As drought-stricken Arizona bakes in searing heat, the Scottsdale City Council unanimously agreed this week to ban natural grass in front of future single-family homes in an effort to conserve water.
The new ordinance will apply to new houses constructed or permitted after August 15.
“By adopting this ordinance, Scottsdale aims to lead the way in water conservation practices, setting an example for other communities across the region,” said Brian Biesemeyer, executive director of Scottsdale’s water department.
According to Scottsdale City Council, feedback gathered from Scottsdale Water customers in June found that 86% of those who responded supported the ordinance.
“It’s a positive step that supports responsible use of our water resources and an initiative that works in tandem with Scottsdale Water’s existing residential and commercial rebate programs that offer water saving options and maintain the beauty and functionality of Scottsdale’s neighborhoods,” the city council said in a news release.
In recent years, Arizona has implemented various methods to conserve water as the Southwest grapples with soaring temperatures, groundwater shortages and drought conditions.
Parts of Arizona have been in a long-term drought since the mid-1990s, according to the Arizona State Climate Office.
Prior to the natural grass ordinance, Scottsdale officials asked residents to use 5% less water, and city government operations reduced their water usage by 9%. Ultimately, the city saved about 657 million gallons of water, the city council said.
Across the state, Arizonans are sweltering from weeks of scorching temperatures. Temperatures in Phoenix, for example, have reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit every day this month.
And meteorologists expect the weekend heat will be record-breaking, reaching a staggering 119 degrees in some parts.
An extreme heat wave in the Southwest could pose a risk to Lake Powell’s water levels, which have been steadily increasing all summer.
After an extended drought period, Lake Powell, which is in Utah and Arizona, reached drastically low levels last summer, but levels began rising in earnest in April after California experienced a wet winter. The above-average snowfall in the mountains led to an increased snowpack melt that has continued to supplement Lake Powell, as well as Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada, this summer.
Lake Powell’s intake has been slowing as snowpack melt stops for the summer. The lake has seen a steep increase in recent months, with water levels rising more than 60 feet since mid-April. Levels are more than 45 feet higher than this time last year, but the increase has started to slow, and on some days the lake is losing water.
A decrease in levels is typical in the summer months as snowpack melt stops and the region enters a dry period, and a heat wave may exacerbate the lake’s tendency to lose water during summer months, according to AccuWeather senior meteorologist David Houk.
“We’re in a better position than we were last year at this time, but now we start to see the drain on the overall hydrological levels across the entire basin,” Houk told Newsweek.
He added that during the hot summer months, it is typical for water to drain out of the reservoirs and not be resupplied until the winter, when precipitation usually resumes.
However, despite the positive intake this spring and the first part of the summer, NewsNation reported that inflows are expected to plateau, and the Colorado River basin reservoirs aren’t predicted to rise again until next year, when runoff resumes.
A spokesperson from the Bureau of Reclamation said that decades of drought could not be fixed by a single season of good rainfall as Lake Powell currently stands at just 41 percent capacity.
Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation by email for comment on Thursday.
wet and cool start to 2023 helped Southern Nevada consume 25 percent less water from the drought-stricken Colorado River through the first five months of the year.
From January through May, the region’s consumptive use from the river was just under 61,000 acre-feet of water, Warren Turkett, a natural resource analyst for the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, told commissioners Tuesday.
That’s down from nearly 82,000 acre-feet of water consumed during the same period last year, which was near the same amount the valley consumed in 2021 (84,489 acre-feet) and 2020 (80,885 acre-feet).
Turkett said that reduction is due to continued conservation efforts coupled with weather that was cooler and far wetter than usual. But whether the region can keep that pace up for the entire year remains to be seen, especially with the latest seasonal forecast showing conditions that are likely to be warmer and drier than normal through September.
“It will be telling to see what happens over the summer months because those are the biggest water use months,” Turkett told commissioners. “The next few months … hopefully will be consistent with keeping that reduction.”
Nevada normally gets 300,000 acre-feet of water from the river each year, but low water levels at Lake Mead have reduced that down to 275,000 acre-feet this year through prior drought agreements.
After cutting its consumptive water use to 224,000 acre-feet last year — a reduction of about 8 percent compared with 2021 — Nevada is on pace to use even less water this year. The latest projection from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released Tuesday shows the state on pace to consume about 202,000 acre-feet this year.
Consumptive use is the measurement of the total amount of water the region has used from the Colorado River minus Nevada’s return flow credits, which allow the state to pull extra water out of the river for every gallon of treated wastewater Southern Nevada sends back to Lake Mead.
That agreement, which needs to be approved by the Bureau of Reclamation, would require Nevada to keep an additional 75,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead in 2023 and 2024, with slightly smaller saving commitments the following two years.
The federal government is reviewing the proposal and has said it plans to release a draft environmental impact statement for the proposal this fall.
From climate change to species loss and pollution, humans have etched their impact on Earth with such strength and permanence since the middle of the 20th century that a special team of scientists says a new geologic epoch began then.
