WesternWaterBlog

A lesson about water

This article appeared in the Dessert Valley Times.

The hearing was conducted by State Engineer Jason King who will rule on SNWA’s application to tap into 126,000 acre-feet of Groundwater in the Spring, Cave, Delamar and Dry Lake valleys.

Critics of the plan, including the people who live in the region from where the water would be drawn, cite potential environmental damage, and point to the problems created when Los Angeles began taking water from Owens Valley in California, draining Owens Lake.

Supporters of the plan, including those from the construction and tourism industry, say the water is needed to save the economy of Las Vegas, and predict disaster if Las Vegas suffers a water shortage.

There’s a lesson here: don’t build more than your water supply can support.

The Virgin Valley appears to have a water supply that will allow for a growing population, but estimates vary on how much growth that supply will support.

The Virgin Valley Water District is considering embarking on a phased study to determine how much water it really has. While it’s almost impossible to determine exactly how much water is available, technology should yield fairly accurate estimates. The City of Mesquite has a dog in this fight — its growth will eventually be determined by how much water is available.

Getting the water from a distant source is not the answer — sticking your straw in someone else’s glass doesn’t go down well these days. A case in point happened a few years ago when someone tried to sell Arizona water to the VVWD, which got the people in the Arizona Strip stirred up.

People get in trouble when they live beyond their means, as do countries. Just as we should live within a fiscal budget, so should we live within a water budget, planning and building according to resources available.  See this article!

Undiluted Perchlorate Regs a Scam

Undiluted Perchlorate Regs a Scam

By WAYNE LUSVARDI posted on www.Calwatchdog.com

Everyone wants clean drinking water. But environmental zealots often forget the old saying, “The solution to pollution is dilution.”

A good example is regulations that govern the amount of perchlorate in drinking water. Perchlorate is a type of salt that occurs both naturally and unnaturally.

Regulations on perchlorate are a government scam when they are based on undiluted concentrations of perchlorate in confined water wells, rather than in the diluted drinking water found in municipal water systems. It’s the drinking water, after all, that we drink.

Diluted perchlorate in drinking water is no heath threat in Rialto, California, one of the major “hot spots” for perchlorate contamination in the state, according to a surprising new study.

Titled, “Evaluation of Exposure to Contamination at the BF Goodrich Superfund Site in Rialto,” the study was conducted by the California Department of Health in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Division of Health Assessment and Consultation, in Atlanta, Georgia.

One water well — Well No. 22 — may have exposed residents to mild concentrations of perchlorate in drinking water high enough to affect the development on unborn children, infants and children in the 1980’s. But that is speculative and unknowable. Well No. 22 has been shut down since 1997.

According to the study, today water is safe to drink in the West Valley Water District in Rialto, the Cities of Rialto and Colton and the Terrace Water Company in Colton.

The BF Goodrich Superfund Site is located north of Rialto, where in the 1950’s to the mid 1980’s, a few companies made fireworks and explosive devices using perchlorate and trichloroethylene, an industrial solvent.

Perchlorate is a molecule composed of four parts oxygen and one part chlorine — oxygenated chlorine — that has often been used as a booster in rocket fuel and fireworks.  Perchlorate also occurs naturally in the environment at low levels and can be inadvertently produced in drinking water systems when chlorine used to decontaminate drinking water is exposed to a static electric charge by water pumps.

Background on Perchlorate
Imported water supplied to Southern California water agencies from the Colorado River Aqueduct has six parts per billion of perchlorate that occurs naturally. In the nation of Chile, where perchlorate occurs at higher levels than six parts per billion in groundwater, extensive studies have never found any birth or educational defects in children due to perchlorate.

The health concern about perchlorate is not cancer or poisoning but the reduction of thyroid hormone in unborn and small children that affects normal growth and development.  Perchlorate was once used in extremely high concentrations not typically found in industrial waste sites to zap the thyroid gland to cure hyperthyroidism.  Today hyperthyroidism is treated with a nuclear pill.

The traditional method of preventing any health affects on young children has been to put iodine into table salt — iodized salt — or to eat fish which has high concentrations of iodine. But with the rise of the environmental movement, perchlorate has been removed from drinking water with expensive treatment plants, despite there never having been a known study in the United States showing that educational deficits in children are connected with perchlorate in drinking water.

Key Finding
The key finding of the California Health Department study is not located in the body of the report, but in a comment by Anthony Araiza, general manager of the West Valley Water District. He wrote state officials that Well No. 22 was blended with water from other sources, including groundwater from Lytle Creek, and thus the concentration of any perchlorate was diluted to acceptable levels. The findings of the study are being changed to reflect that any perchlorate from Well No. 22 is diluted, which further corroborates that there is no health threat posed to the community.

Regulation of perchlorate is a governmental scam when it is based on duplicitous standards that require removal of undiluted levels of perchlorate from drinking water that is later diluted with pristine groundwater rendering it safe to drink.  Nevertheless, this isn’t deterring the managers of the BF Goodrich Superfund site in Rialo from proceeding with a costly plan to remove perchlorate from a groundwater plume.

Now that’s a waste.  See this article!

Brown needs to get results for water woes

If the need is obvious and the money is there, why make poor people suffer?

This is the question for Gov. Jerry Brown following Bee reporter Mark Grossi's three-part series on the drinking water crisis in rural San Joaquin Valley communities.

I ask because who better than Brown to fix a problem begging for leadership?

