New Year Water Issues

Flooding in Brisbane, Australia suburbs January 2011

Source: NASA Earth Observatory

It has been awhile since I last posted. The holidays, a family member's illness, and generalized winter lethargy are to blame for the lack of comments and linkages. Water issues, on the other hand, do not take seasonal holidays, so some largely unrelated issues need at the least to be enumerated.

Once again the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission has had a trunk line water main break with a string of associated problems. Yesterday, on the coldest morning of the current season, much of the Beltway (I-95) in Prince Georges County, MD was closed for several hours due to flooding, and some serious damage was done to nearby surface streets, at least one commercial structure, and several automobiles. The U.S. Census Bureau's headquarters were shuttered for the day due to lack of water, and a number of local businesses had to close as well. Today residents of Prince Georges County served by that trunk water main have been instructed to continue boiling water before use.

Too much water has also been a problem in Australia, especially in Queensland. After years of drought and draconian restrictions on water use in some parts of Australia, the current summer with the strongest la niña in a generation or more has seen huge quantities of rain in some of that continent's normally arid and semi arid areas. Thousands of housing units have been damaged or destroyed, roads and other transportation facilities have been closed and damaged, and flooding in agricultural areas may contribute to a large uptick in world food prices in the next few months.

The role of global climate change in the Australian floods is a matter of debate. Less so is a report just issued suggesting that the Czech Republic may be the first state in the European Union to suffer from water supply problems due to warming air and redistribution of precipitation.

Drinking Water

Millrace, Mt. Vernon Distillery and Grist Mill Park, Fairfax, VA

©eop

For residents of the Washington, DC area, there have been a number of drinking water issues in this current, exceptionally cold, early (meteorological) winter. Water main breaks have been all too common, especially in the District of Columbia and in portions of Maryland served by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. A combination of long periods of freezing weather and old pipes makes long established urban areas vulnerable to breaks. While the District of Columbia claims to be replacing old pipe at an accelerated rate, there are still many kilometers of old cast-iron pipe, so weather induced breaks are to be expected until warmer weather returns.

A second issue raised in Sunday's right-wing Washington Post is the presence of hexavalent chromium in the water supplies of a number of urban areas including Washington. While I have not seen the movie (I do not care for Julia Roberts in any role), apparently that chemical was the cause of the supposedly courageous activities of Erin Brokovich. Hexavalent chromium is a known carcinogen, but at the moment its presence in drinking water is noted but not regulated. Current evidence indicates the chemical is in the water supplies of many urban area in the United States.

Related articles

• Tests find cancer-causing chemical in 89 percent of cities sampled (bespacific.com)
• Report: Probable carcinogen found in cities' drinking water (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Lead in Washington, DC's Drinking Water

Capitol from Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Court, Washington, DC

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In common with the situation in most other major cities in the eastern United States, lead in the local water supply has been a concern in Washington, DC for the past half century. Lead pipes and lead welds on water supply pipes made of other materials created a potential hazard for those consuming the water, especially for growing children. Over the past two decades there was a massive effort to reduce lead in the water supply. Now it is reported that effort was inadequate to reduce lead levels in about 15,000 residences. The deleterious effects of lead on the bodies and brains of those who are exposed to it in drinking water are numerous and profound, and there is a great concern about what this discovery may mean for those children living in the residences where lead levels remain high. An article in press expresses both the problems and the levels of hazard in Washington, DC (Brown, M.J., et al., Association between children’s blood lead levels, lead service lines, and water disinfection, Washington, DC, 1998–2006. Environ. Res. (2010), doi:10.1016/j.envres.2010.10.003).

Related articles

• New concerns about lead in D.C. water (washingtonpost.com)
• CDC: Partial pipe replacement didn't cut lead risk (sfgate.com)

Urban Water III

Fountain, City of London

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Today's New York Times has a good op ed piece by its regular columnist Bob Herbert concerning the pressing need for investment in urban water supply facilities. While urban uses account for less than 10 per cent of total water use, it is a crucial percentage, supplying the basic needs of millions of US citizens and residents. Saving some or most of the 10-20 per cent of water in urban systems currently lost to leakage would itself justify a large investment in new and renewed facilities, especially in cities where some of the water (and waste removal) infrastructure is over a century old. It would in most circumstances be far cheaper than expanding the supply system to bring in that much more water. Herbert further justifies the investment because it would create jobs and new opportunities for private enterprises. 

