Reply With Quote
Rain.
We need Fkn rain.
SAWS Board of Trustees authorized staff today to appear as a party in a lawsuit filed last month in Travis County by the Guadalupe Blanco River Authority (GBRA). SAWS officials expressed disappointment in the lawsuit intended to cir vent the public evaluation of GBRA’s controversial Lower Basin water project as well as that of a "bed and banks" application submitted by SAWS to the State of Texas.
GBRA's legal action seeks to block efforts by SAWS to deliver 50,000 acre-feet per year of water for instream uses to the coastal bays and estuaries, and seeks to give GBRA full control of San Antonio’s valuable treated wastewater effluent in the future. In effect, GBRA is positioning to eliminate all critical freshwater flows from reaching the bays and estuaries, and sell all water essential for the environment to GBRA customers.
Contrary to GBRA’s position, SAWS contends that the bed and banks authorization SAWS has requested from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) will have little or no impact on GBRA’s access to existing water permits. However, the nature and extent of the impact is an issue to be analyzed by TCEQ staff and determined by the commission.
A careful review of the SAWS application by TCEQ would provide extensive opportunity for public input, discussion and challenge by third parties such as GBRA.
"This is an issue that should be resolved through an established open and public process. SAWS has undertaken an application that provides an opportunity for essential public scrutiny," stated Robert R. Puente, SAWS president and CEO. "However, rather than welcome and participate in the TCEQ public process, GBRA has sued itself in an Austin courtroom, invoking a little-known judicial procedure in an attempt to cut off open discussion before it begins."
Last month’s lawsuit contends that San Antonio cannot reuse wastewater transported out of the Edwards Aquifer region, prohibiting contributions for instream and environmental uses outside of Bexar County.
SAWS treated wastewater effluent is a valuable asset, developed at great cost to San Antonio ratepayers. Properly managed, it can provide an invaluable benefit to the environment and downstream interests, while still meeting the needs of the city.
The action filed by GBRA in Travis County is a summary process that relies on stealth and surprise to achieve a pre-determined outcome at the expense of careful analysis and enlightened public discourse.
"This lawsuit is an abuse of a state statute intended for financial bond validation," Puente said. "GBRA has not yet issued the bonds they seek to validate through court action. Even the amount of money to be borrowed is unknown."
http://www.saws.org/latest_news/News...fm?news_id=980
Rain.
We need Fkn rain.
If El Nino occurs this fall and is as strong as forecasted our drought will end the same way the 50's drought ended, and we'll be talking about all of the flooding in Texas.
unpredictable, aperiodic hosings from El Nino weather doesn't fulfill all of TX's water needs.
how about drilling down deeper to "ancient fossil water" reservoirs? nope, fracking and waste water injections poisoned them all.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-19-2014 at 02:29 PM.
I'm hopin early tropical depression from the gulf.
A Twenty-First Century Water War Erupts in Texas
Gary Cheatwood grew up near the town of Cuthand, in far northeast Texas, and he always found peace along the wooded banks of Little Mustang Creek. His grandfather had bought 100 acres in 1917 and now Gary’s family owns 600 acres of bottomland near where the creek’s clear waters meet the Sulphur River. He especially loves the woods around the creek—some 70 species of hardwood trees, including a massive Texas honey locust that ranks as official state champion. “This forest is not making money,” says Cheatwood, a retired surveyor and construction manager. “But a lot of things are more important than money. The trees give me pleasure.”
Everything about the land pleases Cheatwood. Still wiry and lean at 75, he walks it every week, always wearing his standard outfit of lace-up work boots, jeans, plaid flannel shirt, and baseball cap. He collects finely crafted Caddo and Cherokee Indian arrowheads. In the spring, blue and yellow wildflowers bloom. He takes pleasure, too, in looking for rare creatures—the American burying beetle, a certain obscure shrew, even the eastern timber rattlesnake.
