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.

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

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.

Brisbane residents best water savers in world: Newman

From ABC News, “Councillor Newman says the Queensland Water Commission data, showing residents are using an average of 123 litres a day, means Brisbane has overtaken cities in Germany as the best water savers in the developed world.”

What does 123 litres of water a day look like compared to Canada?

I’m familiar with a typical value of 340 as the average daily water consumption per person but I have seen info suggesting that we are getting down to below 300 for some communities that have implemented water conservation measures.

Other info, here , here, here and here.

So if a community has implemented water conservation, what does it take to get down to the EU typical rate of 140 litres per capita? What does a solution look like that cuts a typical Canadian water consumption figure in half? To even consider this, we have to go and look at the CBC article and a breakdown of water use, Toilet flushing = 30%, and water used per task.

Just for completeness, I checked and our household’s consumption based on the last bill was 138 litres/person.

Homeland Security hacked

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) suffered more than 800 hacker
break-ins, virus outbreaks, and other computer security problems over
two years, senior officials told Congress.
Story here.

WEAO 07 Conference:INFORMATION DRIVEN ASSET MANAGEMENT – LEVERAGING

This paper by Ross Homeniuk, UMA | AECOM and Hesham Osman, UMA | AECOM was the only interesting paper out of a whole day in the Asset Management track at London’s WEAO conference.

The paper uses NRC CCTV inspection codes (1 to 5 where 5 is collapse) to set up a failure rate model using Markov chains. The result when you recognize that about 3% to 6% of a population of pipes actually get worse enough to move up in the defect assessment codes is that some wastewater pipes have a statistical probability of reaching a useful life of 250 years.

This is a very interesting conclusion because it provides a mathematical method that verifies something that I’ve suspected for a long time. Ever since, that tour of a Roman aqeduct that was built 2000 years ago and would still function today if put into service. Indeed there are examples in the Middle East of infrastruture that is hundreds and thousands of years old that is still in service.

The difficulty is that the analysis of the markov chain only provides a decay curve for pipes that progress to a collapse failure. What about the class of pipe that decays but does not progress to a collapse failure? (Most of the sample data is based on the City of Winnepeg infrastructure). This analysis does not include those pipes that are considered to have failed because they leak like a sieve and cause downstream flooding problems. This a class of pipe failure that is related to an I&I problem. It may not result in a complete pipe replacement but in an in situ rehabilitation technology; however, the result of incurring a capital expense that is a betterman, (extension of service life) is the result.

So I suspect that the analysis may have be a bit too uniform in its treatment of pipe failure types. There may be other ways that a pipe can fail that do not fit in this analysis.  A really interesting bit of work though and very well presented. Kudos to the authors.

Headline news: Going nowhere fast: Top rivers face mounting threats

The WWF has released a report assessing the world’s top 10 rivers at risk.
More info is here.

A political rarity; Greg Sorbara compliments Finance Minister Flaherty

I saw this on TV last night and was pleased to actually see and hear one politician recognizing an opposing party’s political work.

“Ontario welcomes the proposed federal Working Income Tax Benefit, which will support people with low incomes. And we are pleased to see Ottawa’s proposal on the Capital Cost Allowance as a way of helping hard-hit manufacturers.” link to source.

All too often the only sound bite that is captured and/or presented is a critical comment that suggests that the budget presented is all crap. This is what the federal Liberals and NDP presented. I think that the federal conservatives have done a couple of good things with this budget including:

• rebates on fuel efficient vehicles *and* penalties on gas guzzling vehicles.
• tax incentives for big pharma to donate medicines to developing countries,
• the working income tax benefit, and
• A National Trust to protect land, buildings and national treasures.

The other item mentioned by Sorbara in the budget is the CCA for the manufacturing to have a two year window to write off new equipment along with the ACCA or accelerated Capital Cost Allowance to move from oil sands to green technology. Unfortunately, neither of these is a benefit to municipal utitilties that are starting to track their investments in capital but do not receive a tax benefit for doing so.

What municipalities need is an capital incentive program that replaces inefficient systems with green technologies for moving and treating water and wastewater.