpose.

And with trillions more federal dollars pouring into municipalities all across the US, thanks to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the American Rescue Plan Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s incumbent on cities to figure out how to effectively use that money to get the lead out.

What went wrong

For almost five years, hardly anyone in Troy knew that there was $516,565 languishing in the city’s coffers, when it could have been funding crucial public health work.

That was until late last year, when a Troy mother, Jona Favreau, started asking questions. She found out that her child had elevated levels of lead in his blood, due to what she discovered were lead pipes in her home. Lead is a toxin that can stunt neurological development in children and cause a host of brain, kidney, and heart problems in adults. She contacted the city, and managed to find out about the grant funding, but couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been spent.

She eventually connected with the non-profit Environmental Advocates NY (EANY), which dug into the matter and realized Troy was the sole outlier among the other grant recipients that had long since leveraged the funds.

“There was no good reason not to spend this money,” said Rob Hayes, director of clean water with EANY.




https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... lead-pipes
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AndyinPA
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#303

Post by AndyinPA »

Sort of...
Lake Tahoe has attained a clarity that scientists haven’t seen in 40 years – and it’s all because of a microscopic animal acting as a “natural clean-up crew” to restore the clear blue waters.

On Monday, researchers from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC) released their annual report showing that the lake’s average visibility in 2022 was at 71.7ft – compared with 61ft in 2021 – which was largely due in part to a spike in clarity in the last five months of the year.

Such a sudden improvement “is, I believe, totally unprecedented”, said Geoffrey Schladow, TERC director, to the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’ve never plotted data like this, where the last five months of the year were totally different” from the remainder of the calendar year.

The dramatic change can be attributed to an uptick in the concentration of zooplankton, tiny critters that are specialized to consume particles that inhibit the lake’s visibility and an unexpected depletion in the numbers of Mysis shrimp that normally would eat those zooplankton. According to Schladow, the zooplankton, especially the Daphnia and Bosmina species, “largely disappeared from the lake after they were grazed down following the introduction of the Mysis shrimp in the 1960s”.

Other factors can affect changes in lake clarity including winter runoff, the warming of the lake’s surface and the concentration of particles such as silt, algae or clay. But TERC’s research says the primary factor in the lake’s recent clarity sits squarely with the Daphnia and Bosmina zooplankton.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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Lani
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#304

Post by Lani »

The Navy is still contaminating our drinking water. Every time we think this is over, more contamination is discovered. We are not happy about the Navy. :mad:

Federal grand jury conducting criminal probe into Red Hill fuel spills
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/04/1 ... el-spills/
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - A federal grand jury is conducting a criminal investigation into the Red Hill fuel spills that sickened thousands of Hawaii families.

Hawaii News Now has learned that a number of military and civilian officials have been subpoenaed in recent months to testify about the 2021 spills, which contaminated the drinking water of more than 90,000 military personnel and civilians.

Environmental activist Carroll Cox applauded the criminal probe.

“Someone should go to jail over this and be held criminally responsible,” he said. “This is about the health and .... welfare of the people and the environment.”

Right now, it’s unclear who the grand jury is targeting and what charges are being pursued.
More at the link :mad:
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#305

Post by Volkonski »

Europe’s next crisis: Water
The Continent is bracing for yet another drought after a winter with little rain and snow.


https://www.politico.eu/article/europe- ... te-change/
It’s barely spring, and Europe is running dry.

A key reservoir serving millions of Catalans is dwindling away. A conflict over water triggered clashes in France, where several villages can no longer provide their residents with tap water. And Italy’s largest river is already running as low as last June.

More than a quarter of the Continent is in drought as of April, and many countries are bracing for a repeat — or worse — of last year’s bone-dry summer.

A study using satellite data confirmed earlier this year that Europe has been suffering from severe drought since 2018. Rising temperatures are making it difficult to recover from this deficit, leaving the Continent stuck in a dangerous cycle where water becomes ever more precarious.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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Lani
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#306

Post by Lani »

I posted last month: -
A federal grand jury is conducting a criminal investigation into the Red Hill fuel spills that sickened thousands of Hawaii families.

Hawaii News Now has learned that a number of military and civilian officials have been subpoenaed in recent months to testify about the 2021 spills, which contaminated the drinking water of more than 90,000 military personnel and civilians.
There's another enormous spill. The Navy was silent.

Sources told Hawaii News Now they believe the contaminated mixture included up to 3,000 gallons of fuel and showed signs of AFFF (Aqueous Film Forming Foam) contamination, a toxic firefighting foam.

“We had what we thought was visible signs of foaming that would indicate that there was AFFF,” said a source.