Whether the latter points are correct or not, huge investment is going to be essential in the next decade merely to maintain current standards of safety and reliability. Otherwise we are going to see many more events like those that have plagued the Maryland water utilities serving the Washington, DC slurbs. The WSSC in Maryland, in comparison to many urban and slurban water utilities elsewhere, runs a relatively new and up-to-date system. Despite that, it has suffered several major crises over the past couple of years. In those systems which are rapidly aging, it is only a matter of time before a colossal fire in one and in another one an epidemic of water borne disease happens because the water systems are beyond the breaking point, broken and dilapidated. 

Slurban Water Supplies: The Case of Kitsap County, Washington I

Eagle Harbor,  Bainbridge Island (née Winslow)

Kitsap County, Washington, Winter 2004

©EOP

When thinking about the problem of inadequate water supply for urban and slurban areas in the U.S., one usually thinks about the sprawling cities of the desert, probably including Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Phoenix. Even without climate change, those cities are likely to "run dry," that is outgrow feasible sources of inexpensive water, should growth resume after the Cheney-Bush economic crash. Only draconian restrictions on water use or immensely expensive new water projects will allow growth to continue at anything approaching the rate of the 1990-2005 period. One is not inclined to think of Seattle with its somewhat undeserved reputation for heavy rainfall (undeserved because Seattle actually receives less rain in a typical year than a number of East Coast and Midwest cities - Seatac Airport (SEA) receives about 930 mm of rain per year, while Washington National Airport (DCA) gets 1011 mm and St. Louis Airport (STL) gets 956 mm). In fact, in common with other U.S. cities in humid regions, Seattle, and especially some of its slurban territory, also faces problems of future water supply. This is especially true for those areas dependent on ground water, on aquifers, for a large part of that water.

The Kitsap Peninsula, a ferry ride from downtown Seattle on western side of Puget Sound, is a rapidly slurbanizing part of the Seattle metropolitan area. Despite its many cloudy days, Kitsap County (more or less coterminous with the Kitsap Peninsula plus Bainbridge Island) is facing potential water shortages over the next two decades. It grew from about 84,000 people in 1960 to about 240,000 in the fifty year period 1960-2010, by Sunbelt standards a moderate rate of growth. During that growth the county shifted from a mostly rural area with a small industrial city (Bremerton) to a largely slurban area. First to slurbanize was Bainbridge Island, a 35 minute ferry ride to downtown Searttle. A bit later, the expansion of military facilities, in particular the submarine base at Bangor on Hoods Canal, Naval Base Kitsap, contributed to slurban development of the peninsular part of the county. Most recently lower prices for real estate in comparison to the eastern shore of Puget Sound, especially for parcels with shoreline access or views of water and mountains, attracted many to the county.

Seattle and other cities on the eastern shore of the Sound depend primarily on surface streams fed by melting Cascade snowpack for their water supplies. Even though there are high mountains with glaciers and heavy winter snows both east and west, the Kitsap Peninsula is separated by salt water from those mountains, and its water supply is mostly from ground water supplemented by a few surface streams. The costs of piping water to Kitsap County from the Olympics or the Cascades have been considered prohibitive in an area where cheap water is taken for granted.

Most of the Puget Sound Basin was glaciated in the last ice age, and the area was near the southern terminus of the great continental glaciers, the depositional zone for glacial detritus. In consequence, much of the surface is underlain by permeable sand and gravel forming an excellent aquifer.The West Coast of the coterminus U.S.  has a Mediterranean type climate with most precipitation falling in the months from October to April and a summer drought. Because there is ample winter precipitation in most years (unlike much of California where winter precipitation is uncertain), the Puget Sound aquifers store enough water to allow for summer growth of the lush evergreen forests which once blanketed the Peninsula. At moderate rates of usage, the aquifers also allow for agriculture with some supplemental irrigation and human settlements. Common to all aquifers, however, the rate of withdrawal can exceed the rate of recharge and cause the water level to drop.

Surrounded by salt water, some Puget Sound aquifers form lenses of fresh water floating atop denser salt water. When enough fresh water is withdrawn, salt water intrudes into those lenses. Beyond some critical level of withdrawal, the aquifer can be damaged or even destroyed for future use.The image below was drawn for the San Juan Islands, a little further north in Puget Sound, but the situation is almost identical on the Kitsap Peninsula (and as we shall see in a later posting, Bainbridge Island).

A not inconsiderable portion of the water supply of Kitsap County goes to service the large US Navy facilities in and near its largest place, Bremerton, and the submarine base at Keystone on Hoods Canal, the arm of Puget Sound that marks the county's western boundary. Together those facilities exert an industrial demand for process water, Bremerton is one of the U.S. Navy's more important shipyards, an export demand as ships heading out to sea are stocked with water, and a residential demand for military and civilian personnel working and living on the bases. Waste disposal, including unknown quantities of toxic chemicals,  from those facilities has contaminated some of the aquifer under the county.

