Jordan’s Huge New Water Project

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

Parched Jordan on Wednesday officially inaugurated a near-billion-dollar project to supply the capital with water from an ancient southern aquifer to help meet a chronic shortage.

King Abdullah II pushed the start button to begin pumping water from the 300,000-year-old Disi aquifer, 325 kilometres (200 miles) south of Amman.

“The Disi project will provide the capital and other governorates with 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of high quality drinking water every year,” water minister Hazem Nasser told a ceremony.

Jordan. One of the ten driest countries in the world.

“This amount covers 20 to 25 percent of Jordan’s drinking water needs.”

He said Turkey’s GAMA Energy firm built the water system in 48 months.

The water ministry started an experimental pumping of water from wells of the Disi aquifer last Wednesday.

Officials say the much-awaited $990 million project required 250,000 tonnes of steel and the digging of 55 wells to pump water from Disi to Amman, where the per capita daily consumption of its 2.2 million population is 160 litres (42 gallons).

The water ministry says Jordan, where 92 percent of the land is desert, will need 1.6 billion cubic metres of water a year to meet its requirements by 2015, while the population of 6.8 million is growing by almost 3.5 percent a year.

The demand for water is constantly rising in Jordan, which mainly depends on rainfall and is currently home to more than 500,000 Syrian refugees.

A 2008 study by Duke University, in the United States, shows that Disi’s water has 20 times more radiation than is considered safe, with radium content that could trigger cancers.

But the government and some independent experts have brushed aside such concerns, stressing that Disi water can be treated by diluting it with an equal amount of water from other sources.

AS THE climate warms, glaciers shrink. That is a problem for those who rely on meltwater from them to irrigate their crops: farmers living in the valleys above Leh, in Jammu and Kashmir, for example. Most of the lower-lying glaciers in the area they inhabit have disappeared, and those at higher altitudes have retreated by as much 10km (6 miles). The meltwater that farmers need to irrigate their newly sown crops used to arrive in March or April. Now it does not come until June—too late to be of much use in a place with such a short growing season.

Chewang Norphel, a retired civil engineer who lives in the area, thinks he has the answer: if the natural glaciers have gone, why not build artificial ones? That is what, for the past decade or so, he has been doing. Moreover, he has built the new glaciers in places where they will thaw at exactly the right time, and debouch their contents directly onto farmers’ fields.

Based on a Newton-and-the-apple-like moment, when he noticed that a stream in his garden had frozen under the shade of a poplar grove, though elsewhere it flowed freely, he realised that the way to build a glacier is to slow water’s flow and shield it from the sun. And that is what he and his team of engineers are now doing. They have diverted several streams in the worst-affected areas into canals that take long, meandering routes through shady, gently sloping topography. They have also built stone weirs across these canals at regular intervals, to slow the current down still further and encourage water to spill over the canal banks. As the spring thaw sets in and the canals fill up, this overspill freezes into a layer of ice. And as the process repeats itself over the ensuing months, these ice sheets stack up and get thicker.

So far, Mr Norphel and his team have built a dozen artificial glaciers in this way. The largest of them is a kilometre and a half long and two metres thick. Meltwater from these glaciers helps sustain the livelihood of thousands of farmers. Indeed, because the new glaciers are located where they will be most useful, rather than where the whims of geomorphology dictate, some farms are better-off now than they used to be in the days before the natural glaciers vanished. Land that previously yielded but one crop a year yields two. And water-loving cash crops like willow (whose twigs and branches are used in the area as building material) can be grown.

Picky glaciologists might argue that what Mr Norphel is creating are not, strictly speaking, glaciers. For a body of ice to qualify for glacier status, according to the textbooks, the layers it is made of must, by a process of repeated freezing and thawing, have metamorphosed into a solid block of granular ice. Mr Norphel’s have not—at least, not yet.

This distinction is, however, probably lost on Leh’s farmers. They are just glad to have their meltwater back. And Mr Norphel has identified several other places which might benefit from his technique, including Spiti in Himachal Pradesh, Gilgit-Baltistan over the border in Pakistan, and a number of valleys in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In an area where neighbours do not always see eye to eye, the spread of his technique may perhaps put a positive spin on the phrase “diplomatic relations are glacial”.

