LeakBird

(March 22, 2009, Reuters)
If water is the new oil, is blue the new green?
Translation: if water is now the kind of precious commodity that oil became in the 20th century, should delivery of clean water be the same sort of powerful political force as the environmental movement in an age of climate change?
And, in another [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, The Guardian)

The world’s pre-eminent climate scientists produced a blunt assessment of the impact of global warming on the US yesterday, warning of droughts that could reduce the American south-west to a wasteland and heatwaves that could make life impossible even in northern cities.
In an update on the latest science on climate change, [...]

(March 6, 2009, MSNBC)
Cape Coral’s mayor is concerned some homeowners have contaminated well water. He wants to continue the Utilities Expansion Project, even if federal funding doesn’t come through.
“There’s a concern that the water may not meet drinking water standards,” said Cape Coral Public Works Director Chuck Pavlos.
A report from Lee County and Florida health [...]

(March 4, 2009, Huliq)

The water levels in the Dead Sea – the deepest point on Earth – are dropping at an alarming rate with serious environmental consequences, according to Shahrazad Abu Ghazleh and colleagues from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany.
(Original Article Here)

The projected Dead Sea-Red Sea or Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channels therefore need a [...]

(March 5, 2009, The Sound News)

Rainy Seattle, nestled between Lake Washington and Puget Sound, enjoys an abundance of the wet stuff. Being surrounded by water and having it come down on us throughout the year is misleading in thinking that general availability and accessibility is the norm. The collective mindset reflects a standard, a high [...]

(March 2, 2009, The Sacramento Bee)
Californians have grown accustomed to digesting odd ideas that routinely flow out of Sacramento, many of them not so palatable.
But are they ready for this one?
Last week, amid a third year of a statewide drought, the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District adopted a strategy to sell treated sewage as drinking [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, AlterNet)
The state has done little to study the impacts drilling might have on water supplies and is unprepared to treat the waste water it produces.
Got bubbles? Alarms have been ringing for months about the risk that natural gas drilling poses to drinking water supplies, but recent reports of water contamination just [...]

(Jan. 28, 2009, E-Science News)
Scientists and engineers will face a host of obstacles over the next decade in providing clean water to millions of people caught up in a water shortage crisis, a panel of scientists and engineers said today at a briefing at the Broadcast Center of the National Press Building on the Final [...]

(Jan. 23, 2009, San Francisco Chronicle)
San Francisco must upgrade its emergency water system to avoid a catastrophe like the fire that devastated the city after the 1906 earthquake, according to a report to be released today.
Improvements to the system – a network of pipes and storage facilities – won’t be cheap, according to the report, [...]

(Jan. 22, 2009, Shaun McKinnon, WaterBlogged)
Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva introduced legislation Thursday to protect more than 1 million acres near the Grand Canyon from mining.
The measure would withdraw public lands near the canyon from mineral exploration and is aimed in particular at proposals to mine uranium.
Grijalva and House Democrats tried last year to block federal [...]

(Jan. 24, 2009, The Portland Water Bureau)
NSF International announced updated standards regulating lead content in plumbing components. The new standards will limit lead content to 0.25% by weight. The current EPA regulations minimize lead content to 8.0%. The revised standards are in response to new strict standards recently enacted in California. These revised standards will [...]

(Jan. 13, 2009, Pacific Institute)
Are we running out of water?
“Is there such a thing as ‘peak water’? There is a vast amount of water on the planet—but we are facing a crisis of running out of sustainably managed water,” said Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. “Humans already appropriate over 50% of [...]

(Jan. 21, 2009, Frank R. Rijsberman, AlterNet)

So, is the planet drying up? Not exactly, but a growing number of people are sharing a fixed amount of water that is badly managed and polluted.
Sri Lanka’s celebrated twelfth-century king Parakramabahu reportedly said, “not a single drop of water received from rain should be allowed to [...]

(Jan. 21, 2009, UN News Centre)
Water supplies for over a billion people around the world are under threat from increasing populations, expanding cities, industrialization, climate change and even the rising demand for food, warned the United Nations, as delegates from more than 60 countries kicked off a meeting today in preparation for the upcoming World [...]

(Jan. 15, 2009, Stan Cox, AlterNet)

A thousand people a day move to Florida, but with development gone wild, the state’s natural systems have passed the brink of sustainability.

