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Flint’s Contaminated Drinking Water is Third Water Crisis For Michigan Governor

January 11, 2016

Flint’s Contaminated Drinking Water is Third Water Crisis For Michigan Governor

Residents put at risk by ideology, misguided decisions.

Rick Snyder Flint Michigan water crisis

Photo courtesy Michigan Municipal League via Flickr Creative Commons
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is at the center of criticism over a public health crisis in Flint, where a state decision to switch the city’s water source ended with lead-contaminated water. Here, he speaks to the Michigan Municipal League in 2011.Click image to enlarge.

On Tuesday, January 12, residents of Flint, Michigan are invited to bring their children to a local elementary school for a “Lead Testing and Family Fun Night.” Combining a school carnival with medical tests to check children’s blood for abnormally high levels of lead, the event is an example of the bizarre circumstances that families are contending with in Flint, Michigan’s seventh largest city.

A series of public decisions, driven by misguided management practices and ideological principles that backfired, converged during the past 20 months to poison the city’s drinking water and cause one of the most severe public health threats in the United States. The extent of the risk to Flint’s residents is not clear.

Flint’s crisis is the third time during the administration of Republican Governor Rick Snyder that decisions about water supply and water quality at the most senior levels of state government have put state residents in harm’s way. In 2014, again as a result of the governor’s decision to appoint an emergency manager in Detroit, drinking water services were cut off for thousands of city residents said to be in arrears on their water bills. But water services for many of the city’s largest commercial water consumers, which owed the city water department millions of dollars in unpaid charges, were not halted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. Not Prepared for Tar Sands Oil Spills, National Study Finds

December 12, 2015

U.S. Not Prepared for Tar Sands Oil Spills, National Study Finds

Report urges new regulations, research, and technology to respond to spills of diluted bitumen.

China Shenzhen economic development office park economy Guangdong Province

Photo courtesy Sam LaSusa
Oil gathers in a sheen near the banks of the Kalamazoo River more than a week after a spill of crude oil, including tar sands oil, from Enbridge Inc.’s Line 6B pipeline in 2010. It was the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history. Click image to enlarge.

Spills of heavy crude oil from western Canada’s tar sands are more difficult to clean up than other types of conventional oil, particularly if the spill occurs in water, a new study by a high-level committee of experts found. Moreover, current regulations governing emergency response plans for oil spills in the United States are inadequate to address spills of tar sands oil.

The study by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine confirmed what scientists, emergency responders, and conservationists knew anecdotally from a major oil spill that contaminated Michigan’s Kalamazoo River in 2010 and another spill in Mayflower, Arkansas in 2013. Tar sands crude, called diluted bitumen, becomes denser and stickier than other types of oil after it spills from a pipeline, sinking to the bottom of rivers, lakes, and estuaries and coating vegetation instead of floating on top of the water.

“[Diluted bitumen] weathers to a denser material, and it’s stickier, and that’s a problem. It’s a distinct problem that makes it different from other crude.”

–Diane McKnight,
Chair
Committee on the Effects of Diluted Bitumen on the Environment

“The long-term risk associated with the weathered bitumen is the potential for that [oil] becoming submerged and sinking into water bodies where it gets into the sediments,” Diane McKnight, chair of the committee that produced the study and a professor of engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Circle of Blue.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wisconsin Groundwater Dispute Is a Warning Signal for the Eastern United States

October 27, 2015

Wisconsin Groundwater Dispute Is a Warning Signal for the Eastern United States

Water problems in states east of the Mississippi River mirror those of the dry American West.

Wisconsin Caroline Lake Ashland County

Photo © Codi Kozacek / Circle of Blue
Caroline Lake sits near the Lake Superior shore in northern Wisconsin. The state is one of many east of the Mississippi River confronting unsustainable groundwater use. Click image to enlarge.

When it pulled back from the North American mid-continent roughly 10,000 years ago, the Laurentide Ice Sheet left the state of Wisconsin a lovely basket of geological parting gifts: rich soils, sculpted terrain, and a dimpled landscape.

The glacial retreat laid the foundation for Antigo silt loam, the official state soil and an asset still drawn upon by farmers in north-central Wisconsin. Glacial floods sliced open the cliffs of the Dells, a popular mid-state tourist attraction. Soon after the glaciers receded, the dimples filled with water and formed many of Wisconsin’s 15,000 lakes.

Today, a hydrological reversal is taking place. Some of the lakes are shrinking, victims of high-capacity groundwater wells that pump more than 378,000 liters (100,000 gallons) per day and are used by big farms, dairies, and companies mining silica sand for use in the fracking industry. The state Legislature is discussing the matter. Lawmakers introduced three bills this session that seek, in various ways, to preserve Wisconsin’s waterscape.

“We have to accept that navigable waters have been impacted and we have to act,” said Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who co-sponsored one of the bills, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.