Source: The Economist

A Server, A Spy, and a Water Footprint

by Elizabeth Cutright

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

Here’s another angle to the NSA citizen-spying story you may have not considered—the amount of resources devoted to this mass surveillance project. In order to keep tabs on all those website visits, e-mails, and Google searches, the NSA needs data centers packed with servers.

Lots and lots of servers…

And while racks and racks of computer processors require a lot of energy, the water-demand component cannot be ignored.

So how much is the NSA’s water footprint? As reported online by the website Geek, the NSA’s latest facility—set to open in September near Bluffdale, UT, “will require as much as 1.7 million gallons of water each day.”

Spying takes lots of water. In this case, 1.7 million gallons per day.

The facility, christened the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center (now that’s a mouthful!), is a “1–1.5 million square foot facility with about 100,000 square feet devoted to data storage.” And while the NSA will only admit that the data being collected is classified, Geek’s Ryan Whitwam believes “the data center will be processing the contents of electronic communications including phone calls, e-mails, and Internet searches.”

“Basically, it probably has something to do with PRISM,” he writes.

Regardless of the motives behind the data center’s information processing capacity, this newest NSA facility has a water footprint that would make most suburban neighborhoods jealous: its millions of gallons in cooling water roughly equivalent to the water usage of several thousand average American households. While up to one third of the data center’s cooling water can be reused for irrigation, the city of Bluffdale anticipates that up to 1% of the region’s water supply will be used by this new data center.

Birth defects linked to bad Valley water

by Mark Grossi

Water News in a Nutshell.

Finding the truth about fluoride

By Geoff Cumming

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

To see how easily the truth about fluoride can go from pearly white to shades of grey, look no further than the sparkliest weapon in the pro-fluoride arsenal: areas with fluoride in the water supply have lower rates of tooth decay than areas without. Every few years, authorities wheel out new studies clearly demonstrating that fluoridated water helps to produce healthier teeth: drawing not just on foreign academic papers but on the teeth of New Zealanders.

The Ministry of Health’s 2009 oral health survey suggests putting fluoride in the water makes a difference of around 10 per cent in the health of children’s teeth and those gains flow through adulthood.

A 2004 study, which compared non-fluoridated Christchurch with fluoridated Wellington found 5-year-olds in Christchurch had an average of 3.8 “decayed, missing or filled surfaces” compared to an average 2.63 decayed, missing or filled surfaces for 5-year-olds in Wellington. Studies in Auckland, Northland and Southland similarly show incontrovertible benefits of fluoridation. End of story, you might think – and the fluoride debate is a 50-year saga most of us would love to see the back of.

But in the hands of fluoridation opponents, such comparisons assume less and less significance. There are, apparently, 128 tooth surfaces inside the average child’s mouth. So a difference of 1.17 surfaces per child seen in the Christchurch/Wellington study doesn’t cut it, they claim. Then they convert to percentages – and the benefit becomes less than 1 per cent. And that’s just for starters: we should be free to choose and we know not to trust authorities, don’t we?

No wonder the forces of control are losing the battle to drug the water supply with toxic scrapings from industrial chimneys – acids which the “antis” link to lower IQ, brittle bones, thyroid problems, male infertility, cancer and Adolf Hitler. (Go online and grow very afraid, but then check the veracity and depth of the research.)

Establishment experts, using more measured language, will counter that small differences are, in fact, extremely significant on a population basis and the reduction in decay results in big savings in costly and painful treatment. These key messages seem to be getting lost. Throw enough mud and, no matter the substance, some of it sticks.

Dismissed for so long as fringe nutters and conspiracy theorists, anti-fluoride campaigners keep bouncing back and, finally, seem to be winning. First they took Ashburton. In the current (2010-13) local government term, Taumarunui, New Plymouth, Central Hawkes Bay and now Hamilton have fallen – the last three after comprehensive “tribunal” inquiries.

