Studies predict water shortfall in Southwest

Each week, the Freshwater Society publishes a digest of important regional, national and international articles and research on water and the environment. Scan the articles here, then follow the links to read the articles in their entirety where they originally were published.

Studies predict water shortfall in Southwest
The glum projections of the growing gap between demand for water in the Southwest and the dwindling supplies have never been optimistic, but two new studies— one a research report based on satellite data, and the other an analysis of rainfall, water use and the costs associated with obtaining new water — make earlier forecasts seem positively rosy.

The United States branch of the Stockholm Environment Institute, based in Somerville, Mass., just released an extended analysis of water demand and future supplies that estimates that the cumulative shortfall over the next century in the Southwest, without the adoption of adaptation strategies, will be 1.815 billion acre feet. And that’s without factoring in a climate-change-driven reduction in supply.
–The New York Times

River cities brace for spring floods
Ice is still on the rivers, but the flood fight is on.

With near-historic crests predicted for the third year in a row, people along the state’s flood-prone waterways are sandbagging, strengthening their defenses, and watching with confidence, wariness and weariness.

Fargo-Moorhead, the epicenter of recent flood fights, have both declared states of emergency. Fargo will launch a drive to fill 3 million sandbags to hold off the Red River in North Dakota.

Along the Minnesota, the Mississippi, the St. Croix, and even along tributary creeks, communities are buying sandbags, hiring levee builders, planning for volunteers and prodding residents to buy flood insurance.
–The Star Tribune

Federal aquaculture rules proposed
The federal government issued the nation’s first policy guidelines for aquaculture, opening the way for farm-raised seafood to be produced in federal waters as long as the operations do not threaten wild fish stocks or saltwater ecosystems.

 The guidelines, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, offer general standards that regional fishery councils will have to meet when they propose fish farms.

 Aquaculture has been growing rapidly worldwide, and in 2009, farmed fish and shellfish surpassed wild-caught stocks as the major source of seafood worldwide.

 NOAA estimates that 84 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is now imported, and half of that is produced through aquaculture.
–The New York Times

Ex-Sens. Frederickson, Lessard join DNR
Gov. Mark Dayton announced that former GOP state Sen. Dennis Frederickson will be southern director for the Department of Natural Resources. He also announced that former Sen Bob Lessard will be a senior adviser to DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr. Chris Niskanen, the outdoors writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, will also be communications director for the DNR. 

Frederickson served as a state Senator from 1980 – 2010. He decided against running for reelection. Lessard served in the Minnesota Senate from 1976 – 2003. He was a member of the DFL Party and the Independence Party during his time in office. 

Niskanen is a prominent outdoors writer who worked for the Pioneer Press for 17 years. 

“We went out and found the very best people we could to lead us into the future,” said Landwehr in a news release. “I’m very excited about leveraging their skill and experience to better reach out to the people of Minnesota and represent their needs and concerns.”
–Minnesota Public Radio

 Apple Valley, Burnsville agree on runoff
After years of looking for ways to deal with water pollution, Burnsville and Apple Valley have reached an agreement to create a large holding pond to collect storm runoff. 

Apple Valley will build the new Whitney pond this summer on land owned by Burnsville in Lac Lavon Park. The pond, expected to be completed by November, also will have a walking trail around it. 

“It’s a great partnership between the two cities,” said Terry Shultz, Burnsville’s director of parks, recreation and natural resources. “It will greatly improve the water quality of Keller Lake and Crystal Lake.” 

The two lakes are on the state’s list of impaired waterways, Shultz said, and the new Whitney pond will allow the cities to lower the phosphorous levels in those lakes.
–The Star Tribune

Hugo-area drainage dispute lingers
The century-old Judicial Ditch No. 2 in Hugo is the problem that refuses to die.

 A lawsuit filed against the Rice Creek Watershed District is the latest in a long line of legal conflicts over the drainage ditch, which has been making headlines for more than a decade because of flooding, farmers’ complaints and bickering between government agencies.

 The watershed district voted in December to alter a small dam in the ditch. In January, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and Hugo farmer Fran Miron sued the district.

The DNR claims the district needs DNR permission to do anything that will affect the water level of nearby Rice Lake. Miron is asking the court to force the district to either maintain the ditch according to its original specifications or pay for any land that is adversely affected by failing to do so.