The combination of contaminated aquifers, salt water intrusions, and the possibility of draining the aquifers by too much use define the limits of water use in Kitsap County, as they do everywhere that ground water is used as the major water source. In a future posting we shall examine the water use in the City of Bainbridge Island (coterminus with the island), the most densely developed slurb in the county.

Kitsap County (pink area Naval Bases), Bainbridge Island at the Center of the Map

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bottled Water II: The Baltimore-Washington Area

Infrared photographs of zone between Baltimore and Washington, DC 1973 and 2002 showing increase in urban development. Source: NASA Earth Observatory

Awhile ago I posted some comments on bottled water. When thinking about bottled water, we mostly think of the small bottles people who jog, bicycle, or want to appear addicted to exercise carry with them along with the multi-liter bottles on the refrigerator shelf. According to a television advertisement for Britta philtres, people in the United States annually empty enough of those bottles to encircle the earth 100 times. The costs in monetary terms and in environmental damage from consumption of that kind of bottled water are substantial, a topic we may examine in a little more detail at some later date.

Another kind of bottled water is known to people in urban areas where large (and mostly reusable) jugs of water are delivered to office and shop water coolers. That business, like the sale of smaller bottles, is huge as evidenced by a fawning piece in the pathetic business section of todays right-wing Washington Post (WP). The Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is supplied by an oligopoly composed of two multi-national firms Crystal Springs and the Nestle owned Deer Park along with a much smaller local firm DrinkMore Water (also peddling small bottles with custom labels through its division called DrinkMore Custom Water). Those firms will deliver to private residences, but the bulk of their sales are to large customers in offices, retail establishments, and factories. The evidence in the piece published today by the WP is the market is growing.

The reasoning for having water delivered rather than using tap water for employee and customer drinking is complicated, but a simple analysis would suggest that it is almost never justified. By any measure, bottled water, even that in large jugs, is far costlier than water from the tap. Instead of fractions of a penny per liter, the bottled water costs 10 cents or more per liter, often substantially more. The cost is quite variable depending on how much water is delivered to a given location. For home delivered water at $7.50 per 19 liter container (5 gallons) advertised by DrinkMore Water in the DC area, the bottled water  is about 40 cents per liter. Fairfax Water tap water costs its residential customers between $1.94 and $2.08 for 3,785 liters (1,000 gallons) or about 0.55 cents per liter at the county water agency's highest rate.

The water delivered by the oligopolistic companies is generally safe water, at or below maximum acceptable levels of bacteria and other contaminants, but the water delivered by urban water supply systems through the taps also meets that requirement. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has established maximum allowable levels for various contaminants, and it requires frequent testing of water by suppliers to ensure water is not contaminated beyond those levels. Advertising to the contrary, it is not at all clear that bottled water is any healthier or safer to drink than tap water, except in a very few special circumstances when local tap water is contaminated. In the end, taste is the primary selling point, and the companies argue their water has a better taste because of special filtration.

Recent postings have noted water supply issues in the Maryland area served by Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. At the moment there are no restrictions or advisories, but ones in the recent past have been alarming. In the District of Columbia, lead in the water remains an issue and will until a vast investment is made in replacement of aging pipes, though the use of orthophosphate and other treatment has reduced the levels of lead in almost all of the water to the EPA maximum or less. The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority offers lead testing for concerned customers with lead problems frequently occurring within private structures and not in the public water mains. The water in Fairfax County, Virginia the largest suburban jurisdiction, tastes foul to many of us, but it meets or exceeds EPA standards, and the foul taste can be removed using simple filters like those sold by Britta. Despite those reservations, all of the evidence suggests that there is really little reason for the vast majority of commercial sites in the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area to depend on delivered bottled water. In addition to the monetary costs noted above, each of those oligopolistic companies selling bottled water has a fleet of trucks driving many kilometers each day in order to serve customers scattered over several thousand square kilometers of territory and contributes to environmental contamination in several other ways as well.

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• Is it not oxymoronic that a bottled water company like Nestle Waters is trying to be eco-conscious? (greenanswers.com)

The Occoquan Watershed

George Mason University Campus Fountain, July 2010

©EOP

This morning I was looking for some local materials to include in the water course, and I chanced upon a good (if too small a scale) land-use map for the Occoquan Watershed (I hope to find a similar map at a bigger scale for use in a Power Point). Our Fairfax City house sits just slightly to the Potomac watershed (small streams draining directly into the river) side of the interfluve dividing the watersheds of the Potomac and the Occoquan. The GMU campus sits on the interfluve,and a part of the campus is on the opposite slope with water draining into small streams feeding the Occoquan (which itself eventually, just southeast of its eponymous town, flows into the Potomac).

