Journalists reporting on the status and future of the Colorado River are increasingly using the phrase “dead pool.” It sounds ominous. And it is.
Dead pool occurs when water in a reservoir drops so low that it can’t flow downstream from the dam. The biggest concerns are Lake Powell, behind Glen Canyon Dam on the Utah-Arizona border, and Lake Mead, behind Boulder Canyon Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border. These two reservoirs, the largest in the U.S., provide water for drinking and irrigation and hydroelectricity to millions of people in Nevada, Arizona and California.
Some media reports incorrectly define dead pool as the point at which a dam no longer has enough water to generate hydroelectricity. The more accurate term for that situation is the minimum power pool elevation.
As a 22-year drought in the Colorado River basin lingers, reaching minimum power pool elevation is the first problem. Lakes Powell and Mead have turbines at the bases of their dams, well below the surface of the reservoirs. Water flows through valves in intake towers in the reservoirs and is channeled through the turbines, making them spin to generate electricity.
(CNN)China’s Zhurong rover has found evidence suggesting that water persisted on Mars for much longer than expected.
Zhurong landed in a large plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere called Utopia Planitia on May 15, 2021 — where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.
The rover’s primary mission, which lasted for three months, was to search for signs of ancient life. It has investigated the minerals, environment and distribution of water and ice in the plain, which is all part of the largest impact basin in the Martian northern lowlands. The rover continues to explore its landing site and send information back to the Tianwen-1 orbiter circling the planet.
Data returned from the rover’s initial survey of the basin suggests that the Utopia Planitia basin contained water during a time when many scientists believed Mars to be dry and cold.
A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
Babylon Micro-Farms is a small company in Richmond, Va. that is literally bringing the farm to the table by building hydroponics systems and installing them in commercial kitchens around the United States. “Up to 60 percent of fresh produce is wasted before it reaches the consumer’s plate,” says Alexander Olsen, CEO and Co-founder of Babylon Micro-Farms, a small sustainable agriculture start-up located in Richmond, Va.
The problem of food waste was something that Olsen and his co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Graham Smith, came across when they were students at University of Virginia. Olsen and Smith had set out to build hydroponics systems in refugee camps to help mitigate food shortage issues within the camps, but their idea was greeted with a much stronger interest from a broader market.
“We saw an opportunity to develop small on-site farming systems that could help businesses, communities, and consumers grow food on-site and eliminate the supply chain,” says Olsen, “What would the world look like if everyone had the ability to grow their own food?”
So in April of 2017 they incorporated and began testing models to serve a larger market.
“I think the thing that is special that we do is that it’s really soup to nuts, it’s totally integrated,” says Smith. “Whereas there are other companies in the vertical farming and hydroponic farming space that do one segment of the total technology chain or the service, we’re really a one stop shop. You don’t need to learn how to put together PVC piping to get a farm running. You don’t need to learn how to dose nutrients or pH or set up the lighting and irrigation schedule. You come to us for the hardware but we also have the software that underpins that technology. And we’re constantly collecting all the data so we know exactly how everything is going and we tweak the variables to make sure it’s always running smoothly.”
The Sacramento is California’s largest river. It arises near the lower slopes of Mt. Shasta, in the northernmost part of the state, and runs some four hundred miles south, draining the upper corridor of the Central Valley, bending through downtown Sacramento, and, eventually, reaching the Pacific Ocean, by way of the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Erik Vink, the executive director of the Delta Protection Commission, a state conservation agency, described the Sacramento to me as “California’s first superhighway.” By the eighteen-fifties, daily steamboats ferried passengers between San Francisco and Sacramento in as little as six hours. Travellers now mostly use I-80 to cover the same ninety miles, and oceangoing ships bound for the Port of West Sacramento finish their trip in a deepwater canal built sixty years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers. But the Sacramento is still important: it and its tributaries make up the state’s single largest source of fresh surface water. Most precipitation in California falls in the north, while the biggest users, including all the major metropolitan areas and the immense farms of the San Joaquin Valley, are farther south. Devising ways to move water from wet places to dry places has been the labor of generations. During the past century and a half, miners, farmers, politicians, engineers, conservationists, and schemers of all kinds have worked—together and against one another—to create one of the most complex water-shifting systems in the world.
In mid-February, I ate lunch at Bethany Reservoir State Recreation Area, a ninety-minute drive south of Sacramento, with Jay Lund, who is a co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, and Peter Moyle, an emeritus professor at the same university. Lund is in his sixties, and Moyle is almost eighty. Spring was well under way—on our drive to Bethany, we’d passed hundreds of acres of blossoming almond trees with neat stacks of beehives spaced at intervals along the rows, for pollination—but the weather was still cool enough for jackets. Before we ate our sandwiches, Lund unrolled a laminated sheet on top of our picnic table. The sheet was three feet wide and so long that one end drooped almost to the ground. Its surface was covered with lines, arrows, symbols, and small blocks of text—a maze-like network that could have passed for the wiring diagram of a nuclear power plant. In fact, Lund explained, it was a schematic of the state’s water infrastructure, the inflows and outflows, both natural and man-made.
