State public health engineering officials admitted the widespread reliance on unsafe drinking water was worrisome. “It is a fact that our schools don’t have access to safe drinking water,” one of the officials of the PHE said. (KNS)
Bottled water you buy in S’pore comes from M’sia tap which was treated in S’pore
by Belmont Lay, originally posted on December 16, 2016
Everything in life comes full circle. Including bottled water.
According to an illuminating Dec. 16 Channel News Asia report, consumers in Singapore spent S$134 million on bottled water in 2015, data gleaned from research firm Euromonitor International showed.
Best of all, F&N’s Ice Mountain and Coca-Cola’s Dasani that made up more than half of the bottled water sales volume in Singapore in 2015, are derived from the local water supply in Malaysia.
According to CNA:
When contacted, F&N confirmed that Ice Mountain sold in Singapore “is sourced and packed in Malaysia from tap water”, while Coca-Cola said that Dasani produced for the Singapore market comes from “the local water supply at (its) facility in Malaysia”. Both companies also said they have multiple purification processes in place, which distinguishes their “pure drinking water” from tap water.
And where does Malaysia get its drinking water from?
From Singapore, of course.
Under the 1962 Water Agreement drafted before Singapore’s independence, Johor is entitled to a daily supply of treated water of up to 2 percent of the raw water it supplies to Singapore.
Our Public Utilities Board (PUB) is entitled to draw up to 250 million gallons of water from the Johor River daily.
Malaysia, therefore, draws about five million gallons of drinking water daily from Singapore.
A 600ml bottle of drinking water is usually sold for between S$0.50 and S$1 here.
The same amount of tap water only costs 0.1 cent, making it 500 to 1,000 times cheaper than bottled water.
But that’s not stopping people in Singapore because consumers here spent 24 percent more than five years ago on bottled water.
So, please start drinking tap water and not bother about paying for bottled water.
Contamination issues improving at former Games and Lanes site in Agawam, according to property owner
by Conor Berry, originally posted on December 14, 2016
AGAWAM — Water contamination issues are improving at the former Games and Lanes property, according to Site Redevelopment Technologies, the Foxborough company that owns the Agawam parcel at 346-350 Walnut St. Extension.
Members of the Agawam City Council, speaking during meetings last week and last month, expressed frustration over the derelict property, which has been vacant since 2001 and remains a major blemish in a business district ripe for redevelopment.
The roughly 2.3-acre property was formerly owned by Standard Uniform Corp., which leased the building to Games and Lanes when the uniform rental business moved in the late 1980s.
Widespread groundwater contamination from dry-cleaning chemicals was discovered in 1989, spreading off-site in a northeasterly direction. The parcel was sold last spring to Site Redevelopment Technologies, or SRT, which buys, cleans and redevelops environmentally impaired properties.
David Peter, SRT’s president, sent a letter this week to Mayor Richard A. Cohen and the City Council, updating them on cleanup efforts at the property. Groundwater testing of selected wells indicates things are getting better, according to Peter.
“Results indicate that the levels of contaminants are continuing to improve and the subsurface environment is conducive to continued remediation,” he wrote in the letter, dated Monday, Dec. 12.
No municipal drinking water supplies or known private groundwater production wells are located within 500 feet of the site, according to a report submitted to MassDEP.
City Councilor Anthony R. Suffriti has made it his mission to keep the eyesore property on the council’s radar, reminding colleagues at each meeting that the site continues to generate complaints about vagrants and people who enter the building.
“The complaints are just continuous,” Suffriti said at a recent council meeting, calling the site a hazard that must be addressed.
“This has gone on for 15 years,” added Joseph Mineo, vice president of the City Council, voicing frustration over the slow progress. “It’s tiring driving by there every day and looking at that,” he said.
After buying the site in April, SRT has spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to comply with cleanup regulations, according to Peter.
“Our goal is to complete all the work necessary to allow redevelopment of the property, but as you can imagine it is not an easy task,” he said in a Nov. 18 letter to Cohen and the City Council.
The cleanup work is expected to be completed by spring 2017, according to Peter.
The building is in an area designated as a “priority development site” by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, which produced a 2010 economic development plan for the City of Agawam.
The city hopes to develop the Walnut Street Extension area into a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly commercial district.
This new bacterial filtration system could provide the world with access to clean water
This new bacterial filtration system could provide the world with access to clean water.
Unfortunately, the water purification plants that can provide millions of people with clean drinking water are not available everywhere.
Two examples of potential solutions that have been developed are the LifeStraw and the Drinkable Book.
The LifeStraw, available since 2005, has provided over 620,000 children in developing countries with clean drinking water.
