Health Officials Are Studying the Extent of Arsenic Contamination in Ohio’s Wells

The US Geological Survey is working with state health officials  to test a broad sampling of water in Ohio in an effort to  find arsenic “hot spots” in groundwater.

The EPA lowered the arsenic drinking-water standard from 50 to 10 parts per billion in 2001.

In the public mind, arsenic is often seen only as a poison that kills quickly, but the real danger of arsenic in public water supplies is the long-term effects of relatively small amounts. People who drink water contaminated with arsenic for years are at higher risk of developing skin, liver, bladder and lung cancers.

More About the Ohio Arsenic Survey

More About Arsenic in Water Supplies

 Clean-Up of a Chemical Mess Left by Champion Spark Plugs Subsidiary Is Ongoing, After More Than 20 Years

Between 1930 and 1976, the Hellertown (PA) Manufacturing Company, a subsidiary of Champion Spark Plugs, made spark plugs in the building pictured above.  While in business, they dumped wastes into 5 unlined lagoons on their property.  The company left behind its pollution for taxpayers to clean up and in 1988 the EPA added the site to its Superfund program.

In 1970, the EPA said the company reported it had discharged 300,000 drums of waste to the lagoons, which sat only three miles from an aquifer that provides water to the Hellertown Water Co. In 1991, the EPA began cleaning up the site, covering the lagoons and  extracting and treating the chemicals and compounds in the groundwater. Ever since, environmental officials have been monitoring the area to ensure progress continued.

Groundwater on the site was contaminated chiefly because of the unlined lagoons that were used to dispose of chemical wastes, including cutting oils, zinc-plating waste and chrome-dip waste, according to the EPA. The company pocketed the money it saved  on disposal costs and passed the bill on to taxpayers.

By 2007, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection took over cleanup efforts at the site,  and the cleanup goes on.  Current plans include continuing to pump out wastes from the site at least through 2016.  The land and the buildings, meanwhile,  cannot be used.

The Hellertown cleanup is typical of many gifts taxpayers have made to unregulated businesses.  Leaving businesses to police themselves is a recipe for disaster and corporate welfare of the worst kind.

More Information.

The Ogallala Aquifer In the Lubbock Area Is Dropping at the Third Fastest Rate in 60 Years

“Exceptional drought and record-setting high temperatures,” which called for increased irrigation in both agriculture and urban water use were blamed for the rapid decline of the water level of the west Texas  Ogallala Aquifer.

Lubbock and the South Plains witnessed the third largest decline of groundwater levels since the start of record-keeping 61 years ago. The numbers for 2011 were released in July 2012 by the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District.

There were reports of homeowners being required to drill deeper wells as the groundwater level declines. Farmers are being limited to irrigation quotas of an equivalent of 15 inches of water, which, they say, is not nearly enough.

 

More Information.

Florida’s Famed Silver Springs Has Lost Two Thirds of Its Flow Rate

Silver Springs, the very brightest of Florida’s famed 700 springs, growing murky with algae and plant grow brought about by greatly reduced flow and consequential nitrate buildup. At one time glass-bottomed boats and underwater photography attracted visitors for all over the world.  Even Tarzan was lured to the springs; six of the movies in the 1930s and ’40s were filmed here. Tourists arrived in droves to these springs, just outside Ocala.

The springs scarcely bubble up now.  Flow rate has dropped by a third over 10 years.

The culprits, environmental experts say, are a recent drought in north-central Florida and decades of pumping groundwater out of the aquifer to meet the demands of Florida’s population boom, its sprinklers and its agricultural industry. To what degree the overconsumption of groundwater is to blame for the changes is being batted back and forth between environmentalists and the state’s water keepers. But, for the first time, a state with so much rain  is beginning to seriously fret about water.

And the decline in the springs are likely a foretaste of worse to come.  As one expert in springs explained,  “Springs are a very good canary in a coal mine because they pull water off the top of the aquifer.”

More Information from the New York Times

 The Ten Most Endangered Rivers in America, and What Put Them on the List

Now in its 26th year, the American Rivers Most Endangered Rivers List includes not necessarily the nation’s most polluted rivers, but those “at a crossroads, whose fates will be determined in the coming year.” Here’s the current list, along with the circumstances that threaten their existence.

1. The Susquehanna River of Pennsylvania, tops the endangered list because it flows through the Marcellus Shale natural gas extraction area.

