A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 9, 2009
2. Supply –
East Bay
Contra Costa Times
City budget calls for 75% water rate hike
UNLV professor targets 'wasteful' dipper wells
CWA Committee Hears Pipeline 6 Study Results
The
Human and Animal Cancer Evidence Prompts Review of Fluoride
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East Bay
Contra Costa Times-6/08/09
By Mike Taugher
The
The East Bay Municipal Utility District is expected to adopt rate increases of 7.5 percent this year and 7.5 percent next year.
The Oakland-based district's revenues have taken hits from the construction slowdown, which has decreased connection fees for new houses, and from the drought, which has resulted in customers using less water and paying less on their bills.
A public hearing is scheduled during the meeting, which begins at 1:15 p.m. in the district's headquarters at
The average single family residence now paying $33.07 per month would see that bill go up to $35.95 and to $38.66 per month beginning in July 2010.
EBMUD serves 1.3 million customers in parts of
City budget calls for 75% water rate hike
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UNLV professor targets 'wasteful' dipper wells
Before you even take that first sip of latte or bite of hand-scooped ice cream, you may have unwittingly participated in a form of water waste as common as your corner coffee shop.
Each year, food establishments across the valley purposely pour more than 100 million gallons of drinking water down the drain in the interest of health and expedience, according to a UNLV professor and a student who want to shut the tap on the practice.
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The culprit is a kitchen convenience known as a dipper well, which uses a continuous stream of cold water to rinse ice cream scoops and other utensils.
Martin Dean Dupalo, an adjunct professor of political science at the
After several hundred hours of research, none of it paid, they settled on three numbers: 2,453 dipper wells at 1,134 food establishments sending 106.4 million gallons of drinking water a year down the drain.
That's enough water to supply 653 average homes.
And Dupalo considers that "a bare minimum." It's a conservative figure they settled on because it could be defended by their research, he said.
Dipper wells are especially common at ice cream shops and specialty coffee houses. Starbucks was blasted in the British media last year for its use of the small, perpetual-flow sinks, but the coffee chain is hardly alone.
"I think the big thing that surprised me was how many businesses used these," Sipe said.
In the course of their research, he and Dupalo found at least one restaurant with five dipper wells running at once, including a well used exclusively for potato slicers.
They also came across several coffee kiosks inside grocery stores and elsewhere that left their dipper wells running all the time, even when the businesses were closed.
Dupalo said the wells make no sense, especially in a place where residents are encouraged to quickly repair slow drips and turn off the tap while they brush their teeth.
"We're in the desert, and we're in a multiyear drought," he said.
Dupalo and Sipe finished their study in April and have been trying to get it on the agenda for the Southern Nevada Health District ever since.
After the health district, they plan to present their findings to the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Clark County Commission.
Ultimately, Dupalo would like to see dipper wells banned from new businesses and phased out of old ones.
Paul Klouse is an environmental health supervisor for the health district. He couldn't speak to likelihood of a ban on dipper wells, but he said the argument against them makes "absolute sense from a water conservation perspective."
"The regulations do not require dipper wells," Klouse said. "There are lots of alternatives to running them."
Water authority Conservation Manager Doug Bennett hasn't seen Dupalo and Sipe's findings, but he knows plenty about dipper wells already.
"Well, they are horribly wasteful," he said.
They are also inefficient. Because a dipper well runs all the time, Bennett said, "it's going to use that water whether you serve four scoops of ice cream or you serve 4,000 scoops of ice cream in a day."
Starbucks has gotten the message.
Earlier this year, the company began implementing alternatives to dipper wells, including more traditional rinse sinks and the use of a separate utensil for each drink that is made.
Starbucks hopes to be able to shut off the dipper wells at all of its locations in the
Starbucks could qualify for a little help from the water authority as it makes the switch from dipper wells in
Through its WET program, short for Water Efficient Technologies, the authority offers rebates to businesses that replace older, less efficient water systems and cut their water use by at least 500,000 gallons a year.
