Midwest Droughts Varied and Far Reaching Effects

The severe drought now being felt in much of the Midwest segment of the United States is threatening to destroy a large portion of the annual corn crop (Drought, heat killing corn crop, The Columbus Dispatch -   http://tinyurl.com/84k8yvp ) At first glance, that would seem like an event that would have significant effects on food prices, and that those effects would be felt most close at hand and become more subdued the farther one travelled from the source of the event.  Evidently, that's not the case.  Here in the U.S., those commodities prices represent only a small part of the average food bill, so in the short term, those food prices should not see any big jumps.  That's according to a story in the Appleton, Wisconsin Post-Crescent - http://tinyurl.com/8yer9t9 .  And yet half a world away, The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the withering U.S. corn crop will drive up commodity prices enough in that country that consumers will definitely feel the pinch at the local supermarkets (US Heatwave to send Australian food prices higher - http://tinyurl.com/7jukl5r ). It's a good example of the interconnectedness of the worlds commodities markets, and how water, or the lack thereof, can have far reaching effects.

CCR - Consumer Confidence Report or Confuse Consumers Report?

July 1st of every year marks the day by which community water systems across these United States are required to have mailed to their customers the previous year’s Consumer Confidence Report (CCR), more commonly known as the water quality report. If you haven’t received yours yet, then look for it in the mail shortly. If you still don’t see it, then it’s probably a good bet it was already delivered to you as a bill stuffer or stand-alone mailer that you summarily disposed of as junk. Hopefully you at least recycled it. If your curiosity about the report has been stimulated by this post, however, then never fear. You can go on-line to your water company’s web site and find an electronic version posted. Once you find it, however, you may find it somewhat difficult to decipher. Don’t blame your water company for that, at least not entirely. Federal regulations promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have a great deal to say about what is and isn’t to be included in the CCR, as well as how it is to be organized and what verbiage to use, and we all know that the Federal Government is not always the best when it comes to communicating in a simple, easy to understand fashion. Just look to the tax code for a good example of that. For that reason, I thought I might try to explain a few of the more confusing bits, judging by the questions I get asked frequently around this time of year.

Although your water company tests for a great many elements, chemicals, compounds, molecules, particles, and life forms in your drinking water, the CCR is only supposed to contain those items that were detected in the water served to the public at concentrations above a defined level. There is a lot packed into that sentence that we should look at a little more closely, one piece at a time.

“Items that were detected” – in other words, if I tested for a hundred different things and didn’t find any of them, my CCR would be blank. So how do you know what the water company tests for and how often they test? You don’t, at least not based upon the information in the CCR. If you want to find out, you can try calling your water company and hope you can contact someone who knows the answer, but it’s a much more difficult and complex answer than you might imagine, given the ever growing extent of drinking water regulations. Or you could search the internet for a posting of your states drinking water regulations, although even if you find them you will then have to interpret them. Adding to the complexity is that not every item needs to be tested for every year. Some testing only needs to be done every other year, or every three, six, or nine years. And the frequency can vary depending upon the source of your water or other factors. The answer is complex, will be different for every water company, and could be different year to year for the same water company.

“Served to the public” – so if you’re looking to your CCR to give you some idea of what is in the local lake, river, or groundwater aquifer your water is drawn from, you’re probably out of luck. The CCR tells you what’s in the water you drink, so if your source water is contaminated with high levels of perchlorate, for example, but your water company treats that water to completely remove the perchlorate before selling it to you (which they had better!), then the CCR would not list perchlorate as a contaminant.

“Concentrations above a defined level” – huh? No analytical test can measure down to zero. They all have what’s referred to as a reporting limit. Above the reporting limit, you can confidently say that the item you are testing for is present at a measured level; it can be quantified. Below the reporting limit, you can’t really measure the level accurately, or even say whether it’s actually present or not with any real confidence. The Federal or State government sets the reporting limit for most items they require to be measured based on their estimation of what can confidently be reported by a majority of laboratories. If the reporting limit is set at 5 ug/L for example, it is not required of any water company to report in their CCR any test results less than that, even if the laboratory that does their analytical work has the capability of reporting lower levels with confidence. So if your water company tested samples at 4 ug/L of this compound, whatever it may be, they would not be required to report that in the CCR.

CCR’s contain a wealth of information, but unfortunately the rules governing how they are produced can make deciphering them a bit of a challenge. I’ve tried to shine some light on a few of those challenges in this post, although certainly not all – I’d need a few more pages for that. Feel free to contact me if you have any particular questions, and hopefully I’ll be able to answer them.

What is the Cost?