Sand blows on the shores of Lake Whitney, south of Fort Worth, TX, in 2011. During the drought that year water reserves in Texas dropped by 62.3 billion cubic meters. Photo credit: Flickr/ Creative Commons
Yet as he stood on the creek bank this January, he knew his family could have their homestead taken by the state of Texas. If Texas Water Development Board planners have their way, sometime in the next 20 years or so Cheatwood’s land will disappear under Marvin Nichols Reservoir, a proposed 72,000-acre lake meant to provide water to the Dallas-Ft. Worth “Metroplex” 135 miles to the west. Some 4,000 of his neighbors (a few estimates go as high as 10,000 people) will also become refugees, driven off their lands, either for lake bottom or for the hundreds of thousands of acres to be taken as “mitigation.”
All over rural Texas, large swaths of farmland and ranchland and coastal estuaries face a similarly precarious future. A convergence of extended drought, supply-side water policy, and relentless economic and population growth has led to bitter fights over how water is to be used.
http://ecowatch.com/2014/06/05/water...upts-in-texas/
The ranchito is in the Carrizo upthrust and I figure within 30 years the 150 acre feet of water rights alone will be worth more than the dirt.
Dow Chemical's Water Woes Signal Trouble
When Dow Chemical, one of the largest manufacturers of chemicals and plastics in the world, announced a multibillion-dollar expansion on Texas’ Gulf Coast last summer, Gov. Rick Perry had yet another example to add to his list of explosive economic growth on Texas soil.
“Texas continues to attract companies looking for the best opportunity to expand or relocate because of our low taxes, smart regulations, fair courts and predictable workforce,” Perry said in an August statement on Dow’s expansion, for which the governor’s incentive fund had provided $1.5 million, on top of a $1 million grant the year before.
But this success story has been underscored by a tense struggle over water, which Dow needs to keep production afloat, and which is in short supply in Texas amid the state’s debilitating drought and its water users’ increasing thirst.
The manufacturing giant is by far the largest user of water from Texas’ Brazos River, which also supplies farmers, cities and other industries along its 900-mile stretch from northwest Texas to the Gulf Coast. Dow is also the river’s oldest user, giving the company priority over all others. And as the Brazos’ water supply diminishes, Dow’s claims to its flows have pitted it against farmers, cities, power plants and local water authorities.
Conservationists and wholesale water suppliers alike warn that in a booming state that’s been slow to address its long-term water needs, companies looking to relocate to Texas could see Dow’s experience and reconsider. They also say that companies in Texas could engage in expensive battles with agricultural and other water users, including fast-growing cities — and that the state is not prepared to accommodate all of its conflicting water demands.
“At some point, you can see where [the] cost of water would cause a refinery to pick up and move to another state because there’s more water there,” said Ivan Langford, general manager of the Gulf Coast Water Authority, a wholesale water supplier to petrochemical companies, oil refineries, municipalities and rice farmers.
Dow, which declined to be interviewed for this article, has twice gone before a state administrative law judge to assert its rights and call for better management of the Brazos River.
“If the flow of the Brazos River gets too low, it becomes difficult to divert sufficient water for Dow’s needs,” Gena Leathers, Dow’s global technology leader for water, said in testimony filed with the judge as part of the company’s demand for better enforcement of its senior-most water right on the river.
In other public do ents, Dow officials threatened to be “much more aggressive” in asserting their right to flows from the Brazos, which could force upstream users — including farmers, cities and industries — to cut back their water use dramatically. Many have alreadydone so to accommodate Dow.
While state legislators and voters signed off in 2013 on $2 billion in loans for future water infrastructure projects, it could be decades before that money translates into new supplies. In the meantime, according to public records filings, Dow believes its future is at risk.
A strained river
Dow first set up shop in Freeport in 1940 to extract magnesium from seawater. Since then, its Gulf Coast operations have grown by leaps and bounds; the company says it now pays nearly $1 billion a year in wages and benefits to a combined 7,000 workers, and contributed more than $70 million in taxes to Brazoria County in 2012 alone.
