H 2 O   P A G E



U.S.G.S. link;  Click above left for Saugatuck Reservoir news - NOTE: view at left is not of Weston--it is Barkhamstead Reservoir early in Spring 2002...Eastern CT regional plans:  a major link in the water project was completed when a pipeline was snaked beneath the Thames River between Montville and Gales Ferry in April 2006.  Map at top right about shows sewer and water service in SWR.  Guess which is blue and which is brown.  "Rural Salem" page;  "Eightmile" page.  Hartford Landfill pix and graphic story of how it grew - click on photo above for article.
FROM THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, January 29, 2008:
DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) — Warnings of a water and food crisis seemed incongruous among the lavish hospitality of Davos this year, but the danger was stressed repeatedly to the assembled world elite. 
Scarcity of water was named by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as a top priority at the World Economic Forum and he warned that conflicts lay ahead if the provision of the vital resource could not be assured.

"Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst. Many more conflicts lie just over the horizon," he said in a speech on Thursday.

Ban reminded the gathering of the world's wealthy powerbrokers in Davos that the conflict in Darfur in Sudan was touched off by a drought. "Too often where we need water, we find guns," he said.

Rising food prices are also causing problems in emerging countries, with demonstrations and violence witnessed in a host of countries including Mexico and African nations Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal.  Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath warned earlier in the week that prices of some foodstuffs had doubled in his country at a time when 25 million people in India were estimated to have moved from taking one to two meals a day.

"What does 25 million people moving from one to two meals a day do for prices?" he asked a room of corporate bigwigs and policymakers who pay thousands of dollars to attend the exclusive get-together here.

Referring to the challenge of providing food at affordable prices, he said: "Next year in Davos we'll be discussing this..."
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THE WATER CYCLE:  So what are we talking about, in language that we all can understand?
H2O:  CT Water Shortage 2002 (now officially over)...background H2O articles from around the globe:

From Puget Sound:
Growth in region spurs PSE merger: Consolidation will mean more money to improve power system
South Whidbey RECORD
Oct 31 2007

Puget Sound Energy customers won’t get bigger bills, at least not in connection with the merger announced Friday with a consortium of mostly foreign-based investors, company officials said Monday.

PSE needs more renewable power and the merger with the consortium will give the company the power it will need in coming years, officials at the Bellevue-based utility said.  The company has predicted that population in Puget Sound will grow 28 percent, or roughly 1 million people, over the next two decades. That means PSE will need new power supplies to feed a power demand of 2,600 megawatts, the company said.

In addition to an increasing customer base, PSE has a number of purchased-power contracts that will expire, which has driven the company to seek out new sources of power such as wind farms and natural gas-fired plants.  The merger will provide an infusion of capital that will fund 20 years’ worth of state-law mandated renewable resource and energy efficiency capital improvements, said PSE spokeswoman Martha Monfried.

“We need to invest nearly $5 billion over the next five years to update our power-generating and delivery infrastructure and to increase our focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy,” Monfried said.

“This will allow us to build more wind and more natural gas-fired plants as we outline in our integrative resource plan.”

The company’s integrative resource plan is based on the construction of 10 wind farms and 10 natural gas-fired plants to supplement current power output, she said, giving the company more power delivery security than it presently has.  PSE already owns two wind farms, valued at $600 million, one in Kittitas County and the other in Columbia County.  While the merger was not the only solution to bringing in more capital for the company, cashing in on the publicly held company’s equity and increasing its debt was not a viable option, Monfried said.

“We could continue to operate as we have in the past by going to Wall Street and getting equity and getting debt and being listed on the New York Stock Exchange,” she said.

“To have some committed investors who want to put the money here to allow us to continue our plans makes the most sense.”

Consortium investors saw a lot of potential in PSE, Monfried said.

“This group of investors has looked at us. They like what we are doing and like the area. It is a growing region,” she said. “It is a way for us to move forward to execute our plans.”

In addition to seeking out more power sources, PSE is looking to improve its customer outreach, Monfried said, such as when storms threaten its service and power distribution.

“On storm reliability and communicating more with our customers; we’re trying to investigate what systems are the best to do that to update what we currently have,” she said. “It is always investing in our future to serve our customers better and provide more information and be better integrated and able to respond.”

The merger is valued at $7.4 billion.  The consortium includes Macquarie Infrastructure Partners, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, Alberta Investment Management, Macquarie-FSS Infrastructure Trust and Macquarie Bank Limited.  PSE’s board of directors has already approved the merger. An approval is still needed from the company’s shareholders — the company will move from a publicly traded company to a privately held utility — and the merger is also subject to approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission.  Simon ffitch, chief of Public Counsel Section within the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, said the merger will get an intensive review from the state.

“This merger could have significant implications for Puget Sound Energy customers,” ffitch said. “Washington law requires that PSE and its merger partners show that the merger is in the public interest and does not harm consumers. Public counsel will be looking at how this major change in ownership could impact rates, service quality and infrastructure reliability.”

Monfried said that she understands the state counsel’s role in examining the merger and remains hopeful because of previous power utility merger approvals.

“That is public counsel’s job to examine agreements that are entered into,” she said. “So we will be filing with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission a merger application to be approved. They will review that.

“We are hopeful that we will move forward,” she said

PSE, which provides electricity to Whidbey Island, said customers would benefit from the merger.  PSE also said the merger would not affect the utility’s current workers and management employees.


Latest news...water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink...not any more!


Question 1:  Where in CT is Willimantic?  Oh, there it is, at Interstate 84, on a railroad line.

ECSU Opens Eco-Friendly Science Building
The Hartford Courant
By GRACE E. MERRITT
December 15, 2008

WILLIMANTIC —

A wide sidewalk crosses a shallow pool filled with river rocks and leads into an oval-shaped lobby. A modern patchwork of natural wood squares panels one wall, while multicolored slate fills another. The air seems clean and the mood is calm.

Ahhhhh.

The visitor instinctively relaxes. The earthy, low-key entrance seems an appropriate welcome to the new Science Building at Eastern Connecticut State University, the latest addition to the university's ongoing makeover and one of the latest "green" buildings to spring up on Connecticut campuses.

The $46 million building exudes a green vibe, with soothing, earth-toned walls and floor-to-ceiling windows in the lobby and corridors.

Inside the walls, pipes carry recycled water and sensors monitor air quality and gauge room occupancy to turn lights on and off. Offices and classrooms ring the building's outer rim to take advantage of natural light.

All of the furniture is locally made from recycled materials. Even the urinals are eco-friendly; they don't use water.

Eastern's Science Building is part of a national trend to go green in campus architecture. The new buildings are designed to have more healthful interiors, take advantage of natural light, use recycled materials and conserve energy and water.

Other recent examples of "sustainable" college buildings include the University of Connecticut's football and training center, which has turf made from ground-up sneakers and tires, and Yale University's Sculpture and Art Building, which features translucent panels filled with Nanogel, or "frozen smoke," to increase natural lighting while insulating walls.

The trend sprang up on campuses in early 2000, when one of the first sustainable buildings in the country opened at Oberlin College in Ohio. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin is packed with "sustainable" features, including a wetland-based ecosystem to treat and recycle wastewater.

The movement gained momentum in 2006 and 2007 as colleges used all kinds of new materials, including insulation made from recycled bluejeans, carpets woven from plastic soda bottles and walkways paved with crushed airplane windshields.

There are currently 260 college buildings nationwide, including laboratories and administration buildings, that meet the strict Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system set by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit organization.

Hundreds of other college leaders, including those at Eastern, are seeking certification for their green buildings.

"Colleges and universities tend to be innovators and see themselves as producing the next generation of leaders. Because they are early adapters of new technology, they tend to embrace things such as renewable energy on campus and want to build very efficient buildings," said Melissa GallagherRogers, who manages the government sector of the U.S. Green Building Council.

Eastern professors say they are pleased with the state-of-the-art facility, which replaces 1970s-era lab and office buildings scattered around campus.

"I don't have to carry distilled water across the campus to my office anymore," biology Professor Ross Koning said.

Not only are the roomy, new labs piped with running distilled water, but also all classrooms and labs, as well as the stadium seating-equipped lecture hall, are wired with overhead projectors connected to a document camera and a computer with Internet access.

"It's a big building at 174,000 square feet. But because there is natural light at the end of every corridor, it doesn't look institutional at all," said Nancy Tinker, director of facilities management and planning at Eastern.

"It really opens up this side of campus and makes it complete," said Katelyn Ercolani, 19, of Wethersfield.

Some college administrators say they feel morally compelled to build sustainable buildings.

"Certainly in terms of the environment and the future, it's the right thing to do," Tinker said. "It's a more efficient building, so it costs you less in the long run to operate it."

In fact, a flat-screen TV in the Science Building's lobby shows how much electricity the building is using in real time and compares it with other academic buildings on campus.

Sustainable design experts say going green has other benefits, such as recruiting students.

"Sustainability is an important criteria for prospective students for deciding where they are going to college," said Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

It also can help keep students and faculty healthier, Dautremont-Smith said.

"Good indoor air quality and natural light both have an impact on student learning and productivity," he said.

Some professors predict that the imposing new building also will encourage more students to major in biology and will help attract faculty to Eastern.

"You can't help but recruit faculty when you have a nice space," Koning said.

Wrestling With Uranium:  Heavy Metal Showing Up In Drinking Water, But Health Effects Uncertain
The Hartford Courant
By DAVID FUNKHOUSER
December 14, 2008

Uranium contamination poses a persistent problem in as many as 16 well water systems serving thousands of people around the state, according to a Courant analysis of test records from the state Department of Public Health.

