New Easy-Off  Water Filter Housings Make Cartridge Changes Easy

by Gene Franks

Sometimes standard items work so well that it’s hard to see how they can be improved.  This has been the case with what is commonly called the “Big Blue” water filter containers that hold the standard-sized 4.5″ diameter filter cartridges — either 10″ or 20″ in length.

Sizes 3 and 4 are “Big Blue” units. (Click for larger image.)

There is now an improvement over the Big Blue that makes cartridge changes easier, makes o-ring replacement usually unnecessary, and virtually assures leak-free cartridge replacement.

Our new Easy-Off housings from Viqua use a unique lock ring seal that simply presses the sump.  With conventional housings, the sump is screwed into the cap by twisting the sump. The lock-ring design does away with the problem of pinched o-rings and o-rings that are flattened by over-tightening.

The picture shows the lock ring held by the wrench.  The ring can actually be hand tightened onto the blue threads of the cap to make a perfect seal.  Only the ring turns; the sump itself does not turn but is pressed tightly against the cap by the tightening of the lock ring.

The advanced housing has other features that set it apart from conventional filter vessels. One very nice feature is a pre-tapped  cap that allows for easy addition of a pressure gauge.  The bottom of the sump is also pre-tapped and capped so that the sump can be drained from the bottom if desired.

A pressure gauge can be easily installed on the cap.

Bottom drain plug can be removed with a screwdriver.

One final note:  The Easy-Off housings work only with radial style cartridges.  They can’t be used for axial  filters.  Radial style includes all carbon blocks and sediment cartridges.  Axials are mainly media cartridges: cartridges with an impermeable outer shell that are usually filled with granular media.  The test is, if you can pick the cartridge up and look through the center hole like a telescope, the new housings will work.  If you can’t see all the way through, the cartridge can’t be used with the new Easy-Off housings.

The new housings are sold with wrench, mounting bracket, and screws, so the only thing more you need to make a whole house filter is a filter cartridge.

Pricing and more details.

Slamming Shut the Doors 

A excerpt from an extensive Journal Sentinel study of Great Lakes devastation by Zebra and quagga mussels:  How invasive species changed the Great Lakes forever.  

A watershed moment has arrived for the Great Lakes.

After decades of regulatory paralysis, a federal judge has forced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to begin requiring overseas ships to decontaminate their ballast water before discharging it into the five lakes that together span a surface area the size of the United Kingdom.

Despite their vastness, for thousands of years the inland seas above Niagara Falls were as isolated from the outside world as a Northwoods Wisconsin pond. That all changed in 1959. The U.S. and Canadian governments obliterated the lake’s natural barrier to invasive fish, plants, viruses and mollusks with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of channels, locks and dams that opened the door for ocean freighters to sail up the once-wild St. Lawrence River, around Niagara Falls and into the heart of the continent.

Small boats had access to the lakes since the 1800s thanks to relatively tiny man-made navigation channels stretching in from the East Coast and a canal at Chicago that artificially linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River basin.

But the consequences of opening a nautical freeway into the Great Lakes for globe-roaming freighters proved disastrous — at least 56 non-native organisms have since been discovered in the lakes, and the majority arrived as stowaways in freighter ballast tanks.

These invaders have decimated native fish populations and rewired the way energy flows through the world’s largest freshwater system, sparking an explosion in seaweed growth that rots in reeking pockets along thousands of miles of shoreline. The foreign organisms are implicated in botulism outbreaks that have suffocated tens of thousands of birds on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. They are among the culprits responsible for toxic algae blooms on Lake Erie that threaten public water supplies.

The hope is the new ballast discharge regulations will shut the door to new invasions.

The reality: The Environmental Protection Agency has already acknowledged they are not stringent enough to do that job.

The agency blames a lack of technology to adequately disinfect ballast tanks. Critics blame a lack of resolve in getting tough with the relatively tiny overseas shipping industry that has done so much damage to this singularly important natural resource; an average of fewer than two such ships visit the lakes each day during the Seaway’s nine-month, ice-free shipping season.

