The early pre-monsoon rains come as a relief to the falling levels at reservoirs and the authorities were expecting that water level will increase due to rain in the catchment areas including Murree.
ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 5th Jul, 2018 ) :The early pre-monsoon rains come as a relief to the falling levels at reservoirs and the authorities were expecting that water level will increase due to rain in the catchment areas including Murree.
The federal capital is in severe grip of water scarcity as water level in major reservoirs of city had reached to dead level.
Director Water Supply of MCI, Nasir Jamil But hoped that the heavy rainfall was forecast during upcoming monsoon and it would fill the dams to their standard level.
He said present water level in Simly dam is 2248ft from sea level which is almost near to dead level of 2233ft adding that due to low level only 50 percent water is being supplied to the residents from Simly dam.
He said CDA is providing only 26 million gallons per day from Simly dam while 8 million gallons from Khanpur dam.
He said Water Supply Directorate was receiving more than 1000 complaints each day from which only 50 percent can hardly addressed through water tankers adding that Water Directorate was lacking sufficient funds to repair and maintain tankers.
He told that only 21 tankers are in position to provide water to the whole city of the federal capital.

In what is already a raging wildfire season, forest service and water officials in Colorado are working to protect the state’s watersheds from contamination.
Damage to water supplies in reservoirs can be disruptive and cost millions in repairs down the line.
He is also the study’s lead author.
The study, funded by The Water Research Foundation and presented at CU last month, lists challenges posed by wildfires, including short- and long-term effects of the availability and quality of drinking-water sources used by major metropolitan areas such as Denver.
The work includes thinning trees and restoring forest on more than 40,000 acres of watershed deemed critical to downstream water supplies, Burri said.
Those areas provide clean drinking water to more than 1.4 million residents in the Denver area, Burri said.
Protecting watersheds has become a top priority on the Front Range, according to Mike Myers, chief of the Colorado Springs Wildland Fire Team, as major wildfires have become almost year-round events.
Colorado Springs, however, was able to draw on two smaller reservoirs to provide safe drinking water for residents, Myers said.
The results showed the heated materials increased the turbidity of the water, a key measure of water quality, and responded poorly to chemical coagulants, leading to downstream filtration problems, the CU researchers said.
Tree-thinning and other mitigation work around Denver Water’s Cheesman Reservoir paid off in 2002 during the Hayman fire, which scorched 138,114 acres.

ISLAMABAD, June 28 (Xinhua) — The Indus River System Authority (IRSA) of Pakistan said that the country’s south Sindh and east Punjab province will face 51 percent of water shortage in the coming days as there is only 220,000 cusec acres of water available in reserves, far less than the demand of water in the country.
Raising alarm over the prevalent acute shortage of water in the reserves, IRSA informed that the current water storage in the reserves stood at 0.220 million acres feet (MAF), local reports said on Thursday.
The authority said that the water inflow in the rivers of the country was measured at 1,12,900 cusecs, while river outflow remained at 1,19,300 cusecs, adding that a total of 1,23,600 cusecs of water was being provided to the provinces.
It was noticed that in June last year, water inflow was 3,75,100 cusecs while this year it dropped to 1,12,900 cusecs.
In addition, the storage last year was 3.6 MAF and this year it was only 0.22 MAF, thus revealing a big gap in storage capacity and inflow.
The IRSA spokesman said that the current situation of water shortage can get better only if the country receives an exceptionally good spell of rain in the forthcoming monsoon season, or an early glacial melting fill the dams to full capacity.
The spokesman said that if it did not happen, the situation could get worse and the forthcoming winter and next year summer crop may get badly affected.
Earlier, the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources issued a warning that the country may run dry by 2025.
It said that the country touched the "water stress line" in 1990 and crossed the "water scarcity line" in 2005.

Horsham, Warminster and Warrington will seek millions of dollars in damages from firefighting foam manufacturers whose products they say contaminated drinking water.
The manufacturers of firefighting foam may feel a little crowded, as all three water authorities impacted by PFAS drinking water contamination in Bucks and Montgomery counties are now suing them over the issue.
Although the three suits are separate, Larry Cohan, lead Anapol Weiss attorney on the cases, said they take a similar tack.
The subject of investigation by this news organization, PFAS chemicals do not break down in the environment and quickly spread through and persist in soil and water.
The Horsham, Warrington and Warminster water authorities all previously relied on groundwater to provide drinking water to approximately 70,000 combined customers.
As the military only agreed to pay to filter wells contaminated above a safety limit recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency, the water authorities were on the hook to pay for the plans, which involved buying large quantities of water from the North Wales Water Authority.
Warminster is currently paying about $2.5 million extra a year, while Horsham is paying about $1.2 million, which it passes through to customers as an average surcharge of $73.48.
Cohan said his firm and the water authorities have not yet totaled an exact amount of alleged damages but that it will be “many millions” of dollars.
Through its investigation of the contamination, this news organization obtained several documents that showed some of the foam manufacturers discussing concerns about the firefighting foams in 2001.
At a meeting of a firefighting products industry group that year, a 3M representative said the company was shutting down its perfluorochemical department due to concern about the chemicals’ “proven persistence pervasiveness, and toxicity.” Records show representatives from Ansul, Tyco, Chemguard, and National Foam were in attendance.