An attorney for the district said attempts have been made to compromise with the DNR, including offers to let the DNR take over the dam, and that the Miron claim was made once before and already addressed by the court.
–The St. Paul Pioneer Press

 U.S. House chided on bottled water
If the Potomac River, which supplies water to the nation’s capital, had run dry, Congress might be able to explain itself. But it hasn’t.  

And that has left one group calling out the U.S. House for spending $860,000 last year on bottled water — money it says could have gone toward installing fountains of perfectly potable water. 

 A report from the nonprofit Corporate Accountability International found that between April 2009 and March 2010, House lawmakers spent an average of $2,000 per member on bottled water. 
–FoxNews.com

 Climate change tracked in Wisconsin
Recent findings from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and University of Wisconsin researchers suggests the effects of climate change have been accelerating over the past 60 years and could drastically transform the state’s idyllic landscape in the future. 

The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts, a group of experts and scientists from across the state, released the report as the culmination of nearly three-and-a-half years of research. 

Using data from the past 60 years and as far back as the 1800s, researchers tracked ongoing trends of climate change distributed across the state to make projections as to what the climate is going to look like in 50 years, said Lewis Gilbert, associate director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

Gilbert said the results of this statistical analysis were combined with global climate models that had been scaled down to better reflect the size of the state.
–The Badger Herald 

Research: Algae affect fish hormonally
Fertilizer runoff from farms can feed blooms of toxic cyanobacteria, which are deadly to pets and livestock. As if that weren’t enough to worry about, new research suggests for the first time that the blooms also could disrupt reproduction in aquatic wildlife through estrogenic effects (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es103538b).

 Until now, most studies of Microcystis aeruginosa, the most common bloom-forming cyanobacterium, have focused on the bacterium’s 80 or so microcystin toxins, says Ted Henry, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Plymouth, in the U.K. The toxins can cause massive internal bleeding and liver damage in mammals and fish.

 Henry, Emily Rogers of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and their colleagues stumbled on the estrogenic actions when they were looking for genes that turn on when fish encounter Microcystis. They hoped that these genes could serve as biomarkers for bloom events in lakes when biologists observe fish die offs. “We wanted to develop a short list of genes that would determine whether a fish had been exposed to Microcystis or not,” Henry says.
–Chemical & Engineering News

Health costs of fossil fuels; irrigation’s demand

The cost — in terms of health care — of fossil fuels. A looming battle in California over desalination. The demands irrigators make on the Colorado River’s waters. Check out these articles and more, then follow the links to read them in their entirety where they originally were published.

Fossil fuels add billions in health costs
Burning fossil fuels costs the United States about $120 billion a year in health costs, mostly because of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution, the National Academy of Sciences reported in a study.

The damages are caused almost equally by coal and oil, according to the study, which was ordered by Congress. The study set out to measure the costs not incorporated into the price of a kilowatt-hour or a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel.

The estimates by the academy do not include damages from global warming, which has been linked to the gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The authors said the extent of such damage, and the timing, were too uncertain to estimate.
–The New York Times

Water shortages put target on irrigators
Along its final miles, the Colorado River snakes through a dizzying series of dams, canals, siphons and ditches, diverted to hundreds of users in Arizona and California until barely a trickle remains.

What flows through this watery Grand Central Station could fill the needs of all the homes and offices in Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas and much of Southern California.

But it doesn’t.

The water, more than a billion gallons a day, irrigates vast fields of wheat, alfalfa, cotton, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, melons and a produce aisle of other fruits and vegetables, feeding an industry tilled from the desert more than a century ago.

In Arizona, the crops yield about 1 percent of the state’s annual economic output, yet the fields soak up 70 percent of the water supply. That outsize allotment has painted a target on the farms as urban water managers search for the next bucket of water to meet future demands.
–The Arizona Republic

Desalination plan focus of fight over growth
Nothing about the Marin Municipal Water District storage yard and the run-down wooden pier protruding into San Francisco Bay give any hint of what they are: the site of what may become one of the fiercest water battles in Northern California in decades.

It is, on the surface, a set piece: an emotional struggle over a large planned water project facing strong environmental opposition. But at a more basic level, it is a contest over the ever-volatile issue of growth in Marin County.

The district is proposing to use both the yard and the Marin Rod & Gun Club pier as locations for a desalination plant that would suck up saltwater and initially could produce about five million gallons of water a day for its 190,000 customers, an increase of 6 percent in the district’s supply.
–The New York Times

Hugo Chavez calls for 3-minute showers
Leftist President Hugo Chavez called on Venezuelans to stop singing in the shower and to wash in three minutes because the oil-exporting nation is having problems supplying water and electricity.