Called the Anthropocene — and derived from the Greek terms for “human” and “new” — this epoch started sometime between 1950 and 1954, according to the scientists. While there is evidence worldwide that captures the impact of burning fossil fuels, detonating nuclear weapons and dumping fertilizers and plastics on land and in waterways, the scientists are proposing a small but deep lake outside of Toronto, Canada — Crawford Lake — to place a historic marker.
“It’s quite clear that the scale of change has intensified unbelievably and that has to be human impact,” said University of Leicester geologist Colin Waters, who chaired the Anthropocene Working Group.
This puts the power of humans in a somewhat similar class with the meteorite that crashed into Earth 66 million years ago, killing off dinosaurs and starting the Cenozoic Era, or what is conversationally known as the age of mammals. But not quite. While that meteorite started a whole new era, the working group is proposing that humans only started a new epoch, which is a much smaller geologic time period.
The group aims to determine a specific start date of the Anthropocene by measuring plutonium levels at the bottom of Crawford Lake.
The idea of the Anthropocene was proposed at a science conference more than 20 years ago by the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. Teams of scientists have debated the issue since then and finally set up the working group to study whether it was needed and, if so, when the epoch would start and where it would be commemorated.
Crawford Lake, which is 79 feet (29 meters) deep and 258,333 square feet (24,000 square meters) in area, was chosen over 11 other sites because the annual effects of human activity on the earth’s soil, atmosphere and biology are so clearly preserved in its layers of sediment. That includes everything from nuclear fallout to species-threatening pollution to steadily rising temperatures.
There are distinct and multiple signals starting around 1950 in Crawford Lake showing that “the effects of humans overwhelm the Earth system,” said Francine McCarthy, a committee member who specializes in that site as an Earth sciences professor at Brock University in Canada.
“The remarkably preserved annual record of deposition in Crawford Lake is truly amazing,” said U.S. National Academies of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, who wasn’t part of the committee.
The Anthropocene shows the power — and hubris — of humankind, several scientists said.
“The hubris is in imagining that we are in control,” said former U.S. White House science adviser John Holdren, who was not part of the working group of scientists and disagrees with its proposed start date, wanting one much earlier. “The reality is that our power to transform the environment has far exceeded our understanding of the consequences and our capacity to change course.”
Geologists measure time in eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages. The scientific working group is proposing that Anthropocene Epoch followed the Holocene Epoch, which started about 11,700 years ago at the end of an ice age.
They are also proposing that it starts a new age, called Crawfordian after the lake chosen as its starting point.
The proposal still needs to be approved by three different groups of geologists and could be signed off at a major conference next year.
The reason geologists didn’t declare the Anthropocene the start of a bigger and more important time measurement, such as a period, is because the current Quaternary Period, which began nearly 2.6 million years ago, is based on permanent ice on Earth’s poles, which still exist. But in a few hundred years, if climate change continues and those disappear, it may be time to change that, Waters said.
“If you know your Greek tragedies you know power, hubris, and tragedy go hand in hand,” said Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes, a working group member. “If we don’t address the harmful aspects of human activities, most obviously disruptive climate change, we are headed for tragedy.”
California’s effort to secure water supplies is a struggle older than the state itself.
It played out during the Gold Rush, and it defines modern San Francisco and Los Angeles. It has created divisions between north and south as well as east and west. It consumes endless political energy and mountains of literal energy, spent by moving water from the Sacramento Bay Delta to San Jose and Southern California, from the Colorado River to the Los Angeles basin, from the Sierra Nevada to the Bay Area.
In all of that, Mono Lake is a small data point, barely a dot on the state’s vast water map. So why is Mono Lake suddenly attracting attention in water circles?
A coalition of environmentalists and Native American tribes – the Kutzadika’a Paiute have lived in the Mono basin for centuries – are fighting for that water, arguing that Los Angeles, which began diverting streams away from the lake in 1941, should give up its rights and let the lake be. That would allow Mono Lake’s surface level to rise, though it still would confront the more ancient problem of evaporation.
There’s a lot of history behind this struggle, as there is in all matters involving California water. And that early history does not reflect well on the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s stewardship of Mono Lake. After receiving its permits to draw water from the area in 1940, the DWP did so voraciously. The level of the lake dropped by 45 feet from 1941 to 1982.
Paradoxically, the argument for forcing Los Angeles to end its diversions from the Mono basin now rests largely on the fact that, since 1994, it hasn’t drawn that much water anyway. So, if it’s already prevented from taking more, why not stop drawing this water altogether? To advocates, that seems like common sense; to the DWP, it feels like being punished for having succeeded.
In the big scheme of things, it’s true that the amounts that DWP takes from the Mono Lake basin are tiny (no water is drawn from the lake itself, since it’s briny; the DWP gets its water from four creeks that feed the lake). Today, the DWP withdraws no more than 16,000 acre feet a year, and it often takes much less than that.
Compared to Los Angeles’ overall usage, that’s a pittance. The city consumes about 500,000 acre feet of water annually, so even in a big year, the water from the Mono watershed amounts to no more than about 3% of the total.