But Freeport hasn’t just been a plum spot for Dow because of its seaside location; the Brazos River, which begins in northwest Texas, empties out there, providing Dow with the 100,000 gallons of freshwater per minute that it needs to operate.
According to draft numbers from the Texas Water Development Board’s 2017 State Water Plan, Brazoria County’s water needs for manufacturing — dominated by Dow — are among the highest for the Brazos River Basin and for the state as a whole.
The strain on the Brazos is expected to grow significantly: In 2020, an estimated 80 billion gallons of water per year will be needed for manufacturing in Brazoria County, up by 30 percent from what was used in 2011; by 2060, the need could be 106 billion gallons, far outpacing the county’s municipal water needs of about 27 billion gallons per year. The 2012 state water plan projects a shortage of 64 billion gallons for the region in 2020, a number that doubles by 2060.
While this same story is being told across Texas, on the Gulf Coast, there’s an even more urgent need for the Brazos: So much groundwater has been pumped in the past several decades to meet the region’s needs that the land is sinking. To avoid any more such subsidence, cities in Harris County and neighboring Fort Bend County are working to convert their supplies to surface water — and they are counting on the Brazos to help them.
“We have some [customers] that are bumping up against the limits of what they have available and, frankly, what we can provide with our existing permits and contract situation,” said Brad Brunett, a hydrologist for the Brazos River Authority, a major wholesale supplier of Brazos water.
In the past decade, the authority has spent $12 million on legal and environmental consultants to lobby the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for a new state permit that could potentially double its en lement to the river’s water, warning of “immediate” water shortages without it.
But Dow sees that effort as an immediate threat to its operations, and has forged an unlikely alliance with environmentalists, who are concerned about the permit’s effect on the river’s health.
“The way things are operating, the landowners and the recreational opportunities and the fish and wildlife are getting screwed,” said Rick Lowerre, an Austin-based environmental attorney who represents the advocacy group Friends of the Brazos and, along with Dow and others, is protesting the authority’s permit application. “We need to try to protect the system. It’s already been overdrafted in some areas.”
In testimony over the disputed permit application before an administrative law judge in 2011, Dow agreed, adding that the approval of new water for the authority could stem the flow of the Brazos to Freeport, threatening Dow’s activities and the water supplies of some smaller cities that purchase water from the company.
Tim Finley, one of Dow’s environmental engineers, testified that the proposed permit “puts Dow, a multibillion-dollar operation, and the water supply for the seven member cities in the Brazosport area at risk.”
Compounding Dow’s problems is the salt content of the Brazos River once it reaches Freeport. Salinity there is already high because of natural geological formations and pollution far upstream. But it gets worse when drought prevents downstream freshwater from diluting it. Finley testified that in 2005 and 2006, Dow’s water supply was so salty that the company had to spend an additional $6 million to remove the excess minerals, creating a “national shortage” of the equipment needed to do so. If all the water used to meet Dow’s daily demand needed such treatment, Finley said, the company would have to make a capital investment of up to $700 million. (The TCEQ has signaled it could be inching closer to approving the permit application, which has been delayed for so long in part because of changing environmental regulations.)
Dow has said the TCEQ did not follow its own rules, which require the agency to ensure no new permits would hurt existing water users.
“If the TCEQ staff does not know its own rules, this brings into question the vetting of the application that was done by the TCEQ staff in general,” Dow attorney Fred Werkenthin wrote to the administrative law judge.
The TCEQ has said its own water modeling shows minimal effects of the permit on Dow’s supply, though some models could be decades old.
Tim Brown, an Austin-based water rights lawyer who has practiced in Texas for almost 50 years, is amazed that the TCEQ is even considering handing out more water rights on the Brazos.
“As early as 1952 or ’53, the chairman of the water commission back then said that every river and stream in Texas was already over-appropriated,” said Brown, who served on the now-defunct Texas
Water Rights Commission. “And yet, the agency continued to issue permits.”