Boil Water Advisory To Customers of Valley Public Service Authority Effective May 14, 2018 Calvin Smith, General Manager advises the customers of Valley Public Service Authority Water System residing on or near Jefferson Davis Highway in the Jon Road and Greenville Road area in Warrenville, that experienced an interruption in their water service or low water pressure due to an unexpected main break on May 14, 2018 to vigorously boil their water for at least one (1) full minute prior to drinking or cooking, until further notice.
There has been no confirmed contamination of the system.
However, because of the interruption in service, the potential for contamination exists.
Therefore, as a precautionary measure, the customers of the water system that have experienced an interruption in service or low water pressure are advised to vigorously boil their water for at least one (1) full minute prior to drinking or cooking once service is restored, until notified otherwise.
Also, any ice made from water which has not been boiled should not be used for drinking purposes.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) is presently working with the water system to handle the problem.
Please check the website www.valleypublic.org for updates as it becomes available.
If you should have any questions concerning this notice, you can contact the water system at (803) 593-2053.
Copyright 2018 WFXG.
All rights reserved.

A boil water advisory that affected thousands of customers since Monday has been lifted.
AMBRIDGE — A boil water advisory that affected thousands of customers since Monday has been lifted.
Michael Dominick, general manager of the Ambridge Water Authority, confirmed that the boil water advisory was lifted by the Department of Environmental Protection at noon on Thursday.
The advisory was put in place Monday morning after an incident that occurred early Sunday morning when an operator at the water plant noticed a large crack in a pipe near the plant.
The crack caused water pressure to fluctuate throughout the water authority’s system, and some neighborhoods in higher elevations lost water completely.
The Ambridge Area School District was affected and classes had to be canceled Monday at Highland Elementary School.
The elementary school reopened Tuesday, but students there and in the high school were restricted from drinking the water during the boil water advisory.
Creekside Springs, a Pulaski Township business that bottles, packages and labels water bottles, donated “countless” pallets of water for use by residents, and the fire departments in all three communities personally delivered water to those who needed it.
“So many people helped out,” he said.
“I want to thank the community as a whole for being understanding, and the fire department for handing out water and doing everything that was asked of them, and more.” He added that everyone “came together to solve this problem as best we could.” Finally, Dominick said the crack in the pipe has been fixed and “everything is good” in the Ambridge Water Authority’s system.

Speaking recently during a two-day water summit held in Naivasha, the Cabinet Secretary in the Ministry of Water and Sanitation, Simon Chelugui, said Kenya was keen to improve its water harvesting capabilities and curb wastage.
“We have a pendulum between floods and drought, but looking forward the new strategic plan of the ministry is to have a fair balance so we are looking at modern ways of conservation and storage,” Chelugui remarked at the summit which ended on Friday.
According to Engineer Daniel Ng’ang’a, the Water Services Providers Association’s Chairperson, up to 43 per cent of water generated in the country is either lost or unaccounted for, a situation that has hampered the development of better infrastructure owing to diminishing revenues.
“We have to understand that there’s need to rehabilitate networks to reduce wastage because most water services providers are using systems that were done before independence,” he said during the Kenya Water Summit.
“It is important to try and reduce the losses we have in our towns and that can only be done through the upgrade of infrastructure and ensure we have proper management in place,” Ng’ang’a said.
Ng’ang’a’s sentiments were echoed by Meru Governor Kiraitu Murungi who chairs the Council of Governor’s Committee in charge of Water, Forestry, and Mining.
It is anchored in Vision 2030 and is key to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals, he said.
Kenya has in the recent past been faced with an unprecedented drought that has affected 3.4 million people most of whom have limited access to clean drinking water.
Water scarcity in Nairobi has, for instance, led to the introduction of rationing program with the city’s water levels at dams supplying the capital with water reported to be sinking.
The national per capita water supply per annum also remains low standing at 647 cubic meters.