“We can do much better,” says biologist Gary Fahnenstiel, who spent his career chronicling the ecological unraveling of Lake Michigan for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If we really care about the lakes.”

Solving the Seaway ballast problem isn’t just about the Great Lakes, because the invaders have a history of making their way into waters across the continent. Out West, where Great Lakes invasive mussels are spreading as fast as boats are towed from lake to lake, states now have laws to throw people in jail and fine them thousands of dollars for transporting the same species Seaway freighters dumped on the continent with impunity.

Great Lakes advocates predict the bubbling frustration out West over the Seaway’s role in their troubles will erupt if — or when — Seaway ships unleash yet another invader.

Zebra Mussel

Zebra Mussels (click for larger view)

“The industry has had this grace period to find solutions,” says Phyllis Green, superintendent of Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. “The grace period they have been given will hit the fan when they find the next one.”

The pressure is mounting inside the Great Lakes basin as well, because even as the EPA leaves this front door to the Great Lakes cracked open, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is under fire from Congress to shut the back door — the Chicago canal system that is the prime pathway for Asian carp to invade the lakes. Rebuilding the natural divide between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River basin is a project that likely wouldtake years and cost billions of dollars.

But it begs the question: Why spend all this money to close the back door if we aren’t going to shut and seal the front door as well?

Building a barrier to protect the upper Great Lakes from Seaway invaders would actually be simpler than restoring the natural watershed divide at Chicago. In fact, such a barrier already exists.

It’s called Niagara Falls.

Read the full study here.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Umbra on Rain Barrels

The except below is  from Grist’s popular “Ask Umbra” feature.  One rain barrel hazard that Umbra leaves out is getting the Rain Barrel Song in your head.  Once there, it can stay for days. Umbra’s comments  illustrate that owning and using even the simplest of objects can be really complicated.–Hardly Waite.

Rain barrels in general are unequivocally healthy for the planet. Simple systems designed to funnel rainwater from your roof into storage tanks, rain barrels relieve pressure on stormwater systems, reduce the energy used to treat and transport water, and save you roughly 1,300 gallons of tap water per summer. [But, there may be some drawbacks.]

Once it hits your roof, a raindrop may run over and collect a number of contaminants. Everything from roof-treatment chemicals to airborne heavy-metal pollutants to mold to the poop from roosting birds or squirrels may be swept into your clean-looking barrel. So while using the water to irrigate trees, shrubs, and flowers is universally smiled upon, some people get a little queasy about putting it on plants they’ll eventually be eating. Might those rooftop nasties make you sick?

I hate to rain on your parade, but there’s not a lot of research out there to provide a definitive answer. One 2013 study from Rutgers examined rain-barrel water for lead, zinc, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and E. coli bacteria. The water harbored no PAHs and little heavy metals, and most (but not all) samples were also low in bacteria. It is possible to have your runoff tested for contaminants at a local health department or well-water testing facility – but experts at Rutgers say testing thoroughly enough for meaningful results is likely impractical and expensive for home gardens.

What we’re left with then . . . is your personal tolerance for risk. I can tell you that plenty of gardeners do dip into the rain barrel to water their veggies. Experts can tell you the risk is minimal, but the practice is not entirely without peril. You should definitely skip it if your roof is copper or has been treated with chromated copper arsenate or zinc (used to prevent algal growth). If not, though, you must decide for yourself.

Feeling lucky? It’s smart to take some precautions. Water the veggies and herbs with a drip or trickle irrigator rather than pouring on the plants themselves; this minimizes direct contact and harnesses the filtration power of the soil. Water in the morning to allow for drying and UV light disinfection, and don’t use rainwater close to harvest time. Always, always wash your veggies thoroughly with potable water before you eat them. You might also consider installing a “first flush” feature that diverts the first few gallons from any rain into a separate barrel, as these are the most likely to contain troublesome additives (though other research casts doubts on this system’s efficacy, too). And finally, make sure to keep your barrel clean throughout the season.