Still, that’s enough water to supply some 45,000 homes or as many as 200,000 people in the denser areas of Los Angeles (San Francisco, with its more tightly packed population and fewer gardens, stretches an acre foot of water to about eight households).
Then there are the birds. Mono Lake is an important way station for migratory birds and a vital shorebird habitat. If the level of the lake falls too low, it exposes land bridges that connect the lake’s major nesting island to shore, allowing coyotes to dart across the bridge and disrupt the birds. That makes keeping the lake level high enough to preserve the islands an important priority.
And yet, despite recent droughts – and even with the DWP’s diversions – the water has not fallen to the level that creates coyote bridges in decades. The level of the lake today is more than 10 feet higher than it was in 1981, according to the DWP.
“There’s nothing even remotely like a land bridge out there now,” Martin Adams, the DWP’s general manager and chief engineer, said in an interview this week.
On the issue of conservation, I asked Adams whether he would walk away from the agency’s water rights in the Mono Lake area if the DWP could find an additional 16,000 acre feet through conservation.
His answer was simple: no.
The DWP’s first priority with conservation, he said, is to cut back on importing water from expensive, environmentally inferior alternatives. If suddenly granted a windfall, “we’ll purchase less water from the Metropolitan Water District,” he said.
That makes good financial sense. Metropolitan water is expensive – about $750 per acre foot – because it has to be shipped, either from Northern California through the State Water Project or from the Colorado River, where other states and Native American tribes are fighting for their rights.
But it’s not just money. There are environmental ramifications as well, and Martin’s priorities make good environmental sense. Metropolitan water has to be shipped long distances, and as a result, it requires huge amounts of electrical power (water is heavy and very hard to move uphill). In fact, moving water from point to point is among the largest uses of electricity in California.
Since generating electricity is one of the main contributors to carbon emissions, it’s bad for the climate to move water.
By contrast, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the genius project of William Mulholland, brings water to Los Angeles from Mono and the Owens Valley by gravity alone. In fact, it generates a bit of power as it flows south. That’s the opposite of spending energy to heave water over mountains from the Bay Delta or the Colorado.
So, financially, it does not make sense for DWP to cut off Mono Lake supplies. And the environmental costs would be mixed: It might shore up bird habitat that is not presently jeopardized, but it would do so at the expense of contributing to climate change.
I ran all of this by Jeff Kightlinger, former general manager of the Metropolitan Water District and one of California’s most highly regarded water experts. Kightlinger doesn’t have a dog in this fight. If anything, a decision by the DWP to abandon its rights to Mono Lake water would help Kightlinger’s former agency, since DWP might be forced to buy more water from Southern California’s giant importer.
Nevertheless, Kightlinger sympathized with the DWP on this one.
Yes, he said, there are issues related to birds, but those mostly seem under control – no land bridges are endangering the nesting areas. And yes, there are gains to made in conservation, but Kightlinger agreed with Adams that it’s hard to see why the DWP would give up a clean water source in the eastern Sierra, where it gets water essentially for free, in return for spending more money and using more energy to buy it from Metropolitan.
“All of these resource decisions involve trade-offs,” he said. “I’m not hearing the compelling argument in this case.”
Could that change? Of course – if the lake levels begin dropping again, putting the birds in danger. Or, if prolonged drought meant that even the DWP’s modest withdrawals from the area’s creeks cut off the supply to the lake and it falls into a downward spiral.
If history is any guide, this fight will drag on for a long time. For the moment, a very wet winter has allowed it to not feel pressing. But it hasn’t gone away.
California has taken a big step towards boosting how much sewage water local governments can purify and reuse for drinking — a process known as water recycling. On Tuesday, the state proposed draft regulations to expand recycling by introducing new purification standards and processes.
Why now: California law currently doesn’t allow cities to put recycled wastewater directly into municipal water distribution systems. Instead, cities are required to first inject that water underground into an aquifer, where further, natural filtration occurs.
What’s proposed: These new regulations would allow putting recycled water directly into the local water system, allowing more cities to recycle water that don’t happen to have an underground basin to store water, or don’t have enough space in groundwater basins because of past pollution, which is the case in L.A.
Why it matters: The climate crisis is driving longer and more extreme droughts, pushing our already overstretched water supplies to the brink. Recycling more water for drinking is one way Southland cities are working to lessen reliance on imported water from the Colorado River and northern California.
What’s next: The State Water Board will hear feedback on the regulations and plans to consider adoption of final regulations before the end of the year. See current recycled water projects in the state here.
By Jennifer Möller-Gulland with J. Carl Ganter and Cody T. Pope
BENGALURU, India – In a small town in the suburbs of this booming city, K.V. Muniraju knows all too well the decade-old battle of securing water for his crops. With groundwater tables continuously falling, the middle-aged farmer once borrowed heavily to dig wells ever deeper.
If he was lucky, he found water. If he was unlucky, he didn’t. If he was really unlucky, he found a hint of water and proceeded to invest in the well infrastructure, only to see the well run dry and trap him in debt.
That happened to Muniraju in 1994 and 1995, when he was forced to direct water into his fields from nearby storm water drains.