2. The Nushagak and Kvichak rivers that flow into southern Alaska’s Bristol Bay are threatened by a proposed mining operation.

3. The Roanoke River flows from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Along the way, it provides drinking water to more than one million people in Virginia Beach, Norfolk, and other communities. It, too, is threatened by the natural gas extraction method called fracking.

4, The human-made Chicago River, which flows through the heart of the city, is theated by the dumping of 1.2 billion gallons of un-disinfected sewage every day. The effluent, in fact, comprises 70 percent of the water in the Chicago River system.

5. The Yuba River begins in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and ends in the Sacramento Valley. In addition to supplying drinking water to 480,000 residents and irrigating thousands of acres of farmland, the Yuba provides critical habitat for wild Chinook salmon and steelhead. The ecological survival of the river is threatened by two  Army Corps of Engineers dams—one built in 1946 and the other in 1906.

6. Western Wyoming’s Hoback River begins with springs, seeps, and wetlands in a roadless area of the Bridger-Teton National Forest and ends in an 8-mile (13-kilometer) stretch that was designated as a Wild and Scenic River in 2009 for its untrammeled character and its wildlife, including a thriving population of native cutthroat trout. But a proposed industrial-scale natural gas drilling operation could inject toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens, into the ground that would threaten the ecosystem and local drinking water supplies.

7. The Green River flows from Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument to the Toutle River, eventually converging with the Cowlitz River in southwestern Washington. Along its path, the river supplies drinking water to 50,000 residents in three communities.A Canadian corporation recently started exploratory drilling for a copper mine near the headwaters of the Green River, and mining operations place the river in jeopardy.

8.  The Black Warrior River and its tributaries are a major drinking water source for the communities of Birmingham, Jasper, Cullman, and Tuscaloosa in northern Alabama.  The river is threatened by relaxed coal mining regulations by the Army Corps of Engineers.

9. The famously beautiful Ozark National Scenic Riverways could crash under the weight of their own popularity, according to American Rivers’ annual list.  Together, the riverways host more than 1.3 million visitors a year. ” In the past 30 years, 13 developed river access points and public campgrounds have expanded to more than 130, connected by mazes of unmanaged dirt roads that bleed suffocating sediment into the river,” according to American Rivers.

10. The St. Croix River begins in northwest Wisconsin and flows south, forming the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin and joining the Mississippi River near the Twin Cities. The main threat to the river is  U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, of Minnesota, who has introduced a proposal to Congress to replace the Stillwater Bridge over the St. Croix with a four-lane freeway-style bridge that environmental groups say will would harm the river’s scenic and recreational values, set a poor precedent for other Wild and Scenic Rivers, and cost taxpayers up to $690 million in tough economic times.

And finally, honorable mention, to the might Mississippi, which did not make this year’s list and keeps on rollin’ along in spite of endless human abuse.

For great National Geographic pictures of the ten most endangered rivers.

To Protect Swimmers and  Recreational Water Users,  A New Law Requires Governments to Report Sewage  Discharges into Rivers

People entered the water along South Beach on Staten Island in the summer of 2011 despite swimming advisories that were posted after millions of gallons of raw sewage was discharged into the Hudson and Harlem rivers

In an effort to protect the public from such discharges, a new law known as the “Sewage Pollution Right to Know Act” requires local governments to report discharges of untreated or partly treated sewage to their health departments and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation within two hours. The notification must be made public at a government Web site within four hours of the discharge and in communications to the electronic media.

Riverkeeper, one of the environmental groups that pressed for the bill, said the law would not only speed public announcements but also help identify aging pipes, sewage plants and other infrastructure in need of repair or replacement.

Full Details about the new law.

Reactions to Water Restrictions  Are Heating Up

In general, Americans have enjoyed an abundance of clean,  delightful water for so long that we’ve come to think of it as our birthright.

Lush green lawns, sprinklers running all night, things that we’ve come to accept as normal, are on their way to becoming part of the Norman Rockwell America that exists only in memory.

As we learn that there is a limited amount of water and that we have to use it wisely, some are taking the news better than others.  Reactions range from a sensible acceptance that water is in short supply and we must use it prudently to disbelief that there is a problem to downright anger.

Like global warming, brown lawns are in our future no matter how vehemently we deny it.

Here’s an interesting piece on the acceptance of watering restrictions in Rotterdam, NY.

