Last night, city council members voted to extend Flint’s current temporary contract with the Great Lakes Water Authority by two years.
Flint’s mayor and state officials have been pushing for a 30-year contract with GLWA.
But city council members have balked at signing on to the deal.
They are concerned the contract does not prevent Flint’s already high water rates from rising even higher.
Last week, U.S. District Judge David Lawson gave the Flint city council until Monday to come up with a solution to the city’s long-term drinking water needs.
City councilman Herbert Winfrey believes the two-year deal will comply with the judge’s order.
The Flint city council also voted to put off consideration of the 30-year GLWA deal for another month.
But Judge Lawson may have something to say about that.
The judge is considering a motion by the city council to delay his order.
For at least two members of the council, it should have been their final meeting.

( Michael Paulsen / Houston Chronicle ) He had heard the stories of dead bodies rotting in the streets.
He knew that the city of New Orleans had totally broken down.
Any sense of optimism the reporter had for the Crescent City’s recovery suddenly went dark.
It was "the moment went the bottom had fallen out," as Douglas Brinkley documented in "The Great Deluge."
Today, in Puerto Rico, they’re not drinking out of hotel fountains.
They’re drinking out of Superfund sites.
Fences around a toxic well were torn down and the water contained was pumped out to citizens desperate to bathe, wash dishes and, yes, imbibe, CNN reported last week.
This can’t be the bottom falling out, because somehow EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to keep digging.
He has proposed an EPA budget that slashes 30 percent from Superfund cleanups and 37 percent from Superfund enforcement, according to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Houstonians warned for years a natural disaster could rupture the storage tanks filled with dioxin and wash the carcinogenic chemical into the San Jacinto River.

By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue Many of the more than one million Californians who live in mobile home parks drink water that is more polluted and more likely to be cut off than residents who get water from other municipal utilities, according to the most detailed research to date on water access in California trailer parks.
Water service and quality in mobile home parks is “terribly neglected,” according to Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author of the study, which was published on October 4 in the journal Environmental Justice.
By analyzing state drinking water data from 2010 to 2014, Pierce and Silvia Gonzalez, a coauthor, showed that mobile home parks had more frequent water quality violations: one-third exceeded at least one drinking water health standard in those years compared to one-quarter of other water systems.
Using federal housing data, the researchers found that residents of mobile home parks were four times more likely to have water cut off than those served by other systems.
That study, led by Pierce and published in 2015, found that mobile home park residents were nearly three times more likely to have water service cut off than residents served by other municipal systems.
For this study, Pierce and Gonzalez evaluated mobile home park water service on quality, reliability, and affordability, which are the three tent poles of the right-to-water law.
Publicly regulated systems in California serve 15 or more connections.
There are a number of policy prescriptions available to remedy poor service and water quality in mobile home parks, Pierce said.
The State Water Board has made progress on this point.
He also writes the Federal Water Tap, Circle of Blue’s weekly digest of U.S. government water news.

The Environmental Protection Agency is warning Puerto Rico residents not to drink from wells at so-called "Superfund" sites amid reports that some on the island have sought water from the hazardous waste areas.
"EPA advises against tampering with sealed and locked wells or drinking from these wells, as it may be dangerous to people’s health."
The warning comes as much of the island remains without access to drinking water in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which tore across Puerto Rico last month.
As of Thursday morning, about 64 percent of residents had water service restored, according to a recovery website managed by Puerto Rico’s government.
Only 17 percent of the island has electricity, according to the site.
The EPA said it is working with local municipalities in Puerto Rico to get drinking wells up and running, but noted that some communities are in need of electrical generators to get the wells functioning.
There are currently 18 sites in Puerto Rico on the National Priorities List.
President Trump has faced criticism in recent weeks for its response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
The administration stepped up its relief operations on the island late last month.
Trump, however, has defended his handling of the situation, suggesting late last month that the U.S. territory’s leadership and others on the island were relying too heavily on federal assistance and should do more to help themselves.

Standing next to newly erected tents clustered on a hillside, Abdul Malek explains one of the biggest problems facing the more than 500,000 Rohingya Muslims who fled violence in Myanmar for the relative safety of Bangladesh.
In the past week, however, a new latrine was installed by the U.N. refugee agency.
To help combat a potential health emergency, aid groups are hurriedly installing thousands of tube wells for clean drinking water and as many latrines as they can.
Asif Saleh, a senior director with the Bangladeshi relief organization BRAC, said it was targeting installation of 15,000 latrines by Oct. 15.
And a lot of the diseases spread from open defecation and not having access to clean water.
Vivian Tan, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said in an email that to date the organization and its partners have installed 500 latrines serving some 25,000 people, mainly in the now-extended section of the Kutupalong camp.
An additional safeguard for controlling the spread of cholera is vaccination.
With support from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund, Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health rolled out an ambitious oral cholera vaccination campaign on Tuesday at many of the settlement sites in the Cox’s Bazar sub-districts of Ukhia and Tekhnaf.
For Malek and his neighbors, the installation of the new latrine helped, but not everyone is using it.
When asked where men go, he gestured towards the hills and fields.

