City Water: Take Nothing for Granted

The two discolored carbon block cartridges in the photo turned blood red with rust stains and clogged after only two months of service at a home served by a small municipal water supply in Texas. The cartridges are 4.5″ X 20″ carbon blocks that were installed in tandem, so that each got only half of the water flowing into the home. Use was moderate.

The condition of the filters underlines the lesson that we are learning from news from Flint, Michigan and the many other poor water quality stories that are surfacing involving city water systems. The lesson is that city water is not necessarily as safe as we have always assumed–that it isn’t, in fact, being monitored to assure that every drop that comes from the treatment plant is perfect and certainly that every drop that passes through our aging delivery pipes gets to us without contamination.

The logical place to treat water to assure its excellence is at point of entry–where the water enters the home itself. Carbon filtration at point of entry and a high quality drinking water unit under the sink are becoming as common and as necessary as locks on the doors.

Ultraviolet treatment, once used almost exclusively on unchlorinated wells, is now becoming a common fixture in city homes as “boil water” alerts and disinfection failures become more common.  UV provides a margin of safety even where water is chlorinated.

A typical water molecule will stick around in an ocean for, on average, a few thousand years. In rivers, a water molecule won’t dawdle as long — just a couple weeks to several months. But a water molecule hunkered down in groundwater might be around for 10,000 years.

Scientists have a name for how long water molecules remain in any given system: “residence time.” And “transit” or “travel” time is how long it takes for water to get through a system.

Kevin McGuire, PhD, an associate professor of hydrology at Virginia Tech, explains the difference like this: If you could take the age of every human being on the planet right now, you would get an average age — or the average time, at this moment, that people reside on Earth. That’s “residence” time.

But that, McGuire says, is different from taking the average age of everyone who passes away today — those who pass through the system of life. That would be the “transit” time.

But going back to water, residence time and transit time are crucial measurements when it comes to taking care of this critical natural resource.

Measuring a moving target

Getting a grip on these numbers can help us understand and protect our environment. They can be used for things like predicting how a pollutant will affect any given system, or how quickly pollution might move through a system. Scientists, given better ways to track water and its movements, might be able to show more accurately how much water is in any given system, or how safe that water is, or how it might be replaced.

But those numbers aren’t easy to figure out. “The idea of this water residence time, or the travel time or the age, it’s really sort of where some of the cutting-edge science is,” says McGuire. “We’ve had a theory for some time to suggest that we need to go after this. It’s like a Holy Grail.”

And to figure out how water slips from one place to the next — or how long it stays put — scientists have to measure “tracers” in the water. Think of them as water-based fingerprints. “You have to have something in the water that moves like the water,” McGuire says.

One widely used tracer is tritium, a radioactive isotope in hydrogen. Tritium occurs naturally only in small amounts, but nuclear bomb testing in the late 1950s and ‘60s released much more into the atmosphere, and that is now tracked by scientists. Compounds like chlorofluorocarbons in water can be tracked, too.

Getting a grip on water

Because residence times and transit times are only estimations, the findings will differ depending on who’s doing the measuring, what method they’re using and a host of other factors. For example, the Spokane Aquifer Joint Board in Washington state uses this chart from a 1979 book, “Groundwater,” that estimates the residence time in oceans and seas to be about 4,000 years. The authors of that book estimated the residence time of rivers to be about two weeks and all the water in the part of the atmosphere that supports life to be less than a week.

Another example: Italian scientists measured the transit time and residence time in a defined body of water — the Adriatic Sea — and even then, the numbers differed depending on where the “tracers” enter the sea. The authors figured the average transit time in the Adriatic is 170 to 185 days. The residence time averaged 150 to 168 days.

Gathering the data

The challenge now in determining these numbers is getting enough data. The technology to gather and analyze samples has been prohibitively expensive until the last decade or so, McGuire says.

That’s getting better, McGuire says, providing more data to crunch and more accurate numbers in the hands of the people caring for different water sources. And it comes none too soon.

According to the United Nations, more than 2 million tons of sewage drain into the world’s waters every day, and every year more people die from unsafe water than die from all forms of violence, including war, according to the United Nations. The World Health Organization reports more than 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water. By some estimates, 2.200 children die every day from diarrhea caused by unsafe drinking water.

Of all the water in the world, only about 3 percent is freshwater, and some 68 percent of that is locked up in glaciers and ice, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. With so much of that endangered, it’s more important than ever to find ways to use it wisely.