Suddenly, less than half the population lives in areas with fluoride-added water and there’s little impetus in non-fluoridated areas to reverse the tide.

Hastings and Whakatane loom as the next battlefields with referendums in the coming local body elections. Root work, in the form of protests and public meetings, is under way in Auckland and Wellington to put fluoridation on the agenda in next year’s council annual plan processes. Could the silent majority, who’ve accepted the assurances of the medical establishment for so long, now be a minority? Were public health authorities wrong about one of the biggest mass medication programmes in modern times?

What’s beyond challenge is that the anti-fluoride lobby, though small and shoestring-funded, has become well-organised and highly-skilled at challenging the establishment. The internet has helped local campaigners to access international resources, raise funds and run campaigns. Community groups can tap into a national body with links to the US-based Fluoride Action Network. They are no longer isolated but part of an enlightened global movement. For every comprehensive, peer-reviewed study which supports fluoridation, there are many more studies raising doubts about safety and efficacy, no matter how reliable or relevant.

Campaigners have become adept at using local council democratic processes because that’s where decisions on water treatment rest. Annual planning and consultation requirements introduced in the 1990s made it easier for campaigners to bring fluoridation on to the agenda each year. Fluoridation costs – and when councillors are looking to trim rate rises, every drop counts.

Local Government NZ wants the issue taken away from councils and decided at central government level. Hamilton Mayor Julie Hardaker, a lawyer who says she came new to the issue after winning the mayoralty with no council experience, agrees. “Measures to address tooth decay are a public health matter and in this country public health is dealt with by central government. We deal with delivering the water and purifying it to drinking water standards – we don’t deal with medical issues.”

Many councillors support Hardaker’s view that fluoridation raises complex scientific questions which politicians should not have to call. But the Government isn’t about to risk fallout by taking the decision away from communities.

“The Government’s role is to support local councils when they decide to use fluoride – not to make the decision for them, and we are not considering changing that,” Health Minister Tony Ryall told the Weekend Herald. After New Plymouth opted out in 2011, Labour promised to hold an independent inquiry (the last was in 2001) with a view to developing a national policy when next in power but the Greens at the time expressed reservations about “mass medication of water” and support for local decision-making.

Responsibility for defending (and promoting) fluoridation rests with district health boards – and their public health staff generally have more pressing priorities such as rheumatic fever or meningitis outbreaks to attend to. Repelling the antis’ arguments is both time-consuming and thankless.

Where the antis have gained most traction is in tribunal-style hearings, a process adopted by the New Plymouth, Central Hawkes Bay and Hamilton councils to decide whether to retain fluoridation. For councils, this quasi-court process holds the promise of getting a perennial issue off the agenda: a decision based on an open, exhaustive inquiry shouldn’t have to be revisited in a hurry.

Hardaker says Hamilton opted for a tribunal in preference to yet another referendum (a 2006 vote found 70 per cent support for fluoridation but was challenged as unfair), largely because all sides felt the tribunal process was fair. The Hamilton hearing took four days – time enough, outsiders might think, for medical experts to debunk the myths, quell the emotion, and convince politicians of the wisdom of a measure supported by the World Health Organisation and key health agencies in the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Instead, Hamilton councillors voted 7 to 1 to end fluoridation. It may not have been that clearcut: three councillors, on legal advice, withdrew from the process because they are elected members of the Waikato District Health Board. Two others stood back because they had expressed support for fluoridation and could be accused of bias. But even if the five had voted for the status quo, they might still have lost.

What went on?

The district health board gave it its best shot, putting up the chief dental officer, medical officer of health, Maori dental health experts backed by Ministry of Health’s chief child health adviser, chief dental officer and a legal adviser.

But the Fluoride Action Network brought some highly-credentialled experts of its own: doctors and dentists including Dr Andrew Harms, former president of the South Australian branch of the Australian Dental Association; Hamilton Accident and Emergency doctor Peter Scanlon; Whangarei dentist Lawrie Brett and oncologist Anna Goodwin.

