Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 13, 2009
4. Water Quality –
Bill introduced to aid Colorado River
Yuma Sun
Industrial firm fined $600,000 for groundwater contamination
San Diego Union-Tribune
Acid In The Oceans: A Growing Threat To Sea Life
NPR
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Bill introduced to aid Colorado River
Yuma Sun-8/12/09
BY Chris McDaniel
Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva has introduced a bill to the U.S. House of Representatives that would provide funding for programs designed to keep the Colorado River clean and the ecosystem pristine.
According to Grijalva, D-Ariz., the Lower Colorado River Protection Act of 2009 seeks to restore and maintain the ecosystems and water quality of the Colorado River, thus assuring the health of the millions of Americans who drink its water and eat food grown with its water, protecting the river basin's precious natural resources and ensuring the region's economic prosperity.
Grijalva said the bill will provide for the development and implementation of a comprehensive plan for the prevention and elimination of pollution in the Lower Colorado River and the maintenance of a healthy Lower Colorado River ecosystem.
"The habitat along the Colorado River has been altered by dams, human interference and non-native plant and animal species," Grijalva said. "The effects of the massive population growth in the Southwest have threatened the Lower Colorado River. The bill will work to reduce the destruction to the river and thereby protect it from future damage."
According to figures supplied by Grijalva, the Colorado River supplies drinking water for more than 25 million people and irrigates over 80 percent of winter vegetables consumed in the United States. The Colorado River and its tributaries are home to many rare and unusual species, including 36 native fish species (not including two that have already gone extinct), of which 25 are found nowhere else.
Grijalva said preserving the water quality of the Lower Colorado River is essential to the health, economy, security and ecology of Arizona, Southern California and southern Nevada.
He said as the climate changes and the population of the region grows, the Lower Colorado River will come under increasing stress, adding that the Lower Colorado River Protection Act will safeguard the region's drinking water supply and protect its precious natural resources.
Natalie Luna Rose, Grijalva's press secretary, said the bill will allow everyone with a stake in the river to have a voice in what is done to protect it.
"There have been longtime issues concerning the limited resources of the Colorado River, and hopefully this bill will be able to float down those resources, because it is the lifeline of the West. This bill will create a program to monitor and design solutions for the ecosystem and water quality programs.
"It will involve the regional stake holders, including the cities, towns, counties, Indian tribes, companies and farmers who get their water from the river to create a plan to protect the Lower Colorado River."
According to the bill, the aforementioned entities will form a Lower Colorado River Management Conference (CRRSCo.) that will help develop the Lower Colorado River Pollution Elimination and Ecosystem Restoration Plan.
The bill allows two years from its time of passage for the CRRSCo. to develop such a plan.
The bill does not allow for the purchase of water for the purpose of flow regulation in the Lower Colorado River Basin.
"The program will work with local and state authorities as well as federal agencies," Luna Rose said. "It will provide support for the development of infrastructure for the water usage along the river, and with the implementation of this program, we hope to safeguard the drinking water supply. River communities are booming and we hope this will help them manage their resources."
Federal agencies involved if the bill passes will include the Environmental Protection Agency, Western Area Power Administration, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Geological Survey.
"Grijalva introduced this bill because it is fundamental to the health, economy security and ecology of Arizona, California and Nevada," Luna Rose said.
"The river affects millions of people, and even in faraway places, they rely on the water too. It is vital to the West."#
http://www.yumasun.com/news/river-52108-colorado-grijalva.html
Industrial firm fined $600,000 for groundwater contamination
San Diego Union-Tribune-8/12/09
By Mike Lee
Regional water pollution cops fined an industrial company $600,000 on Wednesday and threatened to nearly double the penalty if it doesn't meet deadlines leading up to treatment of a contaminated groundwater plume in El Cajon.
In February, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board had proposed a fine of $2.3 million – one of the agency's largest ever – against Ametek Inc. It said Ametek failed to deal with trichloroethene and other toxins that leaked under the company's former plant on Greenfield Drive.
The board has pushed for mapping and treatment of the chemicals for more than 20 years, but has been delayed by legal challenges, bureaucracy and earlier efforts to win compliance without penalties.