 

 The Fabled Yamuna Has Become A River of Waste

by Hardly Waite

New Delhi can neither quench its thirst, nor adequately get rid of the ever bigger heaps of sewage that it produces. Some 45 percent of the population is not connected to the public sewerage system.

 Nationwide, more than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year, according to the United Nations.–Somini Sengupta.

 

The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks the city of New Delhi was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India. It is also a cautionary tale about what can happen to overburdened rivers.

In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today it is still worshiped, but it is a disaster. From its the bridges,  the faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter the ashes of their dead. But in New Delhi, the Yamuna is clinically dead.

As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water.

As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day.

In its trip thorough New Delhi,  the river becomes a noxious black thread of raw sewage, assorted trash and methane gas– hardly safe for fish, let alone bathing or drinking. The  level of fecal coliform  in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.

In 1992, a retired Indian Navy officer who once sailed regattas on the Yamuna took his government to the Supreme Court. The retired officer, Sureshwar D. Sinha, charged that the state had killed the Yamuna and violated his constitutional right, as a practicing Hindu, to perform ritual baths in the river.

In 1992, as a result of a civil suit,  the Supreme Court ordered the city’s water authority to treat all sewage flowing into the river and improve water quality.  That command is still unmet.

New Delhi’s population, now 16 million and rapidly expanding, continues to dump sewage into the river, more than half of it untreated. Sewage lines are badly clogged and power failures leave them inoperable for hours at a time.

The quantity of sewage keeps increasing and the will to address the problem is lacking.

Some areas of the city are not even connected to sewage lines.  Open sewers put out unimaginable stench in slum areas.  Cl0gged canals are havens for malaria and dengue fever carrying mosquitoes.

Downstream cities like Mathura and Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) use the river as their main source of drinking water.  They are forced to treat the water heavily because of the poor stewardship of their upstream neighbor.

Adapted in part from an excellent New York Times article by Somini Sengupta.

Distillation Process Is Proposed for Cleaning Up the Very Dirty Waste Water Created by Fracking

Claiming that its method turns the very salty waste of hydraulic fracturing into a product that can be sold as bottled water, a company called Altela is seeking investors for its distillation process.

“Our technology is not new. It has been around for four and a half billion years. So we clean water in the same way that Mother Nature has been cleaning water for a long time,” said Todd Hand, vice president of marketing and sales.

Promoters of the plan say that the distilled frack water can be discharged into rivers and streams, into the ground, or sold as bottled water.

The interesting part of the proposal is that Atela representative Todd Hand  seems say that the process is virtually energy free.  Mr. Hand claims that Altela is offering a more affordable alternative to water treatment. Because conventional thermal distillation processes rely on high temperature and high pressure units, “They have to use really expensive metals in their unit. We get away from that because we don’t use high temperature and high pressure,” he said.

Mr. Hand also said Altela’s technology is a zero energy gained, zero energy lost process. “We’re able to recapture [the] energy and use it to heat up the next drop of water,” he said.

Exactly how that might work is not explained.

More Details

When You Turn On Your Electric Hair Dryer, You’re Burning Water

A  report by River Network reveals that thermoelectric energy (including coal, nuclear and natural gas) is the fastest growing use of freshwater resources in the country. The report, Burning Our Rivers: The Water Footprint of Electricity,says that for every gallon of water used in an average household, five times more water (40,000 gallons each month) is used to provide that home with electricity via hydropower turbines and fossil fuel power sources.  That means every time we flip on the television or crank up the air conditioning, it sends more potable water down the drain.Although coal, nuclear power, and natural gas have been praised as the “cheapest” ways to produce electricity, this assessment does not take water use and consumption into account. The report found that a single MWh of electricity generated by coal withdraws approximately 16,052 gallons of water from the environment and consumes approximately 692 gallons of water.Nuclear power withdraws approximately 14,881 gallons and consumes 572 gallons of water per MWhOn average, while natural gas withdraws approximately 6,484 gallons and consumes approximately 172 gallons of water per MWh of electricity produced.

These figures do not include water that is wasted by contaminating drinking water supplies.

According to an excellent article by Beth Buczynski:

Fossil fuels are as archaic as the rock from which they’re pried. It’s time to enter the 21st century of energy production. It’s time to acknowledge that coal, gas, and nuclear power will not be able to meet the needs of future generations. It’s time to start rebuilding an electrical infrastructure that takes into account its impact on surrounding systems, including water and wildlife. Only then will we be able to ensure a clean, healthy, well-hydrated future for our children.

Burning Our Rivers