Then came apparent salvation. In 1998 the nearby town installed a sewer system and discharged the untreated wastewater through the same storm water drains alongside his fields. In the 20 years since, Muniraju has had a secure water source to grow his crops.
The steady water supply, though it reeks, also contains high nutrient concentrations. That enables Muniraju to increase production while reducing input costs, such as fertilizers. His standard of living has increased – he built a stone house and sent his three sons and two daughters to school and college.
Across India, and particularly in the nation’s big metropolitan regions, countless numbers of farmers like K.V. Muniraju raise their crops with untreated wastewater. Medical specialists say farmers and their families risk serious disease from exposure to harmful sewage-borne microorganisms and metals. Scientists have measured unsafe levels of heavy metals and other toxic substances in Indian crops – posing a public health threat if consumed.
Indian public health and safety authorities have displayed limited action in tackling the impending public health crisis. Just 30 percent of wastewater undergoes any sort of treatment before being discharged in a wretched stream of industrial effluent that contains heavy metals and toxic chemicals. To date there is no regulatory framework for testing primary products, such as vegetable and fruits, for toxic contaminants. The widespread use of untreated wastewater – particularly in urban and peri-urban areas – to grow a considerable portion of India’s food supply, coupled with current inaction from officials, has converged to produce, say some scientists, a toxic time bomb in a nation that soon will overtake China to become the world’s largest.
“It is a complex nexus,” said Sumit Kumar Gautam, an environmental scientist at the Center for Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) in New Delhi. “If surface water is contaminated with untreated effluent, farmers use this for irrigation. The farmer is exposed to all contaminants and is likely to experience diarrhoea, bronchitis, skin diseases, eye irritation etc. The contaminants enter the soil, the biomass and thus enter the food chain. The entire food chain is contaminated because of this untreated effluent.”
The motivation for farmers to use wastewater to raise their crops is plainly evident in a convergence of three primary nation-testing challenges – rapid population growth and urbanization, increasing demand for food, and seriously depleted reserves of clean water.
Driven by economic opportunities, India’s megacities are growing fast. A 2010 study by McKinsey estimated that urban expansion is projected to happen twice as quickly as in the past – unlike any urbanization India has seen before – with 590 million people living in cities by 2030, or 170 million more than today.
But the supply of clean fresh water to produce food is diminishing. Rivers and lakes are profoundly polluted, according to state and government studies. And groundwater reserves are shrinking fast from over pumping. Fresh water scarcity is made worse by deep and lengthy droughts that grip India with increasing regularity and ferocity. According to the latest assessment by the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI), 70 percent of the country’s fresh water – in the ground or on the surface – also is contaminated.
Fresh water, in sum, is in the worst condition in India’s history, according to the NITI report that was released in June by Nitin Gadkari, minister of water resources. India, said the study, was snared in “the worst water crisis” in its history. The report found that at least 600 million Indians – almost half the country – contend with high or extreme water stress.
The single water supply that is still plentiful, though, is a stream of treated and untreated municipal and industrial wastewater.
Digging Deeper Into Food Supplies
The Hindon River, once the lifeline in one of the most fertile and productive agricultural regions in northern India is now one of the most polluted stretches in the Ganga Basin due to the discharge of untreated, highly polluted industrial, municipal and agricultural wastewater. Key industries upstream include paper mills, sugar processing and associated alcohol distilleries, as well as dairies, textile factories, tanneries, and informal battery manufacturing units. While it is mandatory to treat industrial effluent, water pollution levels show that this is not adhered to, nor enforced.
Krishan Pal Singh, an environmental activist in Doula Village remembers when farmers could safely use surface water to irrigate. That was before the 1980s. Then industries settled in the region and abstracted groundwater and polluted surface water.
The cocktail of heavy metals and pesticides carried by the Hindon have accumulated in the river sediments and seeped into the ground. Now groundwater is polluted, too. A study in 2009 found manganese, lead, zinc, copper, chromium, iron, and elevated levels of cadmium in river sediments. The industrial wastes aggravate any potential measures to clean the Hindon and reverse the decades-old contamination.
Downstream in Muzaffarnagar, an industrial city, the Hindon River is a pitiful sight. It looks more like a sewage canal than a river. Its stench is overwhelming. A mass of solid waste in the river forms a dam, limiting its flow. Dogs roam the landfill, happily picking up pieces of meat discharged by a slaughterhouse upstream. Along the river banks, farmers harvest corn. “The water is so polluted, we can only grow resistant crops,” said one farmer. “Half of our chili plants have diseases and at times the industries discharge acid, which damages the crops. If we use river water or not – we always lose.”
A bit further downstream, farmers transplant rice paddies, standing knee deep and without any protection in untreated wastewater. The head farmer explained that skin diseases are an issue at times. But he appreciates the fertilizing qualities of the untreated wastewater and the money he saves.
Further downstream, farmers from the village of Surana in the Bagpat district, said that surface water is of such bad quality that crops are of bad quality now, too. While they have no means of testing their water or crops for toxins, they realize that the quality of crops worsen with greater proximity to the river.