Water regulators expressed hope Wednesday that Ametek will make substantial progress to reduce the largest plume of its kind – about a mile long – in the county. A waste tank had leaked tens of thousands of gallons of pollutants before it was removed, the water board said.
“Today's board action marks the long-stalled beginning of recovery for the groundwater basin in El Cajon. We expect cleanup activities to begin without delay and to continue until the contamination and nuisance are gone – or we'll be back with stronger penalties,” said John Robertus, the board's executive officer.
His agency didn't cite any health problems directly linked to the plume. Human exposure to the substances can result in dizziness, organ damage and death.
The water board lowered its fine after revising the number of days it figured Ametek had violated water-quality laws. The total penalty would top $1 million if Ametek doesn't meet the terms of the settlement agreement.
Ametek, which has domestic offices in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, didn't admit wrongdoing in the settlement. An Ametek representative couldn't be reached Wednesday, but a lawyer for the company previously said Ametek had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars studying the plume and has been “totally responsive” since it took over the lead cleanup role about two years ago.
In several months, Ametek needs to finish mapping the underground waste flow and propose a remedy. Eventually, the company is supposed to meet soil and groundwater cleanup levels set by the water board.
Ametek owned the 17-acre site, where it operated an aerospace and electronic manufacturing business, from 1968 to 1988. A previous owner had installed a sump for storage of waste materials, and that tank leaked the chemicals.
When the water board first learned about the pollution, it started demanding that Ametek and a spinoff company, Ketema, map the full extent of the plume.#
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/aug/12/bn12fine-water-police/?metro
Acid In The Oceans: A Growing Threat To Sea Life
NPR-8/12/09
by Richard Harris
When we burn fossil fuels, we are not just putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A lot of it goes into the sea. There, carbon dioxide turns into carbonic acid. And that turns ocean water corrosive, particularly to shellfish and corals.
Biologists are now coming to realize that rising acid levels in the ocean can affect many other forms of sea life as well.
Visit Moss Landing, Calif., in the spring and at first blush it seems marine life is flourishing. Sea lions, weighing in at 600 pounds or more, jostle for space and spar with one another as they try to cram themselves onto docks that groan under their weight.
Marine biologist Eric Pane looks on approvingly at what seems to be part of a Pacific success story. Up and down the coast, biologists see healthy populations of marine mammals, fish and other wildlife.
But as we cross the street and head into his laboratory at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Pane's outlook about the future of life in the sea takes a dark turn. His budding career as a marine biologist is framed by an ominous trend: civilization is venting carbon dioxide from tailpipes, smokestacks and chimneys at a prodigious rate.
"And at least a third of it so far, has actually ended up in our oceans," Pane says. "(That's) sort of good and bad news because it has prevented more CO2 from accumulating in the atmosphere but it comes at a price. More CO2 in the ocean leads to it being acidified."
Acidity is measured on the pH scale. Already, the oceans are a tenth of a unit more acidic. And by the end of the century, the pH is expected to change by half a unit. But don't be fooled by these modest-sounding numbers.
"So we say 'only' — 'only' half a unit. What's the big deal about that? Well, that's a tripling of acidity," Pane says. "That's a three-fold increase.
That's because the pH scale is logarithmic, so each unit increase actually represents a ten-fold increase in acidity.
Over the past half-dozen years, marine biologists studying ocean acidification have focused mostly on the animals they assume will be the most vulnerable, such as coral reefs and shellfish. If acid levels in the ocean get too high, their shells can literally dissolve.
Pane is part of a second wave of research on ocean acidification as biologists try to understand the consequences for all the life in the sea.
Enlarge Richard Harris/NPRA researcher examines a neptunia snail that was collected in some of the deepest waters of Monterey Canyon.
Richard Harris/NPRA researcher examines a neptunia snail that was collected in some of the deepest waters of Monterey Canyon.
"Right now we're scrambling and we're trying to get our feet beneath us," he says.
The simplest issue, he says, is to understand how organisms respond to acidification — as well as how the ecosystem responds.