Reusable Water Not Cheaper: Report
http://bit.ly/KbuW9C


Committee Seeks Consultant to Help Evaluate Desal Projects
http://bit.ly/KfCIQ1


Both of these articles, the first dealing with San Diego Counties efforts to implement potable reuse as part of its overall water supply scheme, and the second involving the continuing saga of trying to bring more desalination to the Monterey Peninsula to alleviate the water supply issues there, involve making sure that the cost of the water, whatever the source, stays as low as possible. While on the surface this seems a worthy goal, the process by which this evaluation on cost takes place is fundamentally flawed. The cost comparisons, whether they intend to or not, inevitably use as their baseline the historical cost of water. But the historical costs were heavily subsidized by taxes and were from unsustainable systems of acquiring and delivering the water, which is why so much of the State of California is now in the situation it finds itself, faced with dwindling supplies and escalating costs. Cost comparisons for future water supplies need to consider the cost of increasingly limited supplies on the economy, and need to reflect the true, all encompassing cost of supplying the water. Essentially, we need to be asking ourselves not what will some project cost compared to what we’ve been paying for water, but what will it cost us, as individuals and as a community, if we run out of water.

OC Water Summit 2012

I attended the OC Water Summit at the Grand Californian Hotel, Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California today. Just like last year, it was a day of great presentations with lots of information in an absolutely beautiful facility, as well as a day of meeting and chatting with other passionate water industry professionals. My biggest take away for the day wasn’t even the direct topic of a presentation, but was an affirmation based on related information that California needs to work much harder and faster to develop more regional and local sources of water and stop relying on so much water pumped from the Bay Delta.

Curt Schmutte, P.E., and engineering consultant and expert on the Bay Delta system, gave an info packed and slightly scary overview of all the challenges facing the Bay Delta. It left me feeling like the chances of a total catastrophic failure of the system that draws water from this region to distribute to Southern California is much more likely than it is to get fixed any time soon. From the Bay Delta “holes” as Curt calls them, which are thousands of acres of islands that are up to 30 feet below sea level and still subsiding; to the threats of sea level rise and the potential for significant seismic events, the Bay Delta as it exists now is completely unsustainable.

The presentation by Michael Mann, Nobel Prize winning professor and author on climate change just reinforced the threats to California’s current water distribution system with its predictions of extensive sea level rise and rain fall pattern changes. Unfortunately, many of the audience members were very hung up on the issue of whether climate change is anthropogenic – caused by humans – or not. From a totally pragmatic point of view, who cares; our industry just needs to plan for the inevitable results of the change, not worry so much about what’s causing it. Leave that to others with more expertise in that area.

Even with those threats to the Bay Delta region, there are efforts being made to try and fix it. A big part of that is an upcoming $11.1 billion (yes, billion) bond measure of which a good sized chunk is slated for Bay Delta sustainability projects. But a panel made up of Tracy Rafter, CEO of the Los Angeles Business Federation; Joseph Cruz, Director, California State Council of Laborers; and Adan Ortega, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Water Conservation Partners that talked about this November, 2012 election bond measure had less than positive feelings regarding whether the measure will pass. Given California’s current economic situation, which isn’t good, I don’t think it will pass either.

So if the Bay Delta is in decline and the amount of water available for delivery to points south destined to be reduced, and given that the Colorado River is extensively oversubscribed (not discussed at the Summit), California needs to start developing new regional and local sources of supply, which to me means desalination - both brackish and seawater desalting - and extensive water recycling for potable purposes. And those projects should not be paid through bond measures, the debt service on which just strips money from already decimated programs like education and various social services. The costs should be paid by the users of those projects through water rates, which of course will make rates go up substantially. It’s long past time Californians, and all Americans, start paying the true cost of water through their water bills and learn to appreciate this resource appropriately.

The Politics of Regulation: Hexavalent Chromium and Arsenic

Hexavalent chromium, or Cr(VI), is almost constantly in the news lately. California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has set a hotly contested Public Health Goal (PHG) of 0.020 ug/L, or 20 parts per trillion. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has introduced legislation into the U.S. House of Representatives to regulate Cr(VI), and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) has introduced the companion legislation into the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is re-reviewing the toxicological data for Cr(VI) after intense political and public pressure to regulate the chemical. But don’t confuse all of this frenzied activity with productivity, or even effective purpose.