It is unfamiliar territory for the damp state, but Wisconsin has plenty of company in that regard. Depleted groundwater tables, shrinking lakes, and faltering rivers — problems most commonly associated with the dry American West — are spreading eastward.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Healthy Soils Reduce Water Pollution

October 13, 2015

Healthy Soils Reduce Water Pollution

Absorbent soils yields big benefits for air and water.

 

rainfall simulator soil runoff agriculture water pollution SEJ Norman Oklahoma circle of blue

Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue
The rainfall simulator demonstrates the soil’s capacity to store and filter water. When heavy rain strikes bare fields and construction sites, the two soil samples in the middle, dirty water flows into rivers and streams. Click image to enlarge.

On a bright October morning in a hotel parking lot, Greg Scott turns on the rainfall simulator.

The machine’s swiveling nozzle sprays fat drops on five soil samples held in trays a few feet below. Some soil is bare; other samples are planted with prairie grass, wheat, and other field crops. Within minutes dirty, sediment-saturated water begins flowing off the plots that are not anchored by vegetation. In the other trays, the drops soak into the ground. The little water that does run off the planted trays is much cleaner, the color of green tea. The lesson of the artificial cloudburst is clear: neglect the soil and water will suffer.

A soil scientist with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and a cattle rancher, Scott uses the contraption, hauled like a magician’s prop out of a trailer and onto the asphalt lot, to demonstrate how biologically diverse, untilled soils that are rich in organic matter can help solve agriculture’s twin challenges of water pollution and water scarcity.

“We have accepted for years that the dirty water was normal, and we’ve been putting up with that loss.”
–Greg Scott, soil scientist
Oklahoma Conservation Commission

Soil is having a moment. Several books in recent years — including Dirt by David Montgomery and The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson — have cast the Earth’s skin in a starring role in the story of human progress and decline.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California Drought and Strengthening El Nino Accelerate Statewide Water Transition

August 24, 2015

California Drought and Strengthening El Nino Accelerate Statewide Water Transition

New infrastructure, laws, and practices help the state respond to hydrologic extremes, but more are needed.

California Kern County canal agriculture drought farming Central Valley carl ganter circle of blue

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue
California’s canal system moves water hundreds of miles from the Sierra Nevada foothills to Los Angeles and San Diego. Adapting to 21st century water conditions requires less reliance on energy-hungry water imports and more sharing of water between users, according to panelists who participated in Circle of Blue’s August 18 town hall. Click image to enlarge.

As perhaps the strongest El Nino on record forms in the eastern Pacific Ocean, public officials in California are preparing for a winter in which the state’s drought emergency might be interrupted by disastrous floods.

Yet even a “Godzilla” El Nino, as one NASA scientist dubbed the warming ocean waters, will not solve the state’s water supply imbalances that preceded the current drought and will persist long after, according to experts who spoke Tuesday at a virtual town hall, hosted by Circle of Blue and Maestro Conference.

Godzilla unfortunately doesn’t have freezing breath ensure that all the rain we get is going to restore the snowpack in our mountains.”

–Kevin Klowden, managing director
Milken Institute’s California Center

“Godzilla can’t dig cisterns and build us water storage infrastructure, and Godzilla unfortunately doesn’t have freezing breath ensure that all the rain we get is going to restore the snowpack in our mountains,” said Kevin Klowden, managing director of the Milken Institute’s California Center in Santa Monica, at the Catalyst: California town hall.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

On the Value of Water and the Pain of Drought in the American West

August 14, 2015

On the Value of Water and the Pain of Drought in the American WestMadison River Montana fly fishing drift boat drought circle of blue

Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue
Drift boats carry fly fishermen down the Madison River, in southwestern Montana. Click image to enlarge.

ENNIS, Montana — As roads go, the shoulder of Route 249, which flanks the broad bottomlands of the Madison River, is an inspiring path for a run.

On a recent evening in late July, the route was particularly splendid. Golden-hour sunlight burnished the Madison Range with a honeyed glow, illuminating one of those Big Sky views that stirs wealthy urbanites to peruse ranch listings and learn horsemanship.

I set off on a long out-and-back up the valley, but after 15 minutes I stopped running. It was not for lack of breath: sprinklers caught my eye.

As the road doglegged, one of the great conflict zones for water use in the American West sprawled before me. Beyond, just out of sight, was the Madison River, where drift boats carried fly fishermen along some of the country’s best trout habitat. In the river’s floodplain were rows of alfalfa, one of the thirstiest field crops. The scene was nearly silent, interrupted only by the occasional songbird and the sprinklers, which swung left and right in a 180-degree arc, their swishes and tuts sounding like a roomful of typists reproducing an endless novel.

Value of Water

Agriculture and rivers. These are two of the chief contestants on the West’s water stage. Farming, which uses, on average, at least 80 percent of the water that humans pull out of streams and aquifers, has slayed many a river. Irrigators on the Gallatin River, a neighbor to the Madison, for instance, have the legal right to dry up the waterway, according to Peter Brown of the Gallatin Valley Land Trust.

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