The Drinkable Book, only available since 2015, uses silver nanoparticles to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria in water, though “the project has not yet been proven to remove protozoa and viruses.” Unfortunately, both products are limited in that they can only filter up to 1000 litres and 100 litres of water, respectively, before the filters are no longer effective.
To combat the need for frequent filter replacement, researchers at the University of British Columbia have come up with a purification system that uses bacteria to make the water drinkable.
It’s low-maintenance and as efficient as conventional approaches that need chemicals and complex mechanical systems to keep the membranes clean,” he said.
This new water filtration method is as effective as the complex techniques with their chemicals and mechanical systems, removing “99.99 per cent of contaminants” from the water.
According to the study, this method is “ideally suited to provide high quality water especially where access to financial resources, technical expertise and/or electrical power is limited.” At this point, it looks like this might be the best option for people in developing countries to get easy access to clean drinking water.
Maybe now, with the help of this new development, they will.
Corpus Christi, other cities affected by water discontinuation
originally posted on December 15, 2016
Drinking water remains a luxury in key Old City areas
originally posted on December 12, 2016
CHARMINAR: For residents of Jahanuma, Madina colony and Bibi Ka Chashma, potable water is a luxury they have been receiving just once a week for the last six months. This leaves them with no option but to purchase several gallons of water for domestic use, even as complaints to the authorities concerned fall on deaf ears.
‘Most of the schools provide unsafe drinking water to students’
originally posted on December 10, 2016
Srinagar, Dec 09: Over the last decades, the drinking water at the hundreds of schools across Jammu and Kashmir has been found to contain unsafe levels of lead, pesticides and dozens of other toxins.
Experts say that contaminants have almost surfaced at public and private schools in the whole state.
They expressed concern that the problem has unfortunately gone largely unmonitored by the successive governments, even as the numbers of water safety violations have multiplied.
“The consumption of contaminated drinking water over the years has infected a good number of the school children in the state population by Helicobacter pylori (H.pylori) virus, which is considered as the main cause of gastric cancers,” one of the senior epidemiologist told KNS on condition of anonymity.
He said that the drinking water testing facilities of Kashmir lack equipment to detect the presence of H.pylori. “Government water-testing facilities rely on coliform bacteria, a bacterial indicator to evaluate the safety of source waters, but H.pylori has been found in waters where coliform indicators were absent.”
He said that unsafe water supply was responsible for H.pylori infection. “Majority of the infectious disease in children are because of the contaminated water. I have seen in children who have been infected with H.pylori that causes most of the gastro duodenal diseases.”
Ascribing H.pylori infection to high prevalence of gastric cancer in Kashmir, another senior doctor wished anonymity attributed the prevalence of infection to consumption of highly contaminated drinking water.
“Gastric cancer accounts for more than 60% of all cancers in Kashmir and most of the epidemiologists believe that H.pylori is possibly the only cause of stomach cancer in areas with high incidence of the infection,” the doctors said.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer sponsored by World Health Organization has categorized H.pylori as class 1 carcinogen and a definite cause of human gastric cancer.
The Rural Development Ministry in the recent past in a survey revealed that 60% of villages and over 40% of schools in Kashmir rely on unsafe drinking water.
Experts complain that responsibility for drinking water is spread among too many local, state and federal agencies, and that risks are going unreported. Finding a solution, they say, would require a new strategy for monitoring water in schools.
Doctors say that though many of the same toxins could also be found in water at homes, offices and business establishments but the contaminants are especially dangerous to children, who drink more water per pound than adults and are more vulnerable to the effects of many hazardous substances.
“There’s a different risk for kids,” said one of the doctor posted in SMHS hospital.
In recent years, students at many schools fell ill after drinking tainted water.
Experts say the testing requirements fail to detect dangerous toxins such as lead, which can wreak havoc on major organs and may retard children’s learning abilities.
Sources said that the regular water tests were not conducted in any of the schools of the state.
Inspections show Navajo utility had years of violations
by Emery Cowan, originally posted on December 9, 2016
A new agreement between federal and tribal regulators and the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority shows six sewage treatment plants across the Navajo Nation in Arizona have been violating Clean Water Act regulations for years.
The facilities in Tuba City, Kayenta, Ganado, Navajo Townsite, Pinon and Chinle were found to be discharging wastewater that exceeded pollutant and bacterial limits, posing potential risks to human health and aquatic wildlife, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Total effluent released from all plants, which discharge into the Little Colorado River and a tributary of the San Juan River, also was found to be in excess of permitted limits.
