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Maybe water wars are the future
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spotted-horses
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27 Apr ’15 - 7:27 pm
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Take a look at google earth. It is pretty eye opening. There are so few green areas left in the world. 

We in WV are working to keep water from being the next extractive industry. 

Be RADICAL Grow Food

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28 Apr ’15 - 9:13 am
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has fracking slowed down at all with the drop in oil?

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4 May ’15 - 9:15 am
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I think I'd be walking across the street.

All Tapped Out In A Tiny California Town

Around the tiny rural community of Fairmead, Calif., about an hour north of Fresno on Highway 99, hundreds of one-story houses on small ranches stretch out for miles.

The ground is mostly brown, parched by California's recent drought. But beneath the surface, this mostly African-American community in the San Joaquin Valley has been going dry for years.

Fairmead used to be known for corn and cotton, but today the aging community is surrounded by large almond and pistachio orchards. Family homes in Fairmead with shallow private wells feet can't compete with agricultural wells sucking water out of the aquifer at 1,000 feet or deeper.

Jean Wilson moved to Fairmead 20 years ago to escape big-city life. It wasn't until last year that her private well started shooting out sand.

"I was the first one that actually went out of water," Wilson says. "I think about a year this month."

Wilson got so fed up with the lack of government help that she wrote to Gov. Jerry Brown.

"It's almost inhumane," she says she told him. "The biggest issue was, where can we go get water? You're telling me I can't have water. What are you saying?"

When no aid came, Wilson created a flyer offering to deliver water to her neighbors.

Annie Cooper and her husband found one of those flyers at a laundromat. Last June, their private well dried up when an almond farmer began drilling a well across the street from their country home.

Annie and Lawyer Cooper, moved to Fairmead from Arkansas in the 1940s, have lived without running water in their home for almost a year.

Cooper says she was fixing dinner one day that month when she called her husband to show him the trickle from the tap.

"I said, 'There's hardly any coming out,' " she says. "The next hour so, that water was gone. We've been without it ever since."

The Cooper family moved to Fairmead from Arkansas in the 1940s, like many other African Americans. They hoped to farm small plots instead of settling in cities like Los Angeles and Oakland.

Thelma Williams moved to Fairmead in the 1990s from Southern California to retire on 40 acres of land. But life in Fairmead hasn't been easy: Williams has been without running water for seven years.

She can't afford to dig a new well, so she showers at her parents' home nearby and fills up eight five-gallon jugs to bring home.

For a while, the Madera County Farm Bureau provided drinking water to residents with dry wells, but that program has stopped. Now Madera County is working on a state-funded project to supply water to homeowners with dry wells. In time, qualified residents will receive a large tank for potable water that a truck service will fill every few weeks.

The county plans to deliver bottled water as soon as state funding arrives, and plans to have the first tanks installed sometime in late May.

But Wilson says the process is taking much to long.

"Why do we have to go through so much of this?" she says. "Let all of them get their water cut off, everybody's water cut off for one month and have one station for everybody to go get water, and see what happens."

http://www.npr.org/2.....ornia-town

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15 May ’15 - 8:07 am
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Can you imagine sitting Jail, what are you in for? Water

Water Theft Becomes Common Consequence of Ongoing California Drought

With the state of California mired in its fourth year of drought and a mandatory 25 percent reduction in water usage in place, reports of water theft have become common.

In April, The Associated Press reported that huge amounts of water went missing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and a state investigation was launched. The delta is a vital body of water, serving 23 million Californians as well as millions of farm acres, according to the Association for California Water Agencies.

The AP reported in February that a number of homeowners in Modesto, California, were fined $1,500 for allegedly taking water from a canal. In another instance, thieves in the town of North San Juan stole hundreds of gallons of water from a fire department tank.

more http://www.accuweath.....t/46978449

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22 May ’15 - 8:44 am
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thank goodness we are going to Vegas this summer, I didn't think about what happens if hoover dam stops running

Lake Mead’s low levels could trigger federal shortage by 2017

Lake Mead is expected to shrink low enough by January 2017 to trigger a first-ever federal shortage declaration on the Colorado River, according to a bleak new projection from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

In its monthly forecast issued this week, the bureau predicts the reservoir east of Las Vegas could start 2017 as much as 15 feet below the shortage line of 1,075 feet above sea level.

Only a month ago, forecasters expected the Colorado River to narrowly avoid a shortage in both 2016 and 2017.

If accurate, the new prediction would force Nevada to reduce its Colorado River water use by 4 percent while Arizona and Mexico take larger cuts.

Southern Nevada Water Authority officials insist such a curtailment won’t impact the community because valley residents have already reduced water consumption by more than enough to absorb it.

Potentially more alarming is the even deeper dip Lake Mead is expected to take next year, when it could fall low enough to reduce power generation at Hoover Dam and shut down one of the intake pipes that supplies the Las Vegas Valley with 90 percent of its water.

Already in record-low territory, the lake surface is now expected to drop another 4 feet by the end of June, to 1,073 feet above sea level. After that, forecasters expect the water to gradually rise again, to elevation 1,077 by January 2016, before plunging roughly 22 feet in six months to a new all-time low of 1,055.

