Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 18, 2007
5. Agencies, Programs, People -
Prison goal: Flush control
New electronic toilet device can prevent misuse, save water. -
Sacramento
Chlorine cautions urged
Some worry over deliveries to regional water plant -
Sacramento
Project shows how homeowners waste water
A demonstration project seeks to show how homeowners waste water – and highlights new ways to stop it. -
The Orange County
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Prison goal: Flush control
New electronic toilet device can prevent misuse, save water.
Sacramento
By Hudson
For those not in custody, toilets generally have a single purpose. But for prison inmates, they can be so much more.
By flushing the toilets in their cells, prisoners communicate with one another, relieve boredom, protest prison conditions, dispose of contraband and even create in-cell swimming pools.
Some inmates flush their toilets 100 times a day, experts say. The massive amount of wastewater generated overwhelms treatment facilities and pollutes local groundwater.
That is why
The devices restrict the number of flushes, delay flushing and empty toilets in random patterns, all to prevent improper uses.
They are known in prison circles as flushometers. To generate respect, their proponents insist it's not "flush-O-meter" but "flush-AHH-muhter."
In a hearing Friday in
"I'm sorry," the judge said.
Connelly was hearing a dispute between a plumbing supplier and the state over a contract to install flushometers at prisons in Corcoran and
David Woodworth is a sales and engineering specialist with Sloan Valve Co., which supplies flushometers to prisons throughout the
Woodworth attended Friday's hearing because the state's choice of Sloan products was at stake. After his side won, he explained the many uses to which prisoners put their commodes.
As a guard walks down a row of cells, inmates flush their toilets one after another to sound the alert, he said. To be released from lockdown, they stuff sheets in the toilets and flush repeatedly to flood their cells.
One inmate was a "swimmer," Woodworth said. Late at night he would caulk his cell door with toothpaste, plug his toilet, and flush until water filled his cell. Then he would take a swim.
Lance Corcoran, a spokesman for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, said he'd known prisoners to drain their toilet, build a fire in the bowl, and "have themselves a little barbecue."
He said prisoners will disrupt operations by flooding their cells. "Then they unplug the door and flood the entire tier," he said.
The "random time-generated delay" of the Sloan flushometer thwarts such behavior, Woodworth said.
A programmable control box wired to multiple toilets prevents more than two flushes in five minutes, or more than three an hour.
There is a delay of up to a minute between when an inmate pushes a button and the toilet flushes. And toilets cannot be flushed in a sequence of cells to track a guard's movements.
So far, 11
Woodworth said the cost to retrofit a state prison can range from $250,000 to $600,000 for materials alone. But the return in savings of water and sewage reduction is worth it, he contended.
At Corcoran State Prison, flushometers had reduced the amount of wastewater generated by 120 inmates from 42,000 gallons a day to 8,300 gallons a day -- approximately an 80 percent decrease in sewage, he said.
The state's 34 prisons each house 4,000 to 7,000 prisoners, with 53,000 more beds expected in the coming years, he said.
"There are 173,000 people in prison," Corcoran said. "Let's say they're flushing three times a day. You can imagine the amount of water used up."
Alan Miller, an enforcement chief with the the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board, said devices installed at the California Correctional Center and the High Desert State Prison, both at Susanville, have reduced an excess of sewage that was polluting groundwater.
"This is where flushometers come in," he said, pronouncing the term correctly.#
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/226002.html
Chlorine cautions urged
Some worry over deliveries to regional water plant
Sacramento
By Chris Bowman - Bee Staff Writer
To operators of the
But to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, these rail cars are potential terrorist bombs. The steel cylinders hold up to 90 tons of compressed chlorine gas, the horrific chemical weapon used in World War I by the German and British armies and, lately, in Iraq by insurgents.
A ruptured chlorine gas tanker can release a lung-searing plume up to 14 miles downwind, according to the Chlorine Institute, an industry trade group. In large urban areas such as
Managers of the
In an address to chemical industry representatives last week, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff urged plant operators to voluntarily fill the "one gap in our system of regulation."