Other violations included inadequate staffing, wastewater that was released prior to full treatment, failure to submit complete and timely reports and generally inadequate maintenance and operation of the treatment systems.
Under separate agreements with the U.S. EPA and Navajo Nation EPA, the tribally owned utility agreed to spend $6 million to get its treatment plants back into compliance.
The offenses were the latest among a number of violations that NTUA Deputy General Manager Rex Kontz attributed in part to a reliance on immediate, Band aid-type fixes that failed to address the bigger problem.
“We have a long history of us doing short-term compliance fixes that are short-lived, then we’re back in the same situation,” Kontz said.
NTUA’s past violations, including one at its Window Rock wastwater treatment facility that required $10 million in plant upgrades, have been similar in terms of type and severity, according to EPA spokesperson Margot Perez-Sullivan.
The root cause of the most recent violations is infrastructure age, Kontz said.
“The main thing is they are just old systems and the communities have grown,” he said. The effect is that demand on the systems is beginning to exceed capacity, he said.
Along with the improvements mandated by the EPA agreements, NTUA is planning major overhauls to its treatment plants in Kayenta and Tuba City to expand capacity and transition them from lagoon systems to those that use chemical and mechanical digestion to treat wastewater, Kontz said. The difficulty is securing the millions of dollars in grant funding and loans needed to cover such improvement costs so the entire burden doesn’t fall on ratepayers, he said.
Tribal utility violations widespread
Evidence in the EPA’s reports that some of NTUA’s violations have been going on for years is more common than one might guess, said Manny Teodoro an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M University. Teodoro is the primary author of a recent paper about inspections, enforcement and violations of the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act at tribal drinking water and wastewater facilities.
“Tribal and nontribal, a lot of facilities are perennially out of compliance,” Teodoro said. “There are some facilities that just violate year in and year out.”
In a five-year analysis of tribal versus non-tribal facilities, however, Teodoro’s research team found that tribal facilities receive significantly fewer inspections and enforcement actions, while they tend to have more recorded violations.
Specifically, the paper states that tribal wastewater treatment facilities saw approximately 44 percent fewer Clean Water Act inspections than nontribal facilities while tribal facilities that violated the federal water law were out of compliance for 23 percent more quarterly enforcement periods than their nontribal counterparts.
The reasons the authors suggest for the disparities echo some of those Kontz named as challenges faced by NTUA.
Tribal facilities often lack the human and financial capital necessary to maintain systems that remain compliant with environmental regulations, the authors wrote. That disadvantage goes back to the 1970s and early 1980s when the federal government, in the wake of major environmental lawmaking, issued a stream of federal dollars to help fund the construction of local water and sewer infrastructure, they wrote. But because tribes were not yet subject to federal water protection laws, they missed out on that initial boost of funding.
“It’s almost a dead certainty that nontribal facilities have received far more in federal and state grants for facilities,” Teodoro said.
The location of tribal treatment plants in more isolated, hard-to-access areas as well as the lesser political clout exerted by tribes in general could explain regulators’ less frequent visits to these areas, according to Teodoro.
“These disparities carry troubling implications for environmental justice, since tribal governance is inexorably caught up in racial conflicts past and present — conflicts that often have centered on environmental resources,” the paper concludes.
The story may be a bit different for Navajo water and wastewater treatment facilities, though. Teodoro also is looking into tribes like the Navajo Nation that have assumed enforcement authority over drinking water standards and his initial research suggests their oversight may be more thorough.
He said he is still parsing the exact effects of tribal primacy authority over environmental regulations.
“There might be some important differences there, though,” he said.
Will dry conditions in South Florida lead to lawn-watering restrictions?
by Andy Reid, originally posted on December 8, 2016
Your dried-out, brown lawn could be a sign of water-supply strains to come this winter, South Florida officials warned Thursday.
Above-normal temperatures and below-normal rainfall are forecast to continue through February. And after the driest November on record, water managers are preparing for the possibility that a few dry weeks could turn into a drought.
It could lead to tougher lawn watering limits for South Florida residents so accustomed to running their sprinklers.
“I’m not quite willing to press the ‘drought’ button. … We are not quite there yet,” said John Mitnik, the South Florida Water Management District’s chief engineer. “We will see what Mother Nature brings us.”
The drier conditions already have the district trying to hold onto more rainfall, which during the soggy summer and fall had been drained out to sea to protect neighborhoods from flooding.
An average of just .14 inches of rain fell from Orlando to the Keys during November, the lowest November total since record-keeping began in 1932, according to the district.
Also in November, Lake Okeechobee — South Florida’s backup water supply — dropped nearly a foot. That followed 10 months of high-lake levels that triggered draining billions of gallons of lake water out to sea each day to avoid flooding threats for lakeside towns.