Dow has also sought a watermaster on the Brazos, a state-funded office that, unlike the TCEQ’s current staff, would have daily access to water use data in the river basin and respond in real time to water shortages. This year, the agency agreed to create such an office and fund it with Brazos river users’ fees.
Parties on both sides of the permit dispute say they worry that the TCEQ is not equipped to handle such water fights, which are becoming increasingly common amid the drought.
“We used to have a very vibrant water rights program with lots of staff, really taking care of the water,” said Lowerre, of Friends of the Brazos. Now, “the agency is really changed politically, from one that was really saying, ‘This is a public trust,’ to one that is like, ‘ , let’s just get [the permit] out the door so we don’t have to bother [with] it anymore.”
Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman for the TCEQ, said the agency is prepared to handle such water disputes. “Water rights determinations are very site-specific,” she said, “and the TCEQ has the qualified expertise necessary to properly evaluate these applications.”
At a water law conference in Austin late last year, TCEQ Commissioner Toby Baker acknowledged that the drought has created a steep learning curve for the agency. “We’re doing stuff with water now that’s virtually unprecedented,” he said.
And Brunett, of the Brazos River Authority, said the agency is clearly “stretched pretty thin.” But, he added, all the other water supply projects the authority is considering would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and probably raise water rates for the whole region — and take years, if not decades, to build.
“What’s the alternative if this permit isn’t put in place?” Brunett asked. “Do we have enough time to implement the alternatives?”
Water wars
Drought in the Brazos River Basin hit years earlier than in other parts of the state. Langford, the head of the Gulf Coast Water Authority, recalled pictures from 2009 where “you can literally step across the Brazos.” The Gulf Coast Water Authority has spent $10 million since then on additional short-term water supplies.
Dow, too, has already spent millions of dollars on extra short-term water. In mid-2009, the Brazos was flowing at just 50 cubic feet per second, less than half the speed required for Dow’s smallest pump to pull the water the company needed out of the river. It was an unprecedented occurrence for Dow.
So Dow issued a priority call in 2009 and the years following asserting its “senior” right to divert water from the Brazos River — and force “junior” water rights holders to curtail their use. It was the first time the TCEQ had received such a request, and it took the agency weeks to respond.
Dow did have that right. But by the time the TCEQ determined it several weeks later, the company says it was too late. Junior water rights were suspended that summer, cutting off mostly farmers from using about 46 billion gallons of water, but no additional water flowed down to Dow’s pumps.
But junior water rights holders still felt the pinch. “It’s hard to sit in a room full of farmers and literally see them go to tears,” said Langford, who had to cut off water to the Gulf Coast Water Authority’s agricultural customers, most of whom are rice farmers.
Yet Dow argues that by law, the TCEQ should have cut off even more water than it did; in the interest of public health and safety, the agency elected not to force junior users like municipalities and power plants to cut back.
The Texas Farm Bureau, which agreed with Dow, sued, and a Travis County district judge ruled in its favor last June.
The case is now pending in the Corpus Christi Court of Appeals. If the appellate judge upholds the ruling, cities and power plants — which are already clamoring for more water supplies from the Brazos today — could be at risk of losing their ability to draw water from the river when more “senior” rights holders demand it. Urban planners and state officials fear that means public health will be put at risk in favor of large companies like Dow or farmers with senior water rights in times of water shortage.
Brown, the Austin attorney, said such fights are inevitable, and that the Legislature would eventually have to sort out the state’s decades-old water laws.
For now, Dow is aggressively working on reducing its water consumption, initiating company-wide contests and working with advocacy groups like the Nature Conservancy.
The company is also taking a close look at what climate change could mean for global freshwater supplies, suggesting that it could reduce the Brazos’ total annual flow by as much as 26 percent in the coming decades.
In a news conference in front of one of Texas’ dwindling reservoirs this summer, Perry acknowledged that water has become an economic issue for the state.