The farmers link the increased rate of diseases, particularly skin diseases, to the deteriorating water quality. “Kids are born healthy, but fall ill very quickly afterwards,” one farmer said. “Over time we realized that some crops are riskier to consume than others. Lentils seem to be less contaminated, so we eat them. Other vegetables, such as cauliflower, okra, and aubergine seem more contaminated. We believe they are unfit for consumption, so we don’t eat them. We sell them to the markets in Delhi.”
Bengaluru’s Foaming Lakes
Bengaluru was previously known for its beautiful lakes, which also served as lifeline for the city by collecting monsoon water and providing clean drinking water during the dry season when all rivers went dry. Today, the lakes are full of wastewater.
Bellandur Lake and Varthur Lake have gained international attention for frothing and catching fire as a result of untreated wastewater discharges. The wastewater contains nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon. It also contains sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. The chemistry causes foam to form and accumulate.
Like a giant, smelly bathtub, big balls of snowy white suds roll across the water. The suds sometimes grow to be 30 to 40 feet high and, in a blizzard of bubbles, have even stopped traffic on the decaying bridge that spans the river. The suds are a soup of detergents and surfactants from the city upstream.
The lakes also catch fire. The water contains highly flammable compounds, namely hydrocarbon and organic polymers, as well as phosphates from detergents, from industries close to Bellandur Lake.
Vishwanath Srikantaiah, an environmental activist, said that the groundwater on which the city depends, has become harder to access as wells go deeper, and that people are using more detergent to wash their clothes – which then gets discharged untreated into waterways.
Circle of Blue followed the outflow of the lakes to the Koramangala-Challaghatta valley, where it is received, by grateful farmers, for irrigation and crop production for Bengaluru and its surroundings. Surresh, Shenkar, and Ramakrishna are farmers in their 30s and 40s in the village of Mugalur, downstream of Varthur Lake.
When groundwater got scarce, the river became their lifeline. Until three years ago they could use it for their crops. Since then, water was mixed with foam and the quality and productivity of the crops went down – for rice even by 50 percent. ”Foam is in pipes, in the fields. It’s toxic, as at times when it foams badly, we can set the foam on fire. We use the little groundwater we have to grow our own food. The rest we sell to buyers who bring it to Bengaluru’s markets. We don’t eat it,” they said.
Their buyers, they said, know that untreated wastewater is used to grow the crops. But it does not concern them. Their crops enter the food supply unchecked.
Heavy Metals Through Untreated Wastewater
It is well-documented in the scientific literature that water used for irrigation containing heavy metals is a crucial pathway for the toxic chemicals to enter the food supply chain and be absorbed by consumers. Various studies have shown that long-term irrigation with wastewater results in a build-up of heavy metals in the soil – even if the concentrations in the wastewater are low. That, in turn, results in toxicity to plants and food contamination. Metals also accumulate in the body, increasing in concentration over time, which can result in cancers, genetic mutations, and malnutrition.
Despite the scientifically proven pathways for contamination, and the prevalence of wastewater-irrigated agriculture, surprisingly few raw food sample tests have been conducted across India.
As part of a research project from 2000 to 2003, the UK Department for International Development tested heavy metal contamination in spinach from various markets in Delhi, including the wholesale market in Azadpur. Every sample exceeded the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s international CODEX safety standard for lead. Nearly three quarters of the samples – 73 percent — were found to exceed accepted PFA global public health safety standards for lead. Almost a quarter – 24 percent — contained twice the PFA standard. A fifth of the samples also had markedly elevated levels of zinc.
In a 2015 study, a team of Indian researchers assessed residues of cadmium, lead, zinc, and copper in vegetables in five markets in Delhi. They found that a significant proportion of vegetables contained levels of zinc, lead, and cadmium above safe concentrations.
In a third assessment, of 22 varieties of vegetables grown in the Delhi region, researchers found nickel and lead concentrations in excess of permissible limits.
Similarly, in Bengaluru, food samples from various markets showed that all tested food – including fruits/curd, root vegetables, and leafy vegetables – had at least one heavy metal residue that exceeded the Indian Food Standard. When applying international standards on food safety, the picture becomes even bleaker. Most samples exceeded all international thresholds for analysed heavy metal content.
In 2012, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in Delhi and one of India’s most renowned research organizations, assessed the health risks from eating crops grown on the banks of the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganga that flows through New Delhi. It found that the agricultural soil along the Yamuna contained levels of nickel, manganese, lead, and mercury above international standards. Treated and untreated wastewater discharged to the river was identified as the source.
TERI also found that vegetables grown in the Yamuna flood plain – a 22-kilometer (14-mile) stretch – had higher levels of heavy metals. TERI tested urine and blood samples from women and children in that area and found significantly higher levels of mercury, chromium, and lead than those of the rural population. Most strikingly, 23 percent of sampled children had blood lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter, a widely accepted international safety limit.