The latest permutation of the Act was adopted in 2015 to replace a controversial standard dating back to the late 1970s that often left lawsmakers scratching their heads over which specific U.S. bodies of water must be regulated to control pollution and contamination of drinking water.
After years of state challenges to the rule, the 2015 revisions to the Clean Water Act were set to go into effect this month, but on Jan. 31. the Environmental Protect Agency preempted the rule’s enforcement based on a U.S. Supreme Court determination that a federal district court is the most appropriate venue to hear a previously filed challenge to the Obama-era rules In that underlying lawsuit, more than a dozen attorneys general claim the President Obama’s EPA wrongly applied protections to lands far from traditionally “navigable waters.” In the complaint filed Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Scheiderman and his counterparts from California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington claim the Trump administration is violating federal law by delaying the rule for another two years.
“The Trump Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated federal law by taking action with inadequate public notice, insufficient record support and outside their statutory authority,” Attorney General Schneiderman said in a statement Tuesday.
Calling it “clearly illegal,” the attorneys general argue the move threatens decades of progress made, in each of their states, to ensure access to safe water.
According to the 31-page complaint, when the EPA suspended the rule through February 2020 “without consideration of the extensive scientific record that supported it or the environmental and public health consequences of doing so,” the agency was “acting under the guise of merely preserving the status quo.” When reached for comment Tuesday, a spokesperson for the EPA said only: “It’s worth noting that these lawsuits are over an embattled regulation that’s been put on hold by the courts to prevent it from taking effect.
Accordingly, the EPA’s decision now forces all of the plaintiffs to seek a declaration deeming Pruitt’s suspension unlawful and injunctive relief vacating it.
The comment period was “too short for an important and complex rule” and allowed agencies to act “arbitrarily and capriciously and without a rational basis because they failed to consider whether or how the [suspended rule] would meet the [Clean Water Act’s] objective of restoring and maintaining the integrity of the nation’s waters,” the complaint states.
New York alone is downstream from 13 states.
The attorneys general move was welcome by Pat Gallagher, director of the Sierra Club’s environmental law program.
“We will follow their efforts closely.”

SNOW SHOE — State Rep. Mike Hanna announced Thursday that arrangements have been made with Nestle Waters to provide 1,600 cases of free bottled water to people affected by the low-water and boil water advisories put out by the Mountaintop Regional Water Authority.
Bald Eagle Area High School students will team up with Snow Show EMS to distribute the bottled water starting at 10 a.m. Friday at the Snow Shoe EMS building, 492 W. Sycamore Road in Snow Shoe.
Volunteers will also deliver water to anyone who cannot come to the facility to pick up water themselves.
Anyone with questions or who needs to have water reserved for them can call Mike Hanna’s Milesburg office at 814-353-8780, staffer Tammy Ammerman at 814-206-6433 or staffer Luanna Dudish at 814-571-3446.
Residents can also email at RepMikeHanna@pahouse.net.
Customers in parts of Snow Shoe borough, Snow Shoe Township and Burnside Township have been under advisories for more than one week.
However, residents say water has been milky white, green, and brown in color for nearly two months.
Hanna said that led to several calls from people asking for help.
Mountaintop Regional Water Authority chairman Jim Yost said the problem is that they cannot pump enough water out of their permitted wells and that there are also several leaks throughout the system.
The State College Water Authority has been helping Mountaintop find the leaks.

UTICA – Within the next few days, Mohawk Valley Water Authority customers will receive postcards in the mail, describing an equipment malfunction in their treatment plant.
On December 15th, a polymer pump experienced an electrical failure, stopping the flow of a polymer chemical into water drawn from Hinckley Reservoir.
The polymers bind together bacteria and other contaminants in the water, making them easier to filter out.
Without the polymers, the turbidity, or cloudiness, of the water rose higher than one Nephelometric Turbidity Unit (NTU), a level deemed unsafe by New York State’s Department of Health.
"Microbes have an affinity for the particles of water, so an increase in turbidity could mean an increase in microbes," Phil Tangorra, Director of Water Quality said.
"When the polymer failed, when the pump failed, the turbidity rose within the treatment above that one unit standard."
Tangorra said the problem was detected before any water was passed along to the distribution plant or customers.
Tangorra also said the water was tested, and the addition of chlorine in the final stages of treatment killed the bacteria that wasn’t filtered out.
At this time, there is no boil water advisory, and MVWA officials have installed more alarms on the pump to prevent electrical failures in the future.
Tangorra said officials were given 30 days to alert customers of the problem.