Bull Run, one of the Occoquan's tributaries is very famous, for its small valley at the edge of Manassas City was the site of two of the more vicious battles of the Civil War. At the time of the Civil War and until quite recently the almost 1550 square kilometer basin of the Occoquan was predominantly rural with farmlands, wooded areas and only a few small towns and the small city of Manassas. Since the 1970s and especially since 1990 the watershed has  been rapidly urbanized with farm fields and pastures converted to townhouse projects and small "estates" along with the usual fast food and strip mall development. That has radically changed the timing and the quality of water run off into the Occoquan, for now much of the watershed is paved and impermeable even as urban uses add contaminants to the water flowing toward the river..

Prior to much urbanization the river became an important drinking water source supplying much of the urban water in Prince William County (including Manassas and Manassas Park cities) and some of the water consumed in Fairfax County, the two largest counties by population in Virginia. Altogether nearly 1,200,000 people are connected to water supply systems which use some Occoquan river water. A substantial dam impounds a tributary of the river and creates Lake Manassas, a water supply reservoir for its namesake city. Downstream another dam impounds the Occoquan Reservoir supplying much of Prince William County and large parts of adjacent Fairfax County. While other sources of water are used by both counties, the Occoquan could in an emergency supply most users. A bit further downstream yet near the town of Occoquan is one of the largest sewage treatment facilities in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, sending treated water into the Occoquan just before that river joins the Potomac.

A crucial element in the urban water supply of Washington, DC's Virginia slurbs, the Occoquan is also a major recreation resource for the area, and the undeveloped lands along its banks provide a substantial amount of open space. Unfortunately the stream is badly polluted in places, and runoff from developed areas makes it an endangered stream. The Prince William Conservation Alliance has an excellent webpage examining the issues of pollution in the Occoquan basin. The quality of water in the river is important for those of us condemned to live in Northern Virginia!

Watershed Map from Prince William Conservation Alliance.

Drought II -- A Drought in the Washington, DC Area?

Last week it was confirmed that the June just ended was the hottest and nearly the driest recorded in the eastern states of the United States. Thus far this year there is a rainfall deficit in the Washington, DC area. Farmers in nearby area of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia are beginning to worry about their crops. The  lack of rainfall is a problem even when temperatures are normal as there is little use of irrigation in the normally humid region. [Just as I started writing this posting, heavy rain associated with a thunderstorm started to fall.]

Should the lower rainfall amounts continue through the summer, there could be problems of urban water supply in Washington, DC and its surroundings. Unlike most American cities of comparable size, Washington does not have large storage reservoirs to augment low flows during droughts, reservoirs filled in seasons and years of normal or above normal rainfall. Instead Washington depends on run of river flows on the Potomac River, its major water source. The Potomac and tributaries are the source for almost all of the water consumed in Washington, DC and its Virginia suburbs. Part of the demand in the Maryland suburban counties is met from the Patuxent, a river that flows parallel to the Potomac but enters the Chesapeake Bay directly.All of the streams are dependent on precipitation falling in the two adjacent watersheds, rain and snowfall in a roughly 40,000 square km area

[By the way, the water restrictions in suburban Maryland noted a few days ago have been lifted as the pipe has been repaired, but the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission is aware that much of its infrastructure is old and potentially at risk for failure. Meanwhile the Montgomery county seat of Rockville, which has its own water system, had declared an emergency and called on residents to curtail water use. That emergency caused by a water main break was ended earlier today. ]

The Washington DC Metropolitan area falls at a boundary in the (arbitrary) division of the US into climate regions. The Drought Monitor at the end of June from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln suggests that the Virginia suburban are at the early stage of drought.

Urban Water II

Le château d'eau du Peyrou, Montpellier France 2005

©EOP

"One of Montpellier’s more interesting architectural curiosities is the neoclassical temple Chateau d’Eau in the Promenade du Peyrou. Built to hide the reservoir of the Aqueduc St-Clement (completed in 1771) to bring water from the Lez river. The aqueduct is located behind the temple and modeled on the Pont du Gard."

One of the great and continuing challenges of human society has been the supply of water in urbanized areas and the associated issue of removing sewage (an issue we shall not investigate in any detail). Located in a Mediterranean climate, the city of Montpellier in southern France, long a center of medicine and science, was annually faced with the summer drought associated with its climate. Its response was an old one for cities near the shores of the Mediterranean, construction of an aqueduct from a nearby river to the center of the city. Not far away is the famed Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct crossing the Gard one of the larger rivers in southern France. That aqueduct brought water to the city of Nîmes, an important Roman settlement which continued to use water brought by the aqueduct long after the fall of the Roman Empire. On a first view one might also attribute the aqueduct and associated works in Montpellier to the Romans, but in fact they were constructed during the ancien regime. Montpellier, world renowned for its university and the associated medical school and also a city that was a hotbed of Protestant religious activity, was a particular focus for the Paris government and resources were freed for construction of its waterworks a couple of decades before the Revolution.

