[Water_news] 4. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATER QUALITY - 6/18/08

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

June 18, 2008

 

4. Water Quality –

 

 

Flood victims worry: What's in the water?

Associated Press – 6/16/08

 

Rain gardens capture storm water, clean it up

The San Francisco Chronicle- 6/18/08

 

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Flood victims worry: What's in the water?

Associated Press – 6/16/08

By Allen G. Breen, AP National Writer

 

The floodwaters that deluged much of Iowa have done more than knock out drinking water and destroy homes. They have also spread a noxious brew of sewage, farm chemicals and fuel that could sicken anyone who wades in.

 

On Monday, Bob Lanz used a 22-foot aluminum flatboat to navigate through downtown Oakville, where water reeked of pig feces and diesel fuel.

 

"You can hardly stand it," Lanz said as he surveyed what remained of his family's hog farm. "It's strong."

 

LeRoy Lippert, chairman of emergency management and homeland security in nearby Des Moines County, warned people to avoid the floodwaters: "If you drink this water and live, tell me about it. You have no idea. It is very, very wise to stay out of it. It's as dangerous as anything."

 

As some of Iowa's flooded towns began cleaning up Monday, others braced for new flooding risks, particularly in southeastern Iowa along the Mississippi River.

 

The federal government predicts that 27 levees could potentially overflow along the Mississippi River if the weather forecast is on the mark and a massive sandbagging effort fails to raise the level of the levees, according to a map obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

 

Officials are placing millions of sandbags on top of the levees along the river in Illinois, Iowa and Missouri to prevent overflowing.

 

In Des Moines County, where the Mississippi was expected to crest Wednesday, authorities had asked for a half-million sandbags.

 

"We have just begun to fight," Gov. Chet Culver said. Two more deaths were reported Monday, including a woman whose car was hit by a National Guard truck, bringing the state's death toll to five.

 

Also Monday, the American Red Cross said its disaster relief fund has been completely spent, and the agency is borrowing money to help flood victims throughout the Midwest.

 

In the college town of Iowa City, damage appeared limited. Some 400 homes took on water Sunday, and 16 University of Iowa buildings sustained some flood damage over the weekend. But the town's levees were holding and the Iowa River was falling.

 

In northeast Missouri communities along the Mississippi, armies of Mennonites and Amish worked sandbag lines with convicted felons, college students and other volunteers in a race to beat the rising river. The very wide Mississippi was forecast to crest in the area by mid- to late-week.

 

"Today is our critical day, we need to get it done," said Monica Heaton, spokeswoman for Canton's emergency operations center.

 

In La Grange, Mo., a town of 1,000 people without a levee, City Hall was evacuated and about 50 residents left their homes Monday after Main Street and 20 homes flooded, City Administrator Mark Campbell said. The tiny town of Alexandria, just south of the Iowa border, abandoned sandbagging efforts and was completing an evacuation Monday.

 

Officials in Illinois were building up the approach to the only major bridge over the Mississippi River linking Hamilton with Keokuk, Iowa, so the bridge could stay open despite rising water.

 

BNSF Railway Co. said flooding had caused major delays along three routes, and normal traffic won't resume until the rivers crest.

 

The disrupted routes run east-west through Ottumwa, Iowa, along the Des Moines River, north-south from St. Louis to Burlington, Iowa, and north-south from St. Louis and Memphis, Tenn., along the Mississippi River, spokesman Steve Forsberg said.

 

In Cedar Rapids, hazardous conditions forced officials on Monday to stop taking residents into homes where the water had receded. Broken gas lines, sink holes and structural problems with homes made conditions unsafe, said Dave Koch, a city spokesman.

 

Frustrations spilled over at one checkpoint, where a man was arrested at gunpoint after he tried to drive past police in his pickup truck.

 

Warnings about the dangers of walking in the polluted water prompted hundreds of people to line up at a downtown clinic Sunday for free tetanus shots.

 

Teresa Schirm wore latex gloves as she stood ankle-deep in smelly brown water in her garage in Cedar Rapids.

 

"You can see the oil on top of the water," she said. "But when you're trying to salvage what little you have left, you do it. I don't know what else to do."

 

All manner of refuse could be seen floating down the Cedar River — 55-gallon drums labeled "corrosive," propane tanks, wooden fences and railroad ties. Dead birds and fish sat on the city's 1st Avenue Bridge.

 

A few blocks away, a paint store stood with its windows blown out. A line indicating the high-water mark could be seen about eight feet above the floor. At the gas station next door, strong currents had knocked over two pumps.

 

Ken Sharp, environmental health director for the Iowa Department of Public Health, acknowledged that the floodwaters had the potential to make people sick. But he said the sheer volume of water can dilute hazardous substances.

 

In the aftermath, Sharp said, one of the biggest concerns will be preventing injuries from slipping or sliding, or from people stumbling into obstacles such as manholes with covers that have washed away.

 

The flooding also raised concerns of contamination in rural wells, said G. Richard Olds, professor and chairman of the Medical College of Wisconsin.

 

"For rural folks, it's going to be hard to know if their water's safe or not," he said.

 

Adding to the misery were mosquitoes, which can breed rapidly in the standing water.

 

Greg Burg, assistant director of undergraduate biology at the University of Kansas, said the flooding "adds that much more water where they could potentially lay eggs and have the eggs survive."