Source: Mother Nature Network.  The source article includes videos.

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Gazette Famous Water Pictures: The St. Francis Dam

The ill-fated St. Francis Dam, shown above, became one of the largest but least discussed man made tragedies in US History when it burst in 1928, killing some 450 people.

The St. Francis Dam was a curved concrete gravity dam, built to create a large regulating and storage reservoir for the City of Los Angeles. The reservoir was an integral part of the city’s Los Angeles Aqueduct water supply infrastructure. It was located in San Francisquito Canyon of the Sierra Pelona Mountains, about 40 miles (64 km) northwest of Downtown Los Angeles, and approximately 10 miles (16 km) north of the present day city of Santa Clarita.

The dam was designed and built between 1924 and 1926 by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, then named the Bureau of Water Works and Supply. The department was under the direction of its General Manager and Chief Engineer, William Mulholland.

At 11:57 PM on March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, and the resulting flood took the lives of as many as 431 people. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and remains the second-greatest loss of life in California’s history, after the1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The disaster marked the end of Mulholland’s career.

St. Francis Dam, after the deluge.

Newsweek Video Account

The world’s most expensive places to buy water

By Astrid Zweynert

Papua New Guinea is the most difficult and expensive place in the world to access clean water, forcing the poor to spend more than half their income on this essential resource, a charity said on Tuesday.

Some 650 million people do not have access to clean water, and often have to make do with much less than the 50 liters per person per day the World Health Organization says is necessary for domestic use and to maintain health and hygiene, Water Aid said.

Lack of access to an affordable, convenient source of clean water is one of the biggest barriers to escaping a life of poverty and disease, the charity said in its report “State of the World’s Water 2016”.

An estimated three out of four jobs globally are dependent on water, meaning that shortages and lack of access are likely to limit economic growth in the coming decades, according to a United Nations report, also released on Tuesday.

Below are some facts about the cost of water and access to it.

* In Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby, it costs a poor person 54 percent of a day’s earnings to buy the recommended minimum 50 liters of water from a delivery service.

* In Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, the cost of buying 50 liters of water from a truck is 45 percent of a person’s daily pay, while in Ghana’s capital Accra it is 25 percent.

* A British person earning the minimum wage spends 0.1 percent of a day’s pay on 50 liters of water from an official piped supply. Average use is about 150 liters per person, per day.

* In Mozambique, families relying on black-market vendors will spend up to 100 times as much on water as those reached by government-subsidized tap stands.

* Papua New Guinea, Equatorial Guinea and Angola have the lowest percentage of households with access to clean water in the world.

* In 16 countries, some 40 percent or more of the population do not have access to clean water.

* Cambodia, Mali, Laos and Ethiopia have made the greatest improvement in increasing access to water.

* Despite much progress, inequalities persist even in nations that have made great strides, the poorest often paying the highest percentage of their income on water. Sources: Water Aid, United Nations

Source: Reuters.

Waterite Venturi Air Injector. Air is drawn into the water stream through the stem on the right. The system can also be used to inject liquids into the water stream by attaching a tube to the barbed stem.  The nut on the left provides an adjustment.

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Do We Have to Have Chlorine in our Municipal Water?  The Answer Is Not as Simple as You Think.

Disinfecting tap water with chlorine is the norm around the world and we’ve been doing it so long in the United States that we accept it as an essential though sometimes unpleasant fact of life.  You may not know that some very advanced countries get along well without chlorinating their water.

Although we complain about the taste of chlorine and we’re understood for some time that it certainly has negative health implications, we have been trained to view it as a necessary evil. After all, the chlorination of water virtually wiped out water-borne diseases like Typhoid. The benefits of foregoing chlorine include better-tasting and, potentially, healthier water. But without it, we would go back to the age of cholera, right?

Distributing tap water with residual chlorine is a century-old strategy used to protect populations by preventing the proliferation of waterborne pathogens. But is it necessary? In a recent commentary published in the journal Science, researchers provide evidence from Europe showing that chlorine could be forgone if other protective barriers are in place.

Factors other than the addition of disinfectants determine the quality of tap water.  Certainly, the quality of the source of the drinking water is of utmost importance, as is the treatment of the water before its delivery into the distribution network. What is often not considered, though, is the extreme importance of the quality of the distribution network itself. Decades of experience in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have shown that, when none of these three elements are compromised, the number of waterborne-disease outbreaks are low, even lower than in countries that add chemical disinfectants to their water supply in order to compensate for poorly maintained networks, insufficient water treatment, or contaminated water sources.