On Thursday, the lake was 14.70 feet above sea level, considered normal for this time of year.
Yet drier conditions have the lake dropping faster than expected.
In November, water district projections showed just a 10 percent chance that the lake level would drop low enough to trigger water shortage concerns before summer rains bring relief. On Thursday that projection increased to a 20 percent chance — still low but on the rise.
“Things have dried up dramatically,” said Terrie Bates, the water management district’s director of water resources.
Landscape watering accounts for about half of public water use and cutting back on sprinkling is a primary target of conservation efforts, especially during droughts.
South Florida has year-round lawn watering rules aimed to boost conservation, though enforcement has been lax. Tougher landscape irrigation limits can still be imposed during droughts.
Lawn watering rules can vary city to city. For most of Broward and Miami-Dade counties, lawn watering is currently limited to two days a week. For most of Palm Beach County, lawn watering is limited to three times per week.
Despite the historically dry weather, current water supplies from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades remain in good shape, according to the water management district.
Lake water is being moved south to boost South Florida supplies. And portions of the Everglades stretching through western Broward and Palm Beach County still have enough water to help restock community drinking water supplies, according to the district.
“We are being cautious about how we (drain) water out of the system,” Mitnik said.
State’s water grab hurts more than just farmers
by Fernando Aguilera, originally posted on December 8, 2016
The state of California’s proposed Bay Delta water plan is being portrayed as a water fight between supposedly wealthy farmers and fish.
When there is so much more at stake to us all, I have to ask why?
I suspect this is a deliberate tactic by those involved in professional politics and government. It is probably much easier to say that only a handful of farmers are being harmed by a massive water diversion than to acknowledge that an entire community – including some of the most disadvantaged youths and adults in the state – are going to be harmed.
The Merced Soccer Academy has about 3,800 young people ages 3 to 18 involved. In addition, there are thousands of other family members who support the program. Our players come from diverse families with parents who are firefighters, teachers and lawyers. But the highest percent of parents work in the fields and food-processing factories.
In many cases, the common denominator isn’t soccer – it’s the fact that their neighborhoods are overrun with gangs, drugs and crime. The fact is, all of our youths are at a disadvantage.
When you are raised in a community with so much poverty, with gangs and with drugs – and a shortage of well-paying jobs – the allure of drugs, gangs and crime becomes more alluring.
Merced Soccer Academy has worked to provide an alternative for all youths. We have given them a voice, confidence, positive role models and a chance to travel to other communities outside Merced. We have opened, and now manage, programs at the Stephen Leonard Youth/Parent Center, giving our players and other youths from the community a safe place to go even when they’re not playing.
Absolutely none of this has come easy, especially with no funding sources. We have frequently heard voices telling us, “No you can’t.”
The latest voice saying those words is coming from our own state government. The governor-appointed members of the state water board, under the guise of more water for the environment, plan to take water now benefiting our local farms and providing drinking water for our communities and recreation for the entire community and send it to farmers in other communities far away.
So now, in addition to every other negative message our youths receive, the state water board is telling them: “You are not good enough to have good drinking water or good jobs. Fish need that water more than you.”
Do you know how many fish? According to the water board’s own study, the goal is to increase the Merced River’s salmon population by 1,100 fish. So, 1,100 fish outweigh the drinking water quality of our entire community.
At the state water board’s hearing, I asked why? Please tell me why so I can explain this to my community. I am still waiting for an answer.
I suspect we already have an answer. In the eyes of Sacramento, we don’t count. They just won’t say it.
Instead, they will say farmers don’t count as much as fish, at least not farmers in Merced County. Nor do the residents of Merced County count.
On Dec. 19, when state water board officials visit our community, we have the opportunity to show them that we do count.
I urge you to come out and support our community. It is extremely important that you come forward to show that our community is just as important and we are not being fooled into a fish vs. farmer debate. This is your community, our community, and your presence will assist in determining the future of our community.
Journalists to speak about water issues
originally posted on December 7, 2016
Marcellus Outreach Butler will present investigative journalists Joshua Pribanic and Melissa Troutman of Public Herald to speak at 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 10 in Butler about how the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency hid drinking water contamination from fracking.
They will discuss their findings from a 30-month investigation of water contamination related to fracking that has occurred across Pennsylvania. Their report reveals nine ways that state and federal regulators keep water pollution related to oil and gas operations “off the books.” Pribanic and Troutman will describe how this happened, whether there’s a growing water crisis in Pennsylvania caused by fracking, and what citizens can do.