The monumental stone signs and freshly paved entry road appear to lead to nothing but wide-open, semitropical countryside. But a second look reveals a skyline of sorts [...]

(Jan. 20, 2009, CleanTech)
Researchers at Frost & Sullivan say the water treatment industry is going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of China’s plan for RMB 4 trillion in government spending in 2009 to stimulate the economy.
The government already spent RMB 120 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, with about 10 percent of [...]

(Jan. 20, 2009, The Vacaville Reporter)
Pushing hard to build a new canal around the delta, the Schwarzenegger administration rarely misses an opportunity to point out how rickety California’s water system has become.And in their zeal to get the expensive and controversial aqueduct built, they occasionally exaggerate.
For example, when federal regulators imposed new rules last month [...]

(Jan. 20, 2009, New York Times)
Six states bordering the Ohio River are joining the Environmental Protection Agency in the largest study of its kind to identify and reduce dangerous levels of bacteria that plague the waterway.
Unsafe levels of fecal coliform, or E. coli, have been identified in about 500 miles of the 981-mile river, which [...]

(Jan. 20, 2009, Macon)

Many people are applauding the state’s new water conservation plan, now up for public comment, although some critics say it isn’t specific enough and is likely to suffer from lack of funding.
Water planning gained new urgency — and political legs — in the wake of a historic drought that has hit north [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, Enviroblog)
Economic losses caused by nutrient pollution of U.S. freshwaters are felt by people all around the country, according to the policy analysis by the Kansas State University team of scientists led by Walter Dodds.
Repeated application of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, intensive tillage of soil, discharge of manure from animal farms, and [...]

(Jan. 19, 2009, Sarah Kuck, WorldChanging)

On the blue planet, and especially in the industrialized world, water is seemingly everywhere. At the turn of the faucet or the flush of a toilet, our control over our water supply is misleadingly large.
Although the planet is covered in more than 70 percent of the stuff, only three [...]

(Jan. 18, 2009, Treehugger)
China’s “Dead Lakes” Keep Reappearing
Two years ago, an algae outbreak in China’s renowned Tai Lake sounded a global environmental alarm. Now, despite China spending billions of dollars on lake cleanup efforts, some algae has returned. And similar poisonous blue-green algal blooms that have been cropping up in other lakes across the country [...]

(Jan. 19, 2009, Arabian Business)
Saudi-based Huta Marine has been awarded a $52 million contract to supply drinking warter and to construct a reverse osmosis plant at the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC), it was reported Monday.
KAEC is the largest private finance initiative in the Kingdom, taking up 55 million sq m of greenfield land and [...]

(Jan. 18, 2009, Colorado Water Examiner)
Infrastructure — Rachel Maddow’s favorite topic — receives a good deal of attention in the new stimulus bill. Efforts will largely be focused on upgrading existing older systems that fail stricter standards both for supply and wastewater.
Colorado is in line for funding for the Arkansas Valley Conduit. The project is [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, Peak Oil News)
…new evidence by scientists from the University of Rhode Island and colleagues in the U.S. and Canada, published recently in the journal Eos, indicates that the water level in the lake system is highly sensitive to climate changes.
“In the distant past, there were great fluctuations in the water level [...]

(Jan. 17, 2009, ENS)
Eight water conservation and control projects along China’s longest river, the Yangtze, will be underway by 2011 to improve water use and protect the environment, a water conservation official said Tuesday.
Cai Qihua, director of the Yangtze Water Resources Commission, announced the projects during the commission’s annual work meeting in Wuhan, the [...]

(Jan. 17, 2009, AFP)
Every day when Israel pauses its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians launch a ground assault on the territory’s public fountains to try to lay their hands on precious supplies of water.
As soon as the radio announces the start of the daily three-to-four-hour lull, thousands of people race from their homes, laden [...]