Being water stressed means Pakistan needs to be very careful in its usage of water for all purposes, including domestic and agriculture use.
“If we continue to act the way we are acting today, the forecast is that this will further drop to 500 cubic meters per person per year, making it (Pakistan) a water scarce country,” the managing director of the food and beverage company added.
Nestle fills around 20,000 bottles with groundwater in an hour at its Sheikhupura factory, which runs 24/7.
Nestle’s six drinking water facilities provide access to safe and clean drinking water to more than 60,000 people every day.
Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, executive director, Sustainable Development and Policy Institute (SDPI), admitted to weak government policies when it came to water resources and its uses.
The SDPI official urged for agro-ecological zoning to save water, agriculture and to promote food security.
The PAD secretary said water was short because the Indus Basin System was designed at 16 percent cropping intensity, whereas currently it was over 135 percent.
“So the additional water requirements due to increased cropping intensities are being met through augmenting weakened out supplies, ground water pumping…and conservation of irrigation water at farm level through different water saving techniques,” he added.
Industry players, government officials, and other stakeholders agreed that the need was to promote better policies for preserving the precious resource to make the country food secure, as indeed 44 percent Pakistanis suffered from food insecurity.
Nestle in its endeavour to conserve water, apart from the AWS standards certification, and zero water targets at dairy factories, has also introduced drip irrigation, furrow irrigation, and sprinkler irrigation to its partner farmers.

U.S. Sens. The association, made up of nearly 1,300 residential lots, provides potable water and wastewater services to about 445 homes.
“Rural communities in Hawaii face unique challenges in maintaining and updating aging water infrastructure,” Hirono said.
A neighbor taking a morning walk saw smoke coming from the Kaulana Street house and called 911.
The first alarm was at 5:57 a.m.
No one was at home at the time of the fire.
Seventeen firefighters responded to the blaze.

U.S. Sens. Mazie K. Hirono and Brian Schatz, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced that the Hawaiian Shores Community Association will receive nearly $3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve its community drinking water system in Puna, Hawai‘i.
“Rural communities in Hawai‘i face unique challenges in maintaining and updating aging water infrastructure,” said Sen. Hirono.
“The Hawaiian Shores Community Association is very grateful to the USDA, Sens.
In addition, USDA will provide HSCA with $1,978,000 in federal assistance.

(MissionNewswire) As part of its Clean Water Initiative, Salesian Missions recently donated eight water reservoir tanks to the Don Bosco Araimiri Secondary School in Araimiri, Papua New Guinea. The new water tanks give students access to clean drinking water.
Currently, the school educates 250 students.
UN-Water estimates that worldwide there are more than 663 million people living without a safe water supply close to their home and must spend countless hours queuing or trekking to distant sources to look for water and cope with the health impacts of using contaminated water.
In response to this crisis, Salesian Missions, the U.S. development arm of the Salesians of Don Bosco, has made building wells and supplying fresh, clean water a top priority for every community in every country in which Salesian missionaries work.
“Having access to clean water and proper sanitation brings a sense of dignity to the children and families we serve in our programs,” says Father Mark Hyde, executive director of Salesian Missions.
Close to 50 percent of adults are illiterate and 25 percent of children are unable to attend school. In rural areas, where nearly 88 percent of the population resides, there are few roads or means of transportation to get to schools or places of employment.
Salesian missionaries in the country provide primary and secondary education as well as technical skills training to prepare youth for the workforce.

According the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), more than 180 million people are deprived of access to clean water in countries affected by conflict, violence, and instability.
Only 3 percent of the world’s water is freshwater. At the current rate of consumption, by 2025, majority of the world may face water shortages.
Demand-induced scarcity results from the water needs of increasing populations.
Terrorism: where water resources, or water systems, are either targets or tools of violence or coercion by non-state actors.
Humans need to drink water to survive. The majority of the human body (60 percent) is composed of water.
Yemen: It may become the first country in the world to run out of water. It is an impoverished desert country with years of conflict, instability and misgovernment.
If everyone has access to clean water, then there would not be any water conflict.