In the United States, a water main breaks at least every two minutes. As our nation’s water and wastewater infrastructure ages, the gap between spending and necessary funding for repairs is growing. With the infrastructure funding gap currently at $81 billion, this is an issue that can no longer be ignored.

That’s the message of The Economic Benefits of Investing in Water Infrastructure: How a Failure to Act Would Affect the US Economic Recovery, a new report released by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Value of Water Campaign. Released against the backdrop of the global coronavirus pandemic, the report calls for major increases in government spending to ensure public health and bolster economic recovery efforts.

“Millions of Americans all around the country are really struggling with this dual crisis of COVID-19 and the worst economic crisis that I have certainly seen in my lifetime,” Chief Executive Officer of the US Water Alliance Radhika Fox said during a press conference. “Elected officials are thinking hard [about] what are the best ways to jump start our economy, to jump start growth and to help put people back to work. In that context, the findings of the report … really illustrate that the investment of water infrastructure is one of the best bets that we can make as a nation.”

The study outlines 10- and 20-year projections from econometric models of two future scenarios: one where current investment trends continue, and one where all investment needs for infrastructure are met. What these scenarios show is that appropriate funding for water infrastructure projects has benefits that ripple throughout the economy, touching aspects of nearly all industries — like mining, manufacturing, and health care — that rely on water and wastewater services to function.

“If we fail to act, there [could] be staggering economic losses to GDP, jobs, wages, and increased costs to American families,” Katie Henderson, a senior program manager with the US Water Alliance, said.

If funding needs and infrastructure investment trends continue at current levels, the annual funding gap will grow to $136 billion by 2039. In fact, the U.S. would need to invest a total of $109 billion per year in water infrastructure over the next 20 years in 2019 dollars to close this gap, the report continued.

At a time when our country is struggling, the financial challenges facing water and wastewater utilities will continue to grow due to the revenue losses and increased operational costs incurred during the coronavirus response. According to industry experts, our nation’s drinking water and wastewater utilities will start FY 2021 anywhere from $13.9 billion to $16.8 billion in debt, making the infrastructure picture even more bleak.

“The COVID-19 pandemic only intensifies the need to act and invest across all levels of government. Failing to act now will lead the country into a prolonged era of economic and public health vulnerability,” the report states.

So, what can we do about this issue?

Advocating for investment in infrastructure is important work, and it starts in our own communities. Managing demand through conservation, water recycling, and addressing non-revenue water loss can help extend the life of current systems and should be practiced by water utilities whenever possible. Citizens can turn off taps when brushing their teeth, plant water-wise gardens and lawns, and work with local government to increase awareness of these issues and bolster funding for projects in their community. Finally, with the November elections coming up, we can all use our votes to tell our local, state and federal leaders that water infrastructure is important, vital, and essential to public health and our way of life. I hope you’ll join me in this effort, and as always, thanks for reading.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: https://www.waterworld.com/drinking-water/infrastructure-funding/article/14182721/the-value-of-investing-in-water-infrastructure

The Nile River Basin faces a huge challenge in terms of water security. With an expected doubling of the population in the basin in the next twenty-five years, water supply in the basin will be further depleted as demands for agriculture, domestic and industry continues to grow.

Water availability in the basin will also be threatened by climate change and variability and pollution from increased agricultural and industrial activities and from urban areas. However with limited up-to-date ground observations, in terms of duration, completeness, and quality of the hydro-meteorological records it is difficult to draw an appropriate picture of the water resources conditions.

A new report Water accounting in the Nile River Basin describes the water accounting study for the Nile River Basin carried out by IHE-Delft using the Water Productivity (WaPOR) data portal of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

FOR MORE INFO: https://www.unwater.org/water-accounting-in-the-nile-river-basin/

Nestlé is considering selling most of its bottled water operations in the United States and Canada, the company said on Thursday. That business accounts for a significant share of the Swiss food giant’s sales but has also drawn criticism from environmental groups.

The company generated revenue last year of 3.4 billion Swiss francs, or $3.6 billion, from American water brands it owns like Poland Spring, Deer Park and Zephyrhills, and from delivering purified water to homes and businesses. That figure does not include higher-priced import brands like Perrier, S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna, which are more profitable and which Nestlé intends to keep.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, has come under fire from groups that say it drains natural water supplies to bottle and sell at a profit. Environmental activists regard bottled water as inherently wasteful, at least in countries with drinkable tap water, because of the energy required to transport it to stores. Bottled water also contributes to the global glut of plastic waste.

With corporations under intense pressure to help fight climate change, Mark Schneider, Nestlé’s Tesla-driving chief executive, has been trying to show that the company can be both sustainable and profitable. Nestlé, whose brands of baby formula, ice cream, chocolate, pet food and coffee are omnipresent worldwide, has been moving into plant-based meat substitutes, promising to reduce sugar and fat content in its products, and aiming to make all of its packaging recyclable by 2025.