Feeling not so lucky? That’s OK too – you can find loads of other uses for that water. Use it to wash your car, top off the pool, clean your gardening tools, and flush your toilet. And as I mentioned up top, rainwater is A-OK to use on non-edible plants. In fact, it’s even better than tap water because it doesn’t contain chlorine or calcium, which may harm beneficial bugs in the soil.

Source:  Grist (Ask Umbra)

 Military Water Pollution–A National Disgrace

“Almost every military site in this country is seriously contaminated,” said John D. Dingell, a soon-to-retire Michigan congressman who served in World War II. “Lejeune is one of many.”

Over the years, the US military has been the unquestioned leader in water pollution.  Newsweek for 7-25-14, cover pictured above, features an excellent study by Alexander Nazaryan of the military’s environmental crimes over recent decades, concentrating on Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.   As the article points out, however, Camp Lejeune is only a small part of an ugly picture of the US military’s war on the environment.

These military sites form a sort of toxic archipelago across the land: Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, where the Air Force allegedly dumped trichloroethylene (TCE) into the soil, part of what some residents call a “toxic triangle” in south-central Texas; McClellan Air Force Base near Sacramento, California, which includes not only fuel plumes and industrial solvents but also radioactive waste; Umatilla Chemical Depot in the plains of northern Oregon, where mustard gas and VX nerve gas were stored; Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a onetime sarin stockpile just north of Denver; the Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod, poisoned by explosives and perchlorate, a rocket fuel component that is emerging as a major Pentagon pollutant. But because Camp Lejeune’s abuses and betrayals are more flagrant, it has become a test case for whether the military can defend our soil without ruining it.

Here is an excerpt from a detailed study which we urge you to read in its entirety.  It focuses on one of many health problems, male breast cancer,  caused by the military’s lack of environmental concern.

Men With Mastectomy Scars

Camp Lejeune, built in 1941, is 240 square miles in area, making it the largest Marine base east of the Mississippi River, and the second largest in the nation after Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. Situated at the swampy mouth of the New River, it is an ideal training ground for the sorts of amphibious assaults that are the Marines’ favored means of arriving at the war dance. From here, leathernecks shipped out to the Pacific theater of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The Marines killed in the 1983 terrorist bombings of a barracks in Beirut had also come from Lejeune; a memorial to them sits in a wooded glade at the camp’s edge.

In the decade before Camp Lejeune was built, the chemical industry saw the advent of the “safety solvents” TCE and tetrachloroethylene (PCE). These were chemical cleaning agents of the organochlorine group: TCE was a degreaser for machine parts; PCE was used in dry cleaning.

A military base is rife with machines. This sounds obvious, but it’s quite striking when you see all those tanks and airplanes and amphibious vehicles that seem perfectly poised for battle, even on a humid North Carolina afternoon when overseas wars might as well be waged in another galaxy. Part of that readiness is cleanliness, which your average military mechanic would have achieved, until very recently, by washing grease-covered parts in TCE.In 2004, a former Marine named Joseph Paliotti decided to clear his conscience. He was on the verge of perishing from cancer, and he suspected that Camp Lejeune had something to do with it. He had spent 16 years working on the base. “We’d come down there, we used to dump it: DDT, cleaning fluid, batteries, transformers, vehicles,” he told his local television station. “I knew sooner or later something was gonna happen.” Several days later, Paliotti died.

The cleaning of clothes might seem like a more innocuous matter, but that’s only because most people don’t have much of a notion of how a dry cleaning enterprise works. You surrender your clothes; they return immaculate. Magic! As it happens, the chemicals that cleanse a shirt are about as carcinogenic as those that cleanse an airplane engine.

One of the places at Camp Lejeune that could care for your uniform was ABC One Hour Cleaners, which sits just a few yards from the edge of the base. The dry cleaners, which started operation in 1964 and ended on-site cleaning service in 2005, did nothing different from what thousands of other dry cleaners did around the United States: It used PCE as a cleaning solvent. Some of the PCE sludge was used to fill potholes, while much of the liquid waste ended up in the ground, just like the TCE used to clean machines across the road, behind the barbed wire.

