Water Crisis Uproots Syrian Farmers

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

SHAIZAR CASTLE, Syria (Reuters) – Only a few decades ago, fish were plentiful in the Orontes river which for thousands of years has provided water to the lush Syrian plains, at the crossroads of the ancient world.

These days the Orontes’s 12th century norias, enormous water wheels famous for their distinctive creak, barely turn in the weak tides. Algae covers the river’s surface and the desert has been closing in.

“The river has become so polluted. The quality of our produce has suffered and there is barely enough now to feed my family,” said 80-year-old farmer Mohammad al-Hamdo.

Syria’s worst drought in decades has displaced hundreds of thousands of people and raised calls for a coordinated water policy for the Middle East as the region faces a dryer climate and water supplies depleted by damming and water well drilling.

Yet whether a coordinated water policy is even possible is in doubt in a region riven by tensions and rivalry and where water politics is often seen as a zero-sum game.

The Euphrates River, which flows from Turkey through Syria and Iraq, is polluted and salinized. Damming by Turkey and demands for water by ballooning populations have drastically reduced its flow.

Mohammed Okla is among an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 Syrian farmers and their families who in the past three years have been forced to abandon their land due to drought, according to a recent United Nations study.

“I lost two-third of my cattle after the water wells dried up,” said Okla, who fled the badly-hit eastern Hasaka province five months ago and now lives in a tent with his two wives and 15 children next to the main garbage dump in Damascus.

Okla’s family have turned from wheat and cattle farmers into virtual refugees. Flies cover the faces of his barefooted children who play among scraps of metal and trash pulled from the dump as substitute toys

A recent United Nations study said the drought now covers over 60 percent of Syria’s land mass and 1.3 million people have been affected so far, with regions around Damascus, Aleppo and Hamah receiving the bulk of the displaced.

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Source: Reuters

Maine Community Rebuffs Nestlé Over Water Rights

By Leslie Samuelrich, Corporate Accountability International

After an extended grassroots campaign, Nestlé is finally removing 23 bottled water test wells from a wildlife management area in Shapleigh and Newfield, ME.

Shelly Gobielle and her neighbors first discovered the wells a year and a half ago, three years after Nestlé’s under-the-radar installation. Upon realizing that Shapleigh was likely one of the next site for Nestlé’s water extraction for its Poland Spring brand bottled water, residents approached town officials with their concerns about what bottling would do to the local ecosystem. Their words fell on deaf ears, as Nestlé had already lobbied for and secured the support of the Shapleigh town officials.

The only option was for residents to take matters into their own hands, forming the group Protect Our Water and Wildlife Resources (POWWR). Members hit the streets and went door to door educating the public and signing enough petitions to call a town meeting, held four months ago.

Residents in both Shapleigh and the neighboring town of Newfield passed ordinances that asserted the right of townspeople to control their own water and to prohibit commercial water extraction, a reality that can at last be assured.

This is a watershed moment, so to speak, in the effort to restore local control over water. Earlier this month another community group, the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, secured a major court victory against Nestlé after nine years of legal battles and Nestlé appeals. The settlement requires Nestlé to dramatically reduce pumping during summer months at a critical well site in Northern Michigan, and prohibits the corporation from increasing pumping levels in the future.

Source: AlterNet Mobile

Rising Tension Over Nile Water

CAIRO (AP) — Ministers from the 10 African countries on the Nile river began crucial discussions Monday over drafting a new water sharing agreement, which is hampered by Egypt’s refusal to reduce its share of world’s longest river.

In an opening address to the Nile Basin Initiative, held in the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, Egypt’s Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif urged for a “return of the cooperation and harmony” among the group’s members, describing the ongoing dispute as a “misunderstanding.”

In the two-day meeting, participants are hoping to conclude the Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement, which establishes a permanent body to oversee water allocation along the Nile.

During talks last month in Kinshasa, Congo, officials from the 10 countries of the Nile basin, failed to agree over a new system of water sharing desired by a majority of the members.

A 1929 agreement between Egypt and Britain, acting on behalf of its then east African colonies, set up the original sharing framework and gave Cairo the right to veto upstream projects.

In a 1959 agreement with Sudan, Egypt was awarded an annual 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water, the largest share of any country along the river.

The remaining eight riparian states resent Egypt’s quota and want to draft a new agreement. The other Nile basin countries are Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Burundi.

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Source: Sun-Sentinel

Dredging Causes High Levels of PCBs in Air and Water

By Dennis Yusko, Times Union

FORT EDWARD — Federal officials have modified how they dredge the Upper Hudson River after high levels of PCBs were found in the air and water near Rogers Island in Washington County, they said Friday.

Air and water monitoring conducted along the river in Fort Edward last week showed higher-than-allowed levels of PCBs in the air and water contamination of up to 442 parts per trillion, just short of the federal standard of 500 parts per trillion that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said would shut the project down.

“At no point was anybody in danger,” EPA spokeswoman Kristen Skopeck said. “It just told us that we needed to make changes.”

But dredging critics jumped on the findings Friday, calling them a “crisis on the Hudson” and demanding the EPA immediately cease all dredging.