"Other states are watching what we are doing,” he said. “When we compete with them for a major expansion site or a relocation for major employers, you better believe water is part of the conversation.”
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/07/...n-things-come/
I'm hoping SAWS desal plants of S TX brackish water gives them the experience to set up desal plants for Gulf water, turning brown gold into blue gold (but desal water is expensive). Also recycling water not only for non-potable but for potable water. I'm afraid the SAWS, etc bureaucrats won't think big enough.
If I calculated the 50,000 annual acre ft correctly, that's a flow of 31 thousand gallons a minute.
Water Planners Focus on Bigger Texas, Not a Hotter One
as state water planners prepare to spend that money and address Texas’ water needs in the coming decades, they are only planning for a bigger Texas — not a hotter one. Scientists say Texas Republican leaders’ aversion to reducing the state's economic dependency on carbon-polluting fossil fuels — and their reluctance to acknowledge climate change — prevent the state from properly planning for the impacts of a warming planet on natural resources crucial to its growing population.
“Climate change will affect water supply by 5 to 15 percent in the next 50 years,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor at Texas A&M University. “I don’t think [the effects] are small enough to ignore.”
Nielsen-Gammon and other scientists say higher temperatures due to global warming are already diminishing water resources, and that climate change will cause the southern and western portions of the state to become drier. Those regions supply water for fast-growing cities like Austin and San Antonio
The Texas Water Development Board “does not have an official position on climate change,” said Robert Mace, deputy executive administrator of the agency. Nor does it consult with climate scientists on their long-term projections.
Asked why the state’s chief water planning agency does not take climate change projections into account, Mace said, “You’d have to talk to the Legislature to answer that question.”
State Sen. Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, who is chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee, said the Legislature has no plans to direct the agency to incorporate climate change projections into its water planning in the future.
"It's not a parameter that we've requested they look at," he said, adding that "there is a disagreement within the people of Texas on the science of greenhouse gases."
There’s little doubt in climate scientists’ mind that warmer temperatures have played at least some part in the extensive drought. 2011 was the hottest summer ever on record in Texas, and the following summer broke the record again. In a 16-month period, the lakes lost 130 billion gallons of water, or about one-fifth of their capacity. Officials called that rate “staggering” and suggested the hydrology of the lakes was significantly different than in the past. In the last three years, evaporation has claimed as much or more water from the lakes as the city of Austin uses annually.
even though up to seven inches of rain fell on some parts of the lakes’ watershed last September, the lakes gained only one percent of their capacity. By contrast, less than half the rain fell in similar areas in 2007, but added four times as much water to the lakes.
http://www.texastribune.org/2014/07/...ot-hotter-one/
Ignorant BigCarbon Repug s letting BigCarbon set TX water policy, and its sounds like a disastrous water "policy".
Has anyone else noticed how this tends to follow the faster populations growths in some metro areas and land use changes like Corpus Christi and Austin. Haven't they been growing and spreading pretty fast?
Wind power to the east and northeast...
That doesn't look like the population growth map of Texas. Looks more like the drought monitor map of the past 2-3 years.
btw, I was in Houston Monday. All corn fields along I10 are stunted and brown. How wonder how many $Bs TX ag will lose this summer.
Shocking drought data from NASA
A new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine, scientists finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought.This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin has been suffering from prolonged, severe drought since 2000 and has experienced the driest 14-year period in the last hundred years.
Scientists were shocked at the results of their latest study:
"We don't know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don't know when we're going to run out," said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study's lead author. "This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking."
If you live in the western and southwestern part of the United States, it's even worse:
"Combined with declining snowpack and population growth, this will likely threaten the long-term ability of the basin to meet its water allocation commitments to the seven basin states and to Mexico," Famiglietti said.