The contaminated sites include Johnson Memorial Hospital in Stafford, a mobile home park in Killingworth and 10 condominium complexes in Brookfield. At those sites and in four other towns — Danbury, Kent, Madison and Newtown — well water systems exceeded federal limits for uranium in drinking water at some point in the past year.

Earlier this fall, contamination at a condominium complex in Madison prompted officials to test two nearby public schools, where they also found uranium. The discovery alarmed residents and prompted officials to turn off the taps, bring in bottled water and start a broad public education campaign.  Brian Toal of the state Department of Public Health's water section said the department sent out letters a few weeks ago to all the towns affected by uranium contamination, recommending that they look around the wells in question and alert nearby private well owners to make sure it isn't a more widespread problem.

Uranium, found as a trace metal in bedrock throughout the Northeast, is not highly radioactive, though it is a heavy metal known to damage the kidneys at high enough exposures. State health officials said they are unaware of any health problems directly linked to the contamination, and don't expect any at the levels that have been found.

But the federal Environmental Protection Agency has required testing for uranium in communal well water systems only in the past few years, and the state and communities involved are just beginning to understand the scope of the problem and how to cope with it.  Health officials consider a system to be out of compliance if the average of test results from the previous 12 months exceeds the federal standard of 30 parts per billion of uranium.

Still Running

The water supply at Johnson Memorial Hospital has contained an average of 38 to 42 parts per billion of uranium over the past year, tests show.

For now, the water is running as usual, and the hospital has posted notices of the test results in public areas, hospital officials said. The hospital, which is being bought by the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, has proposed a $500,000 plan to provide filtration and address the problem.

"I am aware of our levels and the limits set by the [EPA], and I am very comfortable drinking the water," said Peter J. Betts, the hospital's interim chief executive officer.

Bill Blitz, director of the North Central District Health Department in Enfield, said state health officials notified him about the contamination at the hospital a week or two ago. He said the DPH is working with the hospital to address the problem.

"We're planning now to do some testing of wells of housing around the site to see how far the pollution extends," he added.

Getting a handle on uranium contamination is tricky, and health officials say there is no sure way to know, when a well is dug, whether the water in it will be contaminated. Some areas are more susceptible because of the underlying bedrock that may contain uranium. Most of the contaminated sites are in the western part of the state.

"You came to the right place — the home of radionuclides," Brookfield First Selectman Bob Silvaggi joked when asked about his town's problem. He said the town has been dealing with the issue of radioactive elements in its water for two decades. Parts of town have been plagued by excessive radon and radium, both by-products of uranium decay.

In the most recent test results, for the third quarter of this year, six condominium groups in Brookfield with a combined 1,740 residents were found with uranium above the federal standard, according to the DPH. The amounts ranged from 41 to 257 parts per billion.  Most of the violations are clustered in two areas, Silvaggi said: on Silvermine Road and further south along Route 7 near the Danbury line. Brookfield is seeking millions of dollars in loans from the state to connect the affected areas to public water supplies. In the meantime, residents have largely been responding by drinking bottled water and installing filters.

All residential public water systems serving 25 or more people must test for uranium. That doesn't include non-residential schools, clinics, restaurants and other transient facilities where people are likely to drink less water than at home. Tests are done quarterly, and the results fluctuate.

As of the end of September, nine systems in four towns were out of compliance. Seven other systems that had violated the uranium standard earlier in the year were in compliance after the latest round of tests.

Health directors in the affected communities said they were considering how to respond. Most said they were likely to recommend more testing of private wells.

For individual homeowners, a test for uranium costs about $50, and special filters are available that can remove not only uranium but also radon and radium. Health officials consider radon and radium to be more dangerous. Radon, which poses a problem in the air in many parts of the state, can cause lung cancer. Radium poses a risk for bone cancer, Toal said.

Community systems face a more expensive problem: Treating large quantities of uranium-contaminated water wastes a lot of water and typically involves flushing contaminated water into the ground — something state environmental officials generally oppose.

"If high levels of uranium in drinking water are a cause for concern, you would not want to discharge water back into the ground that could contaminate unaffected or uncontaminated sources," said Dennis Schain, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP is suggesting that communities first look into tying into alternate sources of water, Schain said. That can be expensive, too. In Madison, officials estimated that it would cost $1 million per mile to extend a water main up to the affected condos and schools.

Other Fallout

The other systems affected by uranium contamination include Candlewood Park in Danbury, which serves some 500 residents. Test results were slightly above the uranium standard earlier this year, but it is now in compliance.

In Killingworth, Jensen's Beechwood Mobile Home Park, with about 750 people, averaged 60 parts per billion over the past year. Town Health Director Edward Winokur said local officials have invited the DPH down to talk over the issue at a meeting Wednesda, 7 p.m., in town hall.  Uranium was found just above the standard in well water serving the Marvelwood School's faculty houses in Kent earlier this year, but the system is now in compliance, the DPH said.

Madison's Legend Hill Condominiums have been out of compliance for at least the past year. The problem prompted officials to look at the nearby Ryerson and Brown schools, where they found three times the allowable level of uranium. Town officials are talking to health officials and the DEP about possible long-term solutions.

Uranium was found in the well water at the Middle Gate School in Newtown, but the school has since been hooked up to the public water supply, according to health director Donna Culbert.  Also in Newtown, the Meadowbrook Terrace Mobile Home Park was above the uranium standard earlier this year but is now in compliance, according to DPH data.

Across the state there are at least 186 separate well water systems serving residential and non-residential schools, and they are all regularly tested for various contaminants, such as bacteria, lead and copper, pesticides and herbicides and various other chemicals. But only schools with 25 or more resident students and faculty must test for uranium and other radionuclides.  Two hospitals besides Johnson Memorial are served by wells and considered residential systems, and so must test for uranium: Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown and Gaylord Hospital in Wallingford.


SEWERLINE BREAK
Robert Grierson of DPW for the Town of Greenwich, at the scene of a break in a sewer main on Sound Shore Drive in Cos Cob which an EPA administrator in Boston says spilled 28 million gallons of raw sewage into the Mianus River over the course of a 4 day period. (Bob Luckey/Staff Photo)

Shellfish test normal after Greenwich spill
Greenwich TIME
By Colleen Flaherty, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/20/2008, but we suspect that this is a mistake, since the article was close to the top of news for Jan. 2, 2009!

Seawater and shellfish meat samples show normal levels of bacteria following last month's sewer main break in Cos Cob, the state Bureau of Aquaculture & Laboratory Services said.

Water samples tested Wednesday and shellfish meat samples tested last week were the first and only samples to be tested following the Dec. 12 incident, which caused 28 million gallons of sewage to be diverted into the Long Island Sound via the Mianus River over four days, one of the largest spills in New England history. The samples showed normal levels of bacteria, said bureau Director David Carey.

"The samples are never clean but we have cutoffs," said Carey, at his office in Milford Wednesday. "The (bacteria) levels are significantly below the cutoff."

Carey said he would pass on the information to the town's Shellfish Commission, which shut down seven of eight Greenwich shellfish beds following the sewer main break.  The eighth bed was already closed, for other reasons.

Roger Bowgen, the town's shellfish commissioner, hadn't yet spoken with Carey Wednesday but said, "The beds will not open until we as a Shellfish Commission are completely satisfied that there is no danger to the general public."

Three weeks ago, a high-pressure sewer main carrying wastewater from eastern Greenwich ruptured near Sound Shore Avenue.

During the four days it took to repair the main, which was complicated by the discovery of a nearby gas line, wastewater was diverted to Long Island Sound via the Mianus River.  The cause of the break is still unknown, according to town and state officials.  The town's Health Department posted no signs around the sewer bypasses at Cos Cob Harbor and Juniper Lane, according to Director of Environmental Services Michael Long.

"September through May, any swimming is at your own risk because we don't do any weekly testing during the winter season," he said.

All of the town's shellfish beds, however, have remained closed due to shellfish feeding habits, said Carey.

"Shellfish are filter feeders," he said. "They can filter 70 gallons of water a day. So when you go to eat them on the second day (of a spill), they've got 140 times the bacteria. You're more at risk."

Some fish are filter feeders, also.  Bowgen said signs indicating the closure of the beds spanned the shoreline, and that the information also was available on the town's Web site and on the shellfish hotline, 622-7777.
Greenwich sewage spill one of largest in New England Sewer main break spilled 28 million gallons into Mianus River
Greenwich TIME
By Colleen Flaherty, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/30/2008 08:04:57 AM EST

The Dec. 12 sewer main break in Cos Cob sent 28 million gallons of untreated wastewater into the Mianus River, according to a report filed by the town of Greenwich with state and federal environmental officials.

The amount, diverted into the Long Island Sound via the river over four days, could have filled 42 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

"This is one of the larger spills," said Michael Fedak, senior enforcement coordinator for water programs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's New England office in Boston.

Fedak, an EPA official for 30 years, said he could recall only two other spills of similar magnitude, one in Worcester, Mass., and one in Wethersfield.

The report, which was due on Dec. 17, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, was faxed to the EPA and DEP on Dec. 26, according to officials there.

Through last week, town officials said they did not know the amount of sewage that was diverted into the river. The report, prepared by Wastewater Division Manager Richard Feminella, said its estimate of 28 million gallons had finally been made based on the drop in the town's treatment plant flow combined with bypass pumping rates during repair work.