Experts who’ve turned – who once stood for fluoridation but now oppose it, such as former Auckland principal dental officer John Colquhoon – helped to raise doubts over the certainty of experts. Video links to strident international campaigners Paul Connett (USA) and Declan Waugh (Ireland) further muddied the scientific waters. (Connett, of the Fluoride Action Network, has made three New Zealand tours since 2003 and, wherever he goes, fluoridation revolts tend to follow).

Mary Byrne, national co-ordinator of the Fluoride Action Network NZ, says campaigners have always included medical professionals but as councils have grown more open-minded it’s become easier to go public. “Having doctors and dentists and scientists gives [decision-makers] that level of security – that it’s not just people misinterpreting science or peddling pseudo-science.”

The net effect, according to councillors, was that the experts – along with the research evidence – cancelled each other out; their decision to stop fluoridation swung on issues other than science.

Several councillors were influenced by the mathematical blurring of individual vs population gains and bought the anti-fluoridists’ line that “at worst it’s equivalent to one further decayed tooth over your lifetime”.

“One other thing was a real arrogance from some of the DHB people and scientists who told us we’d just been listening to a whole lot of quack science,” says councillor Dave MacPherson. “We felt they were treating us as a bunch of morons.”

To emphasise what they are up against, the district health board used a shocking image of a child’s front teeth rotted by decay in a non-fluoridated area. But fluoridation opponents used the same image to argue the real culprit was sugar.

Evidence that fluoridated water plays a minor role compared to topical application of fluoride toothpaste swayed some, particularly those attuned to concepts of individual responsibility – and choice.

“For people who don’t want fluoride in the water, it’s extremely costly to remove it [using filters],” says Hardaker, “whereas people who want to use fluoride can buy a three-pack of toothbrushes for 99c at Pak’nSave and a tube of toothpaste on special for $1.29 – and the best application is to clean your teeth twice a day.”

“The other issue was babies,” Hardaker says. “Advice from the Ministry of Health was that children under 3 should not ingest fluoride and that babies under 6 months should not be exposed to fluoride via bottle-fed formula.”

There’s nothing new in the arguments raised by opponents – their strategies and the studies they draw on have been critically analysed by Adelaide-based fluoridation supporter Jason Armfield of the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health. “Techniques such as the ‘big lie’ and innuendo are used to associate water fluoridation with health and environmental disasters,” Armfield wrote in a 2007 analysis. “Half-truths are presented, fallacious statements reiterated and attempts are made to bamboozle the public …”

It’s clear the two camps are deeply locked in trench warfare; not just at referendum or tribunal time.

It can go too far – Waikato DHB boss Craig Climo complains that senior officials have been subjected to offensive, highly-personal emails before and since the Hamilton result.

It’s relevant that council decision-makers, not just in Hamilton, are predominantly white and middle class, while the majority of their constituents behave as if there really is something in the water – improved dental health has fuelled complacency over fluoridation.

What irks authorities most is that the measure continues to have value as an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff – giving socio-economically deprived groups, particularly Maori and Pacific Island children, a fighting chance of healthy teeth and adults a better chance of keeping theirs.

These groups are more likely to have higher intakes of high-sugar drinks and snacks, and less likely to brush their teeth as frequently. Many under-5s don’t access any dental care, Waikato DHB principal dental officer Rob Aitken told the tribunal.

A truncated trial in Northland points to the difference fluoridation can make in disadvantaged communities. During the two-year trial, decay rates fell significantly in newly fluoridated areas in Kaitaia and Kaikohe, even though advocates thought the benefits might need five years to show up. But the Far North District Council ended the trial in 2009 after a postal vote which drew a response of just 16 per cent.

Waikato DHB estimates the end to fluoridation in Hamilton will add $500,000 a year to the cost of treating decay.

Ministry chief dental officer Dr Robyn Haisman-Welch stresses that the fluoridation tide has not all been in one direction. Thames, Dunedin, Hutt Valley and Kapiti Coast all recently resolved to maintain treatment after passionate debates.

Treatment has been introduced in Patea and Waverley in Taranaki while the Waikato District Council is working to extend it to northern Waikato towns. The 2009 oral health survey showed public support for fluoridation was still strong, Haisman-Welch says.