What's more troubling, while westerners are conserving water in a historic drought, the Nestle Corporation is still draining western aquifers for profit:
The plant, located on the Morongo Band of Mission Indians' reservation, has been drawing water from wells alongside a spring in Millard Canyon for more than a decade. But as California's drought deepens, some people in the area question how much water the plant is bottling and whether it's right to sell water for profit in a desert region where springs are rare and underground aquifers have been declining."Why is it possible to take water from a drought area, bottle it and sell it?" asked Linda Ivey, a Palm Desert real estate appraiser who said she wonders about the plant's use of water every time she drives past it on Interstate 10.
"It's hard to know how much is being taken," Ivey said. "We've got to protect what little water supply we have."
The Desert Sun has an extensive exposé on the struggle over water rights in the Southwest. It's well worth the read.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/24/1316428/-Shocking-drought-data-from-NASA?detail=email
eventually we are going to have to find a cheap way to draw large amoutns of salt water from the ocean, convert it to fresh water and pipe it to these drought sticken areas. i have no clue if theres even a way to do that but it sounds logical.
SAWS has two desal plants for the brackish water their sucking out of S. Texas. That should give them some experience for building huge desal to suck from the Gulf.
Melbourne AU bit the bullet with their desal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbour...lination_plant
damn Bou is there anything that you dont know anything about? lol thats cool to know that there some technology coming along in the event it ever gets that severe in our lifetime. I wonder what will come first, severe water shortage or oil
Looks like SAWS is willing to destroy surrounding fresh water supply to get their way. Wonder how long it will be before the EPA intervenes.
http://www.pleasantonexpress.com/new...o_Aquifer.html
another risk to Carrizo aquifer is of course from all y'all's beloved, adored BigOil, aka The Sky People
http://www.texasobserver.org/observe...le-ford-shale/
The Blue Gold wars will only get nastier and nastier. BigOil in TX will have full support of the Repug govt and the corrupt Repug SCOTX.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-27-2014 at 05:34 PM.
local coverage of (possible) Edwards Aquifer Stage IV restrictions:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/env...in-5673363.phpThe rapidly falling Edwards Aquifer has reached a critical low point that likely will mandate an unprecedented 40 percent cut in pumping by early next week.
The aquifer's J-17 monitoring well in Bexar County stood at 629.6 feet above sea level, a condition that can trigger Stage IV of the Edwards Aquifer Authority's critical period plan. If the aquifer remains at 630 feet or below — which is likely, given the hot, dry short-term forecast — tougher pumping reductions could start Tuesday, according to the EAA.
Municipal utilities and agricultural and industrial users have had to cut their permitted use by 35 percent since April 10 when the EAA declared Stage III in the pool of the aquifer tapped by Bexar, Medina and portions of Comal, Guadalupe, Hays, Atascosa and Caldwell counties.
Despite facing more cuts in pumping from the Edwards, the San Antonio Water System plans to remain in what it calls Stage 2 drought restrictions — limiting landscape watering by customers to once a week on a designated day and during certain hours.
In dry California, water goes to those who drill the deepest
The only sign of life sprouting out of a vast expanse of land in this unincorporated corner of Tulare County is a large drilling rig and two trucks laden with 1,000-foot-long drill pipes.
Men in hard hats work round the clock in sweltering 100-plus degree temperatures and in the still of the night, under the glare of construction night lights.
They’re boring down 40 feet an hour to reach their ultimate goal of 2,000 feet into the Tulare Basin aquifer. Once dug and built, the well could eventually pump up to 1,000 gallons of water a minute and turn the arid ground above into the fertile soil that California’s Central Valley is renowned for.
Large agricultural company J Poonan Limited Partnership owns the land and has invested more than $500,000 to drill the well. That doesn’t count the cost of building reservoirs to store the water, testing and environmental studies that could bring the final costs well above $1 million.
It’s an expensive quest. But when 80% of California is in an extreme drought, surface water runoff from the mountains stops flowing and reservoirs are depleted, farmers see the only way to go is down – way down.
“It’s the busiest we’ve ever been,” said Eddie Robledo, of Rottman Drilling Co., who helps oversee the drilling here.