But the researchers point out that distributing the water without added chlorine comes at a cost. It requires protecting groundwater sources, properly controlled water treatment, and regular maintenance of the water distribution network. But where chlorine can be foregone, the benefits go beyond improving the taste of tap water. When disinfectants, like chlorine, react with natural organic matter that is always present in drinking water, this can lead to the formation of disinfection by-products, some of which are potential carcinogens.

In the United States, failure to support water infrastructure has resulted from misguided efforts to keep taxes and water rates that support water infrastructure ridiculously low. Failure to maintain the sources, treatment plants, and the distribution systems have led to reliance on the cheap fix of dosing our public water with  chlorine.  It keeps us safe from cholera, but it keeps us from enjoying the really excellent public water available to more advanced societies. 

Reference: NewsMediaCom

Gazette Famous Water Pictures: Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” land art sculpture in Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

The most famous work of American art that almost nobody has ever seen in the flesh is Robert Smithson’s ”Spiral Jetty”: 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a gigantic coil, 1,500 feet long, projecting into the remote shallows of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from algae.–NY Times.

In 1970, when artist Robert Smithson executed  his famous “earthwork” that extends into the Great Salt Lake, the lake’s water level was exceptionally low because of a severe drought. The work cannot be seen when the lake’s water is at normal levels.

As New York Times Magazine explains, “Smithson anticipated that the lake would rise and fall, the residue of salt crystals causing the black rocks to glisten white whenever the water level dropped. But he miscalculated. Spiral Jetty was visible for about two years, then became submerged and stayed that way except for a few brief reappearances.”

Because of that minor miscalculation, the only time you can see “Spiral Jetty” peeking above the water is when the levels are below 4,195 feet. This is likely to happen during a drought (like the one that occurred during the initial building of the Jetty), but in recent years, water levels have been dipping below the historic average (4,200 feet) more often than usual, likely as a result of what many scientists speculate are man-made influences.

The Spiral Jetty from the air.

If you are the largest dairy producer in Saudi Arabia and you are running out of water to grow cattle feed, there’s only one thing to do if you want to stay in business: go shopping.

Which is exactly what dairy giant Almarai has done, undertaking a global search for land and water to grow alfalfa to feed its dairy cows. The search brought Almarai to a most surprising place: California, which is suffering its worst drought in recorded history.

Earlier this year, the company announced that it had paid $31.8m for 1,790 acres of land near Blythe, in the southeastern corner of California, for the sole purpose of growing alfalfa. Known as lucerne in some parts of the world, alfalfa is a member of the pea family, growing up to 1 meter high with small purple flowers and leaves that resemble clover. Almarai will grow the crop using water diverted from the Colorado River, then ship it back to Saudi Arabia to feed Almarai’s estimated 1m dairy cows, helping to ensure it remains the number one dairy producer in a nation of 30 million people.

But for Adam Keats, a senior attorney at the advocacy group Center for Food Safety, Almarai’s land purchase highlights everything that’s wrong with globalization. Not only does it result in exporting California water in the form of alfalfa, he said, but it also creates enormous carbon emissions to transport heavy, bulky animal feed to the other side of the world.

“Water is an essential and core common good,” Keatsa said. “But they have figured out this proxy method of owning our shared water resources. It’s a fiction to believe that globalization is this unqualified good thing for the world.”

Almarai’s methods have also prompted concerns in the Blythe area, but for different reasons. Farmers there don’t particularly care who owns the land or where the alfalfa gets consumed. They merely want the water to remain devoted to farming, where it can support the local economy, and not sold off to Los Angeles to ease urban water shortages.

“They’re not doing anything else but farming at this point. But I still watch,” says Ned Hyduke, general manager of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, which delivers water to farms in the region. “They are our customers and we’re going to take care of them, but we want to make sure they follow the rules.”

For decades, an agricultural boom in Saudi Arabia relied entirely on groundwater. But rapid growth depleted those aquifers, causing many farms to collapse and forcing the nation to whiplash from being a net exporter of many commodities to a net importer. Alfalfa, a thirsty crop that is among the most nutritious livestock feeds, is just one case in point.