The TCE and PCE percolated through the sandy soil of Camp Lejeune and into the shallow Castle Hayne aquifer, from which the base drew its water. Also flowing into the soil was benzene from the Hadnot Point fuel farm. A component of gasoline, benzene is an aromatic hydrocarbon. Its name does not mean that it is pleasantly pungent. Instead, the deceptively alluring adjective refers to the strong carbon-hydrogen latticework of the compound. Like other aromatic hydrocarbons, benzene is a carcinogen that readily enters the body.

An Associated Press report found that as “late as spring 1988, the underground tanks at Hadnot Point were leaking about 1,500 gallons of fuel a month—a total of more than 1.1 million gallons, by some estimates.” Eventually, the leaked fuel would form an underground layer 15 feet deep, a carcinogenic band essentially covering the aquifer from which the drinking water was drawn.

Among those who drank that water was Mike Partain, who was born on base. His father was a Marine, as was his grandfather. He lived in the same housing complex where the Ensmingers conceived their daughter Janey. He joined the Navy but was discharged because of a debilitating rash that would overtake his body without explanation. Eventually, Partain ended up in Tallahassee, Florida, where he was a teacher and, later, an insurance adjuster.

Then married with four children, Partain was in good health until the age of 39. (He has since divorced; “my marriage didn’t survive Lejeune,” he told me.) Toxins, like terrorist sleeper cells, are patient. As he would later write for the website of Semper Fi, a documentary about Camp Lejeune, in April 2007 “my wife gave me a hug before bed one night. As she did, her hand came across a curious bump situated above my right nipple. There was no pain, but it felt very odd.” Partain went for tests, which revealed an almost incredible diagnosis: breast cancer.

Male breast cancer is rare enough in the general population, especially for someone like Partain who has no history of the disease in his family. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, only about 7 breast cancer victims out of 1,000 are men. Yet it turned out that many other men who’d lived on Camp Lejeune had developed breast cancer: Partain told me that he knows of 85 victims. Several of these aging men, showing mastectomy scars, posed for a 2011 calendar.

Coincidences do happen, even in cancer epidemiology. What looks like obvious causation to some may be just cruel fate, but the overall infrequency of the disease, combined with its relatively high frequency among the men of Camp Lejeune, as well as the other ailments plaguing those who lived on the base, made clear that there was a connection. “This has all the characteristics of a male breast cancer cluster,” the noted epidemiologist Richard Clapp said at the time. Camp Lejeune is, in fact, now widely believed to be the largest known cluster of the male variant of the disease.

Source:  Newsweek.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

 Twin Tank Water Softeners Are the Most Efficient Softeners Made

One of the most underrated “green” products available is the twin tank water softener. Although the initial cost is more, twin softeners can pay for themselves in water and salt savings. They also offer the satisfaction of being the most environmentally friendly of conventional water softeners.

A twin softener is essentially two identically-sized water softener resin tanks joined and controlled by a single softener valve. The control valve can be either a timer or a metered regeneration style, with metered being strongly preferred for this type softener.

To dispel a common misconception about twin softening units, the two tanks work one at a time. That is, you don’t get double softening. A single softener tank is more than adequate to reduce the hardness of most residential water to virtual zero. The twin unit operates by keeping one of its tanks in reserve. When the capacity of tank one is reached, the control valve immediately puts tank two into service, so that there can never be a time when hard water is being sent to the home, as can happen with single tank softeners. Even when a tank is being regenerated, soft water is being delivered to the home. And, unlike the single tank unit, twin units use soft water for regeneration.

Since the switch from one tank to the other can be made at any time of the day or night, no “reserve” needs to be programmed into the softener. With conventional one-tank units, a certain amount of the tank’s capacity–usually about one day’s expected usage–is always held in reserve. This is accomplished by simply programming the softener to regenerate a day early. By conservative estimate, this “reserve” requirement is responsible for about 15% of the salt and water used by a single-tank softener. Simple arithmetic tells you that if a softener that regenerates once a week always regenerates one day early, in a year it will simply throw away 48 days worth of its softening capacity. And what is really being tossed away is water and salt.