The drilling frenzy is escalating at a fast and furious pace in agricultural counties throughout California. Drilling permits are being issued in record numbers, raising concerns that this unregulated activity may deplete the aquifer. It has already drained water away from residents – many of them poor Hispanic farm workers – who depend on groundwater from shallow wells, some that date back 60 years and reach no farther than 50 feet to 85 feet under.
“Yeah, the more wells you drill, the more wells are going to go dry,” Robledo said.
And, yes, groundwater pumping is not regulated in California, one of the most regulated states in the nation. It is the only western state without regulated groundwater management.
http://america.aljazeera.com/article...hedeepest.html
Deadly Algae Are Everywhere, Thanks to Agriculture
"Most water treatment plants are watching for the toxin," says Don Scavia, environmental engineer, director of the Graham Environmental Sustainability Ins ute at the University of Michigan and an expert on such harmful algal blooms. "The options when it occurs are to treat it—very expensive—or to shut down."
Such dangerous blooms are becoming more common, affecting all 50 states, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Just last year a township near Toledo had to shut down its water supply due to a similar bloom. And such blooms are not confined to freshwater. Offshore, similar algal blooms create dead zones; microbes consuming dead algae use up all the available oxygen in the water, killing slow-moving and sessile sea life. Such dead zones are on the rise not just on the U.S. seaboards and interior waters but worldwide. The annual ocean dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River covered an area roughly the size of Connecticut this year, after reaching Massachusetts-proportions in 2013. Freshwater blooms like the one that shut down Toledo's drinking water cost the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and also occur in countries such as Brazil and China.
Warmer summertime temperatures, more powerful rainstorms and longer growing seasons—all conditions expected to strengthen as climate change continues—will only make conditions even more hospitable for such cyanobacteria, some of the oldest life on Earth. The algae have been blooming earlier and lingering later in recent years. And ecosystem changes in Lake Erie may be contributing to the problem. "The zebra and quagga mussels in Lake Erie might also be important because they do not eat theMicrocystis species, favoring their growth over others," Scavia notes.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...A_EVO_20140811
The Rio Grande is disappearing. Demand for water is growing as average temperatures rise faster than they ever have in the past 11,000 years. The water that remains is being fought over by the countries and states that agreed to share the river. At the same time, a border fence is being built along its banks.
http://riogrande.texastribune.org/
What City Will Run Out of Water First?
As drought threatens more areas of the world, we’re hearing a steady stream of stories about cities, towns and regions whose water supply is interrupted temporarily.
San Antonio, TX, with a population of nearly a million and a half, and a metro population of 2.3 million, faces the threat of running out of water. Photo credit: ShutterstockThat’s led experts to investigate what major world city could be the first to run out of water entirely. And it could be a city right here in the U.S.
A study done at the Environmental Hydrology Laboratory at the University of Florida ranks the 225 American cities with populations greater than 100,000 on fresh water
availability and vulnerability. And while many of the most vulnerable cities are in the southwest, as one might expect with drought conditions sweeping California and Texas, there are some surprises.
The study rates ten cities as having a high level of vulnerability.
San Antonio, with a metro area population of just under 2.3 million, comes in at 225.
But it’s followed by Miami, Florida, at 224 the second most vulnerable city.
The largest metropolitan area threatened is Los Angeles, ranked 220 in terms of water security.
The other U.S. cities bringing up the rear are
Lincoln, NE (223),
San Jose, CA (222),
San Diego, CA (221),
Salt Lake City, UT (219),
Riverside/San Bernadino, CA (218),
Mission Viejo, CA (217) and
El Paso, TX/NM (216).
Other areas with a population of more than a million that face lesser but still high threats of water depletion are New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Tampa/St. Petersburg.
http://ecowatch.com/2014/09/03/city-...24726-85879165
SAWS' ocean desal plans:
http://www.saws.org/your_water/waterresources/projects/ocean_desal/
Drought forecast to improve or end by December
http://blogs.kxan.com/2014/08/21/dro...er/#more-18994
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