On the morning of Friday, Dec. 12, town workers responded to a sewer main break at Sound Shore Avenue in Cos Cob.

Wastewater from the high-pressure main, which transports effluent from eastern Greenwich to the Grass Island treatment facility, was temporarily diverted into the Mianus River , one at Cos Cob Harbor and one in Riverside on Juniper Lane.  Efforts to repair the main were complicated by the discovery of an adjacent gas line midday Saturday, which prevented contractors from installing shoring around the site to prevent a possible collapse.

Town officials have said they asked Connecticut Natural Gas to cut the line, which supplies the Cos Cob Power Plant, but it initially refused. The gas company finally agreed to remove the several-meter section of the pipe in question only after Commissioner of Public Works Amy Seibert issued an order that it do so Monday, Dec. 16.  The sewer main was not repaired until lunchtime Tuesday, Dec. 16.

Fedak, who had only looked at the report preliminarily Monday, said he expected he would be in contact with town and state officials in the near future to discuss the root causes of the incident, key to preventing such breaks in the future.

"The report basically talks about what the town did in response to the break," he said. "It's probably premature to figure out what the root cause of it was."

Feminalla said Monday he wasn't sure what had initially caused the 16-foot crack in the bottom of the main. That section of the pipe has been removed and will be studied by an outside firm, he said.

"There's a couple of things that could have contributed to the failure of that piece of pipe," he said, citing exterior pressure points caused by rocks as an example.

Feminella said the situation inside the pipe was exacerbated by the heavy rains and high tides the night before the incident.  Asked if he felt the town could have predicted the break in the aging main, which had a history of leaks, Feminella said, "I don't think so, no. This particular force main is three miles in length."

He added that the town was constantly monitoring known problem areas along the pipe, but, he said, "You don't just go out and install a brand new pipe. You do it in sections and everything costs money."

In the meantime, the shellfish beds throughout Greenwich are still closed. Shellfish Commission Director Roger Bowgen did not return a call for comment.

Michael Long, director of environmental services for the town's health department, said Monday he did not know the results of the commission's most recent water and shellfish tests.  Conservation Commission Director Denise Savageau said Monday that the Long Island Sound would suffer no long-term damage as a result of the spill.

"As a municipality," she said, "we're really in good shape."

Savageau continued, "Cities like New York and Bridgeport are dumping sewage right into the Long Island Sound every time there's a storm event. We just had a one-time event in Greenwich. We just have to fix in and move forward."

Jo Conboy, a Greenwich environmentalist and chairman of Save Our Shores, a local environmental group, however, called the break and the four days it took to fix it "unacceptable" Monday.

"There's a lot of work that needs to be done on our sewer system here," she said. "We have to look into our infrastructure because we've neglected it."
A Tall, Cool Drink of ... Sewage?
NYTIMES
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
Published: August 8, 2008

Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life’s more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water’s journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.

A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.

Still, Orange County forged ahead. It didn’t appear to have a choice. Saltwater from the Pacific Ocean was entering the county’s water supply, drawn in by overpumping from the groundwater basin, says Ron Wildermuth, who at the time we talked was the water district’s spokesman. Moreover, population growth meant more wastewater, which meant building a second sewage pipe, five miles into the Pacific — a $200 million proposition. Recycling the effluent solved the disposal problem and the saltwater problem in one fell swoop. A portion of the plant’s filtered output is now injected into the ground near the coast, to act as a pressurized barrier against saltwater from the ocean. Factor in Southern California’s near chronic drought, the county’s projected growth (another 300,000 to 500,000 thirsty people by 2020) and the rising cost of importing water from the Colorado River and from Northern California (the county pays $530 per acre-foot of imported water, versus $520 per acre-foot of reclaimed water), and rebranding sewage as a valuable resource became a no-brainer.

With the demand for water growing, some aquifers dropping faster than they’re replenished, snowpacks thinning and climate change predicted to make dry places even drier, water managers around the country, and the world, are contemplating similar schemes. Los Angeles and San Diego, which both rejected potable reuse, have raised the idea once again, as have, for the first time, DeKalb County, Ga., and Miami-Dade County, Fla.

While Orange County planned and secured permits, public-relations experts went into overdrive, distributing slick educational brochures and videos and giving pizza parties. “If there was a group, we talked to them,” says Wildermuth, who recently left Orange County to help sell Los Angelenos on drinking purified waste. “Historical societies, chambers of commerce, flower committees.” The central message was health and safety, but the persuaders didn’t skimp on buzz phrases like “local control” and “independence from imported water.” Last winter, the valve between the sewage plant and the drinking-water plant whooshed open, and a new era in California’s water history began.

When I visited the plant, a sprawl of modern buildings behind a concrete wall, in March, Wildermuth, in a blue sport coat and bright tie, acted as my guide. “Quick!” he shouted at one point, mounting a ledge and clinging to the rail over a microfiltration bay. “Over here!” I clambered up just as its contents finished draining from the scum-crusted tank. The sudsy water, direct from the sewage-treatment plant, was the color of Guinness. “This is the most exciting thing you’ll see here, and I didn’t want you to miss it,” he said.

Wildermuth went on to explain what we were looking at: inside each of 16 concrete bays hangs a rack of vertical tubes stuffed with 15,000 polypropylene fibers the thickness of dental floss. The fibers are stippled with holes 1/300th the size of a human hair. Pumps pull water into the fibers, leaving behind anything larger than 0.2 microns, stuff like bacteria, protozoa and the dread “suspended solids.”

The excitement and the bubbles were backwash: every 21 minutes, air is injected into the microfibers to blast them clean. The schmutz goes back to the sewage-treatment plant, and the cleaner water, now the color of chamomile tea, is pumped toward reverse-osmosis filters in another building. Before we saw that process, Wildermuth led me underground to inspect several enormous pumps and pipes large enough to crawl through. I noted that everything was clearly labeled and scrupulously clean. Then it dawned on me: reassurance was the reason we’d taken the detour.

We followed the pipes up to a sunlit, metal-clad building where the water, now dosed with an antiscalant and sulfuric acid to lower its pH, was forced at high pressure through hundreds of white tubes filled with tightly spiraled sheets of plastic membranes. Reverse osmosis, Wildermuth says, stops cold almost all nonwater molecules (things like salts, viruses and pharmaceuticals). The stuff that’s removed is washed back to a pipe that discharges into the ocean. The filtered water, now known as permeate, moves one building over, where it’s spiked with hydrogen peroxide, a disinfectant, and then circulated past 144 lamps emitting ultraviolet light. “Destruction of compounds through photolysis,” Wildermuth said, nodding. Anything that’s alive in this water can no longer reproduce.

Strolling back through the campus, Wildermuth took me to a three-part demonstration sink with faucets streaming. The basin on the right contained reverse-osmosis backwash: it was molasses black, topped with a rainbow slick of oil. “Don’t touch,” Wildermuth warned as I leaned in for a better look at the ocean-bound rejectamenta. The middle basin contained the chamomile water from microfiltration. And on the left was the stuff Orange County would eventually drink. It was clear and had no smell.

But even this suctioned, sieved and irradiated water wasn’t quite set for sipping; it still needed to be decarbonized and dosed with lime, to raise its pH. Finally it would enter a massive purple pipe, which dives into the ground inside a nearby pump house and reappears 13 miles to the north, in Anaheim. There, the water would pour into Kraemer Basin, a man-made reservoir, where it would mix with the lake water and filter for six months through layers of sand and gravel hundreds of feet deep before utilities throughout the county pumped it into taps.

The reservoir is a prosaic ending for a substance that’s been through the glitziest of technological wringers, transformed from sewage to drinking water only to be humbly redeposited into the earth. This final filtering step isn’t necessary, strictly speaking, but our psyches seem to demand it.

To understand the basics of contemporary water infrastructure is to acknowledge that most American tap water has had some contact with treated sewage. Our wastewater-treatment plants discharge into streams that feed rivers from which other cities suck water for drinking. By the time New Orleans residents drink the Mississippi, the water has been in and out of more than a dozen cities; more than 200 communities, including Las Vegas, discharge treated wastewater into the Colorado River. That’s the good news. After heavy rains, many cities discharge untreated sewage directly into waterways — more than 860 billion gallons of it a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. However — and this is where we can take solace — the sewage is massively diluted, time and sunlight help to break down its components and drinking-water plants filter and disinfect the water before it reaches our taps. The E.P.A. requires utilities to monitor pathogens, and there hasn’t been a major waterborne-disease outbreak in this country since 1993. (Though there have been 85 smaller outbreaks between 2001 and 2006.)

So confident are engineers of so-called advanced treatment technologies that several communities have been discharging highly treated wastewater directly into reservoirs for years. Singapore mixes 1 percent treated wastewater with 99 percent fresh water in its reservoirs. (In Orange County, the final product will contain 17 percent recycled water.) Residents of Windhoek, Namibia, one of the driest places on earth, drink 100 percent treated wastewater. For 30 years, the Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority, in Virginia, has been mixing recycled wastewater with fresh water in a reservoir and serving it to more than a million people. Still, no system produces as much recycled water as Orange County (currently 70 million gallons a day, going up to 85 million by 2011), and none inserts as many physical and chemical barriers between toilet and tap.

Environmentalists, river advocates and California surfers — the sort of people who harbor few illusions about the purity of our rivers and oceans — generally favor water recycling. It beats importing water on both economic and environmental grounds (about a fifth of California’s energy is used to move water from north to south). “The days are over when we can consider wastewater a liability,” says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental research group in Oakland. “It’s an asset. And that means figuring out how best to use it.”