There was a previous AFFF spill in 2019 at the site where the Navy said the contaminated soil was excavated. Crews collected floating oil and the Navy says the spill did not impact the drinking water supply, but there was no testing of the contaminated mixture.

No testing of the water collected from the 2021 release has occurred to date....
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2023/05/0 ... rl-harbor/
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#307

Post by raison de arizona »

:torches: Words matter, except when the supreme court takes away our reality and substitutes its own.
Cristian Farias @cristianafarias wrote: Five members of the Supreme Court dealt a crushing blow to the Clean Water Act, rewriting the word "adjacent" in the law to mean "adjoining," thus leaving unprotected from pollution, and EPA oversight, vast swaths of wetlands.

https://supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf

The decision is so extreme that they even lost Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote separately to note that "long-regulated adjacent wetlands" are now at the mercy of polluters, "with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States."

The court, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, made up an entirely new test, not in the statute, to determine what counts as "waters of the United States." According to him, waters must have a "continuous surface connection" to be regulated.

Not the law Congress passed.

I really recommend reading both Kagan's and Kavanaugh's opinions, which lay out in very clear terms how the Supreme Court just rewrote a landmark piece of environmental legislation, essentially taking the U.S. back to the 1970s.

"If you’ve lately swum in a lake, happily drunk a glass of water straight from the tap, or sat down to a good fish dinner, you can appreciate what the law has accomplished," wrote Kagan.
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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#308

Post by raison de arizona »

Arizona Limits Construction Around Phoenix as Its Water Supply Dwindles
In what could be a glimpse of future as climate change batters the West, officials ruled there’s not enough groundwater for projects already approved.

Arizona has determined that there is not enough groundwater for all of the future housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, and will stop developers from building some new subdivisions, a sign of looming trouble in the West and other places where overuse, drought and climate change are straining water supplies.

The decision by state officials marks the beginning of the end to the explosive development that has made the Phoenix metropolitan region the fastest growing in the country.

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and its suburbs, gets more than half its water supply from groundwater; most of the rest comes from rivers and aqueducts as well as recycled wastewater. In practical terms, groundwater is a finite resource; it can take thousands of years or longer to be replenished.

The announcement of a groundwater shortage — what the state calls “unmet demand” for water over the next hundred years — means Arizona would no longer give developers in areas of Maricopa County new permits to construct homes that rely on wells for water.

Phoenix and nearby large cities, which must obtain separate permission from state officials for their development plans every 10 to 15 years, would also be denied approval for any homes that rely on groundwater beyond what the state has already authorized.

The decision means cities and developers must look for alternative sources of water to support future development — for example, by trying to buy access to river water from farmers or Native American tribes, many of whom are facing their own shortages. That rush to buy water is likely to rattle the real estate market in Arizona, making homes more expensive and threatening the relatively low housing costs that had made the region a magnet for people from across the country.
:snippity:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/clim ... water.html
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
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#309

Post by AndyinPA »

This is just the start.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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#310

Post by Dave from down under »

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-28/ ... /102366986

While it's 'fashionable to blame climate change', that's not the only thing turning Türkiye's great lakes to dust
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#311

Post by W. Kevin Vicklund »

My father and I had a number of discussions spanning several years about the impending water shortages out west, especially in Arizona (my grandparents moved to Sedona when they retired and my father bought land in nearby Oak Creek for when he retired). For perspective, my father died April 2004 - I've been aware of this issue for at least a quarter century.
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#312

Post by pipistrelle »

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#313

Post by pipistrelle »

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#314

Post by pipistrelle »

It's getting worse, with no sign of relief.

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#315

Post by Volkonski »

Following the Spring rains in Wichita Falls the bigger reservoir, Lake Arrowhead, is now 67.4% full. A year ago on this date it was 81.1% full.

The historically driest part of the year is now here. Record high temperatures are forecast. By the Fall things could get critical.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#316

Post by Foggy »

We aren't going to de-industrialize the planet.

We're just going to have to learn how to engineer the climate. I don't see any alternative.
Out from under. :thumbsup:
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#317

Post by AndyinPA »

We've had a fair amount of rain. Our area should look a bit better next week.
"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies." -Octavia E. Butler
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#318

Post by Estiveo »

I had to go to Manteca last week, and my route over the Pacheco Pass includes passing by the San Luis Reservoir. It was FULL! I can't remember the last time I saw it full. And the San Joaquin River was running high as well.