Nestlé announced on Thursday that, also by 2025, it will replenish all of the water it draws from watersheds while taking measures to offset the carbon dioxide produced by bottled water production and transport.

The Nestlé plant in High Springs.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

During a telephone interview, Mr. Schneider said Nestlé had decided to consider exiting the U.S. water brands in part because they were not selling as well as the company would like. American consumers are less willing to pay for bottled water than Europeans are.

Mr. Schneider acknowledged that environmental concerns had hurt sales. Those concerns are easier to address with imported brands that command a higher price, he said.

“As you go higher in the price range, there is more room to invest in the sustainability goals,” Mr. Schneider said. “The environmental agenda and business agenda are very much aligned.”

Mr. Schneider declined to comment on whether there were any potential buyers for the water business, and noted that there were options besides an outright sale, like a partnership. Last year, Nestlé sold a majority of its Herta lunch meat business in Europe to Casa Tarradellas, a Spanish company, but kept a minority stake.

Zephyrhills water at the Nestlé plant in High Springs.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

FOR MORE INFO: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/business/nestle-us-water-business.html

FOR INTERACTIVE MAP GO HERE!  http://arcg.is/0y1ae9

New Hampshire MAP!

The Green Mountain Conservation Group of Effingham New Hampshire has been running GET WET! since 2008!  They have decided this year to manage their results in an ESRI GIS program!  The drop menu ease of use and differentiation of parameters is incredible and can be used to educate not jus the general public but can now be used by educators in many states!

Hopefully they can add results from all of the years they tested!

The following link shows the 5 towns that encompass both New Hampshire and Maine!  Well done for the multi-state collaboration and excellent representation! New Hampshire MAP!

What’s the Clean Water Act, why is it important, and has it been a success?

In the late 1960s, many U.S. waters were little more than liquid waste dumps. The Cuyahoga River famously caught on fire, as did others. We lacked appreciation for the important functions of wetlands, like filtering pollution and curbing flooding, and allowed rampant destruction of them. And we failed to control the discharge of raw or barely-treated sewage all over the country.

These conditions were widely viewed to be unacceptable, so Congress responded and adopted the Clean Water Act. It was so groundbreaking that a prominent Senator described it as “perhaps the most comprehensive legislation that the Congress of the United States has ever developed in this particular field of the environment.”

The Act has helped us make enormous improvements, but we remain far short of achieving its aims. By virtually any measure, our water bodies are better off today than in 1972. Pollution from industrial operations and sewage treatment plants has been curbed significantly. Industry-specific discharge standards prevent more than 700 billion pounds of toxic pollutants every year. EPA has found that thousands of waterways now meet standards after once being too polluted to be used as states wished. And many of our nation’s most treasured waters, like the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes, have substantially improved.

But the U.S. still has a long way to go before Congress’s vision of fishable and swimmable waters everywhere is achieved. Today, more than half of assessed waters still do not meet all goals that states have established for them. And the country continues to lose wetlands, despite their widely-acknowledged ecological benefits.

I.      How does the Clean Water Act work?

The power of the Clean Water Act comes from the “comprehensive” scope it was designed to have. It includes pollution control programs for almost any kind of discharge you can imagine, and virtually every one of the Act’s critical safeguards applies wherever there is a water body that is considered a “water of the United States.” Those protections include:

• The national goal that pollutant discharges “be eliminated by 1985”;
• The absolute prohibition on discharging “any radiological, chemical, or biological warfare agent, any high-level radioactive waste, or any medical waste”;
• The core requirement that if an entity is going to discharge pollutants into waters from a pipe or similar conveyance, it must first apply for and obtain a permit that limits the pollutants allowed to be discharged;
• The obligation that states develop water quality standards protecting uses—like swimming or fishing—that the waterway should support and that EPA reviews to ensure they are adequately protective;
• EPA’s review of cleanup targets to restore impaired waters;
• The requirement to develop water body-specific control strategies to address toxic pollution problems;
• The obligation that states prepare biennial reports on water quality conditions;
• Protections against the discharge of oil or hazardous substances;
• The bar on a vessel that “is not equipped with an operable marine sanitation device” from operating in protected waters;
• The directive for states to develop management programs for pollution like agricultural runoff, and the related directive that EPA provide grants to assist with the implementation of such programs;
• The directive that applicants for federal permits (like pipelines) first obtain the state’s okay that the discharge will comply with various requirements; and
• Restrictions on the disposal of sewage sludge.

The federal law also empowers people affected by water pollution to go to court to enforce its critical safeguards.

Because these protections are triggered by the presence of “waters of the United States,” industrial polluters have long fought to shrink what qualifies for that designation to just the largest rivers and lakes in the country. Thanks to the Trump administration, they might soon get a lot of what they’ve wished for.