The PHG setting process in California is a very rigorous one that takes into account the best available toxicological data in the scientific literature. OEHHA has identified the PHG level of 0.020 ug/L “as protective against all identified toxic effects from both oral and inhalation exposure to hexavalent chromium that may be present in drinking water.”(1) However, there is a great deal of debate among toxicologists that this PHG has been set much too low because of the methodology used in many of the studies OEHHA relied on. In contrast, there is almost no debate that almost any level of arsenic consumption can cause adverse health effects. The PHG in California has been set for arsenic at 0.004 ug/l, which is 4 parts per trillion, or 5 times lower than the PHG for Cr(VI). The EPA has a process similar to OEHHA’s for setting a Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) which is analogous to the PHG. The MCLG that EPA has set for arsenic is 0 mg/L. “The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) evaluated arsenic in 1980 and classified ‘arsenic and arsenic compounds’ in Group 1, which includes ‘chemicals and groups of chemicals, which are causally associated with cancer in humans.’ Arsenic is also known to be atherogenic, genotoxic, teratogenic, and may cause other adverse developmental effects in exposed children.’(2)

Setting PHG’s and MCLG’s is the first step in the regulatory process. These goals, along with other considerations such as Best Available Technologies (BAT) for treatment and what that treatment costs, are used to set the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL), which is the regulatory level. The MCL for arsenic has been set at 10 ug/L, or 2,500 times higher than the PHG. Yet the political and public pressure is being applied to set the MCL for Cr(VI), a less toxic chemical by almost any measure, at or very near the PHG of 0.020 ug/L. The logic here is illusive to say the least.

I don’t think the MCL for arsenic should be lowered. There are too many small systems that can’t meet the MCL now, and many others can only meet it at great expense. That’s an expense that gets passed on to the consumer in a time when complaints about increasing water bills show up in the news a lot more frequently than news about Cr(VI). And I don’t think that the MCL for Cr(VI) should be set at or near the PHG. The same considerations that were used to set the MCL for arsenic 2,500 times higher than the PHG need to be applied to setting the MCL for Cr(VI). Water purity has to be balanced by water expense in providing an acceptable product to the public.

1) PUBLIC HEALTH GOALS FOR CHEMICALS IN DRINKING WATER, HEXAVALENT CHROMIUM (Cr VI), July 2011.  http://oehha.ca.gov/water/phg/pdf/Cr6PHG072911.pdf


2) PUBLIC HEALTH GOALS FOR CHEMICALS IN DRINKING WATER, ARSENIC, April 2004.
http://oehha.ca.gov/water/phg/pdf/asfinal.pdf

Time for Ag to Step Up and Reduce Nitrate Contamination

I find it incredibly disturbing that in California, a State with the 7^th largest economy of any country in the world, we have drinking water issues that we share with countries that are at the bottom of the economic ladder, the so called Third World Countries.  The United Nations even sent a Special Rapporteur, Catarina de Albuquerque, to the United States to report on safe drinking water and sanitation.  The report, available here - http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/18session/A-HRC-18-33-Add4_en.pdf - was widely reported on in the press (http://newamericamedia.org/2011/09/un-report-california-county-lacks-clean-water.php ; http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/25/local/la-me-seville-water-20110425 ; http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/comment/reply/9877 ), and documents how terrible water quality conditions are in parts of California’s Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.  The ground water aquifers in the area, from where most drinking water is drawn, are contaminated with nitrates, arsenic, and pesticides.  While the arsenic is most likely naturally occurring in many if not all of these areas, the nitrates and pesticides are definitely the result of intensive agricultural practices, which include both applications of nitrate fertilizers and the disposal of waste from concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFO’s.  Currently, several of the Regional Water Quality Control Boards around California, because this is an issue not exclusive to the Central Valley,  are working on adopting new rules that will require agricultural entities to reduce groundwater and surface water pollution from nitrate fertilizers, pesticides and sediment carried from irrigated farm fields.  Needless to say, these regulations are hotly contested by the agricultural lobby as being too expensive and otherwise burdensome for farmers to deal with.  As a regulatory and water quality professional working in the highly regulated field of drinking water, I agree that regulations are burdensome, as well as irksome, but they are also highly necessary to protect public health, and it is more than past time for agriculture to step up and bear the responsibility for the havoc they are reeking on the ground water resources of this State.  Agriculture needs to stop foisting the problem off on to the residents of poverty stricken, politically orphaned, primarily Latino communities who suffer the economic damage and degraded health that is the result of this agricultural pollution.  Instead, they need to do the right thing by working hard and long, something farmers are very good at, to do the monitoring, reporting, and implementation of best management practices that will begin to turn this problem around and clean up California’s precious ground water resources.

Total Coliform Bacteria

A typical sample station for taking coliform
samples in the distribution system.