Applications

Twin tank units are especially good for applications that require a long, uninterrupted supply of soft water. For example, if a softener is used to pretreat hard water for a large reverse osmosis unit, it is difficult to assure that the reverse osmosis unit will not demand water when the softener is regenerating. A twin tank unit solves this problem by providing a never ending supply of soft water.

One of our local customers is a yogurt store that needs to protect its expensive yogurt machines from scaling. Yogurt machines run around the clock and it would be very impractical to turn them off so that a conventional water softener can regenerate its resin bed. A twin softener is a perfect solution. It provides an endless supply of treated water with fully automatic operation with no need to maintain a “reserve.”

Twin softeners are the most water and salt efficient softeners made. They regenerate less frequently because no “reserve” capacity has to be calculated. They have the added advantage of performing the regeneration with softened water, assuring a cleaner and more complete regeneration. Twin softeners are especially useful for applications requiring long service cycles that need an uninterrupted supply of soft water.

 Acute water crisis looms in Gaza, aid agencies warn

by Stephanie Nebehay

Editor’s Note: One of the very dirtiest forms of warfare is to attack civilian populations  by destroying water infrastructure.  If the report below is correct, Israel appears to have sunk as low as the US and Great Britain, who in the years preceding the first US attack on Iraq destroyed the country’s water infrastructure with bombs, then purposely prevented repairs by sanctioning the import of parts needed to fix water and sewage plants as well as such essential water treatment items as chlorine.  As a result, tens of thousands of Iraqis, and especially Iraqi children under five, died of easily preventable waterborne diseases.  Warfare of this type is simply an indirect application of biological warfare, which civilized nations claim to abhor. See “A Prayer for Water & Children” which is archived on the Gazette’s old website.–Hardly Waite.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are without water after Israeli air strikes that have wrecked the water and sewage system and the whole strip is threatened with a water crisis within days, aid agencies warned on Tuesday.

The eight-day assault has caused massive damage to infrastructure and destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said.

“Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement.

If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis”, he said.

“Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

Several municipal water engineers have been killed in the conflict and Gaza’s water service provider has suspended all field operations until the safety of its staff can be guaranteed, according to the ICRC, an independent aid agency whose teams have helped with emergency repairs.

“Water is a problem and it can quickly turn into a catastrophe,” ICRC spokewoman Nada Doumani told a news briefing.

At least 184 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in the fighting, the worst flare-up in two years. The stated purpose of Israel’s bombing is quieting cross-border rocket fire from Hamas militants fired into southern Israel.

UNTREATED SEWAGE

UNRWA said the destruction compounded the effects of eight years of Israel’s blockade of the enclave.

“The water and sewage network is barely functioning, and with the sustained bombardment of the past 8 days, it’s as good as destroyed,” UNRWA spokesman Sami Mshasha told the briefing.

“We’re looking at 90 million litres of untreated sewage that flows into the ocean every day because there is no electricity to treat it. Ninety percent of the drinking water is not fit for human consumption.”

The World Health Organization (WHO), a U.N. agency, warned last week that health services in the occupied Palestinian territory were on the brink of collapse among severe shortages in medicines and fuel for hospital generators.

Hamas militants fired volleys of rockets from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, drawing a threat by Israel to abandon an Egyptian-proposed truce it had unilaterally accepted.

“We are extremely worrried as UNRWA that if the ceasefire being negotiated today does not succeed, then the much-talked about ground offensive might unfold and we might see an Israeli military incursion into Gaza,” Mshasha said.

If there is a truce, the ICRC hopes for better access to the increasing numbers of casualties, spokeswoman Doumani said.

The ICRC is “documenting violations of international humanitarian law” in the conflict, she said.

U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay on Friday voiced serious doubts that Israeli’s military operation against Gaza complied with international law banning the targeting of civilians, and called on both sides to respect the rules of war.

Source: Chicago Tribune News.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Where Contamination on Beaches Comes From

Editor’s Note:  Recent water news has been filled with stories about polluted beaches in the US and around the world.  Most of  these report the bad news but do little to explain the causes.  We’ve excerpted some information from an excellent article by  Andrea Gelfuso Goetz that appeared in the Denver Post  that gives a good explanation of the how and why of the nation’s dirty beaches. –Hardly Waite. 