Los Angeles (CNN)As California battles a historic drought and a water crisis looms, the state’s coastline protection agency is poised to vote Thursday on whether it will allow a $1.4 billion desalination plant in Huntington Beach that would convert ocean water into municipal water for Orange County residents.
Poseidon Water, which has been trying to build the plant for decades, says it would be capable of producing up to 50 million gallons of drinking water a day, helping to make the region more drought resilient.
But desalination opponents argue less expensive and less harmful conservation tactics should be the first resort.
Managing water resources has always been important, but that monitoring is becoming increasingly high-tech and much more useful. Rather than a spot check at the tap, or a crude measurement of water levels in a reservoir, chips are making it possible to monitor and measure water quantity and quality at the source, wherever it is stored, the spigot, and in the wastewater systems.
As climate change and unchecked population growth pressures water supplies, every drop counts. Some new sensors and networks show promise by making sensors and the networks cheaper.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets a limit on drinking water systems in the U.S. of 90 contaminants, including both chemical and microbial. That testing must be done on schedule, although states can make more stringent rules.
The European Parliament also monitors for and limits contaminants and recently launched a watch list to monitor for two endocrine disrupting substances — beta-estradiol and nonylphenol — which can have an effect on human physiological and biochemical processes. The EU revised its drinking water standards in 2020 and made its wastewater standards more stringent.
Los Angeles, California – Amid a once-in-a-millennium prolonged drought fuelled by the climate crisis, one of the largest water distribution agencies in the United States is warning six million California residents to cut back their water usage this summer, or risk dire shortages.
The scale of the restrictions is unprecedented in the history of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 20 million people and has been in operation for nearly a century.
Adel Hagekhalil, the district’s general manager, has asked residents to limit outdoor watering to one day a week so there will be enough water for drinking, cooking and flushing toilets months from now.
“This is real; this is serious and unprecedented,” Hagekhalil told Al Jazeera. “We need to do it, otherwise we don’t have enough water for indoor use, which is the basic health and safety stuff we need every day.”
The district has imposed restrictions before, but not to this extent, he said. “This is the first time we’ve said, we don’t have enough water [from the Sierra Nevadas in northern California] to last us for the rest of the year, unless we cut our usage by 35 percent.”
A lawsuit filed last month by the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority accuses firefighting foam manufacturers of negligence in selling a product that has contaminated local airports with harmful chemicals.
The lawsuit alleges the compounds “are present in certain areas of” Tampa International Airport, Peter O. Knight Airport, Tampa Executive Airport and Plant City Airport. They are commonly called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down well and may taint the groundwater and soil, accumulating over time and sickening people who ingest them.
A spokeswoman for the Aviation Authority declined to answer questions about where specifically the chemicals have been found or at what levels.
“Because of pending litigation, we cannot comment on specifics of the case or speculation of damages,” wrote spokeswoman Emily Nipps. “The lawsuit is a proactive step by the Authority to recover potential costs associated with any future mitigation or remediation as a result of commercial airports, including (Tampa International Airport), using this (Federal Aviation Administration)-mandated chemical in its firefighting methods.”
The lawsuit asks for money from the manufacturers to pay for investigating, fixing and monitoring the “ongoing contamination” of its “surface, surface water, groundwater, soil and sediment.”
Florida is suing the makers of certain firefighting foams, accusing them of polluting the environment and potentially sickening people with chemicals.
Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office filed suit in mid-April in Hillsborough circuit court. The state’s lawyers accuse several businesses — including DuPont de Nemours, Inc.; The Chemours Company FC, LLC; Tyco Fire Products; and Chemguard, Inc. — of using materials that could put people at risk of cancer and other illnesses. The substances are commonly called “forever chemicals.”
The companies, the Attorney General’s Office said, did not warn customers or the public about the danger.
Florida’s case follows similar lawsuits from other states and agencies, including Tampa Bay Water, which oversees much of the region’s drinking water, and the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority, which oversees Tampa International Airport.
The city of Portland is notifying water customers that the drinking water has exceeded the maximum contaminant level for total trihalomethanes.
According to a public notice issued by the city, the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality notified the city that the water exceeded the 0.080 milligram per liter level of trihalomethanes established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Trihalomethanes are volatile organic compounds that are formed when chlorine reacts with naturally occurring organic matter in the water. Some who drink water containing an excess of trihalomethanes over a long period of time could experience problems with liver, kidney or central nervous systems and may have an increased risk of cancer, a news release said.