Every week, drinking water operators everywhere spend their morning driving from sample station to sample station, very carefully filling little 100 mL bottles with water from their distribution systems. At least once per quarter, and probably more often, they do the same thing for the water from each and every operating well in their systems. They cap the bottles, label them appropriately, and prepare them for transport to the laboratory where they will be tested for Total Coliform Bacteria. If the test is positive, then the sample will also be tested for a particular bacterium, Escherichia coli, more commonly known as E. coli. So what is a coliform bacterium and why do we test for it? Coliform bacteria are defined as rod-shaped Gram-negative non-spore forming bacteria which can ferment lactose with the production of acid and gas when incubated at 35-37°C (American Public Health Association, Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater, 19th ed., APHA, Washington, DC, 1995). That’s a mouthful! In other words, a coliform bacterium is one that gives a positive test result; not a real meaningful definition. In theory, the coliform test is used to try and detect bacteria that may be present because of contamination by sewage or sewage contaminated water. A great many of the bacteria that live in the gut of mammals like humans are coliform bacteria. However, coliform bacteria can and do live just about anywhere; in the soil, in surface and groundwater, in and on plants, flowers and fruits, everywhere. So just because there may be a positive coliform sample doesn’t mean that the water is contaminated. It is just an indicator that there could possibly be a problem, and that you should do some investigating to see if there are any problems you weren’t aware of in your system; maybe a leak, an unprotected backflow situation, low chlorine residuals, etc. Drinking water systems are required to test for these bacteria in the distribution system by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Total Coliform Rule (TCR), and there are very specific steps that must be taken if a test result is positive, such as taking repeat samples. The TCR is currently being revised to better reflect the fact that a positive result does not necessarily mean the distribution system is contaminated. The revised rule is expected to be finalized later this year, and would go into effect in 2014. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) requires that each well be tested at least quarterly, and there are no regulations related to a positive result. However many water companies, in an effort to more closely monitor and protect groundwater resources, have implemented monthly testing for their wells, and implement their own actions should a well test positive.

Although not necessarily indicative of any contamination, testing for coliform bacteria can be a very good tool for keeping track of the overall health and cleanliness of groundwater resources, the distribution system, and of the water we deliver to our customers. The job of taking all those samples is a very important one for system operators.

Carbon Disclosure Project Water Disclosure Global Report 2011

Published in late 2011, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Water Disclosure Global Report looks at corporate awareness of global water issues. A total of 238 companies responded to the information request that was the basis of the report, out of a total of 425 companies solicited for a response rate of 56%. That’s an enviable response rate for any such endeavor. Companies were chosen from the FTSE Global Equity Index Series, The Australian Securities Exchange, and The Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Key highlights from the report include:

• 59% of respondents report exposure to water related risk that has the potential to cause significant impact;
• 63% have identified water related opportunities to generate substantial change in revenues;
• Increasing numbers of companies are tracking water withdrawls and recycling/reuse data;
• Energy companies report a very high level of water related risk but a low level of board oversight of water issues.
In all, global companies are realizing the significance of water to their overall operations. As part of the information collection response, IBM replied, “Water …is fast becoming one of the planet’s most stressed resources. Access to clean water has emerged as a critical issue affecting economic activity, development, and business around the world.” Not to mention the importance to sustaining life itself for all the planets many and varied inhabitants. Read the full report here - https://www.cdproject.net/water .

Is So Cal Finally Getting Serious About Its Water Crisis?

This article from Time (http://ti.me/whFGlX ) does a good job giving an overview of Southern California’s start/stop/start again process for dealing with water self sufficiency. Every time there’s a drought, people run around screaming and yelling about reducing dependence on imported water and developing reliable local sources. The discussion includes conservation, recycling, stormwater capture, rainwater harvesting, increased groundwater use, and desalination. Plans are made, funding sources explored, consultants (lots of consultants) are contracted with to explore every aspect of each and every proposal. Then, of course, it rains, and everything comes to a screeching halt; who needs all of those expensive alternative water supply projects when the stuff is falling from the sky? It’s a problem that isn’t limited to the California southland; Australia, during a long and serious drought, was able to get several desalination plants built to try and drought-proof their water supply. Now that the drought there has eased a bit, many are questioning whether those plants are necessary or should have ever been built.


The people of Southern California will have to experience a great deal more pain from increased water costs and decreased availability before they will demand from their political institutions a determined, significant effort to reduce the dependence on imported water. The Time article indicates that the Los Angeles area has reuced it’s dependence on imported water by 25% in the past 20 years. At that rate, it will take at least another 60 years to reach water independence, which is way too long.