The governor has the power. And, in the past, he has shown interest in the issues that intersect in tiny Tulare County farmworker communities such as Tooleville and Seville: poverty, health, environmental protection and cutting government bureaucracy.

The question is, will Brown come to the rescue, or will mothers in these towns keep lugging 5-gallon jugs of water from the store so they can cook with something uncontaminated?

No doubt about it. Water is complicated. So is government.

But with a phone call to Diana Dooley, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, Brown could untangle the bureaucracy preventing small communities from tapping loan and grant programs for safe water.

Or the governor can decide that he faces more pressing issues -- as governors before him have done. The poor are easy to ignore.

There's no doubt about money being available to fix tainted water systems. The state and federal governments regularly dole out grants and loans from well-funded programs. The barriers for rural towns have been bureaucracy and political will.

Residents in these communities live in the shadows. Many are undocumented workers, so they can't vote. They work the fields for small paychecks and try to provide the start of something better for their sons, daughters and grandkids.

You would hope that in California -- which has the world's eighth-largest economy -- these families would get safe drinking water from a faucet instead of a store.

You would hope that parents wouldn't have to worry about children drinking tap water when there isn't money to buy the bottled stuff.

And you would hope that the governor's team in Sacramento would help leaders in these towns navigate the bureaucratic maze instead of allowing technicalities to block access to safe drinking water.

The obstacle course to tap state funds begins with filling out a "pre-application." That's right, you apply to apply. This year, towns were given two months and a day to get their requests in -- July 29 to Sept. 30. Do you think that bigger cities and service districts with professional staffs might have a leg up on Tooleville and Seville in receiving help?

Brown has stuck up for the poor and underserved throughout his political career. He was an ally of Cesar Chavez and, in his first stint as governor, signed the landmark bill giving farmworkers the right to organize. In his return to politics, Brown sought to turn around impoverished, crime-plagued Oakland as its mayor. The record shows he has a social conscience.

On Friday, Brown signed seven bills related to improving drinking water, including AB 983, authored by Assembly Member Henry T. Perea of Fresno, whose district includes areas with contaminated water.

Perea's bill lets poor communities apply for grants that provide for improvements without raising water rates. This is a good start.

Now Brown needs to give the order that brings results -- not promises and further delays.

 The columnist can be reached at bmcewen@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6632. Listen to his talk show daily at 4 p.m. on KYNO (AM 940). Follow him on Twitter: @fresnomac.  See this article!

Denham's water storage bill passes out of committe, moves to House floor

Sun-Star staff

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Jeff Denham’s legislation, H.R. 2578, passed out of the House Committee on Natural Resources today. Denham’s bill is a simple, common-sense bill that will provide for much needed water storage during wet years in the San Joaquin Valley of California., his office said in a news release. Moving the bill to the House Floor is the next step for the legislation.

“Currently unemployment in my district is hovering around 17 percent, which is almost double the national average. We are dependent on water for jobs and to sustain our local economy. My bill, H.R. 2578, is a much needed piece of legislation that will create desperately needed jobs, increase water storage and help stimulate the depressed local economy,” Denham said in the release.

The legislation has bipartisan support in Congress and the backing of the Central Valley delegation. Co-sponsors include Rep. Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Jim Costa, Rep. Devin Nunes and Rep. Dennis Cardoza.

 H.R. 2578 will allow the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to consider a proposal by the Merced Irrigation District (MID) to raise the spillway at the Exchequer Dam by 10 feet without using any state or federal dollars.

The bill will allow for much needed storage of up to 70,000 acre-feet of water, which has the potential for the generation of an additional 10,000 mega-watt hours of clean renewable electricity, increased recreation activity in the area and agricultural benefits, as well as the creation of about 840 jobs, according to the news release It will also increase desperately needed water supply to the San Joaquin Valley.

Denham’s bill has the support of California water organizations and job creators in the Valley, including organizations such as Merced Irrigation District; California Citrus Mutual; Paramount Farms; Westlands Water District. Read this article!

Solutions to tap-water crisis frustratingly tough to come by

By Mark Grossi / The Fresno Bee

Don't expect a rush to clean up the tap-water mess in the San Joaquin Valley, say those closest to the problems.

The issues are being studied, litigated and, according to many small-town residents, avoided.

It might take more than a decade of unsnarling red tape before rural residents can stop lugging home five-gallon bottles of drinking water, says the nonprofit watchdog Community Water Center in Visalia.

That just doesn't work, say folks in small towns.

So what would?

Several answers emerge from interviews with water engineers, local leaders, water system managers and the residents themselves:

Fix as many existing water problems as possible right now so people can stop buying bottled water. Drill new wells for some towns. Replace pipes for others. Make the water safe, at least temporarily.

Figure out how to get river water to people. It's the long-term fix, eliminating the reliance on tainted groundwater. It would require capturing extra water in wet years, possibly by allowing it to seep into underground basins called water banks. Farmers would use banked underground water, allowing some of their river water to go to people.

Provide a one-stop place where state and local leaders can find the information they need to understand and compare each town's money request. Prioritize the problems.

Clarify often confusing rules and priorities of the California Department of Public Health, which doles out money for fixes.

Assembly Member Henry T. Perea says these ideas should have been set in motion by now.

"Studies are nice, but I think we have enough information in front of us to know the problem exists," said Perea, whose district includes several small Tulare County towns.

Perea's Assembly Bill 983 -- waiting for the governor's signature -- would help small towns get full state funding for rebuilding their water systems. At the moment, they can only get 80% of the funding from the California Department of Public Health. Some towns can't afford the other 20%.  Read this article