I just hope we don't go right back into drought again next year.
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#319

Post by pipistrelle »

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#320

Post by Volkonski »

Saltwater wedge could reach New Orleans by late October

https://www.fox8live.com/2023/09/22/tim ... e-october/
The ongoing drought affecting the midwestern and southern regions of the United States has led to alarmingly low water levels in the Mississippi River. The situation has resulted in the intrusion of saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into the river in southeast Louisiana, posing a potential threat to the drinking water supply for thousands of residents in the coming weeks.

To address the situation, the Louisiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness held a press conference Friday at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

Governor Edwards says the historic low river levels are expected to persist for several weeks. He will be asking for an emergency declaration from the federal government to take precautions and to be eligible for reimbursements.

As the salt water continues its journey upriver, it could affect the drinking water for an additional 20,000 people in Belle Chasse. Subsequently, there is a risk that the salt water may reach the drinking water intake for the Algiers community in New Orleans, located across the river from the French Quarter.

With no significant rainfall expected in the foreseeable future, experts warn that the saltwater intrusion could reach parts of New Orleans by late October. Mayor LaToya Cantrell on Friday signed an emergency declaration in preparation for the impacts. She says her administration is monitoring more than 50,000 lead pipes across the city.

Commander Cullen Jones with the Army Corps of Engineers laid out a timeline for potential impacts:

Belle Chasse - Oct. 13
St. Bernard - Oct. 19
Algiers - Oct. 22
Gretna - Oct. 24
W. Jefferson - Oct. 25
Carrollton - Oct. 28
E. Jefferson - Oct. 29
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#321

Post by Volkonski »

What is a saltwater wedge?
It's called a saltwater wedge, and while it may sound like something off a New Orleans drink menu, it's not anything anybody wants. A saltwater wedge is the movement of salt water up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the drinking water of New Orleans and other Louisiana communities.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#322

Post by Volkonski »

As saltwater pushes upriver, Corps prepares to ship in 36M gallons of freshwater a day
Low flow in Mississippi River is allowing salt to threaten drinking water supplies up the river.


https://www.nola.com/news/environment/c ... 90c8f.html
Unsafe levels of saltwater may reach many New Orleans-area drinking water intakes by mid-October, forcing officials to scramble for barges that will bring in fresh water from further up the Mississippi in hopes of avoiding contamination of local water supplies.

Gov. John Bel Edwards joined federal, state and local officials at a news conference Friday to explain how they were "making plans for a duration of an event and a severity of an event" that will exceed a similar saltwater intrusion in 1988.

Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers said they've taken the first steps to begin transporting 36 million gallons of river water to the area by barge every day for use by local utilities.

"We just executed the contract to get the initial capacity for 15 million gallons on site next week, and then we are rapidly moving through the Corps of Engineers to obtain more," said Col. Cullen Jones, commander of the Corps' New Orleans office. The barges will range in size from 100,000 gallons to 1 million gallons.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#323

Post by Volkonski »

Work begins to raise barrier against saltwater pushing up Mississippi, threatening water supplies
The Army Corps says the underwater dam will delay the saltwater's progress by up to 15 days.


https://www.nola.com/news/environment/w ... 7f17f.html
Work to elevate a saltwater barrier in the lower Mississippi River has begun, but it will only stall rather than halt the creeping threat to water supplies in the New Orleans area.

The earthen sill near Alliance in Plaquemines Parish will be raised about 25 feet from the height the Army Corps originally built it to in July, corps officials announced Monday. Once finished next month, the sill, which acts as an underwater dam, will be about 30 feet below the river's surface. It’s hoped that the sill will delay saltwater contamination in New Orleans and Belle Chasse and much of St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes.
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#324

Post by Volkonski »

El Nino drought: Panama Canal cuts ship numbers further

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67281776
The Panama Canal will make more cuts to the number of ships using the waterway due to the worst drought in over 70 years, authorities say.

The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) says it has been forced to make the decision due to the driest October since records began in 1950.

The El Niño weather phenomenon has contributed to the severe drought, the ACP says.

It is expected to increase the cost of shipping goods around the world.

The Panama Canal greatly reduces the time and distance for ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, between 13,000 and 14,000 ships use it annually, according to the canal authority.

A naturally occurring El Nino climate pattern associated with warmer-than-usual water in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is contributing to Panama's drought.

Water levels in Gatun Lake, the rainfall-fed reservoir that is the main source of water used in the canal's lock system, have "continued to decline to unprecedented levels for this time of year," according to the ACP.

Starting from 3 November, booking slots will be cut to 25 per day from an already reduced 31 per day, the ACP said.

That number will be further reduced over the next three months to 18 slots per day from the start of February 2024.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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#325

Post by Foggy »

:shock:
Out from under. :thumbsup:
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