The Detrimental Effects of Heavy Metals
One more seminal question confronts Indian food growers – the safety of the country’s agricultural exports. India is the world’s 15th largest exporter of agricultural, fishery and forestry products. The United States is India’s top export market. Other important markets include Vietnam, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom.
The world is well aware of India’s wastewater-contaminated food exports. The United States ranks India among the three nations that most consistently violate American import safety limits. Food grown in India accounts for 60 percent of the items that United States Customs inspectors refuse to allow into U.S. markets.
Two years ago, the UAE barred Indian imports of chili peppers, mangoes, and cucumbers unless each shipment arrived with official residue analysis reports. The UAE is one of the top four global markets for Indian fruit and vegetables and one of the world’s biggest importers of Indian mangoes and onions.
The National, an important UAE newspaper, warned that the lack of regulatory oversight in the food sector, and the persistent failure to meet international quality standards, threaten India’s farmers and food companies. “An initiative is needed in the regulation of food exports. The introduction of better controls with clear guidelines for acceptable produce would dramatically help Indian’s agricultural industry. Time is running out for Indian farmers as consumers around the world have become more savvy and have options closer to home.”
Even knowing the risks from irrigating crops with untreated wastewater, most Indian farmers – especially in the peri-urban areas – have no alternative. Close to Bengaluru, farmer K.V. Muniraju projected that if wastewater started to be treated, it would be used for other purposes. It would not pass his farm anymore, he said.
“We are praying that the wastewater flows will last as long as it takes for our children to find other jobs so that they can support our family.”
Joko Widodo, in a press conference on Monday, shook up Indonesian society.
Widodo, who was re-elected this spring to a second term as the county’s president, revealed his preferred site for a new capital city.
Jakarta, the current seat of power, will remain the center of business. But under Widodo’s proposal government offices will relocate to a new campus in the province of East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.
Widodo had hinted at the plan in April, and proponents justify the long-debated move for several reasons. Traffic in Jakarta, home to more than 10 million people, is unwieldy. There are equity issues: Java, the island on which Jakarta sits, is where political and economic power is concentrated. Then there are environmental factors: polluted air, sinking land, and, for the coastal metropolis, a mounting flood risk.
Certain districts of Jakarta, especially near Jakarta Bay, have sunk more than 4 meters since the 1970s, a direct result of excessive and uncontrolled groundwater use. Removing water from layers of soft soils causes the land to compact and settle, like a sponge being squeezed dry. It’s a process called subsidence, and it is jeopardizing the future of a number of coastal cities, especially in Asia: Ho Chi Minh, Hanoi, Semarang, Bangkok, Dhaka, and others.
“In most megacities, groundwater is a major driver of subsidence,” said Gilles Erkens, a subsidence expert at Deltares, a research group based in the Netherlands.
The coasts, particularly delta regions, were a natural setting for urbanization. At the intersection of river and ocean, they connected upstream producers to global markets. It was a successful model, for a time. But a new geography of risk has emerged. Because of climate change and mismanagement of natural resources, coastal cities are increasingly hazardous locations.
Subsidence is one of those risks. Shifting land topples buildings and buckles roads and bridges. It is worsened by unrestrained urbanization on fragile, compactable soils and by upstream dams that block the sediments that replenish delta lands. These sediments, which are also channeled out to sea by levee systems, are “the only natural compensation method available” for land lost to compaction, Erkens told Circle of Blue. And, by engineering design, it has been taken away.
These factors combine to amplify flooding risks from rising seas and storm surges, which are already calamitous. Along the sea wall in Jakarta, a pedestrian looks up, not down, at the waters of Jakarta Bay. Northern districts of the city, those adjacent to the bay, have the worse subsidence and highest flood risk.
In Surat, India, expected to be the world’s fastest-growing city in the next 15 years, some 2 million people, mostly slum-dwellers, could be living in high-risk flood zones by 2070 if subsidence and population growth trends continue, according to an International Institute for Environment and Development report. When the land sinks at the same time that the seas swell, flood disasters become more damaging.
Much of the subsidence that has already occurred is irreversible. But cities can stanch future declines by taking action now, Erkens said. That means restricting groundwater use and finding alternative supplies. Tokyo, which was plagued by high subsidence rates that dropped the city by as much as 4 meters in the early 20th century, built reservoirs and shifted to river water by the 1960s. In Texas, which faced a similar fate in the Houston metro area, the Legislature established a government agency in 1975 to regulate groundwater withdrawals in Harris and Galveston counties. Municipalities gradually shifted to river water from surface reservoirs. Subsidence in those areas has been halted or significantly slowed.
Bangkok today is a city in transition between a subsidence crisis and resolution, Erkens said. City officials instituted a tax on groundwater withdrawals in an attempt to reduce consumption.
These are not quick and easy fixes. Controlling subsidence requires scientific understanding of the interaction between groundwater and land, political will to enforce groundwater restrictions, project planning, and money to carry out the new infrastructure. Still, Erkens sees Tokyo, Houston, and Bangkok as hopeful examples for Jakarta and others.
“Once we get these stories told, other cities will be less reluctant to do something about it,” Erkens said. “It’s possible to take action and have a successful economy.” And, one might add, a capital where the land is stable, at least for a while longer.