But the pro-fluoride camp needs to lift its game. If New Plymouth wasn’t enough of a wake-up call, Hamilton certainly was, with the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, issuing a missive and the ministry reviewing its approach.

A ministry offshoot, the National Fluoridation Information Service, keeps tabs on the fluoride science industry (such is the volume of research) and maintains that none of the health fears raised by opponents amount to a proven threat – not in the dosages allowed in our water of less than 1 part per million.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for doubt. The one established side effect is dental fluorosis, a mottling or flecking of tooth enamel. This has an aesthetic effect but is not a clinical concern at current levels. Children under 6 should not use full-strength toothpastes and there is concern about the impact of formula milk on babies’ developing teeth.

But Emmeline Haymes, information service national co-ordinator, suggests more is needed than reassuring messages. DHBs do not have staff dedicated to the issue and do not take a pro-active approach. “Other than me, there’s nobody working permanently on this in the country.”

We’re in danger of dying of thirst, one drop at a time

by Jack Flobeck

Water News in a Nutshell.

 

It reminds me of the story of the frog in a pot of water on the stove. When the heat is turned up slowly, the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late, and he finds himself in a pot of boiling water without the strength to jump out. So, too, we see the signs of drought all around and are doing nothing. How long before there is nothing left to do?

Some time back, I traced the Colorado River from Grand Lake to Yuma, Ariz. – finding only a trickle at the terminus where years previously there was a beautiful lush weeded marsh with great varieties of fish, flowers and birds, replaced now by a cracked dry desert bed of ugly hard mud. The river never makes it to the sea, but the portion that is diverted off into the All American Canal trudges west to California to irrigate the Imperial Valley and provide San Diego with desperately needed water. The fluid in the All American Canal is a shiny yellow green soup of phosphates, fertilizers and salt with a dash of animal and human waste thrown in, too. Don’t judge hastily and call people paranoid who double wash all produce from the Valley, especially after seeing the water that irrigates and grows those crops.

Recently, I traveled across New Mexico and Arizona. I always scan the local papers for water, ranching and agricultural news. This time the articles were front page and gloomy, headlining the latest data showing that cattle herds were at all-time lows as a result of the drought. Drought means no water for the cattle to drink, no water to grow feed, and since neighboring states all have the same problem, imported feed becomes excessively expensive. No one needs a degree in “the dismal science” of economics to understand that with fewer cows the price of meat will go up, and we certainly have seen increases at our supermarkets. Wheat crops wither as flour prices explode, and the price of the staff of life, bread, goes up daily.

Articles in the press, in towns south of us like Lamar, as well as in communities in Oklahoma and Texas, warn of a coming return to the Dust Bowl and print vivid pictures of dried-up lakes and burned-up crops telling the visual picture all too well.

We ignore the warnings of reputable research organizations like Scripps that tell of “Dry Pool” at Lake Mead, and we scoff at the predictions that the Ogallala Aquifer will be dry by 2030.

But what if that comes to pass? Tens of millions of people from all walks of life – the farmers, the ranchers, the city office workers, the manufacturers, the bus drivers, the scientists – all relying on Ogallala water and river waters from our wonderful headwaters state of Colorado, from diverse regions across New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California; simply put, they all will be sucking a dry straw.

We have preached the nexus between energy and water; but an overlooked and inevitable result of drought in the southwest will be eventual electrical brownouts and blackouts. How will the youngest and the oldest generations survive 100-degree days in Arizona without air conditioning?

The past few weeks should serve as a wake-up call to cope with water shortages. It’s hotter now than it was a few years ago. More heat means more evaporation and thus less water. We should be developing innovative options for local ponds and water sources to fight forest fires that will be with us for years to come as beetle kill, lack of cutting, possibly more careless campers converge to produce more Western forest fires.

So, let’s take a few years to study the situation, write a plan, examine the plan, have public discussion about the plan, have legislative debate to decide on how to fund the plan, culminating in starting the plan to solve the drought dilemma in five or six years. Will we have the stamina to jump out of the pot?