As we deplete the earth’s nonrenewable resources, like oil and metals, the one-way trip from raw material to disposed and forgotten waste makes less and less sense. Already we recycle aluminum to avoid mining, compost organic material to avoid generating methane in landfills and turn plastic into lumber. As it becomes more valuable, water will be no different.

“We have to treat all waste as a resource,” Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, says. “Our water source, hundreds of miles away, is drying up. If the population is growing, what are our options?”

Water conservation could take us a long way, as would lower water subsidies for farmers. But sooner or later, stressed-out utility managers come back to the same idea: returning wastewater to the tap.

The process isn’t risk-free. Some scientists are concerned that dangerous compounds or undetectable viruses will escape the multiple physical and chemical filters at the plant. And others suggest that the potential for human error or mechanical failure — clogged filters or torn membranes that let pathogens through, for example — is too great to risk something as basic to public health as drinking water.

Recycled water should be used only as nondrinking water, says Philip Singer, the Daniel Okun Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of North Carolina. “It may contain trace amounts of contaminants. Reverse osmosis and UV disinfection are very good, but there are still uncertainties.”

And then there are those whose first, and final, reaction is “yuck.”

“Why the hell do we have to drink our own sewage?” asks Muriel Watson, a retired schoolteacher who sat on a California water-reuse task force and founded the Revolting Grandmas to fight potable reuse. She toured the Orange County plant but came away unsatisfied. “It’s not the sun and the sky and a roaring river crashing into rocks” — nature’s way of purifying water. “It’s just equipment.”

The Santa Ana River forms in the San Bernardino Mountains and flows southwest through Riverside and then Orange counties to the sea, the largest coastal stream in Southern California. But that’s not saying much: in the summer, the Santa Ana’s flow is nearly 100 percent wastewater. The river’s base flow — what enters the channel from runoff, rain and wastewater-treatment plants — is increasing. Not only is more effluent entering the river, a consequence of population growth, but as the county develops and paves more surfaces, rainwater runs off the earth faster, sluicing into the river channel before it can sink into the earth and replenish aquifers.

To capture and clean that water, the Orange County Water District has gone into hyper-beaver mode on the river. Twenty miles upstream from Anaheim, the water district has created the Prado Wetlands. It’s a lovely place, lush with willow and mule fat, busy with butterflies and, over the course of the year, 250 species of birds. Moving through a series of rectangular ponds, river water filters slowly through thickets of cattails and bulrushes meant to extract excess nitrate from upstream dairy farms and sewage-treatment plants. Returned to the main channel, the water wends around T- and L-shaped berms that slow the water and maximize its contact with the river bottom. Gates and sluiceways then shunt the water into nine man-made ponds and pits. The goal is to get more water into the county’s groundwater basin, a 350-square-mile, 1,500-foot-deep bathtub of sand and gravel layers, which act as natural scrubbers. The system upriver — using gravity and gravel — and the system in Fountain Valley — in tanks and tubes — both achieve the same goal. Sort of.

It’s one of the many pardoxes of indirect potable reuse that the water leaving the plant in Fountain Valley is far cleaner than the water that it mingles with. Yes, the water entering the sewage-treatment plant in Fountain Valley is 100 percent wastewater and has a T.D.S. — a measure of water purity, T.D.S. stands for total dissolved solids and refers to the amount of trace elements in the water — of 1,000 parts per million. But after microfiltration and reverse osmosis, the T.D.S. is down to 30. (Poland Spring water has a T.D.S. of between 35 and 46.) By contrast, the “raw” water in the Anaheim basins has a T.D.S. of 600.

If everything in the Fountain Valley plant is in perfect working order, its finished water will contain no detectable levels of bacteria, pharmaceuticals or agricultural and industrial chemicals. The same can be said of very few water sources in this country. But once the Fountain Valley water mingles with the county’s other sources, its purity goes downhill. Filtering it through sand and gravel removes some contaminants, but it also adds bacteria (not necessarily harmful, and local utilities will eventually knock them out them with chlorine) and possibly pharmaceuticals.

In other words, nature messes up the expensively reclaimed water. So why stick it back into the ground? “We do it for psychological reasons,” says Adam Hutchinson, director of recharge operations for the water district. “In the future, people will laugh at us for putting it back in, instead of just drinking it.”

Psychologists and marketers have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what makes a product, or a process, seem natural. Obviously, framing the issue properly is the key to acceptance. “If people connect the history of their water to contamination, you’ll get a disgust response no matter how you treat that water in between,” says Brent Haddad, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “But if you enable people to frame out that history by telling them, for example, that ‘the clean water has been separated from the polluted water,’ they no longer make that connection.” We abridge history all the time, Haddad adds. “Think of the restaurant fork that was in the mouth of someone with a contagious disease, the pillow that was underneath people doing private adult things in a hotel bedroom. If you think of it that way, the intermediate steps, like washing with hot water, don’t matter.”

All water on earth is recycled: the same drops that misted Devonian ferns and dripped from the fur of woolly mammoths are watering us today. From evaporation to condensation and precipitation, the cycle goes on and on. But in the planet’s drier regions, where the population continues to rise, we can expect the time between use and reuse to grow ever shorter, with purification, pipes and pumps standing in for natural processes. Instead of sand and gravel filtering our drinking water, microfibers and membranes will do the job; instead of sunlight knocking out parasites, we’ll plug in the UV lamps.

You could argue that in coming to terms with wastewater as a resource, we’ll take better care of our water. At long last, the “everything is connected” message, the bedrock of the environmental movement, will hit home. In this view, once a community is forced to process and drink its toilet water, those who must drink it will rise up and change their ways. Floor moppers will switch to biodegradable cleaning products. Industry will use nontoxic material. Factory farms will cut their use of antibiotics. Maybe we’ll even stop building homes in the desert.

But these situations are not very likely. No one wants to think too hard about where our water comes from. It’s more likely that the virtuosity of water technology will let polluters off the hook: why bother to reduce noxious discharges if the treatment plant can remove just about anything? The technology, far from making us aware of the consequences of our behavior, may give us license to continue doing what we’ve always done.

The recycled water coming out of the sink at the Fountain Valley plant looked good enough to drink. Wildermuth didn’t press me to taste it, but I was eager for a sample — to satisfy my curiosity, and to be polite. I filled a plastic cup and took a sip. The water tasted fine, if a little dry; I’m used to something with more minerals. It did cross my mind that any potential health issues from drinking so-far undetectable levels of contaminants would be cumulative and take decades to manifest.

Then I reminded myself: no naturally occurring water on earth is absolutely pure. And most everything that’s in Orange County’s reclaimed water is in most cities’ drinking water anyway.

It was hot, my throat was parched, and I asked for a refill.


Saturday is the day for St. Louis to receive the crest.  Upriver, Gulfport, Illinois intersection at right.  Click here for Hurricane Katrina reports.
Mississippi Surges Over Nearly a Dozen Levees
NYTIMES
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and MONICA DAVEY
Published: June 20, 2008

The swollen Mississippi River continued to spread destruction on Thursday, surging over nearly a dozen levees in the St. Louis area and flooding vast areas of farmland, as the region’s growing crisis pushed corn and soy prices toward record levels.

The runaway river claimed its latest Missouri town late Wednesday night when it broke a levee in Winfield, just outside of St. Louis, leaving a 150-foot hole, deluging the small community and sending a surge of water downstream toward the next levee. Crews of firefighters spent the night evacuating residents, in some cases by boat, as workers fought to contain the river further south.

With weather forecasters calling for as many as two inches of rain in some parts of Missouri on Thursday, crews of emergency responders, sandbags in hand, were preparing for the worst.

St. Louis is the next major town in the path of the surging river, which is expected to crest at 40 feet there on Saturday. Because the river widens in St. Louis and connects with several tributaries, the damage is expected to be minimal. Still, the threat was great enough to prompt the city to relocate its annual Independence Day fair and festival for the first time.

President Bush was expected on Thursday to visit several communities, including Cedar Rapids, where the waters have receded but 25,000 people are homeless, according to the White House.

Since the flooding began, 20 levees have been breached — 11 of them in the St. Louis area — and as many as 30 more were in peril. Estimates of the damage to farmland throughout the Midwest ranged from 2 million to 5 million acres of crops, pushing corn prices close to a record price of $8 a bushel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is said to be planning a thorough review of the damage later this month.

On Wednesday, the surging river was gruesome news for the farmers and residents — about 100, the authorities said — near the tiny hamlet of Meyer in western Illinois. Around the small community, part of a region of endless fields of soybeans, corn and cattle, state conservation police officers rode door to door in boats to ensure that everyone had left, and flew over in a helicopter, scanning for anyone stranded.

So it went all along the Mississippi this week, through Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, north of St. Louis: People marching along levees and flood walls, scanning for the slightest puddle or hint of pressure in the sand, waiting for what might come. In Quincy, Ill., local officials raced to reinforce a levee they were worried about south of town; at stake were 100,000 acres of farmland and access to the Mark Twain Bridge. And federal authorities said they were closely monitoring more than 20 other levees they view as vulnerable, as the waters continue to rise downstream in the coming days.

Around Meyer, farmers were devastated. “That’s all been lost, and it’s not going to be replanted this season,” said Gerald Jenkins, general manager of Ursa Farmers Cooperative, not far from Meyer. One of the cooperative’s grain elevators, in Meyer, was swamped, Mr. Jenkins said, another at risk.