Bennett said a chain of restaurants or coffee shops could easily save that much merely by replacing the dipper wells at its valley locations.
A small, family-owned coffee shop or ice cream parlor also might be able to earn a rebate by getting rid of its dipper wells and making other water efficiency improvements, he said.
Dupalo hopes businesses will decide to make the change on their own, but a complete, valleywide conversion will never happen without a firm push from regulators.
As it stands now, he said, dipper wells are "unregulated, unmonitored and continuous flow," words that should never be used when it comes to managing water in North America's driest desert.#
http://www.lvrj.com/news/47195482.html
CWA Committee Hears Pipeline 6 Study Results
The
The
The San Diego County Water Authority’s Water Planning committee heard the results of a Pipeline 6 feasibility and alignment study during a special May 14 meeting.
In addition to evaluating preferred alignments, the study identified major system integration and timing issues for the implementation of Pipeline 6.
Pipeline 6 is expected to carry between 470 and 630 cubic feet per second (cfs) of water and would connect
Pipeline 6 is expected to be an untreated water pipeline, which would allow the conversion of an existing untreated water pipeline to a treated water pipeline and increase treated water capacity from about 600 cfs to 900 cfs and untreated water capacity from less than 800 cfs to about 1,000 cfs.
Pipeline 6 was initially proposed in 1987, and in 1993 the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the County Water Authority jointly prepared and certified an Environmental Impact Report. Shortly after the EIR was certified, work on Pipeline 6 was suspended due to updated water demand projections and the higher priority of other projects.
The total length of Pipeline 6 would be approximately 32 miles. The north reach of Pipeline 6 serves Temecula and covers the first seven miles between
The southern portion is expected to be needed between 2018 and 2023 if the
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California will be responsible for the segment between
In March 2006 the MWD board authorized its staff to conduct a feasibility and alignment study for the segment to the delivery point and in December 2007 the CWA board approved a consultant contract for MWH Americas, Inc., to prepare a feasibility and alignment study for its portion of Pipeline 6.
MWD released a draft planning report in late 2008 which identified four alignments generally following existing MWD aqueduct pipelines and the 1993 EIR. MWD also slightly modified its East Alignment alternative to avoid land owned by Pechanga Indian Reservation.
The alignment alternative information includes total length, trench length, tunnel length, estimated construction cost, estimated right-of-way cost, and estimated mitigation costs.
The
The CWA study analyzed four alignments. The western alignment, which would run west of Interstate 15 before connecting with the CWA’s Second Aqueduct, had the lowest construction and mitigation costs at $281 million and $11 million, respectively, along with a $27 million right-of-way cost.
MWD and CWA staff held a one-day workshop February 5 and discussed eleven possible alignment combinations. The combinations were given relative scores based on ten weighted criteria including cost, schedule, environmental, and operations issues. The combination of the MWD’s
The Middle West-West alignment was considered by both MWD and CWA staff to have the least environmental impact, the least schedule risk, and the lowest total project cost. That alignment would total 130,100 feet in length, comprised of 117,200 feet of trench and 12,900 feet of tunnel. Its total estimated cost would be $607 million.
The Middle West-West alignment would run parallel to CWA Pipeline 3 for almost its entire length and would place Pipeline 6 in the same aqueduct corridor as Pipelines 3, 4, and 5.
That creates the risk of having nearly 90 percent of the CWA’s imported water conveyance capacity in parallel pipes, and that risk would be mitigated by incorporating special design features where Pipeline 6 crosses the San Luis Rey River and by diverting Pipeline 6 away from the existing aqueduct pipelines where the route follows narrow ridgelines.
Operational coordination and seasonal shift operation regarding the San Vicente Dam raise are considered more cost-effective near-term solutions to peak demand than accelerating Pipeline 6.