Venezuela has suffered several serious blackouts in the past year because of rapidly growing demand and under-investment, which has been aggravated by a drop in water levels in hydroelectric dams that provide most of its energy.

Chavez announced energy-saving measures and said he would create a ministry to deal with the electricity shortages, which have affected the image of his socialist revolution before legislative elections due in 2010.
–Reuters

Corps wants Red River flood choice by Dec. 1
Fargo-Moorhead officials finally have plenty of options for flood control.

But it will test their ability to work together to quickly pick a plan by Dec. 1 that could determine the area’s safety for decades.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers presented an array of diversion and levee options at a meeting of the Metropolitan Flood Management Committee at the Moorhead Marriott .

With the project on a tight timetable, corps engineer Craig Evans said his agency needs to know by Dec. 1 whether it’s a diversion channel in Minnesota or North Dakota, or levees, that has local support.
–The Forum

Pollution credit trading  market planned
American Farmland Trust is teaming up with Electric Power Research Institute, the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission Duke Energy, American Electric Power, Kieser & Associates, Hunton and Williams, the Miami Conservancy District, University of California at Santa Barbara, Ohio Farm Bureau, Hoosier Rural Electric Cooperative, and Tennessee Valley Authority to establish a water quality trading market across the Ohio River Basin, an area that spans fourteen states.

The project will focus on Ohio and seven nearby states, with the goal of improving water quality in the Ohio River Basin and reducing hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.

Water quality trading creates a market that pays participants for reducing the pollution they emit into watersheds. It creates a market that allows pollution sources who reduce their nutrient emissions or releases below an agreed upon baseline, to generate credits to sell to point sources required to reduce their nutrient releases. Such point sources include public utilities or manufacturing operations. Subsequently, participants are given a financial incentive to reduce their own pollution.
–AgWeb.com

Washington County preserve to grow
Land dedicated to scientific research in south Washington County grew substantially when the Trust for Public Land completed the purchase of 120 acres in Denmark Township.

The land, bought from private landowner Mike Rygh for $1.14 million, will be added to the 200-acre Lost Valley Prairie Scientific and Natural Area and will remain open to the public for walking, exploring, nature observation, educational use and scientific research.
–The Star Tribune

Coloradoans contest Nestle bottled water plan
In many ways Salida, Colo., typifies the 21st-century Rocky Mountain town. Originally founded along a railroad line in the late 1800s, it’s now geared primarily toward tourism.

Among the red brick buildings of the historic center where ranchers, miners, and railroad workers once held sway, tourists now move between coffee shops, galleries, and outfitters. During warmer months, kayakers “surf” a man-made wave in the fast-flowing Arkansas River, which marks the edge of the downtown area.

For the better part of this year, Salida – population 5,400 – has also been the setting for a 21st century kind of battle – over water.
–The Christian Science Monitor

Exxon hit with damages in pollution suit
A federal jury in New York City ruled Exxon Mobil Corp had polluted the city’s ground water and ordered the oil giant to pay $105 million in damages, the city said.

The city contended Exxon knew that gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether would contaminate ground water if it leaked from the underground storage tanks at its retail stations.

Exxon ignored warnings from its own scientists and engineers not to use MTBE in areas of the country that relied on ground water for drinking water, the city said.
–Reuters

Times journalist talks about ‘worsening pollution’
An estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals, parasites, bacteria or viruses, or fails to meet federal health standards. Part of the problem, says journalist Charles Duhigg, is that water-pollution laws are not being enforced.

Duhigg reports on the “worsening pollution in American waters” — and regulators’ responses to the problem — in his New York Times series, “Toxic Waters.” In researching the series, he studied thousands of water pollution records, which he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
–National Public Radio

California considers massive water overhaul
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers are laboring over an ambitious package of policy and spending initiatives that could transform — from dam to tap — how California uses its limited water supply.

If the changes happen, most residents and businesses probably would have to pay more and consume less.

For the first time, statewide law would require farmers to pay a premium if they draw too much water. Among the dozens of potential directives is a proposal for urban customers, including those in the San Diego region, to wring at least 5 percent more in water conservation.

Longer term, the area’s water agencies might be able to compete for billions in state grants to build more storage facilities, invigorate conservation and extend alternative supplies, such as desalination.
–The San Diego Union