Worse, Mr. Jenkins said he feared that so many fields under water would mean not much grain for the cooperative to sell come the fall harvest. “It’s a very sickening feeling,” he said.

Still, the breached levees were a guilty relief for others, here in Canton and in the other towns on the Missouri side of the river or downstream, who had watched the water rise and rise, and hoped that a breach somewhere else might mean less flooding where they were.

“It’s too bad for them, but that’s the way it is,” Joe Clark, the mayor of Canton, said on Wednesday. Throughout the town, hundreds of workers scrambled to raise a three-mile-long levee still higher, with two-foot-tall wooden boards and piles upon piles of sandbags. So far, the levee here was winning, but the river’s crest — only inches short of the highest ever here — was not expected until early Thursday. Mr. Clark said he was hopeful that the town’s levee would hold, and its empty, shuttered downtown would be spared. “Now it’s a matter of waiting,” he said.

A few miles south, the waters crept waist high in some parts of LaGrange, Mo. Still, the levee failures elsewhere might lessen the blow, even in LaGrange. “Everything that’s broken other places is helping us,” said Pat Ryan, who continued to pile sandbags around his house, despite the rising waters.

In towns throughout the area, roads closed, train cars sat empty on flooded tracks, and bridges over the river were barricaded. Everywhere, sore, sweaty volunteers filled sandbags — more than 12.8 million of them have been issued so far during this flooding, by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Despite several days of mostly dry weather here, the sheer volume of water already in the tributaries of the Mississippi had led, inevitably, to flooding along the Mississippi itself. More rain, though, may be on the way: a storm system was forecast to roll over some of the flooded areas on Thursday and Friday, bringing scattered thunderstorms, up to an inch of rain and even the possibility of large hail in parts. The storms were not expected to raise flood levels significantly, though.

South of here, in Clarksville, the water that had already swamped some homes rose nine more inches by Wednesday.

“You just see it creeping up,” Tommy Beauchamp, a volunteer firefighter, said on Wednesday.

There was one piece of good news, though: the water was expected to crest about three inches lower than had been predicted, perhaps, in part, because of upstream levee breaks. To Mr. Beauchamp, the difference did not seem measly. “We celebrate every inch that we can get,” he said.



The Food Chain:  Mideast Facing Choice Between Crops and Water
NYTIMES 
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: July 21, 2008

CAIRO — Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

For decades nations in this region have drained aquifers, sucked the salt from seawater and diverted the mighty Nile to make the deserts bloom. But those projects were so costly and used so much water that it remained far more practical to import food than to produce it. Today, some countries import 90 percent or more of their staples.

Now, the worldwide food crisis is making many countries in this politically volatile region rethink that math.

The population of the region has more than quadrupled since 1950, to 364 million, and is expected to reach nearly 600 million by 2050. By that time, the amount of fresh water available for each person, already scarce, will be cut in half, and declining resources could inflame political tensions further.

“The countries of the region are caught between the hammer of rising food prices and the anvil of steadily declining water availability per capita,” Alan R. Richards, a professor of economics and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said via e-mail. “There is no simple solution.”

Losing confidence in world markets, these nations are turning anew to expensive schemes to maintain their food supply.

Djibouti is growing rice in solar-powered greenhouses, fed by groundwater and cooled with seawater, in a project that produces what the World Bank economist Ruslan Yemtsov calls “probably the most expensive rice on earth.”

Several oil-rich nations, including Saudi Arabia, have started searching for farmland in fertile but politically unstable countries like Pakistan and Sudan, with the goal of growing crops to be shipped home.

“These countries have the land and the water,” said Hassan S. Sharaf Al Hussaini, an official in Bahrain’s agriculture ministry. “We have the money.”

In Egypt, where a shortage of subsidized bread led to rioting in April, government officials say they are looking into growing wheat on two million acres straddling the border with Sudan.

Economists and development experts say that nutritional self-sufficiency in this part of the world presents challenges that are not easily overcome. Saudi Arabia tapped aquifers to become self-sufficient in wheat production in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the kingdom had become a major exporter. This year, however, the Saudis said they would phase out the program because it used too much water.

“You can bring in money and water and you can make the desert green until either the water runs out or the money,” said Elie Elhadj, a Syrian-born author who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the topic.

Egypt, too, has for decades dreamed of converting huge swaths of desert into lush farmland. The most ambitious of these projects is in Toshka, a Sahara Desert oasis in a scorched lunar landscape of sand and rock outcroppings.

When the Toshka farm was started in 1997, the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, compared its ambitions to building the pyramids, involving roughly 500,000 acres of farmland and tens of thousands of residents. But no one has moved there, and only 30,000 acres or so have been planted.

The farm’s manager, Mohamed Nagi Mohamed, says the Sahara is perfect for farming, as long as there is plenty of fertilizer and water. For one thing, the bugs cannot handle the summer heat, so pesticides are not needed.

“You can grow anything on this land,” he said, showing off fields of alfalfa and rows of tomatoes and grapes, shielded from the sun by gauzy white netting. “It’s a very nice project, but it needs a lot of money.”

Mr. Mubarak calls his country’s growing population an “urgent” problem that has exacerbated the food crisis. The population grows about 1.7 percent annually, considerably slower than a generation ago but still fast enough that it is on pace to double by 2050.

Adding 1.3 million Egyptians each year to the 77 million squeezed into an inhabited area roughly the size of Taiwan is a daunting prospect for a country in which 20 percent of citizens already live in poverty

One recent morning in the Cairo slum of Imbaba, people crammed in front of a weathered green bakery shack for their daily rations of subsidized bread, a pita-like loaf called baladi that sells for less than a penny, so cheap that some Egyptians feed it to their livestock.

The bakery shares the end of a dead-end street with a mountain of garbage, 25 feet by 5 feet, that looks as if it is moving because so many flies swarm over it.

“Most people are really suffering, but what can they do?” asked Mohamed Faruk, a 38-year-old grocery worker who moonlights as a bus inspector, as he carried nine loaves of baladi in newspaper.

Awatef Mahmud, a 53-year-old mother of five who sat on a nearby stoop waiting for her bread to cool, said higher prices had led to dietary changes for her family. “Instead of buying one kilo of meat every week, we buy a half a kilo,” she said. “People used to buy pasta to make for their kids. But now that it’s four and a half pounds,” she said, referring to the currency, “they give them bread instead.”

Economists say that rather than seeking to become self-sufficient with food, countries in this region should grow crops for which they have a competitive advantage, like produce or flowers, which do not require much water and can be exported for top dollar.

For example, Doron Ovits, a confident 39-year-old with sunglasses pushed over his forehead and a deep tan, runs a 150-acre tomato and pepper empire in the Negev Desert of Israel. His plants, grown in greenhouses with elaborate trellises and then exported to Europe, are irrigated with treated sewer water that he says is so pure he has to add minerals back. The water is pumped through drip irrigation lines covered tightly with black plastic to prevent evaporation.

A pumping station outside each greenhouse is equipped with a computer that tracks how much water and fertilizer is used; Mr. Ovits keeps tabs from his desktop computer.

“With drip irrigation, you save money. It’s more precise,” he said. “You can’t run it like a peasant, a farmer. You have to run it like a businessman.”

Israel is as obsessed with water as Mr. Ovits is. It was there, in the 1950s, that an engineer invented modern drip irrigation, which saves water and fertilizer by feeding it, drop by drop, to a plant’s roots. Since then, Israel has become the world’s leader in maximizing agricultural output per drop of water, and many believe that it serves as a viable model for other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Already, Tunisia has reinvigorated its agriculture sector by adopting some of the desert farming advances pioneered in Israel, and Egypt’s new desert farms now grow mostly water-sipping plants with drip irrigation.

The Israeli government strictly regulates how much water farmers can use and requires many of them to irrigate with treated sewer water, pumped to farms in purple pipes. It has also begun using a desalination plant to cleanse brackish water for irrigation.

“In the future, another 200 million cubic meters of marginal water are to be recycled, in addition to promoting the establishment of desalination plants,” Shalom Simhon, Israel’s agriculture minister, wrote via e-mail.

Still, four years of drought have created what Mr. Simhon calls “a deep water crisis,” forcing the country to cut farmers’ quotas.

Egypt, at least, has the Nile. Under a 1959 treaty, the country is entitled to a disproportionate share of the river’s water, a point that rankles some of its neighbors. It has built canals to bring Nile water to the Sinai Desert, to desert lands between Cairo and Alexandria and to the vast emptiness of Toshka.

For Saad Nassar, a top adviser in Egypt’s ministry of agriculture and land reclamation, the country has little choice but to try to make the desert bloom, even in unlikely places like Toshka, which it says will eventually succeed: all of Egypt’s farms and population are now crowded onto just 4 percent of its land.

“We don’t have the luxury of choosing this or that,” he said. “We have to work on every acre that is cultivatable.”

Egypt is establishing an estimated 200,000 acres of farmland in the desert each year, even as it loses 60,000 acres of its best farmland to urbanization, said Richard Tutwiler, director of the Desert Development Center at the American University in Cairo. “It’s sand,” he said, referring to the reclaimed desert land. “It’s not the world’s most fertile soil.”

As Cairo’s population has grown — to an estimated 12 million today — hastily constructed apartment buildings have sprouted among the fields. “They sow apartment buildings instead of wheat,” said Gideon Kruseman, a Dutch agriculture economist working with the government to improve farming there.

For more than 5,000 years, farmers have worked the land along the Nile and in the Nile Delta, the lotus-shaped plain north of Cairo where centuries of accumulated silt have produced a deep, rich layer of topsoil. They have endured drought, flood, locust and pestilence.