"We're trying at this point to get as many animals as we can across a spectrum of invertebrates [and] vertebrates," he says. "All we can get to, basically so we can get them into the lab and expose them to these different scenarios of CO2."
Pane's lab is focusing on animals that live in relatively deep water. Many live nearby. There's an enormous underwater canyon just offshore, slicing through Monterey Bay.
"We've got gastropods, marine snails. We've had brachiopods," he says. "We've worked with decapod crabs, basic crustacea. We're hoping to get some smaller fish in, down in our seawater lab facility."
At a lab bench inside the facility, three-inch-long marine snails sit in a glass dish. They came from 700 meters offshore. The snails have holes drilled in the top of their shells to make it easier for researchers to draw frequent blood samples.
Each animal they want to study presents different challenges — whether it's getting a blood sample from a snail or figuring out how to keep deep sea fish alive in the lab. It's also not always so obvious what effects to look for.
A change in acid can actually impose a subtle "energy tax" on marine animals. They already use some energy pumping acid out of their cells to maintain a healthy pH. As the oceans get more acidic, Pane says, the animals will be forced to expend more energy to maintain that balance.
That means less energy for such things as growing and reproducing, Pane says.
"So we're going to be looking at growth rates of organisms over a long time," he says. "We're going to be looking at fecundity, amount of offspring produced. The health of offspring produced. And then try to extrapolate in a long term approach into what's going to happen to these ecosystems that we know."
It's too early to say, just yet, what this portends for life at sea — up to and including the fat and happy sea lions down on the dock.
"I think the least we can say is there's going to be profound changes to ocean ecosystems. From there, where we go and the judgments we make about that is an issue for further on."
Marine biology sounds to most people like an exciting career, but Pane says his work is actually a bit depressing. "Within a few years there's going to be change basically, and I'm not sure how it's going to work out."
There are just a few people in the world who have actually been thinking about ocean acidification for decades. And one of those is down the hall from Pane. Peter Brewer realized that something was amiss with the ocean's chemistry back in the 1960s, and he's seen the problem grow much, much worse.
"The quantity of carbon dioxide we've put in the ocean is now well over 500 billion tons," he says. "And you can't just transfer that much mass without making changes to the physical properties as well as the biological properties."
Brewer says the carbon dioxide has already altered ocean chemistry in such a way that it affects the way sound travels through the ocean. That effect will grow, as more and more carbon dioxide ends up in the sea.
"One assumes that whales, which communicate at these frequencies, will sense this effect," Brewer says. "Whether they will adapt their communication patterns, one does not know."
Scientists may simply have to wait and watch to see how that unintentional human experiment evolves. But they won't have to wait much longer to see what rising acid levels will do to ecosystems at the bottom of the sea.
Brewer takes us to a lab where scientists are working on an instrument that will eventually study carbon dioxide increases right on the sea floor.
Enlarge Richard Harris/NPRWhen deployed underwater, this large device will increase carbon dioxide levels in a test area, allowing scientists to observe and measure any changes that take place.
Richard Harris/NPRWhen deployed underwater, this large device will increase carbon dioxide levels in a test area, allowing scientists to observe and measure any changes that take place.
It has a green metal frame, bigger than a car, with Plexiglas wings that can unfurl underwater. One of the technicians is sitting right in the middle of the machine... where a test chamber will be.
"We can put some animals in there, add some carbon dioxide," Brewer explains. "It will flow through the chamber. We can create a change and we can observe behavior and make measurements."
Studying animals on the ocean bottom would, after all, be a more realistic experiment than a lab study — presuming they can get the test chamber to do a good job of simulating future ocean conditions. It'll probably take another year to sort out the technical challenges of getting this instrument to work well.
And while those problems seem solvable, Brewer ponders the enormous societal problems that created the acidity problem in the first place.
"We're all in a bind here," he says. "It's going to be very hard to maintain this number of people on the planet and not have these problems. It worries me that scientists sound the alarm but don't come up with solutions. We're going to have to try."
Technology has revolutionized ocean science during his career. He can only hope that it will also revolutionize the way we produce energy — before the oceans suffer irreparable harm.#
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111807469&ft=1&f=1025
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