"I don't want you to breathe a sigh of relief because you're off the hook," Chertoff told the Chemical Sector Security Summit.
"You're on the hook, because you're going to have to do this yourselves, until the time comes along that regulatory authority to address these comes to us or to some other agency."
Most chlorine gas goes to chemical and plastic manufacturing plants, which are covered under the new security rules.
Chertoff singled out chlorine as one of the "high-risk" chemicals and said the areas of "greatest vulnerability" are rail yards and sections of track where chemical cars are idle for long periods.
The Sacramento Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant is one of an estimated 3,000 sewage treatment and drinking-water purification plants that keep more than 2,500 pounds of chlorine gas on hand, according to Paul Orum, author of a report published in April by the Center for American Progress, a think tank.
The Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District treats an average 165 million gallons of wastewater daily from 400,000 homes and businesses in
The district takes delivery of about 70 chlorine gas tankers a year at its Elk Grove-area plant, said Wendell Kido, district manager.
A rail spur takes the chlorine tankers directly to the plant.
Railroads will not drop off these rail cars unless plant workers are on hand to immediately secure them inside the fenced facility.
Kido said the plant has had no security threats or accidents involving chlorine in its 25 years of operation.
"The treatment plant is very, very secure," Kido said. "It has a very high fence topped with barbed wire, locks on gates and surveillance cameras."
The tankers are pressurized to keep the chlorine in liquid form, economizing on space. The sewage treatment plant depressurizes the tankers and converts the liquid chlorine to gas. The gas is injected into the wastewater to kill off germs at the end of the treatment process.
The
Orum, a consultant on chemical safety and security, recommends that utilities shift from chlorine gas to safer methods of disinfection, such as ultraviolet light or sodium hypochlorite, a high-strength liquid bleach.
His report, "Toxic Trains and the Terrorist Threat," argues that federal regulations are too focused on security of chemical plants -- better lighting and fencing -- but inadequate on the delivery of the hazardous material, particularly those shipped in bulk by rail.
Chlorine gas rail cars pose a threat not only to communities that receive the shipments but also to cities all along the route from the producers, Orum said.
The
District officials have ruled out ultraviolet radiation and liquid bleach as too expensive, the latter costing an extra $10 million a year.
Further, Mary Snyder, the district engineer, said converting to bleach simply shifts the danger to bleach manufacturing plants, which typically make it from bulk rail shipments of chlorine gas.
Orum said the district's costs estimates on conversion are high compared with those of utilities he surveyed that made the switch.
Producers of the safer liquid bleach can make it without having large amounts of chlorine gas on hand, Orum said.
Under a technology dubbed "just-in-time," chlorine gas is created and promptly used only in small amounts to supply immediate demand, eliminating the danger of a catastrophic gas release.#
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/226851.html
Project shows how homeowners waste water
A demonstration project seeks to show how homeowners waste water – and highlights new ways to stop it.
The Orange
By PAT BRENNAN
On closer examination, however, things begin to look a little odd. First, the houses are much too small. They are isolated on a broad expanse of dirt. And nobody lives there.
Part experiment, part demonstration project, the three houses are designed to reveal how Orange County homeowners create torrents of contaminated water runoff – and to showcase state-of-the-art technology for controlling it.
"They're designed so people could see what they could implement to improve water quality," said Darren Haver, a water quality adviser with the
The project, dreamed up by Haver three years ago and recently completed, has become a minor sensation among the landscapers, developers, consultants and master gardener groups who receive firsthand training on the site.
They learn how to control urban runoff which, with its burden of contaminants, pesticides and fertilizer, can pollute beaches when it rolls downstream or prompt unwanted algae blooms in places like
And while the agricultural research station the houses are placed on is not open to the public, Haver hopes to build a similar set of demonstration plots in a public setting to be viewed, poked and prodded by anyone who is interested.
The three houses go from bad to better to best. House number one, labeled "typical," illustrates the traditional
They mimic the hodge-podge setups around real homes that waste water.