Now the scourge is development. For farmers like Magdy Abdel-Rahman, the new buildings not only ruin the rural tranquillity of his ancient fields, with the constant hammering and commotion, but they also reduce his yields.

“The shade is not good for the plants,” said Mr. Abdel-Rahman, who farms corn and clover on a half-acre lot 20 miles from downtown Cairo.

Five miles farther out, Talaat Mohamed’s three acres of sweet potatoes are squeezed between four-, five- and seven-story apartment buildings like a jigsaw puzzle. A building recently went up a dozen feet from his field, with steel bars jutting from the foundation and piles of gravel alongside.

Mr. Mohamed, 60, routinely turns down eager land speculators because, he says, he loves working outdoors. But he complains about all the time spent removing urban detritus from his field, which on this day included a maroon brassiere, soda cans, food wrappers, wads of indistinguishable plastic, a Signal toothpaste box and a black flip-flop.

“The Egyptians invented farming,” he said, peering despairingly at a landscape of electric wires and buildings, traffic and trash. “And this is what it has become.”


How dry is it in Catalonia? You’re looking at the bottom of the Sau reservoir near Barcelona. The ruins of the medieval stone church were deeply submerged when the reservoir was first filled in the 1960’s and did not reappear until late last fall. This photo was taken in early April. (Gustau Nacarino/Reuters)

Water Woes From Florida to Spain to Orbit
NYTIMES
By Patrick J. Lyons
May 16, 2008,  12:24 pm

You need water more urgently than anything other than breathable air, yet the difficulty of securing a clean, reliable supply seems to be making headlines all over, and not just in desert areas or in the ravaged wake of disasters like the Sichuan earthquake or the Irrawaddy Delta cyclone.
 
The latest this morning from all-too-soggy South Florida is that the place has not shaken its Ancient Mariner problem after all. (You know: “…nor any drop to drink….”) Temporary restrictions on water use that were lifted in April will have to go back on, and may become permanent, The Miami Herald reports,because Lake Okeechobee, the heart of the region’s supply, started dropping precipitously again as soon as they were relaxed. The water level in the lake is now only six inches above historic lows, The Herald says, and the start of the rainy season is still a couple of weeks away.
Relief is even further off for the drought-seared Catalonia region of Spain, where the city of Barcelona has had to resort to chartering ships to bring in fresh water from abroad; the first one reached the city on Thursday. Barring miraculously atypical weather, the ships will have to keep coming until October, the city says.

The drought afflicting Australia has gone on for seven years now, and the government has moved far past short-term contingencies like tanker ships; its new $13 billion national water plan includes building desalination plants and buying back irrigation-water rights from farmers in the vast drainage area of the Darling and Murray rivers, which, like the Colorado, are so heavily tapped now that they would silt up and peter out before reaching the sea if not for constant dredging. About $1 billion of the money, the government said Wednesday, will go to help cities turn waste water, salt water and storm runoff into potable supplies.
Recycling sewage into drinking water is a concept that has long been more feasible technically than politically.

No matter what the scientific tests say about the purity of the results, the very idea just skeeves a lot of people. Out in Los Angeles, though, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa broke with the nose-wrinklers on Thursday, proposing a package of supply and conservation measures that conspicuously included plans for reprocessing sewage effluent into drinking water, Randall Archibold reports in The New York Times today. The mayor opposed the idea a decade ago on safety grounds, but he says the technology has improved since then and the city needs the water too badly to forego it.

Neighboring Orange County has been doing it since November, and San Diego and San Jose are wrestling with it too, as are a host of other cities around the country. NASA said this week that a system for recycling astronauts’ urine in space will be flown up to the International Space Station on the next shuttle mission.

Back on earth, many municipalities are taking it one step less far, recycling sewage into “gray water” that can be used for industrial or irrigation purposes, to spare the limited supplies of the purer stuff for uses that really require it, like drinking, cooking and bathing.

That irrigation (rather than, say, long showers or half-filled dishwashers) is the principal culprit in many an urban and suburban water drama can be seen in how, when supplies start to get tight, the first thing officials do is tell people to cut back on how often they water their lawns. In South Florida, the limit looks headed back to two days a week, The Herald says; in Barcelona, forget it completely.
Warming Leads To 'Africanization' Of Spain 
DAY
By Elisabeth Rosenthal , New York Times News Service    
Published on 6/3/2008 

Fortuna, Spain - Lush fields of lettuce and hothouses of tomatoes line the roads. Verdant new developments of plush pastel vacation homes beckon buyers from Britain and Germany. Golf courses - dozens of them, all recently built - give way to the beach. At last, this hardscrabble corner of southeast Spain is thriving.

There is only one problem with the picture of bounty: This province, Murcia, is running out of water. Spurred on by global warming and poorly planned development, swaths of southeast Spain are steadily turning into desert.

Murcia, traditionally a poor farming region, has undergone a resort-building boom in recent years, even as many of its farmers have switched to more thirsty crops, encouraged by water transfer plans, which have become increasingly untenable. The combination has put new pressures on the land and its dwindling supply of water.

This year, farmers are fighting developers over water rights. They are fighting one another over who gets to water their crops. They are buying and selling water like gold on a burgeoning black market, mostly from illegal wells.

Southern Spain has long been plagued by cyclical drought, but the current crisis, scientists say, probably reflects a more permanent climate change brought on by global warming. And it is a harbinger of a new kind of conflict.

The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of the present center on oil. But those of the future - a future made hotter and drier by climate change in much of the world - seem likely to focus on water, they say.

Dozens of world leaders will be meeting at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome starting Tuesday to address a global food crisis caused part by water shortages in Africa, Australia and here in southern Spain.

Climate change means that creeping deserts may eventually drive 135 mill88ion people off their land, the United Nations estimates. Most of them are in the developing world. But Southern Europe is experiencing the problem now, its climate drying to the point that it is becoming more like Africa's, scientists say.

For Murcia, the water crisis has come already. And its arrival has been accelerated by developers and farmers who have hewed to water-hungry ventures highly unsuited to a drier, warmer climate: crops like lettuce that need ample irrigation, resorts that promise a swimming pool in the backyard, acres of freshly sodded golf courses that sop up millions of gallons a day.




Is world's wettest place getting drier? 
By Alastair Lawson
BBC News, Meghalaya 
21 July 2008

The town of Cherrapunjee, in the north-eastern Indian state of Meghalaya, is reputed to be the wettest place in the world.

But there are signs that its weather patterns may be being hit by global climate change.

"Not without reason has Cherrapunjee achieved fame as being the place with the heaviest rainfall on earth," wrote German missionary Christopher Becker more than 100 years ago.

"One must experience it to have an idea of the immense quantity of rain which comes down from the skies, at times day and night without a stop. It is enough to go a few steps from the house to be drenched from head to foot. An umbrella serves no purpose."

Late monsoon

But according to Cherrapunjee's most renowned weather-watcher, Denis Rayen, the climate of the town is changing fast.  

"In the days of the Raj, the British used to come here to the the Khasi hills to escape the heat - we are 4,823ft (1,484m) above sea level," he says.

"But today I am not sure they would be able to do that, because it is getting a lot hotter here and the monsoon is arriving later."

Official figures compiled by the Indian Meteorological Office in the nearby city of Guwahati back up Mr Rayen's arguments that north-east India as a whole is getting hotter.

"The average temperature for Guwahati at this time of the year should be around 32C - but this year the temperature has been as high as 38C," said weather expert Harendas Das.

"It's too early yet to say precisely what is happening, but the evidence suggests that higher temperatures mean the whole area is experiencing less rainfall."

Figures compiled by Mr Rayen show that Cherrapunjee may struggle to maintain its position as the world's wettest place. Rainfall figures for 2005 and 2006 were below average.

"The average rainfall at Cherrapunjee during the last 35 years has been 11,952mm (470ins) and there were several years when it was substantially more than this," he says.

In 1974 it rained 24,555mm (967ins) - which Mr Rayen says is "the highest recorded rainfall in any one place in any one year".

On 16 June, 1995, it rained a record-breaking 1,563mm (61.53ins) over a 24 hour period.

"But in 2005 and 2006 our yearly rainfall was well below the average. We could well be witnessing a severe change in our climatic conditions because of global warming."

While the annual rainfall for 2007 was back to normal, Mr Rayen argues that the "pattern of delivery" of Cherrapunjee's rainfall is changing. In previous years, 98% of the area's rainfall was between March to October.

This year the rains did not arrive until June, and the reason for that he says could be man-made.

"During the last few years, I have seen the forests vanish in front of my eyes," said Mr Rayen.

"A combination of global warming and intensive deforestation is taking a heavy toll in this, one of the most beautiful areas of India.

"Because it now rains heavily over a shorter time period, crops are destroyed and there is intensive soil erosion. The lack of woodland means that the water flows faster from Meghalaya into the Bangladesh delta, only 400km (249 miles) away."

Mr Das says that parts of Meghalaya are "at risk from desertification" because of a combination of increasing urbanisation and industrialisation on the one hand and deforestation and shortages of ground water on the other.

"Because the capacity of the soil to hold water is lost, there is a real possibility that the wettest place in the earth may soon be facing water shortages," he says. 


Slide show

California Water Law Curtailing New Development
NYTIMES
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: June 7, 2008

PERRIS, Calif. — As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building.

California officials suggested that the actions were only the beginning, and they worry about the impact on a state that has grown into an economic powerhouse over the last several decades.