 

When the waters rose Sunday in Oakville, a town of 400, Bob Lanz and his family tried to move their pigs out of harm's way. But they could only save a few. Most of their 350 sows and their 800 piglets were lost.

 

The family ripped out canvas ventilation curtains in the barn so the pigs "could at least have a chance," said Logan Lanz, Bob Lanz' grandson. "They were screaming. They were on top of each other. We had some big sows in there. They're frantic, and they run you over."

 

He said the water was choked with dead piglets.

 

Near Iowa City, Angela Betts and her three children were among those who fled last week when the Iowa River burst through a levee at Coralville. She stayed just long enough to fill two trash bags with clothes.

 

The family is now living in a shelter, and as far as Betts is concerned, everything she left behind can stay there.

 

"It bothers me, with everything that's in the water," Betts said. "I probably won't keep anything. It won't be worth it."#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/13/national/a103436D76.DTL

 

 

 

Rain gardens capture storm water, clean it up

The San Francisco Chronicle- 6/18/08

By Ron Sullivan and Joe Eaton

 

It's a bit odd that "green" roofs have become popular here sooner than rain gardens. A green roof certainly does a lot to compensate for the footprint of a building in terms of microclimate heat, maybe habitat loss and certainly rain runoff - the last of which carries with it the prospects of overtaxed sewage systems, flooding, erosion and the pollution of streams and the bay.

 

Look at those admonishments stenciled over storm drains for clues: Runoff from paving and other hard surfaces carries particulates and pesticides, petroleum and fertilizers, and other nasties into the water in small bits that accumulate to toxic levels.

 

Roof gardens require attention to engineering, weight, leakage potential and access for maintenance. Hauling the lawn mower up the chimney is the stuff of sitcoms, but even the toughest plants need attention unless you decide to cultivate a garden of weeds and whatever else chance might deliver. It's fun until chance delivers an acacia and its roots creep up on you with ill intent.

 

Rain gardens are easier. A rain garden is a planting designed to soften the destructive force of rainstorm water and reduce runoff by slowing it enough to allow more to soak into the ground. It might use plants, swales (shallow channels), rocks of various sizes, and/or temporary ponds to do this. Depending on the plants used, it might or might not need irrigation in the dry season.

 

You can use rain gardens to compensate for the runoff from your house and garage roofs, and driveway, sidewalk and patio - all impermeable surfaces - and they can be pretty and provide habitat for other pretty creatures.

 

There are formulas to calculate how much runoff your roof is responsible for in a year. Multiply your roof's square footage by 623, divide the result by 1,000 and multiply that by the number of annual inches of rainfall wherever you live. Compensating precisely is not the point. Anything you can do to reduce immediate rainwater runoff is a good thing.

 

Rain gardens also conserve water where we're going to need it - in our gardens. Pete Veilleux mentioned one very basic system in the June 13 Chronicle's quarterly Green section: Unhook some downspouts from the storm drains or aim them away from the walk or driveway; connect the spouts to perforated pipe wrapped in landscape cloth; lay the pipe in swales or depressions of your own design to carry water into your garden; conceal, if desired, with mulch.

 

Cheryl Sullivan, a senior landscape architect with Cunningham Engineering in Sacramento, spoke about rain gardens, also called bioretention cells, during a recent climate-change conference at UC Davis. She made several suggestions about creating such gardens, one of them urgent: "If you disconnect downspouts from underground drainage," she said, "create a swale or slope to take it directly to the rain garden; don't have it pooling around the building."

 

A rain garden is an anti-Army Corps of Engineers, old-style approach. When creeks got channelized and concrete dikes raised along riverbeds, the idea was to move water away as fast as possible. The problem is that there's always somebody downstream who objects to being on the receiving end.

 

Rain gardens make moving water slow down, absorb, nurture. Vegetation does this via stems and roots, and it's also a natural filter for pollutants, both because it slows the flow, letting particles and substances drop out onto the streambed, and because lots of those pollutants are actually plant nutrients (animal fecal particles, for example) or get harmlessly absorbed and chemically broken down by the plants and soil microorganisms. Biological sewage treatment plants like Arcata's work this way.

 

Because these "non-point source" pollutants generally reach hazard levels only when accumulated from a big area and concentrated into a small one, they've never yet been caught threatening a bioretention site or the groundwater there, Sullivan told us.

 

If you get a sheet of water flooding your yard, sidewalk or street after a hard rain, you can help solve the problem. A rain garden isn't a pond (though it can include one), so there doesn't have to be a mosquito or stagnant-water hazard; it should drain in about 48 hours. It can be a swale - a fairly shallow depression in the ground, lined with plants or drainage rock - and/or a sink of sorts that lets the rush of a rainstorm stand still long enough to percolate away into the ground.

 

"Rain gardens cost only three or four dollars per square foot or less to install," Sullivan told us. "You do have to know something about your soil conditions and plants. The range of plants is huge for California - in general the plants need to tolerate wet to dry conditions, and be appropriate for the local soils. Bunchgrasses can line the bottom of a swale or a slope; plants like manzanitas that resent bad drainage should be at the top."

 

Above all, she said, "Experiment with plants! Landscapes are always changing, in reality, the garden is a piece of performance art."#

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/18/HOCM1182C5.DTL