“After years of dismissing the idea that dredging will cause the resuspension of considerable amounts of PCBs, causing levels in water to spike and volatilization into the air, EPA officials now not only admit that resuspension is occurring, but also that noise and air quality levels have reached the threshold that EPA is supposed to use to shut the project down,” Tim Havens, Sr., said in a written statement.

Havens is president of Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation (CEASE). Its members charged that the EPA was endangering the environment and welfare of local residents.

“EPA is exceeding the safety levels, and they are not even at full production,” Havens said.

The EPA, state Health Department and state Department of Environmental Conservation are monitoring the water and air around Fort Edward to ensure there are no health risks to people along the river, Skopeck said. PCB levels have dropped since General Electric Co. contractors reduced dredging in parts of the river that are most contaminated and changed the ways they handle soil scooped from the riverbed, she said.

The EPA in 2002 ordered GE to remove more than two million cubic yards of PCB-contaminated sediment from the bottom of the river between Fort Edward and Troy. GE plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls legally discharged PCBs into the river for 30 years until 1977. PCBs have been found to cause health problems in humans and animals.

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Source: timesunion.com

Study: West Faces Water Catastrophe

by Bruce Finley, The Denver Post

Denver » A new study projects that all reservoirs along the Colorado River — which provide water for 27 million people in seven Western states, including Utah — could dry up by 2057 because of climate change and overuse.

If warming led to a 10 percent reduction in the river’s flow, it would create a 25 percent chance of depletion, according to the University of Colorado research released this week. Warming resulting in a 20 percent reduction would raise the chance of depletion to 50 percent, the study found.

“In the short term, the risk is relatively low,” said Balaji Rajagopalan, associate professor of civil environmental and architectural engineering at the university and lead author on the study, which was accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union.

“But after that, the risk escalates enormously. If you do nothing, and you have no policies in place, even drastic measures such as cutting people off will not help from staving off catastrophe.”

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Bureau of Reclamation participated in the study. Rajagopalan said the study was done in response to a 2008 University of California study that found a one-in-two chance that overuse and warming could deplete reservoirs much sooner — by 2021.

A 10-year drought along the Colorado River, which runs 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, has created anxiety. Lawyers are looking into how down-river users such as Californians might assert water rights if reservoirs dried up.

Dozens of dams along the Colorado River trap 60 million acre-feet of water in reservoirs — four times the annual flow of the river. (An acre-foot is the volume of water needed to cover an acre to a depth of one foot, or 325,851 gallons, enough to sustain a family or two for a year.)

The reservoirs along the river supply cities including Phoenix and Las Vegas. Drought in recent years has dropped water levels in those reservoirs to less than half full. Currently, the reservoirs are about 59 percent full.

Study authors advocated “adaptive management” of supplies, with basin-wide discussion of how best to reduce down-river use and ramp up efficiency.

“Use the time to put together policies that can be sustainable,” Rajagopalan said. “There’s lots of room for creative policy. We need to start right now — not wait.”

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Source: Salt Lake Tribune

Waste Not: A Solution for California’s Water Woes

By Noah Buyaher, WSJ Blogs

The knives came during California’s budget battle — literally. But there’s still at least one big tussle in the Golden State left this year: solving the state’s water crisis.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders are planning a big push to address water shortages in the state, which has suffered a three-year drought. Everything from new reservoirs to urban conservation efforts is being considered.

But a big lever, according to a new study out of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, is getting farmers to use H2O more efficiently.

The finding is no great surprise. The Institute’s co-founder Dr. Peter Gleick has long advocated a “soft path” for water (freeing up new supply by curbing waste). And he’s been a critic of what he calls misinformation about the plight of Central Valley farmers. He says that they’re getting more water than they claim, and that the causes for astronomical unemployment rates in some farm communities owes more to the recession and poverty than the drought.

What’s interesting about the analysis is just how much the authors think a combination of irrigation technologies and management practices can save: 5.6 million acre-feet in an average year. That’s 17% of all water used by California farmers, and more than twice the total the state’s millions of city-dwellers could save if they wised up about their water use. It’s also a whole lot more than the enormous desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif. will produce when it comes online.

The report reiterates what demand-siders in both the water and energy debates have been saying for a long time: Spending money on capital-intensive projects (like desalination plants and huge solar arrays) makes little sense when there are cheaper and bigger opportunities in improving efficiency.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

Water Decision Leaves Atlanta High and Dry

By Jay Bookman, AJC

Yesterday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Magnuson, denying metro Atlanta access to water stored at Lake Lanier, leaves the metro region up the creek.

Let me be more specific: Up a bone-dry creek.

The potential impact of the decision is disastrous. Magnuson ruled that with the exception of Buford and Gainesville, the metro region has no right to withdraw water from Lake Lanier, and no right to store water there against future drought.

The state was given three years to try to get Congress to alter its authorized purposes for Buford Dam. If it is unsuccessful, Magnuson ruled, “the operation of Buford Dam will return to the ‘baseline’ operation of the mid-1970s. Thus, the required off-peak flow will be 600 cfs and only Gainesville and Buford will be allowed to withdraw water from the lake. The Court recognizes that this is a draconian result. It is, however, the only result that recognizes how far the operation of the Buford project has strayed from the original authorization.”