"Usually, less than 50 percent gets to the plants," Haver said. "The rest is evaporation and overspray."
House number two, nicknamed "retrofit," represents a typical home with innovations added to reduce runoff. There is a computer-controlled sprinkler system, rain barrels to collect water from roof gutters, smaller lawns, more drought-tolerant plants.
Number three, called "low impact," was designed from the ground up to eliminate runoff as much as possible. The 24-valve sprinkler system is hooked up to its own weather station; the plants and trees are almost all drought-tolerant natives; the driveway and walkways are made of permeable material, so runoff sinks into the ground instead of flowing down the gutter into storm drains. Lawn space is far smaller, too.
Such a setup, Haver admits, would be a bit pricey for most homeowners, few of whom would feel compelled to install their own weather station.
But the response among landscape professionals to the demo plot idea has been overwhelming, he said – starting even before the project was finished.
Most of the plants were donated by nurseries, and a landscape designer, Clark and Green Associates, provided services at reduced rates; a landscape association donated labor.
Lennar Homes, the developer of
"It's a valuable resource for us," said George Ellis, a Lennar environmental manager. "Those are the kinds of things we're concerned about as we develop communities and turn them over to a homeowners association."
The low-impact house was finished in January. In an odd irony, it is at the moment slurping up more water than the retrofit house – necessary until the delicate, freshly planted natives grow mature and well-established, Haver said.
What can't be seen on the plots is as striking as what's obvious from the outside.
The low-impact house includes electrically powered sensors beneath the ground that measure soil temperature and moisture and feed the data to the sprinkler system.
"Slot drains" on the retrofit plot, hidden in joints in the driveway surface, are almost invisible, but draw water into a pipe beneath, then flow into the landscape plants.
And what looks like a small patch of gravel with a flagstone or two on top – a pleasant accent to the landscaping – is really a 7-foot-deep "well" of gravel that absorbs excess water and allows it to percolate into the ground.
Haver, who advises nurseries and cities on runoff reduction, spends part of his time tweaking the various gizmos and collecting data on the results. Some of the water-control devices will have to be monitored over time to see how well they really work.
The slot drains and gravel well, for example, will likely have to be dug up and cleared once they become clogged with debris. How worthwhile such devices prove to be will depend on how frequently such maintenance is needed.
The project, paid for largely with a $1 million grant from the state Water Resources Control Board, will run at least two years – longer if more funding can be found.
Haver and other scientists also are gathering data about pesticide use – the original reason for building the faux houses, which were later expanded in scope to include runoff-control testing.
The experiment is still in the works, but Haver hopes laboratory analysis of how the pesticides migrate off the home site will provide clues for homeowners to cut down their pesticide runoff, too.
"Does it stay?" he asked. "Or is it moving really easily? We don't know yet."
Telephone surveys, Haver said, reveal a big problem.
"People tend not to identify the pest properly," he said. "Then they reach for something to take care of the problem quickly. They reach for broad-spectrum pesticides."
Simply targeting the right pests and using more environmentally friendly pesticides could greatly reduce the excess runoff, he said.
The same kind of information will be collected on the demonstration plots about fertilizers. These can wreak havoc in native ecosystems, already stressed by too much water flowing through channels that should be dry part of the year.
The water and fertilizer stimulates growth of invasive, non-native species, leading to conversion from arid, native habitats to wet, weed-choked, alien vegetation corridors.
One of the scientists' first acts when the "typical" home was finished was an intentionally sloppy application of fertilizers (that runoff is collected in cisterns, not released into the environment). Results are pending.
Studying homeowner habits using tiny, mock houses isn't as strange an idea as it might at first seem.
With increased regulation of nurseries, golf courses and other commercial sources, homeowners have begun to emerge in recent years as the biggest contributors to contaminated runoff. In some parts of the county, waterfalls composed entirely of excess runoff run year-round.
Other public agencies in
But with luck, Haver's homegrown
The more people who see the demonstration plots, it seems, the more the ideas flow on how better to control runoff.
"This thing just kind of blossomed," Haver said.#
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1732821.php
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