Verdant on a late summer evening, Clark’s Marsh, an old bend in the Au Sable River, is a fine spot for a walk, and the river is a fine spot to hook a trout. That natural beauty drew Arnie Leriche to this place.
After Leriche retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency he moved with his partner to Oscoda, the town just downstream from the marsh, with the idea that he would spend his work-free years fishing the clear waters of northern Michigan.
Trouble is, the marsh is just downstream from the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base, where toxic PFAS chemicals have been leaking into groundwater for decades from a field that was formerly used for firefighting training. The groundwater, tainted by foams used to put out the fires, seeped into the marsh, then into the river, and on down the watershed, even into Lake Huron. A few years ago, the Michigan Department of Community Health issued a warning to anglers: Do not eat the fish from the marsh.
Leriche, knowing a bit about pollutants from his years at the EPA, began to worry. Tests showed chemical concentrations in pumpkinseed and bluegill fish to be more than 15 times higher than state standards.
“When I heard the news of ‘Do not eat the fish’ I knew it was more serious than most,” Leriche recalled while walking his golden retriever Molly along a berm in the marsh. “I don’t know if I’d make a comparison to Love Canal,” – an infamous New York waste dump discovered in 1976 that spurred the federal Superfund program – “but it’s so significant that I knew that it was going to be a long-term, hard road for all the agencies and the communities. And, that’s what’s turned out to be over the last five years.”
Wurtsmith is one entry in a long and varied ledger of contaminated sites in Michigan that are contributing to a state groundwater emergency that has spilled over into rivers, streams, and lakes. The extent of this contamination and the failure of state agencies and lawmakers to muster a response equal to the challenge are detailed in a report from FLOW, a Traverse City-based water advocacy group.
Groundwater in Michigan, what FLOW is calling a sixth Great Lake, is “compromised and deteriorated,” the report asserts. Threats come both from legacy sites and current practices: abandoned industrial sites, military bases, dry cleaning facilities, landfills, septic tanks, underground tanks that store petroleum fuels, and fertilizers spread on farm fields. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has identified more than 4,000 potential sites where contaminated groundwater and soil could release toxic vapors into buildings. Other connections are just as hard to see. Excessive groundwater pumping in fast-growing Ottawa County has been found to worsen water quality because it pulls deeper, saltier water into wells.
The report criticizes Michigan on two fronts: for inconsistent policies that over decades allowed pollutants to accumulate in groundwater reserves, and for failing to provide adequate funds for cleanup.
“Groundwater is treated as a place where wastes go, not a place to keep wastes out,” Dave Dempsey, the report author, told Circle of Blue.
A concrete pad where firefighting training took place at the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base is ground zero for Oscoda’s PFAS contamination. Foams sprayed here seeped into groundwater that has spread the chemicals to the area’s rivers and lakes. (Photo by J. Carl Ganter/CircleofBlue.org)
A Multitude of Threats
Why write the report now? The timing, Dempsey said. He noted that the discoveries of PFAS chemicals in dozens of locations around the state, from Oscoda in the northeast to Parchment in the southwest, increased public awareness of groundwater, which, in turn, has put pressure on public officials to respond. Second, state elections are in November and a new administration will come to power next year.
“It all adds up to a chance for a new governor to take action on one of our most important water issues,” said Dempsey, a senior adviser at FLOW and environmental adviser in the 1980s to former Gov. James Blanchard.
The to-do list is long, as the FLOW report points out, citing state data. The Michigan Office of the Auditor General found in a March 2017 assessment that the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) lacks funds to clean up 7,313 contaminated sites that affect water and soil. The $685 million Clean Michigan Initiative, a bond that voters approved in 1998 to fund the cleanups, ran out of money at the end of 2017. That money was also used to pay the state’s share of Superfund cleanups.
“Without additional funding, contaminated soil and water sites known to DEQ as posing a health risk to humans and the environment will go untreated,” the audit states.
Securing a new funding source is one of outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder’s priorities for the last months of his term. Snyder has proposed an increase to the fee for dumping waste at a landfill, from $0.36 per ton to $4.44 per ton. The fee would generate an estimated $45 million a year for cleanups.
“It would be a welcomed step, if enacted,” Dempsey said, even though FLOW supports another bond measure instead. Still, the dollar amount proposed by the governor is roughly equal to the $50 million a year that FLOW recommends in the report.
Some sites have been left to fester for decades. James Clift, policy director at the Michigan Environmental Council, criticized the Clean Michigan Initiative for prioritizing actions that leave groundwater pollutants in place, essentially fencing them off underground instead of removing them. It may be cheaper and more expedient than removal, but those chemicals can reemerge, sometimes as toxic vapors that waft into building basements.
“We’re not looking at longer-term problems when keeping it in place,” he told Circle of Blue.
Groundwater at other sites has, in effect, been written off. The state has put restrictions that prohibit the use of groundwater for drinking water on the deeds of 2,239 properties, ranging in size from fractions of an acre to thousands of acres, because of existing contamination.