The state law was enacted in 2001, but until statewide water shortages, it had not been invoked to hold up projects.

While previous droughts and supply problems have led to severe water cutbacks and rationing, water officials said the outright refusal to sign off on projects over water scarcity had until now been virtually unheard of on a statewide scale.

“Businesses are telling us that they can’t get things done because of water,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said in a telephone interview.

On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger declared an official statewide drought, the first such designation since 1991. As the governor was making his drought announcement, the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County — one of the fastest-growing counties in the state in recent years — gave a provisional nod to nine projects that it had held up for months because of water concerns. The approval came with the caveat that the water district could revisit its decision, and only after adjustments had been made to the plans to reduce water demand.

“The statement that we’re making is that this isn’t business as usual,” said Randy A. Record, a water district board member, at the meeting here in Perris.

Shawn Jenkins, a developer who had two projects caught up in the delays, said he was accustomed to piles of paperwork and reams of red tape in getting projects approved. But he was not prepared to have the water district hold up the projects he was planning. He changed the projects’ landscaping, to make it less water dependent, as the board pondered their fate.

“I think this is a warning for everyone,” Mr. Jenkins said.

Also in Riverside County, a superior court judge recently stopped a 1,500-home development project, citing, among others things, a failure to provide substantial evidence of adequate water supply.

In San Luis Obispo County, north of Los Angeles, the City of Pismo Beach was recently denied the right to annex unincorporated land to build a large multipurpose project because, “the city didn’t have enough water to adequately serve the development,” said Paul Hood, the executive officer of the commission that approves the annexations and incorporations of cities.

In agriculturally rich Kern County, north of Los Angeles, at least three developers scrapped plans recently to apply for permits, realizing water was going to be an issue. An official from the county’s planning department said the developers were the first ever in the county to be stymied by water concerns. Large-scale housing developments in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties have met a similar fate, officials in those counties said.

Throughout the state, other projects have been suspended or are being revised to accommodate water shortages, and water authorities and cities have increasingly begun to consider holding off on “will-serve” letters — promises to developers to provide water — for new projects.

“The water in our state is not sufficient to add more demand,” said Lester Snow, the director of the California Department of Water Resources. “And that now means that some large development can’t go forward. If we don’t make changes with water, we are going to have a major economic problem in this state.”

The words “crisis” and “water” have gone together in this state since the 49ers traded flecks of gold for food. But several factors have combined to make the current water crisis more acute than those of recent years.


An eight-year drought in the Colorado River basin has greatly impinged on water supply to Southern California. Of the roughly 1.25 million acre-feet of water that the region normally imports from that river toward the 4.5 million acre-feet it uses each year, 500,000 has been lost to drought, said Jeff Kightlinger, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Even more significant, a judge in federal district court last year issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta — where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25 million Californians — to protect a species of endangered smelt that were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to June, cut back the state’s water reserves this winter by about one third, according to a consortium of state water boards.

The smelt problem was a powerful indicator of the environmental fallout from the delta’s water system, which was constructed over 50 years ago for a far smaller population.

“We have bad hydrology, compromised infrastructure and our management tools are broken,” said Timothy Quinn, the executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “All that paints a fairly grim picture for Californians trying to manage water in the 21st century.”

The 2001 state water law, which took effect in 2002, requires developers to prove that new projects have a plan for providing at least 20 years’ worth of water before local water authorities can sign off on them. With the recent problems, more and more local governments are unable to simply approve projects.

“Water is one of our most difficult issues when we are evaluating large-scale projects,” said Lorelei Oviatt, the division chief for the Kern County Planning Department. In cases where developers are unable to present a long-term water plan, “then certainly I can’t recommend they approve” those developments, Ms. Oviatt said.

As the denied building permits indicate, the lack of sufficient water sources could become a serious threat to economic development in California, where the population in 2020 is projected to reach roughly 45 million people, economists say, from its current 38 million. In the end, as water becomes increasingly scarce, its price will have to rise, bringing with it a host of economic consequences, the economists said.

“Water has been seriously under-priced in California,” said Edward E. Leamer, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. “When you ration it or increase its price, it will have an impact on economic growth.”

The water authority for Southern California recently issued a rate increase of 14.3 percent, when including surcharges, which was the highest rate increase in the last 15 years. In Northern California, rates in Marin County increased recently by nearly 10 percent, in part to pay an 11 percent increase in the cost of water bought from neighboring Sonoma County.

Interest groups that oppose development have found that raising water issues is among the many bats in their bags available to beat back projects they find distasteful.

“Certainly from Newhall Ranch’s standpoint, water was a key point that our opponents were focused on,” said Marlee Lauffer, a spokeswoman for Newhall Ranch, a large-scale residential development in the works is Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles, among others, has opposed the development.

To get around the problem, Newhall Ranch’s planners decided to forgo water supplied through the state and turn instead to supplies from an extensive water reclamation plant as well as water bought privately. Other developers, like Mr. Jenkins, have changed their landscaping plans to reduce water needs and planned for low-flow plumbing to placate water boards.

Mr. Schwarzenegger sees addressing the state’s water problem as one of his key goals, and he is hoping against the odds to get a proposed $11.9 billion bond for water management investments through the Legislature and before voters in November.

The plans calls for water conservation and quality improvement programs, as well as a resource management plan for the delta. Among its most controversial components is $3.5 billion earmarked for new water storage, something that environmentalists have vehemently opposed, in part because they find dams and storage facilities environmentally unsound and not cost effective.

The critics also point out that the state’s agriculture industry, which uses far more water than urban areas, is being asked to contribute little to conservation under the governor’s plans. As more building projects are derailed by water requirements, the pressure on farmers to share more of their water is expected to grow.
Schwarzenegger declares drought in California 
DAY
By DON THOMPSON, Associated Press Writer 
Posted on Jun 5, 6:52 AM EDT

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought after two years of below-average rainfall, low snowmelt runoff and a court-ordered restriction on water transfers.

Schwarzenegger warned that residents and water managers must immediately cut their water use or face the possibility of rationing next year if there is another dry winter.

"We must recognize the severity of the crisis that we face," the Republican governor said Wednesday at a news conference.

He signed an executive order directing the state's response to unusually dry conditions that are damaging crops, harming water quality and causing extreme fire danger across California. Many communities already require water conservation or rationing.

The statewide drought declaration is the first since 1991, when Gov. Pete Wilson acted in the fifth year of a drought that lasted into 1992.

Schwarzenegger directed the state Department of Water Resources to help speed water transfers to areas with the worst shortages, to help local water districts with conservation efforts and to assist farmers suffering losses from the drought.

California depends on winter snow accumulating in the Sierra Nevada for much of its summer water supply. But March, April and May were the driest winter months on record, forcing water use cutbacks by farmers and urban residents alike.

The Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, Nev., reported that precipitation in California during that period was 1.2 inches, or 22 percent of the average for the 114 years since record-keeping began.

Snow measurements last month found that the Sierra held just 69 percent of an average winter. Runoff into California rivers was at 55 percent of a normal year. The state's major reservoirs are at 50 percent to 63 percent of their capacity at a time when they ideally would be full.

Conditions could be even worse next year if there is another dry winter, Water Resources Director Lester Snow said.

"We need at least above normal in terms of our snowpack, and then we're still going to be tight," Snow said. "The idea is to put programs in place now to soften the impact in 2008 and to prepare for a potential third year of drought in 2009."

California's population has mushroomed since the last drought, while the water supply has dwindled, he said.

An eight-year drought in the Southwest means California can't depend on Colorado River water to help supply Southern California. And a federal judge's order last year requires that more Northern California water be left in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to aid declining fish populations.

"We're suffering the perfect storm, if you will," said Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. "The purpose of the governor's declaration is to send a wake-up call."

California has never resorted to statewide rationing during droughts, Quinn said.

Worst-hit so far is the San Joaquin Valley, which could soon merit an emergency declaration because of crop damage, Snow said.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said this week it would cut water supplied to Central Valley farms to 40 percent of the amount growers contract for with the federal government. Water deliveries from state reservoirs could drop to 35 percent, Snow said.

That could mean hundreds of acres of crops won't be planted this year, according to the giant Westlands Water District, which supplies growers who produce about $1 billion worth of crops annually.

The state is exploring ways to send scarce water to farmers for the growing season now while cutting deliveries later, Snow said.

"Giving water to the farmers in September doesn't help the fact that they need it on their tomato crop in June," Snow said. "It's not just the tomato crop that you lose. It's the employment that's associated with the tomato crop."

Schwarzenegger used the drought declaration to push a nearly $12 billion bond to fund delta, river and groundwater improvements, conservation and recycling efforts, and reservoirs. Legislators have not agreed to his plan.

"It is easy for Sacramento to put off dealing with the water infrastructure," Schwarzenegger said. "But as we now see, there is no more time to waste, because nothing is more vital than to protect our economy, to protect our environment, and to protect of quality of life."

Western States Agree to Water-Sharing Pact
NYTIMES
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: December 10, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 9 — Facing the worst drought in a century and the prospect that climate change could yield long-term changes on the Colorado River, the lifeline for several Western states, federal officials have reached a new pact with the states on how to allocate water if the river runs short.

State and federal officials praised the agreement as a landmark akin to the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which first outlined how much water the seven states served by the river — California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — would receive annually.

The new accord, outlined by federal officials in a telephone news conference Friday, spells out how three downriver states — California, Arizona and Nevada — will share the impact of water shortages. It puts in place new measures to encourage conservation and manage the two primary reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which have gone from nearly full to just about half-empty since 1999.

The accord is expected to forestall litigation that was likely to have arisen as fast-growing states jockey for the best way to keep the water flowing to their residents and businesses in increasingly dry times. It would be in effect through 2026 and could be revised during that time.

Some environmental groups said the pact did not go far enough to encourage conservation and discourage growth. But federal officials said they took the best of several proposals by the states, environmental organizations and others and emphasized the importance of all seven states agreeing with the result.

“I think for the first time in 85 years we are on the same page,” said Herb Guenther, the director of water resources in Arizona, which had initially balked at some terms of the agreement and was threatening legal action over it.

But with water levels in reservoirs dropping, a record eight-year drought, the prospect that climate change could bring more dry spells and new scientific analyses suggesting the West could be drier than has been traditionally believed, the states were pushed to act.

These factors “forced the issue to the head and we decided to do something unique and different,” Mr. Guenther said.

The agreement, the product of two-and-a-half years of negotiation and study, establishes criteria for the Interior Department to declare a shortage on the river, which would occur when the system is unable to produce the 7.5 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply 15 million homes for a year, that the three downriver states are entitled to.

Water deliveries would be decreased based on how far water levels drop in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. The Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river system, predicts about a 5 percent chance of such a shortage being declared by 2010, but it all depends on how much the states are able to conserve and, of course, the weather.

The probability projection “does not imply it can’t happen,” said Terry Fulp, a bureau official involved in managing the river.

Water districts, anticipating an eventual cutback of Colorado River water, have been storing large amounts of water and the accord encourages them to continue to do so.

The pact, which Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is expected to sign Thursday, includes a bundle of agreements with the states. One is approval for water managers in the Las Vegas area, which gets 90 percent of its water from the Colorado, to get a greater share of Lake Mead water in exchange for financing a reservoir in California to capture large amounts of river water destined for Mexico but beyond that country’s entitlement by treaty.

“It’s hugely important for us,” said Scott Huntley, a spokesman for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “This really does provide the bridge for us to get into the next decade.”

But John Weisheit, conservation director for Living Rivers, a Utah-based environmental group, said the agreement sends the message to the states that growth trumps sensible water management. Mr. Weisheit said the conservation should have been emphasized and the government’s computer modeling was overly optimistic about future water supply.

“There is more water on paper than there actually is on the landscape,” he said. “They are looking at this in a way that will allow more development even though the water is not theoretically there.”

From Sewage, Added Water for Drinking:
This Orange County, Calif., Water District plant will purify sewer water to feed drinking water supplies, but not directly to the tap.
NYTIMES
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: November 27, 2007

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.  After a process of microfiltration, chemicals, ultraviolet light and reverse osmosis, the treated sewer water will be injected underground to refill aquifers.
 
But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

On that Friday, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. They and others hope it serves as a model for authorities worldwide facing persistent drought, predicted water shortages and projected growth.

The process, called by proponents “indirect potable water reuse” and “toilet to tap” by the wary, is getting a close look in several cities.

The San Diego City Council approved a pilot plan in October to bolster a drinking water reservoir with recycled sewer water. The mayor vetoed the proposal as costly and unlikely to win public acceptance, but the Council will consider overriding it in early December.

Water officials in the San Jose area announced a study of the issue in September, water managers in South Florida approved a plan in November calling for abundant use of recycled wastewater in the coming years in part to help restock drinking water supplies, and planners in Texas are giving it serious consideration.

“These types of projects you will see springing up all over the place where there are severe water shortages,” said Michael R. Markus, the general manager of the Orange County district, whose plant, which will process 70 million gallons a day, has already been visited by water managers from across the globe.

The finished product, which district managers say exceeds drinking water standards, will not flow directly into kitchen and bathroom taps; state regulations forbid that.

Instead it will be injected underground, with half of it helping to form a barrier against seawater intruding on groundwater sources and the other half gradually filtering into aquifers that supply 2.3 million people, about three-quarters of the county. The recycling project will produce much more potable water and at a higher quality than did the mid-1970s-era plant it replaces.

The Groundwater Replenishment System, as the $481 million plant here is known, is a labyrinth of tubing and tanks that sucks in treated sewer water the color of dark beer from a sanitation plant next door, and first runs it through microfilters to remove solids. The water then undergoes reverse osmosis, forcing it through thin, porous membranes at high pressure, before it is further cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light to break down any remaining pharmaceuticals and carcinogens.

The result, Mr. Markus said, “is as pure as distilled water” and about the same cost as buying water from wholesalers.

Recycled water, also called reclaimed or gray water, has been used for decades in agriculture, landscaping and by industrial plants.

And for years, treated sewage, known as effluent, has been discharged into oceans and rivers, including the Mississippi and the Colorado, which supply drinking water for millions.

But only about a dozen water agencies in the United States, and several more abroad, recycle treated sewage to replenish drinking water supplies, though none here steer the water directly into household taps. They typically spray or inject the water into the ground and allow it to percolate down to aquifers.

Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, among the most arid places in Africa, is believed to be the only place in the world that practices “direct potable reuse” on a large-scale, with recycled water going directly into the tap water distribution system, said James Crook, a water industry consultant who has studied the issue.

The projects are costly and often face health concerns from opponents.

Such was the case on Nov. 6 in Tucson, where a wide-ranging ballot measure that would have barred the city from using purified water in drinking water supplies failed overwhelmingly. The water department there said it had no such plans but the idea has been discussed in the past.

John Kromko, a former Arizona state legislator who advocated for the prohibition, said he was skeptical about claims that the recycling process cleanses all contaminants from the water and he suggested that Tucson limit growth rather than find new ways to feed it.

“We really don’t know how safe it is,” he said. “And if we controlled growth we would never have to worry about drinking it.”

Mayor Jerry Sanders of San Diego, in vetoing the City Council plan there, said it “is not a silver bullet for the region’s water needs” and the public has never taken to the idea in the 15 years it has been discussed off and on.

Although originally estimated at $10 million for the pilot study in San Diego, water department officials said the figure would be refined, and the total cost of the project might be hundreds of millions of dollars. Although the Council wants to offset the cost with government grants and other sources, Mr. Sanders predicted it would add to already escalating water bills.

“It is one of the most expensive kinds of water you can create,” said Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the mayor. “It is a large investment for a very small return.”

San Diego, which imports about 85 percent of its water because of a lack of aquifers, asked residents this year to curtail water use.

Here in Orange County, the project, a collaboration between the water and sanitation districts, has not faced serious opposition, in part because of a public awareness and marketing campaign.

Early on, officials secured the backing of environmental groups, elected leaders and civic groups, helped in part by the fact the project eliminated the need for the sanitation district to build a new pipe spewing effluent into the ocean.

Orange County began purifying sewer water in 1976 with its Water Factory 21, which dispensed the cleansed water into the ground to protect groundwater from encroaching seawater.

That plant has been replaced by the new one, with more advanced technology, and is intended to cope with not only current water needs but also expectations that the county’s population will grow by 500,000 by 2020.

Still, said Stephen Coonan, a water industry consultant in Texas, such projects proceed slowly.

“Nobody is jumping out to do it,” he said. “They want to make sure the science is where it should be. I think the public is accepting we are investigating it.”



Bottled water: Really better?
Everett Herald, WA
By David Chircop
Published: Monday, August 20, 2007

Everett sells millions of gallons of water every year to companies that pour it into bottles and jugs, slap on brand names, and then sell it to consumers.

So it didn't surprise Mark Christensen to learn that PepsiCo's Aquafina - the nation's most popular bottled water brand - gets its water from the tap.

For two decades, the owner of A & W Bottling Co., located along the bustling industrial belt west of Paine Field, has filtered and sold tens of millions of gallons of water and soft drinks using city tap water.

Three other companies in Snohomish County also bottle water from municipal sources, according to the Washington Department of Agriculture, which regulates the bottled-water industry in the state.

A & W Bottling and other companies do additional filtering and treatment before selling the water.

"It finally caught up with them," said Christensen about Aquafina. Labels on his Cascade Ice brand say it is made of purified water from "A Municipal Source," in accordance with Food and Drug Administration labeling rules. Aquafina had been using "P.W.S.," which stands for "public water source."

That change has ignited a debate on whether bottled water is actually worth the extra price to consumers and the environment.

It has also highlighted an open secret. Much of the bottled water sold in stores, 25 percent to 40 percent, according to government and industry sources, is tap water - sometimes further treated, sometimes not.

"The propaganda of the industry leads people to believe they shouldn't drink tap water, but I don't do that," said Jon Gergen, owner of Crystal Mountain Pure Drinking Water in Arlington.

His company sells three- and five-gallon jugs of water to about 250 residential and commercial customers in Snohomish, Skagit, Whatcom and San Juan counties. He buys the water from Marysville, which gets its water from Edward Springs, the Stillaguamish River and Spada Lake. Gergen's company removes chlorine from the water and disinfects it before shipping it out.

Many of his customers order his water because their homes are on wells that pump out foul-tasting water with heavy minerals or they are at construction sites without access to running water.

Not all are so tolerant of the tap. Dan Harbeck, owner of Get Distilled Water Services Inc. of Mukilteo, says tap water is often unhealthy. His company's marketing material says water-borne-diseases pollute tap water, and minerals in tap water are harmful.

The company uses Everett tap water but filters out various compounds and disinfects the water using either ultraviolet light or ozone.

Steve Hatch, who owns Allwater Corporation in Lynnwood, a