A study conducted by the environmental organization NRDS found that as many as 10 percent of U.S. beaches are unsafe for swimming, contaminated with storm-water runoff and sewage overflow that cause illnesses like “stomach flu, skin rashes, pinkeye, respiratory infections, meningitis, and hepatitis.”

How does raw sewage end up on U.S. beaches?

Every time it rains, water running over lawns picks up fertilizer, pesticides and animal waste. Water running over streets and parking lots picks up oil, gas and spilled chemicals. In cities, storm runoff is channeled into sewers that discharge polluted water directly into water bodies, including the river your dog likes to splash in.

While some municipal storm water is pumped into sewage treatment plants, they are overwhelmed by heavy storms, so storm water is discharged, untreated, into rivers and lakes. On the coast, storm water is discharged into the ocean, polluting U.S. beaches, sometimes making swimmers sick.

Doesn’t environmental regulation protect us from water pollution? The Environmental Protection Agency sets water quality standards for U.S. waters based on the intended use of each water body. For example, water used for drinking has to meet the toughest standard. Water used for swimming and fishing has to be clean enough so people don’t get sick.

The Clean Water Act regulates “point sources” of pollution (water pollution that comes out of pipes), but only weakly regulates “non-point” sources, pollution that is created when water runs over the ground. So we end up with polluted beaches.

But untreated storm water affects more than beaches. The EPA tracks water-quality data for all types of water bodies, including rivers and streams, lakes and reservoirs. Compared to other water bodies, beach water quality is just ducky. While 90 percent of U.S. beaches meet EPA standards, less than half of U.S. rivers and streams are safe for swimming and fishing. What’s worse, only 28 percent of U.S. rivers and streams have been assessed — so we don’t know whether 70 percent of U.S. rivers and streams meet the standards.

How about lakes and ponds? Nationally, only 43 percent have been assessed. Of those, 67 percent are “impaired” and don’t meet public health standards.

Most disturbing, of the U.S. lakes, reservoirs and ponds used to raise fish for food, 74 percent are impaired.

To see water quality information for all U.S. water bodies, go to the EPA’s website,  click on the science and technology menu, and the waters tab.

Source :  Denver Post.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Golf is a big water user, but so is growing lettuce

The grass doesn’t stay green automatically.  The average golf course gulps down 10,000 gallons of water per day.

According to a report by the United States Golf Association:

There are an estimated 1,504,210 acres of maintained turfgrass (greens, tees, fairways, rough) on golf facilities in the U.S. An estimated 1,198,381 acres or 80 percent of maintained turfgrass are irrigated.

Approximately 80 acres of an average 18-hole golf course’s 100 acres of maintained turfgrass are irrigated.

From 2001-2005, an estimated total of 31,877 acres of irrigated turfgrass were added to existing golf facilities in the U.S. The greatest net gain in irrigated acreage 

From 2003-2005, the average water use for golf course irrigation in the U.S. was estimated to be 2,312,701 acrefeet per year. That equates to approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for golf course irrigation in the U.S. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000”  report,approximately 408 billion gallons of water per day are withdrawn in the U.S. Golf course irrigation accounts for 0.5 percent of this total. 

Water use varies significantly by agronomic region. An average 18-hole golf facility in the Southwest region 
uses an average of 4 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year. An average 18-hole golf facility in the 
Northeast region uses an average of 0.8 acre-feet of water per irrigated acre per year.

Sources of this water?

52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.

46 percent use water from on-site wells.

17 percent use water from rivers, streams and

14 percent use water from municipal water

systems.

12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.

creeks.

Gazette’s conclusion:  Golf courses use oceans of water, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared with total water usage.  Agricultural irrigation is, of course, the biggest water user by far. Ironically, golf uses more water than water polo.

Source:  USGA.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

A Relentless Drought Is Forcing Las Vegas to Take Extreme Measures

by Arnie Cooper

 Editor’s Note.  The dire water shortage facing Las Vegas is hardly news, but this Newsweek piece does a fine job of providing perspective. Drought isn’t new to the area, but drought plus overpopulation plus increasing temperatures have created a much more complicated scenario than that faced by the Anasazi  who lived in the area a thousand years ago.  The article below offers a particularly good overview of the problem and possible solutions. — Hardly Waite.