The scale of the problem can be staggering. In Mancelona, a plume of groundwater laced with trichloroethylene (TCE), a grease cleaner, has spread six miles from a former auto parts manufacturer that operated from 1947 to 1967. It is one of the nation’s largest TCE groundwater contamination sites. Wastewater from the facility was dumped in unlined pits, from which the chemicals percolated into groundwater.
The DEQ, which is funding the cleanup because the company went out of business, estimates that 13 trillion gallons of groundwater, down to depths of 500 feet, have been contaminated. The plume is moving northwestward at roughly 320 to 400 feet per year. The state paid to extend the public water supply system to 500 homes whose wells were tainted.
“It’s always a challenge to have enough staff and resources to address the need,” Andrew Hogarth, former chief of the DEQ remediation and redevelopment division, told Circle of Blue. Hogarth retired nine years ago after managing contaminated site cleanups for the state. New contaminants of concern are always cropping up, which adds to the cost: “PFAS was not even on our radar 20 years ago,” he said, referring to the year in which voters approved the Clean Michigan Initiative.
These slow-moving, widespread contamination zones are a risk especially for the 2.6 million Michigan residents who rely on household wells for drinking water. Well water is unregulated, and it is the homeowner’s responsibility to ensure their water is safe to drink. Dempsey and FLOW recommend a state fund to assist private well owners with water testing, which can cost hundreds of dollars per sample for volatile organic chemicals like TCE.
The report offers a number of other recommendations to protect groundwater, most of which require the Legislature to pass new laws: minimum statewide standards for septic systems or a long-term funding source for cleanups.
Some of the recommendations are vague, such as actions to control nitrate pollution. Neighboring states like Ohio have enacted laws that prohibit spreading manure on snow-covered soil, to reduce the chance of runoff. But agriculture specialists question whether those restrictions will be effective. Farmers will still need to dispose of manure, said Erica Rogers of Michigan State University Extension who works with livestock producers. Holding it back may result in a buildup of manure in storage that needs to be dumped quickly or shipped out of state, she said.
Existing laws do allow for state oversight. Michigan’s Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, passed in 1994, defines groundwater as a water of the state that requires protection. The linkage is sometimes ignored in practice, though. State standards for PFOS where groundwater discharges to streams or lakes have not been met in Oscoda.
“The tools are there but the state hasn’t had the political will to apply them as strongly as it could,” Nick Schroeck, an environmental law expert at the University of Detroit Mercy, told Circle of Blue. “Plus the courts and the Legislature have become more skeptical of regulation and see it as a burden on the state economy.”
What is swept underground often does not stay there. Like a river, groundwater moves – and carries pollutants with it, either upward into drinking water wells or outward to rivers and lakes. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 35 percent of the water in Lake Michigan originates as groundwater.
“Groundwater is treated like a second-class citizen because the connection to surface water is not seen,” Dempsey said.
Those hydrologic connections are evident in Oscoda, where residents are furious that the state and the Air Force have not done more to halt the flow of PFAS coming from Wurtsmith.
The base is “bleeding,” as residents are keen to say. And they want it stopped.
“We’re based on pure Michigan, right? That’s our motto,” says Cathy Wusterbarth, alluding to the state’s marketing slogan.
Wusterbarth, who was born in Oscoda, helped organize Need Our Water, a local activist group. “We’re the Great Lakes state. I’ve never questions the purity of our Great Lakes until now. When I’ve seen the pumping of this contamination and what I know it does to our health, it has changed my attitude on the preservation of water in our area.”
Tampa Bay Waterkeeper recently announced its Patrol Program. The pollution detecting and reporting initiative is meant to help the organization identify areas of concern so they can take action.
“I’ve found that it can be quite difficult to figure out who to contact, what entity or agency to contact for certain issues,” said executive director Justin Tramble. “The goal of this program is to simplify the process so that there’s no real barrier to reporting things that you see.”
All it takes is a simple scan of a QR code on your phone to report any issues you see while out on the water, including algae blooms, injured wildlife and illegal dumping.
“We’ve lost in Tampa Bay 30 percent of our sea grass since 2016, we’re on a downward trend,” Tramble said. “It’s no secret that we’re not in the greatest place in terms of our water quality. We’re just a few years removed from one of the worst environmental disasters that our region’s ever seen in Piney Point.”
Tramble said Tampa Bay’s water quality directly ties into our area’s economic prosperity. He said the goal of the new reporting initiative is to keep our water fishable, swimmable and drinkable.
So far, Tampa Bay Waterkeeper has gotten more than 100 requests for their QR code stickers from boaters, Tramble said. Over the next couple of weeks, the organization will be distributing the stickers to various businesses – such as marinas, bait and tackle shops and charter companies – to make them as accessible as possible.
“In the past, people have had a hard time really getting involved,” Tramble said. “These big issues are complex. This is a way that’s tangible and attainable for the community to really make a difference and we’re really excited about what this patrol program is going to do.”
Anyone can request a QR code sticker from the organization to access the Patrol Program reporting tool. Learn more about the program.