Montpellier was something of a pioneer, for construction of large urban water supply systems was fairly uncommon from Roman times until the 19th century in Europe and the Americas. Most cities used water from adjacent streams along with water from wells or surface seeps and rain collected in cisterns. Much of that water was fouled with wastes from upstream users and sewage from the cities themselves, and water borne illnesses including cholera and typhoid were not rare. Only a few cities sought water from purer sources to meet their needs. The rapid increase in urban populations beginning in the late 18th century along with increasing knowledge about the importance of water (clean water came later) for health was a goad to construction.

Philadelphia's waterworks, also using a classically inspired building as one of its centerpieces (see posting above) was in some degree inspired by two Francophiles who spent significant time in the Pennsylvania city, Thomas Jefferson and especially Benjamin Franklin, both of whom were familiar with Montpellier, Nîmes and waterworks in France.

Suburban Water Problems in Maryland

Head of navigation on the C&O Canal, Cumberland, MD 2009

©EOP

Urban water supply was the subject of yesterday's post. After it was written I found that nearby is a major (sub)urban water supply problem. An urban water system requires almost constant repair and replacement, for just as a stream erodes the rock over which it passes, flowing water in pipes causes them to erode. If the erosion is great enough, then a pipe can break, and a catastrophic spill can follow. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) which provides water and sewer services to the Maryland counties adjacent to Washington, DC had a catastrophic spill in 1998. That spill caused several injuries and substantial economic dislocation in Montgomery County along with dangers to public health and safety. Among other damage, a major commuter street was washed out and had to be replaced at considerable expense and inconvenience to commuters and nearby residents.

Yesterday the WSSC had another problem. After tests showed severe erosion, in order to avoid the rupture of a huge trunk water main, the agency was forced to shut off that line and thereby cut water supplies to nearly 2 million users. In turn water users were asked to drastically reduce their water use over the holiday weekend until repairs can be made to the pipe, but as of this morning the voluntary cut backs were not large enough to prevent a potentially disastrous drop in water pressure. With the 4th of July weekend and week following promising to be very hot and dry, lack of adequate water could prove a major problem to those whose water supply is reduced and uncertain.

While I am unaware of the sources of the problems in Maryland, the parlous state of the urban water supply systems in a number of cities due to inadequate investment in new facilities and lack of maintenance of existing water lines is well known. Tens of thousands of kilometers of water lines, from ones leading from the street into offices, shops and dwellings to major lines bring water from distant sources, need replacement in the near future. A large fraction of those lines are owned and operated by municipal and quasi-governmental agencies like the WSSC. The "no taxes" mantra along with the unwillingness of the public to pay higher rates has meant the utilities have been starved for investment and maintenance funds. Perhaps a major event will waken the public to the need for more money. One must hope that event is not a conflagration involving thousands of houses or a public health crisis!

Urban Water Supply

Fairmount Waterworks, Philadelphia, PA 1998

© EOP

Spending several days in Philadelphia earlier this week, I have not done much work on  the water course. The issue of water was not completely absent, for on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum (brown temple like building in the upper section of photo), we parked in a lot above the Fairmount Waterworks, some classic revival buildings of substantial architectural interest on the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River near downtown Philadelphia.With its museum honoring the city's waterworks, the building is also of substantial interest as a surviving element of one of the oldest municipal water supply systems in the world. Originally opened in 1815, the pumping station has been closed for over a century, but it marks the initial source of a reliable supply of clean water for the residents of the Pennsylvania city and the origins of the idea that a supply of potable water was essential for urban success.

Upstream from the waterworks and the dam on the Schuylkill is Fairmount Park. It was originally created to protect the quality of the city's water by limiting development of its watershed, an idea still very much in the forefront of urban water supply planning. Philadelphia today draws its water from a much larger area, but the green space remains one of the largest urban parks in the United States. A number of urban innovations had their origins in Philadelphia, including a fire department created through the efforts of Benjamin Franklin.Its growth to become one of the largest cities in the United States depended on increasing its water supply. Today's water system supplies a vastly larger population spread over a much larger land area than the Fairmount Park pumping station supplied. A good website called Philly H2O has all kinds of information about the city's water supply, including a great map collection.