At first blush, it’s likely that Gwinnett County would face drastic and immediate water shortages if that occurred. Its whole sewer and water infrastructure, and the bonded indebtedness that financed it, is predicated on access to Lake Lanier. The impact on the rest of metro Atlanta would be less immediate but severe, particularly in times of drought.

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Source: AJC

Australian Town Bans Bottled Water

By Meraiah Foley, New York Times

BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA — When the residents of Bundanoon voted last week to stop selling bottled water in town, they never expected to be thrust into the global spotlight.

With a nearly unanimous show of hands at a community meeting on July 8, locals in this tourist town touched off a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water that has put the beverage industry on the defensive.

State and local officials across the United States have been phasing out the use of bottled water at government workplaces in recent years, citing a range of concerns including the energy used to make and transport the bottles and an erosion of public trust in municipal water supplies. But as far as campaigners are aware, Bundanoon is the first town in the world to stop all sales of bottled water.

Set in the cool highlands southwest of Sydney, Bundanoon is a sleepy village of tidy gardens and quaint cottages surrounded by the weekend estates of wealthy urbanites. It is the sort of place where strangers strike up conversations on park benches along the picturesque main street and townsfolk leave fresh flowers on the local war memorial.

According to Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the “Bundy on Tap” campaign, the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer.

At first, residents were upset at the prospect of tanker trucks rumbling through their quiet streets. But as opposition grew, Mr. Kingston said many began to question the “bizarre” notion of trucking water some 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, north to a plant in Sydney, only to transport it somewhere else — possibly even back to Bundanoon — for sale.

“We became aware, as a community, of what the bottled water industry was all about,” said Mr. Kingston. “So the idea was floated that if we don’t want an extraction plant in our town, maybe we shouldn’t be selling the end product at all.”

A dozen or so activists got together and called a community meeting. Of the 356 locals who turned out to vote by a show of hands, only one objected.

The ban is entirely voluntary. But with the support of the public, the town’s six food retailers have agreed to pull bottled water from their shelves starting in September. They plan to recoup their losses by selling inexpensive, reusable bottles that can be filled at drinking fountains and filtered water dispensers to be placed around town.

Some of the town’s 2,500 residents say they support the plan because they worry about the effects of chemicals in plastic bottles; some view it as a positive demonstration against the water plant. Others, however, are skeptical that the cash-strapped local council will be able to maintain the new drinking fountains. And others worry about the health implications of leaving only sweetened alternatives on refrigerator shelves.

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Source: New York Times

“Water Hog” Label Haunts Dallas

By ANA CAMPOY, Wall Street Journal

DALLAS — A reputation as a wasteful “water hog” is complicating Dallas’s efforts to siphon water from nearby communities.

Local officials, who say they need to nearly double their water supply in coming decades to keep up with a fast-growing population, want to build new reservoirs and buy water from nearby Oklahoma. But these efforts are entangled in federal lawsuits as Dallas’s neighbors see the city’s love for emerald-green lawns and lush golf courses as rampant waste.

“It’s not that they need the water to survive,” said Michael Banks, an East Texas dentist who lives near a river Dallas wants to dam. “What they want is to destroy our wildlife so they’ll have enough water for their grass.”

City officials recognize they have an image problem. “We’ve been called water hogs,” said Ramon Miguez, Dallas assistant city manager. But he said the city has made significant efforts to conserve water in recent years, including educating residents not to drench their lawns.

Spats between communities that sip and those that gulp are becoming increasingly common in the South and the West. Sprawling cities packed with houses featuring big lawns and many bathrooms typically don’t use water very efficiently, experts and environmentalists say.

So when city officials scout for more water beyond their boundaries, they don’t get much sympathy from their neighbors.

“It’s an environmental equity issue,” said David Feldman, chairman of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design at University of California, Irvine. “Before they give up their water, they want to make sure that the city isn’t being wasteful.”

In recent years, cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been forced to conserve water aggressively to meet their needs and persuade other communities to let them tap their supplies.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

Matt Damon Joins the Water Cause

Celebrity is a kind of capital. If you’re famous, and especially if you’re sexy and famous, your name easily brings money and media attention of the sort other nonprofits struggle to obtain to your chosen charity.

The sexy, famous, and talented Mr. Damon has used his celebrity to advance causes linked to poverty, which has led him to an interest in safe drinking water.

Today, Matt Damon announced a merger of an organization he co-founded, H2O Africa, with the global group WaterPartners to form Water.org.

Damon’s role is largely ceremonial, with the former director of WaterPartners, Gary White, staying on to head up Water.org. Damon explained, “As a clear leader in the sector at delivering innovative and sustainable solutions for those in need, WaterPartners was the natural choice with whom to work to truly affect lasting change.”

As for his interest in water? “Every 15 seconds,” Damon says, “a child in the developing world dies from water-related disease.” Indeed, the new group’s website says a billion people are without safe water.

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Source: San Francisco Gate

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