If the
If the
Although the design phase can be delayed, commencing the right-of-way acquisition as soon as possible will likely secure those easements at a lower cost and while many of them are still available. “Probably real estate is not going to get cheaper than it is today,” said City of
“It may not be there five years from now,” said CWA principal engineer Dave Chamberlain.
Wornham referred to himself as a “redundancy freak”. “Redundancy and the capability of having more options is better than having less,” he said.
The revised Environmental Impact Report, including a preferred alternative and other studied alternatives, can also begin in advance of the timetable to design and build the project.
The timeframe of nine to eleven years not only accounts for possible delays but is also based on the various phases being sequential. “If we don’t start design work soon after the EIR we may miss that 2018 date,” Chamberlain said.
CWA staff will work with member agencies over the next few months to address the near-term management of peak demand for untreated water.
The primary issue to be resolved is the detailed environmental review of the preferred alignments, and later this year the CWA board is expected to recommend moving forward with the environmental review.
Other future tasks include confirming the delivery point with MWD and establishing a relationship between Pipeline 6 timing and the development of new local supply projects such as the
http://www.thevillagenews.com/story/38334/
Human and Animal Cancer Evidence Prompts Review of Fluoride
Fresno
On May 29, 2009, over protests by the lobbyists for the American Dental Association and the Personal Care Products Council who oppose further evaluation of fluoride as cancer-causing, the State’s Qualified Experts that comprise the Carcinogen Identification Committee, as advisors to California EPA’s Office of Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), never-the-less established fluoride and its salts as meriting the highest priority they can recommend for further review toward including fluorides on a Prop 65 list of chemicals for which warnings for risks of cancer, birth defects, and reproductive toxicity are to be publicly posted..
Citing the passage of two pre-screenings that acknowledged the existence of animal and human cancer evidence, as well as widespread exposure, this recommendation places fluoride and its salts as one of the first of 38 chemicals that also passed at least one of the tests to be newly prioritized for Hazard Identification materials preparation.
This hazard identification process is similar to a risk assessment performed to establish a scientific point of safety for lifetime ingestion that is ordered by the Safe Drinking Water Act for chemicals in the water, with the exception that this process will evaluate fluorides from all exposures and restricts the assessment to only the risks of cancer, rather than all adverse heath effects.
Proposition 65 was enacted by voters of California in 1986 to assure that warnings of cancer, birth defects, and reproductive risks are publicly noticed so that consumers and workers are informed of the presence of such chemicals in the posted location, or of their inclusion in products, so that individuals may better control exposures and protections for themselves.
Prop 65 warnings are commonly seen at gas stations and dry cleaning establishments for environmental exposures to the chemicals present, and bars and restaurants that serve alcohol for products that may be ingested and cause birth defects or reproductive harm.
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), another fluoride compound, was also separately recommended for the highest priority review.
PFOAs, while technically referring to a class of surfactants, are most commonly recognized by laypersons for their non-stick and non-penetration qualities, which are the basis and sister-chemicals of such products as Scotchgard, Teflon and GoreTex. Some of these products are now to be phased out of production, and restricted in future production, despite their high profitability.
Ranging from water and oil repellants, to non-stain carpets and couches, to waxed paper, this chemical class is listed as used in aircraft production processes, electronic products, personal care products, and thought to be essential in the automotive, chemical, medical, packaging and building/construction industries. Dupont, the primary producer of PFOAs, opposed the recommendation for priority review.
Chemicals that received a lower priority ranking are not expected to receive a timely review.
A summary of the chemical prioritizations can now be accessed at: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/public_meetings/cic060509.html
The Comment on Fluoride and Its Salts produced by Kathleen Thiessen, PhD, of SENES Oak Ridge, Center for Risk Analysis, on behalf of IAOMT can be accessed on OEHHA’s web site: http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/public_meetings/052909coms/fluoride/SENESFluoride.pdf#
http://www.fresnobee.com/547/story/1459684.html
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