Almarai is the largest player in the Saudi Arabian dairy business. Its founder and largest shareholder is Saudi Prince Sultan bin Mohammed bin Saud Al Kabeer. The company holds the top position in sales of cheese, milk and yogurt, notching record profits of $1.4bn in 2015, up 15% from the prior year. It has held that position, despite water shortages, by importing alfalfa and buying farmland in other countries.

With such deep pockets, the company is able to buy farmland anywhere. It made a smart choice in the Blythe area: the desert region has abundant sunshine and ample water rights in the Colorado River, which have remained secure despite California’s four-year drought. This combination is partly why California’s soil can produce more alfalfa per acre than any state except one. Only Arizona gets a higher yield – and Almarai has bought farmland there too.

But its latest purchase in California is simply “insane”, according to Christopher Thornburg, an economics professor at the University of California, Riverside. California officials, he says, have effectively become spectators to a game in which the state’s most precious resource is exported across the globe in the form of alfalfa.

“We are exporting water in the middle of the drought at shockingly low prices,” Thornburg said. “This is a travesty. There’s no other word for it. This is a complete and utter travesty.”

Almarai officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Thornburg is not necessarily upset that California is exporting alfalfa. That’s been going on for a long time, and Saudi Arabia is a small player. California exported one-fourth of its total alfalfa production of roughly 2m tons in 2015. China took about one-third of that, or around 700,000 tons, and Japan was a close second. Saudi Arabia bought only 5,000 tons.

What irritates Thornburg is that the state’s most abundant water supply is being used to grow a thirsty and low-value crop like alfalfa. What California needs, he said, is a real water market that would direct the resource to its highest and best use, whether that’s a more valuable crop, like protein-rich almonds, or to meet the urban needs of homes and businesses.

All of the state’s water is considered a public resource, but it is controlled under an outmoded system known as “first in time, first in right”, which took hold when the state was settled starting in the late 1850s. Although the water is owned by all Californians as a public resource, whoever claimed that water first has top priority to use it, and there are virtually no limits on how they use it. Water claims often come with the land, so water rights are typically attached to property sales. Rights holders may sell their water, usually in the form of temporary transfers, although there is no permanent market in place to simplify the process.
How one man plans to make billions selling Mojave desert water

Water to grow alfalfa in the Blythe area costs farmers about $70 an acre-foot, Thornburg said. But that same water could fetch $1,000 per acre-foot if piped to homes in Los Angeles, 200 miles away, where water shortages caused by the drought have prompted rationing.

“You’ve got to assign a price to water,” he said. “You can’t just give it someone and tell them to do whatever they want with it. You’ve got to allocate water to its best use.”

Because that water isn’t freely available on an open market, agencies like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California are forced to do what Almarai has done: buy land with good water rights. The district is the largest urban water provider in the US, serving the vast population stretching from Los Angeles to San Diego. And in July, Metropolitan became the largest property owner in the Palo Verde Irrigation District when it bought 12,000 acres of farmland near Blythe for $256m.

This rattled farmers in the area even more than Almarai’s purchase. They expect Metropolitan merely wants to fallow the land and export its Colorado River water via pipeline to serve urban homes and businesses. Almarai’s land purchase, conversely, could lock up some Colorado River water in alfalfa production. This would prevent it from being available for some other purpose to help California manage its present and future water shortages.

“It’s a huge problem,” Keats said. “We need to be taking a more proactive stance on how we want anybody to be using our shared resources. Those uses have to be subservient to the public good.”

Source: The Guardian.

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Waterborne diseases like infectious hepatitis,  bacterial dysentery, cholera, and giardiasis were common until fairly recently.  Throughout the world, health impacts were staggering. Entire villages in Europe were wiped out by plagues in the 11th and 12th centuries.   In 1848 and 1849 in a single cholera epidemic alone, 53,000 people died in London.

In 1854 Dr. John Snow, a London obstetrician, carefully plotted the locations of the illness and compared his findings to the subscriber lists of two private companies that provided water for London. His research showed that cholera occurred with greater frequency among the customers of one of the companies–the one that drew its water from the lower Thames river which was contaminated by London sewage. The other company used upper Thames water, which was less polluted.

Dr. Snow’s maps indicated a strong correlation between cholera cases and the proximity to the intersection of Cambridge and Broad Streets. The obvious conclusion was that the main cause of the cholera epidemic was the water drawn from a community pump on Broad Street.

The picture above depicts Dr. Snow removing the handle from the Broad St. pump. Below, an artist’s rendition of the deadly pump before Dr. Snow’s discovery.   For more details.