The Colorado 

When a 60-year drought slowed the mighty Colorado back in the 12th century, it didn’t much matter. The river had to feed only local wildlife and not the millions of people who have since settled in sprawling and hugely water-dependent metropolises like Las Vegas.

Today another dry spell is blistering much of the Southwest. Of course, no one can say whether this 14-year-event will become a decades-long megadrought, but the city is taking no chances. Counter to its reputation, Las Vegas has been one of the country’s most progressive municipalities when it comes to water conservation. Despite explosive population growth, per capita water use has dropped 40 percent in the past two decades, water recycling is up, and homeowners are pulling up their sod in record numbers to save H2O.

But it’s still not enough. Which is why the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is rushing to complete a new intake pipe for Lake Mead, Las Vegas’s main water source.

Initiated in 2008, the project was originally slated for completion in 2012. But the $817 million venture has not gone smoothly. In July 2010, work on the three-mile tunnel was cut back when crews struck a geographical fault, releasing water and muck into the construction area. Attempts to stabilize the area failed, forcing the team to begin excavating in a different direction. The project is now expected to be finished in July 2015. “We’re trying to get this done before the lake drops low,” says Erika Moonin, the engineering project manager for Vegas Tunnel Constructors. “We start seeing water-quality impacts at low lake elevations with our existing facilities.”

According to Moonin, every summer a thermocline—a distinct layer of warmer water, which traps wastewater and contaminants within it—forms near Lake Mead’s surfaces. As the lake level falls, that layer gets closer to the intake pipes, making it more difficult and more expensive to treat drinking water.

And it’s not just Lake Mead and Las Vegas that must cope with the drought. The 1,450-mile Colorado River irrigates nearly 4 million acres of land and provides water to 30 million people in seven states: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California. (Mexico and 23 Native American tribes also share water rights.) The area’s driest two-year-period on record spanned from 2012 to 2013, and the entire river system is now 50 percent full (or empty, depending on how you choose to view it).

Every year, the water manager at each reservoir along the river determines how much water can be sent downstream, based on how much precipitation has flowed into the system. Lake Powell, which sits on the Colorado on the border between Utah and Arizona, is the country’s second-largest reservoir. It dropped a combined 60 feet in 2012 and 2013. This year, because it currently sits so low, Powell will make its lowest water release since the basin started filling in the 1960s.

That means less water going into Lake Mead, the nation’s largest man-made reservoir, which sits farther down the Colorado, between Nevada and Arizona. That’s presenting a challenge for thirsty places like Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its supply from the lake.

In fact, with Mead at 40 percent capacity as of June and dropping, the city could be down to its last straw. Currently there are two intake pipes “sipping” the liquid gold out of the lake and into the city’s waterworks, but if the lake, now down to 1,084 feet, drops to elevation 1,065, serious problems will ensue. That’s because Intake 1, located at elevation 1,050, will no longer be able to effectively pump water. Projections made by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation predict that the lake will fall to 1,068 feet by June 2015. That would mean major difficulty pumping from Intake 1—not to mention water-quality concerns.

The new intake pipe was supposed to pick up the slack, but the economic crisis in 2009 forced the SNWA to postpone building its new accompanying pumping station. Instead, the authority opted for an emergency connection between Intake 3 and the two existing pipes. In June 2014, the connector tunnel was completed .

Bronson Mack, a public information officer for the SNWA, admits that the emergency connection won’t fully compensate for the loss of water should Intake 1 go down. “But it does buy us at least a few years of operation,” and, he adds, it will help them continue to defer the costs of building that third pumping station.

That may sound promising, but it only points to the extreme measures water utilities are going to need to take in a drier future to keep the taps flowing.

A millennium ago, when the Anasazi lived in the river basin, they simply moved to wetter regions when epic droughts hit. But that’s not an option today for residents of Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. And, in 2014, human-caused climate change is making normal dry spells even worse. “You add warming temperatures to a drought, and it becomes even worse,” says Toby Ault, a climate scientist and assistant professor at the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.