(Jan. 17, 2009, Portland Water Bureau)
The island nation of Fiji is in desperate need of clean drinking water after severe flooding left 11 dead and 9,000 people in evacuation centers. The flooding was caused by torrential rain and was the worst the country has seen in 40 years.
Fiji’s interim government has asked for international assistance.
Fiji’s Permanent [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, Aguanomics)
David Zetland, an agricultural and resource economist at the University of California, Berkeley, talks with Bloomberg’s Tom Keene about the economics of bottled and tap water, conservation, and global water supply and management.
The 26 minute interview [.mp3] is — in my not-humble opinion — pretty damn good.
In it, Keene and I [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, WaterWired)
On January 9 Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute gave presentations to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The title: Water and Climate Change: Managing Unavoidable Impacts; Avoiding Unmanageable Impacts.
His conclusions:

Impacts of climate change on water systems are already occurring
Both mitigation and adaptation are needed
Recommendations to water managers have been available [...]

(Jan. 16, 2009, San Francisco Chronicle)

California’s fiscal crisis has derailed 4,000 conservation projects across the state, from restoration of tidal marshes on San Francisco Bay to expansion of the coastal trail, and threatens major land acquisitions on the Sonoma, Big Sur and Mendocino coasts, state officials say.
Facing a cash crunch, state officials notified 1,100 groups [...]

(Jan. 15, 2009, MetaEfficient)
There are lots of misleading claims about water purification. Much of the misinformation comes from water filter manufacturers eager to sell expensive purification systems. But information from local governments also tends gloss over issues of water pollution–it’s not in their interest to point out problems with municipal water.
Unfortunately, there are many sources [...]

(Jan. 15, 2009, Water Technology Online)
The government of Saratoga County, NY, headquartered here, will decide January 20 whether it will join six communities in the county that are planning to sue the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over what they see as a conflict between an EPA-backed PCB-dredging project in the Hudson River and the [...]

(Jan. 14, 2009, China View)
A Palestinian official said on Wednesday that 800,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lack water due to the Israeli air and ground offensive on the enclave.
Monzer Shublaq, chief of the Gaza Strip water authorities, told reporters that 800,000 Palestinians out of the total Gaza Strip population, [...]

(Jan. 15, 2009, WaterWired)

Here’s another missive for soon-to-be President Obama from the American Water Works Association (AWWA), Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA), National Association of Water Companies (NAWC), and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA).
Download National Agenda for Drinking Water
Issues discussed include:

Economic stimulus through water infrastructure investment
Long-term water infrastructure investment
Safe drinking water standards
Source water protection
Climate change [...]

(Jan. 12, 2009, BoingBoing)
Researchers at the Southern Nevada Water Authority analyzed tap water from 19 US water utilities. New Scientist shares the list of the top 11 detected compounds, fortunately all of which were “found at extremely low concentrations.” According the Environmental Protection Agency, there’s no cause for alarm but there could be risk “especially [...]

(Jan. 14, 2009, The Star Tribune)

In a move that would dampen water rate hikes in Minneapolis and seven suburbs, the city is moving to cancel a $90 million water filtration upgrade.
A staff recommendation would end work on the planned Fridley ultrafiltration plant, originally budgeted at far less than the expected cost. The move was endorsed [...]

(Jan. 12, 2009, China National News)
China must overhaul its water management systems to provide better legal protection and more open competition for the increasingly scare resource, the World Bank said Monday.
‘For years, water shortages, pollution, and flooding have constrained growth and affected public health and welfare in many parts of China,’ the bank said in [...]

(Jan. 11, 2009, The Mercury News)

To understand how California reached its current water crisis, one could look for an analogy in the financial meltdown.
In both cases, credit or water once flowed easily: Four of the five years of highest water deliveries from the Delta’s two massive pumping plants were 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006.
In both [...]

(Jan. 10, 2009, Portand Water Blog)
Early results from a study being performed by researchers at the University of Notthingham (Portsmouth England) suggest that the hardness or softness of one’s water could influence the severity of the skin condition eczema.

(Jan. 7, 2009, The Nation On Web)
With the sharp decrease in the graph of underground drinking water, City will be facing a critical water shortage in coming months. If government does not take concrete steps to cope with the situation, a water crisis is in the offing.
Sources in Wasa said that according to a State [...]

(Jan. 7, 2009, MLive.com)
Several coal or oil ash waste sites in Michigan and in Wisconsin and Indiana near the shores of Lake Michigan have contaminated nearby ground water and wells that threaten human health, according to a 2007 Environmental Protection Agency study cited by the New York Times.

A New York Times map shows some of [...]

Blogroll

American Rivers

http://blog.americanrivers.org/wordpress/index.php

[...]