II.        What does the Dirty Water Rule proposal say?

The proposal would end decades of protection for several different kinds of water bodies, namely rain-dependent streams, wetlands without specified surface water connections to other waterways, certain ponds, and interstate waters. Although some of these features might be protected under other parts of the rule (for instance, the rule protects waters you can float a boat on), there’s no question that this would be the biggest backtrack on Clean Water Act coverage in the 46 years we’ve had the law.

The justification for this retreat? The administration claims it is making the rules clearer so that it’s easy to figure out what is in and out, but that’s hogwash – the proposal fails to define critical terms (like how often a stream needs to flow to qualify for coverage) and acknowledges that essential facts (like whether a stream is fed by groundwater or what the “typical” flow of a water body is) are either difficult or potentially costly to ascertain.

What’s really going on here, then, is that the proposal is just a giveaway to polluting industry. Fewer water bodies are protected, which means fewer restrictions on polluting and destroying such waters, which means industrial polluters need to devote less resources to complying with pollution limits.

III.       How bad will the Dirty Water Rule be for the country?

Here’s the most bananas part of the whole scheme—the administration claims not to know how many water bodies will be affected and says it’s unable for a variety of reasons to quantify the public health and environmental consequences of the proposal. If that’s true, it’s irrational and reckless.

The Clean Water Act is supposed to protect people from swimming in dangerously contaminated waters, catching fish that are unhealthy to eat, or drinking water supplies fouled by industrial pollution or sewage discharges. It also is a key restriction on wetlands destruction, which helps preserve their flood-protection functions. But the Trump administration wants you to just accept that it doesn’t know how prevalent those public health and safety threats might be if it persists with its plan.

The administration doesn’t even deny that its proposal could hurt people. In fact, they produced the figure below that traces some (but not nearly all) of the scary outcomes that could flow from restricting the coverage of just three Clean Water Act programs.

However, the administration—over and over again—says that it can’t reliably estimate the degree to which the nation’s waters will be affected by the proposal, much less the adverse impacts that will result from their scheme. I suspect that’s not because it can’t be done; my guess is that they’re hiding the ball to try to avoid the public outrage that would come from an honest assessment of the harm the proposal could lead to.

I think that’s also why EPA has assailed estimates of the potential impacts of the proposal and even disavowed prior work that the agency itself did, which indicates that at least 18% of streams and roughly half of the wetlands in the country would lose protection under the law.

Wow, that’s terrible. It couldn’t get worse, right?

The proposal is scary enough on its face, but what’s truly terrifying is that EPA has hidden a bunch of Easter eggs (rotten ones, that is) in the document, which would allow them to adopt a far worse final rule later. For instance, the proposal invites input on whether EPA should also exclude seasonal streams from federal protection, in addition to rain-dependent ones.

And the anti-clean water forces aren’t dumb—you can bet they’ll reinforce this message in their public posturing about the proposal and in their comments on it. In fact, in an opinion piece reacting to the Dirty Water Rule proposal, a senior attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation—which commonly litigates cases challenging the implementation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act—argues that the proposal isn’t nearly aggressive enough in slashing protections. He claims that the “lackluster proposal” would still give too much authority to “overzealous enforcement bureaucrats” at EPA.

Is all hope lost?

This is not a done deal by any stretch of the imagination. The Trump administration must take public comment on the proposal, respond substantively to those comments, and will undoubtedly face a tidal wave of litigation if it persists.

And there’s a historical precedent for stopping these kinds of attacks. Early in President George W. Bush’s administration, EPA considered weakening these same protections, though far less drastically than the Trump administration’s proposal now. In response to overwhelming opposition from states, hunters and anglers, and other concerned citizens, that initiative was scuttled.

So, please tell the administration what you think—again, NRDC’s comment pagecouldn’t be simpler—and let them know that you don’t want them dumping all over your right to clean water.

FOR MORE INFO: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/jon-devine/lowdown-trumps-lowdown-dirty-water-rule

Congratulations to our students who presented at the 28th annual Southwest Florida Water Resource Conference in Ft. Myers yesterday. Joseph Rubsamen ’19 placed first, and Blake Weger ’19 placed second. Congrats to all our students who presented their research at the conference. Once again, Oxbridge Academy was the only high school presenting research at the conference.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fmedia%2Fset%2F%3Fset%3Da.2120575527999180%26type%3D3&width=500“>More info HERE

Lara Carter ’19 was named one of two winners at the American Water Resources Association national conference last month. Lara presented her research on “The determination of the pharmaceutical NSAID flunixin in surface water sources as a result of large animal waste runoff in rural communities of South Florida.” Lara competed against college students, and Oxbridge was the only high school present at the conference. Congrats, Lara!

FOR MORE INFO: https://www.facebook.com/OxbridgeAcademy/photos/a.170261403030612/2059861107403956/?type=3&theateremy/