Should the lake hit 1,050, the Southern Nevada Water Authority will lose the use of one of its two existing intake pipes, though that will be less of a concern after September, when a new $817 million intake should start drawing water from the deepest part of the lake.

On paper, Hoover Dam is also supposed to stop generating electricity. However, that minimum generation level is expected to be revised downward, to 950 feet above sea level, because of ongoing power turbine improvements.

Four of Hoover’s 17 turbines have been retrofitted to run more smoothly as the reservoir continues to drop, and two more are to be upgraded in the coming year, said Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Doug Hendrix.

Since the lake has never been so low, Hendrix said, more study is needed to see whether the remaining, unimproved turbines can operate safely below the 1,050 mark.

“The new wide-head turbines will,” he said, but it remains to be seen how the older turbines might handle the strain. “You never want to operate your turbines when they’re in distress.”

A reduction in output from the dam could increase costs for power customers by driving up the price of available hydropower and forcing utilities to buy needed electricity on the spot market. That’s what worries Jayne Harkins, executive director for the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, the agency responsible for managing the water and power resources the state gets from the river.

more http://www.reviewjou.....rtage-2017

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23 May ’15 - 10:13 am
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Water ATM's coming to a corner store near you

LAHORE, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Punjab province is set to launch an innovation for water-short Pakistan: Solar-powered ATMs that dispense clean water when a smart card is scanned.

The two-foot-square prototype machine looks and functions like an ATM, but dispenses water instead of cash. Users are issued a card they can use to claim a daily share of water.

The project, a collaboration between the Punjab Saaf Pani (Clean Water) Company and the Innovations for Poverty Alleviation Lab (IPAL), a research center in Lahore, aims to install a water ATM on each of a series of water filtration plants being established in rural and urban fringe areas of Punjab province.

The machine is designed to help the government cut water waste and ensure people have access to clean water, said Jawad Abbasi, a program manager at IPAL.

“The innovative machines will help the government maintain a record of the exact quantity of clean drinking water being dispensed in a day in a specific locality, besides ensuring its quality,” he said.

The quality and quantity of water being dispensed will be tracked in real time online, through a central server, he said.

HOW IT WORKS

The devices play an audio message upon authentication of a scanned card, after which they dispense water for the user. Green and red buttons enable the user to start and stop the flow of water.

A flow control meter manages how much water is dispensed, and sensors measure the amount of water still available.

In its first phase, the project will cover three districts of Punjab including Bahawalpur, Rajanpur and Faisalabad, all areas with particularly serious water contamination issues, experts said.

Each beneficiary family will be entitled to collect a maximum of 30 liters of clean drinking water daily from the filtration plants with their unique identity card, Abbasi said.

“We are planning to install the machines at 20 filtration plants in the first phase that will benefit some 17,500 families,” he said.

He said that his organization was seeking $23,500 in aid from the UK Department of International Development to put the prototype into production and install more of the dispensing machines at existing water filtration plants in Punjab.

Similar card-based water dispensing systems are already in use in neighboring India.

PUSH TO IMPROVE WATER ACCESS

According to Punjab Saaf Pani Company, only 13 percent people in rural areas have access to tap water, compared to 43 percent of people in urban areas of Punjab. The province, with 98 million people, is the country’s most populous.

The government of Punjab aims to provide clean drinking water to over 35 million people by the middle of 2017 and some 20 billion rupees (almost $200 million) is being allocated for the effort in the upcoming budget, said Muhammad Farasat Iqbal, chief executive officer of Punjab Saaf Pani Company.

“It’s one of the top priorities of the provincial government, to ensure provision of clean drinking water in each locality, as access to clean water is a fundamental human right,” he said.

Iqbal said the clean water would be provided free of cost but beneficiary communities would pool money each month to pay for maintenance of the ATMs and filtration plants.

According to Pakistan’s national drinking water policy, 35 percent of Pakistan’s population doesn’t have access to safe drinking water. The policy estimates that diseases related to water, sanitation and hygiene issues cost Pakistan’s economy about 112 billion rupees ($1.1 billion) each year in health costs and lost earnings.

Nazir Ahmed Wattoo, an environmental expert with the Punjab Anjuman Samaji Behbood (Organisation for Social Welfare) said few water conservation systems are in place in Pakistan, resulting in waste both in daily use and in agriculture.

By regulating and measuring the water used daily in a specific area, he said, the government can better manage the scarce resource.

The real test, he said, will be whether the water dispensing centers are maintained and effectively monitored.

He said the centers also need to be supported by a concerted national effort to build new water reservoirs. Pakistan’s water storage capacity is currently just 30 days, a quarter of what neighboring India says is needed.

http://www.reuters.c.....SS20150514

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15 Jun ’15 - 6:28 am
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it begins?

RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.

http://www.washingto.....story.html

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easytapper
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15 Jun ’15 - 9:02 pm
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People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Is this guy a troll?  First world problems??

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