One reason is that the heat tends to send more moisture into the atmosphere because of higher evaporation rates. A recent study by Benjamin Cook, “Global Warming and 21st Century Drying,” argues that this increase in evaporation could end up making a larger part of the West more susceptible to a megadrought.

In fact, Ault’s team at Cornell has come up with a frightening estimate of future megadrought risks: There’s an 80 to 90 percent chance of a 10-plus-year drought occurring this century, with a realistic threat of an epic 30- to 40-year dry spell. Unfortunately, water managers won’t even know if such a drought is happening until many years pass.

Connie Woodhouse, a researcher at the University of Arizona’s Tree Ring Lab, says droughts can be evaluated only by looking back. “It’s a little bit hard at this point to say, ‘Yeah, we’re at the beginning of a megadrought or we’re not.’ You have to watch as things unfold,” she says.

But it doesn’t take a crystal ball to realize just how serious the current Western dry spell is, and cities are starting to respond. Las Vegas uses a lot of water for its size (think of the fountains at the Bellagio), but it has made significant improvements in water efficiency. For example, the city now recycles 100 percent of the water it uses indoors (in bathrooms, kitchens, etc.). And despite a tripling of the population since 1989, per capita water consumption has decreased over 40 percent—thanks largely to the city’s Water Smart Landscapes program, which pays residents $1.50 a square foot to remove turf. “If you had an 18-inch-wide piece of sod, you could roll that piece of sod 85 percent of the way around the globe,” says John Entsminger, general manager of the SNWA. “That’s how much grass we’ve taken out.”

Doug Kenney, director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment’s Western Water Policy Program, at the University of Colorado Law School, also gives Las Vegas water management high marks. “People like to cast a critical eye on Las Vegas regarding water use, but in general, it has shown a lot of leadership in municipal water conservation, and it has been one of the strongest voices calling for improved management of the river as a whole,” he says.

As for those Bellagio fountains, if you were ever mesmerized by the 500-foot geysers, you can assuage your guilt, knowing they’re fed from an old well once used to irrigate the golf course at the Dunes.

Still, more than 50 percent of Vegas’s green carpets remain. Entsminger admits the area has plenty of work left to do. “We’re proud of our conservation plan, but we’re not declaring victory,” he says.

That said, with just a 1.8 percent allotment, Nevada has the smallest entitlement of the seven states that share the river. The real issue, says Kenney, is “the fact that the Law of the River promises more water to seven states and Mexico than exists currently and is expected to ever exist.” He’s referring to a series of agreements, laws and court decisions made since the original Colorado Compact of 1922, which determined how much water would be allotted to each of the states.

Things would get a lot simpler if some serious rain could be counted on. There is a glimmer of hope in that regard, thanks to a possible return to El Niño conditions this coming winter. With above-average sea surface temperatures developing over much of the eastern tropical Pacific, the National Weather Service has indicated the potential for enhanced rainfall in parts of the West.

But even if next year turns out wet, that won’t be enough to fill those reservoirs. Dan Bunk, a senior hydrologist for the Bureau of Reclamation, says that would take an extremely wet period, like the one that occurred from 1982 to 1985. “If you were to simulate that four-year period in our models, you could fill the system back up in about four to five years. But you’re basically talking about repeating the highest four-year period on record,” Bunk says.

The chance of that happening is slim. Ault says we need only combine the long periods of aridity during the last few millennia with future climate models to understand we’re destined to face some serious droughts this century—thus increasing the need for water departments to tackle expensive, complex and time-consuming projects like Intake 3.

What’s more, Kenney points out that lowering intakes is just a coping strategy that doesn’t solve long-term water woes. “Make no mistake: If demands are allowed to continue exceeding supplies, then building a deeper straw only delays a day of reckoning. If a megadrought is on the horizon, then the money being spent by Las Vegas on the new intake is to buy time to find a solution; it’s not the solution itself.

Source: Newsweek. 

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement