Very nice example of sharing the Right of Way, (ROW)

Portland closes a network of roads to all car and truck traffic for pedestrians, bikes, blades and boards. Looks great.

U.S. mayors agree to phase out bottled water

“The change could mean people at city council meetings around the
country in the future could more often see pitchers of water instead of
clear plastic bottles on the tables of local legislators.”
This sends a clear message to consumers and it is a great message for the mayors to endorse. The question is where is the FCM on this issue. How can we get a similar resolution on their agenda?
Article is here.

Inter-state water transactions

This story, illustrates some of the challenges facing the US. In the article, the only demand that gets recognized is the use of water to supply a growing population. In the same manner that the Colorado river is completely consumed, where does the natural environment fit into their management scheme? Would decisions about water management be made differently if there wasn’t a state boundary there? With regard to managing water, political boundaries are completely arbitrary and yet, they set the agenda in the US as it is the only legal platform from which to begin a discussion about water “rights”.

When project accounting goes bad

This project, “$27M down the drain with Manotick pipeline plan” seems odd.
$27 million for 376 homes?
A real estate guy on my hockey team recently said upon hearing that I was a water engineer, “That’s smart business. We always say, ‘follow the sewers’ cause they lead to the money.”
In this case, it seems like the City is trying real hard to ensure the developers / “Minto-owned lands” will be the ones making the money. Course the City is a Janus beast and is opposing the development at the same time by going to the OMB which is easily explained by understanding that action is originating in a different department. Not like two departments would ever consider coordinating their actions.

Great lakes follow up

The Toronto Star writes up an argument for paying the real price of water. The idea is that water pollution is an externality to the economic pricing of goods and services. If we raise the price of using water to better reflect the cost of using it, the theory is that the quality (and quantity?) of water will improve.

The story is adapted from the soon to be published book, “Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America” by Chris Wood. I’ve not read the book yet so I can’t comment on it but when a journalist writes stuff like this, “… the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET)” I get mildly annoyed. Evapotranspiration is one of the advanced topics of thermodynamics and part of an engineering hydrology course. It isn’t insidious in any way but fundamental to the hydrologic cycle. Without evapotranspiration, we’re screwed. So when a journalist describes fundamental science phenomena using language that inflames the reader’s unease, it isn’t serving anyone’s interest. There is a key word in there and that is amplification. Evapotranspiration is one of those things that is pretty tricky to measure accurately. It can also vary significantly within short distances and depends on a great many variables. So extrapolating from single measurements is very inexact. What we do know is that evapotranspirtation is proportional to degree days (to non corn growers out there, a degree day is a measure of heat for growing crops. Hmm wikipedia has a more general and better description than that). So as warmer temperatures are anticipated so too could evapotranspiration. However, as I said this is a not a simple process and we don’t know exactly how this will change.

Guess I’ll have to read the book to see where the argument goes.

Dirty jobs in IT

Hey, it’s great when your professional vocation is attached to the dirtiest job in IT.

 

But few IT gigs get earthier than Dan King’s job as a process control engineer for a Texas sewage treatment facility in the mid-1990s.

“Among other things,” King says, “I was responsible for crawling around the sludge dryer — that’s where the poo goes after it’s extracted from the water — trying to figure out how to program the computers to run the conveyors at speeds that would get the sludge dry enough so that it’s not a sloppy muddy mess, yet not so dry and dusty that it would catch on fire.”
A particularly smelly fire was the reason King was assigned to the project in the first place, he adds pungently.
To keep the “sludge” at the right consistency, King used an ’80s-era programming language called CL, made by Honeywell Industrial Control Systems, to move the conveyor belts at precisely the right speed and send the right amount of electricity to the dryers. That was the easy part.
“Then I had to crawl around the belt and reach in with my glove to check the consistency of this muddy, slushy mess while watching the temperature.”

After that formative experience, King went to grad school. He’s now an SAP consultant and NetWeaver Integration specialist for CapGemini in Houston. He says even that job can get dirty sometimes, especially when he needs to convince clients to give his people access to the things they need to get their work done.
“Some days, I’m still up to my hips in poo, but it’s bull poo,” King says.

 

from The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT

It’s Time To Drink Toilet Water

Slate hits a note with this article by Eilene Zimmerman. The Netherlands started a practice almost 25 years ago of treating wastewater and pumping it into the ground. In their case though, it was to push back the saline water boundary with fresh water. If they pump out too much ground water they get salt water intrusions.

The waterfootprint.org is an interesting site worth checking out.

A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century

This is a longish piece by Ross Robertson that is a very interesting read. I like the idea of Bright Green vs. Dark Green.

Here is a small sample to whet your appetite.

That future will also be significantly more urban. “Manhattanites use fewer resources and less energy than anyone else in America,” writes Steffen—even people living in super-efficient green homes in the country. In fact, urban density is not only one of the best drivers of sustainable consumption but one of the best strategies for preserving wild nature as well. Rejecting the lavish inefficiency of the suburbs and learning how to integrate densely orchestrated urban communities with agricultural greenspace and healthy natural habitats will be essential to building a one-planet society. “The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities,” wrote Stewart Brand in MIT’s Technology Review:

My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it.

Everywhere that we see the rural-to-urban demographic swing around the world, Brand ex-plains—about two hundred thousand people a day leave the countryside for life in the city, and the planet just passed the fifty percent urban point this year—birthrates plummet and population growth stabilizes. That’s good news for developing nations being crushed under economic, environmental, and social pressures never before seen on Earth, because hand in hand with the challenges of urbanization comes an unprecedented explosion of opportunity.

February Tab sweep: Water

Some collected tabs pertaining to water this week.

Adapting Water Use to a Fast Changing World

We are on the verge of a water crisis. As world economy and population continue to grow, we are becoming a much thirstier world. It is important to realize just how much water we need to make every aspect of our economy work. Every liter of petrol requires up to 2.5 liters of water to produce it. On average, crops grown for their bioenergy need at least 1,000 liters of water to make one liter of biofuel. It takes about 2,700 liters of water to make one cotton T-shirt, up to 4,000 liters of water to produce a kilo of wheat and up to 16,000 liters to produce a kilo of beef. The statistics are equally surprising for hundreds of other consumer products that we all take for granted like milk, juice, coffee, fruit, pizza, detergents, carpets, paint, electrical appliances, cosmetics and so on. On average wealthier people “consume” upward of 3,000 liters of water every day.

Water restrictions bite for 70000 as drought worsens

QUEENSTOWN and Whittlesea are in the grip of a drought that has forced the Lukhanji Municipality to institute stringent water restrictions on about 70000 residents. The restrictions came into effect on Friday and will remain in place until further notice. Municipal spokesperson Mkhululi Titi said the Bonkolo Dam, which supplies water to the two areas, is about 67% full, but has only one month’s supply left at the current rate of water usage.

“The ideal level would be above 85%. We haven’t had good rains in a while,” said Titi, adding that the municipality last introduced restrictions in 2003.

Water next big battleground

DISPUTES about the nation’s dwindling water supplies loom as the next great legal battleground, according to the country’s most senior judge, Murray Gleeson. … Justice Gleeson said courts would have an increasing role in settling environmental issues, especially as businesses and governments dealt with concerns about climate change.

Drought-stricken Georgia eyes Tennessee’s border — and river water

Others have threatened to fire rifles from Lookout Mountain.

“If they really do try to pull this off, we will do whatever we have to do to defend ourselves,” said Howell Moss, the mayor of Tennessee’s Marion County, noting that the disputed milewide strip of land has been an accepted part of his state for nearly 200 years.

There is a theme running through more and more water stories. That theme is echoed from the very early environmental movement spawned from the “limits to growth” book. These stories are linked by:

High demand -> Shortfalls in supply -> Conflict -> ________

The last word in that chain is not yet written. In many cases, it will be pursued through courts where there are courts with jurisdiction to resolve water problems. In other places, like intra-nation conflict, it could get very ugly. Let us configure a United Nations body with the express purpose of finding non-violent resolutions to these conflicts. A US style water rights based on property ownership is unlikely to be a workable solution.

Dusting off research: Algae to fuel

Soybeans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year, and canola
produces about 130, LaStella said. Algae, however, produces about 4,000
gallons per acre a year, and he predicted it will go far beyond that.
He said algae require only sunshine and non-drinkable water to grow.
The demonstration pond showed algae will grow even when temperatures
fall below zero. – source here.

I’ve seen an interesting article pointing out that the aglae will grow well on wastewater as a feed source.