CALIFORNIA - The Water Problem

"To build or not to build, that’s the dam question in dry California" PBS NewsHour 11/3/2015

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SUMMARY:  Across California, after years of punishing drought, reservoirs that normally fill canals and make crops bloom are greatly depleted or even empty.  Some say that getting more water into storage by building more dams is key.  But dams also create problems for native fish, and some see them as a waste of money that may not provide sufficient supply.  Special correspondent Spencer Michels reports.

SPENCER MICHELS (NewsHour):  It may be the sign of a hopeful farmer, a biplane spreading fertilizer on a dry field in California’s Central Valley.  There’s no irrigation in this part of the valley, so, for now, rain is the only way these crops will grow, and there hasn’t been much of that for the last four years.

And the reservoirs, like Folsom Lake near Sacramento, that normally fill the canals and make the crops bloom, are depleted.  Folsom is just 17 percent full.

TIM QUINN, Executive Director, Association of California Water Agencies:  It’s flat-out empty because of this drought.

SPENCER MICHELS:  Tim Quinn is executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.

And what’s the solution to this, build another reservoir?

TIM QUINN:  Well, if we’d had more water going into storage, we could still have more left than we have got today.

SPENCER MICHELS:  And that’s important, says Quinn, not just to Californians.

TIM QUINN:  We’re a big part of this economy.  And we provide food to the nation and to the world.

SPENCER MICHELS:  Quinn and many in state government want a comprehensive solution, including conservation.

TIM QUINN:  We do need to build more dams, but we also need to connect them with more underground storage.

SPENCER MICHELS:  But building new dams goes against a recent trend in some states, including Washington, of actually demolishing dams, mostly for environmental reasons like protecting fish and restoring wildlife habitat.

These days in California, the mood is quite different.  Since the gold rush, building dams and canals has been California’s answer to unpredictable rain and snowfall.  To get the water from where it falls in the mountains hundreds of miles away to the dry farms and populated areas, Californians have constructed more than 1,400 dams, including Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River.

In 1968, the state dedicated Oroville Dam, tallest dam in the country, and sent water south to farms and cities.  For many farmers and those whose livelihoods are tied to farming, the success of those dams is a key to what needs to happen now.

IMHO:  Without water you, and every other living thing dies.  A dry parched environment is also harmful.  BUILD MORE DAMS, just be smart about it.

WATER - California and Arizona Shell-Game

"Less Than Zero" by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica 6/16/2015

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Despite decades of accepted science, California and Arizona are still miscounting their water supplies.

Deep beneath the bleached-out, dusty surface of the drought-stricken West is a stash of water sequestered between layers of rock and sometimes built up over centuries.

Officials in the Colorado River basin states have long treated this liquid treasure as a type of environmental retirement account — an additional supply of water they can raid to get through the driest years and make up for the chronic overuse of the rivers themselves.

In recent years, the withdrawals have taken on even more importance:  At least 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, some researchers say.  Arizona, staring down imminent rationing of Colorado River water, pumps nearly half its supply from aquifers.

But in allowing their residents to tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in Southwestern states have ignored an inconvenient truth about how much water is actually available for people to use:  In many places, groundwater and surface water are not independent supplies at all.  Rather, they are interconnected parts of the same system.

The science has been clear for the better part of a century.  Drawing groundwater from near a stream can suck that stream dry.  In turn, using all the water in streams and rivers lessens their ability to replenish the aquifers beneath them.  Farmers who drill new wells to supplement their supplies with groundwater are often stealing water from their neighbors who hold rights to the rivers above them.  This understanding has been the foundation of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s water accounting for decades, and was used by the U.S. Supreme Court to decide one of the most significant water contests in history.

Yet California and Arizona — the two states water experts say are facing the most severe water crises — continue to count and regulate groundwater and surface water as if they were entirely separate.

“States have their own take on this.  Or they choose to not address it at all,” said Stanley Leake, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a leading expert on properly accounting for the connection between ground and surface waters in the West.  “In some cases they pretend that there is no connection.”

Leaders in California and Arizona acknowledge that their states have done this, at least in part to avoid the grim reckoning that emanates from doing the math accurately.  There is even less water available than residents have been led to believe.

If these states stopped effectively double-counting their resources, they would have to change laws, upend traditional water rights and likely force farmers and cities to accept even more dramatic cuts than they already face — a political third rail.

“The politics of water are more challenging than any other issue the state faces,” said Fran Pavley, a California state senator who helped draft a much-praised package of state laws passed last year regulating groundwater withdrawals for the first time.

Tucked into Pavley’s package was a little-noticed provision that explicitly prohibits California state regulators from addressing the interconnection between groundwater and surface water in local water plans until 2025, a compromise meant to give local water agencies a leisurely runway to adjust to a new way of counting.

Pavley said the prospect of more immediately acknowledging the overlap between ground and surface waters threatened to derail the legislation entirely, triggering fierce opposition from the Agricultural Council of California, the California Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups.

“Those who have unlimited water supply don’t particularly like the idea of changing that,” she said.  “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Arizona law, too, treats groundwater and surface water as unconnected, as does Arizona’s state water plan, which purports to account for water resources and to estimate how many years of supply remain.  Its authors know better, Arizona’s top water official acknowledged, but rewriting them to be more truthful would be politically impossible and economically damaging.

“We know for a fact that pumping aquifers can dry up rivers,” said Thomas Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, who says his policy is bound by the Legislature and court rulings.  “But it is the law … it would be a huge upset to the economy to do away with that.”

The costs of refusing to acknowledge or adapt to the reality that two seemingly separate sources of water are actually often one are hard to measure but may turn out to be profound, leading hydrologists say.

In a series of articles, ProPublica has been examining the ways in which man’s mistakes in managing water in the West have exacerbated the severity of the drought and have left Colorado River basin states less able to adapt to a changing climate.  There are lots of culprits:  farming subsidies for water-intensive crops, arcane laws encouraging waste, leaky infrastructure, and more.

But none may be more significant than allowing a miscounting of how much water exists in the first place.  Willingly overlooking the science amounts to a fundamental failure of water management, leading water experts say, one that is leading to decisions about how to use it that will deepen and prolong the drought’s painful effects.  In the end, said Rich Juricich, an engineer with the California Department of Water Resources, it may mean that some places run short of the water they need.

Already, damage from the West’s increasing reliance on underground water supplies is proliferating.  In parts of California and Arizona, groundwater levels are being drawn down so quickly that the earth above them is collapsing.  Bridges and canals are buckling.

The more water is extracted from underground, the harder it becomes to restore the region’s rivers and reservoirs — some of which no longer flow through the summer — simultaneously sucking them dry from above and below.

“If you don’t connect the two, then you don’t understand the system,” said John Bredehoeft, a leading hydrogeologist who for many years managed the U.S. government’s western states water program for the U.S. Geological Survey.  “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgment about how much water you’ve got to work with.”

ENVIRONMENT - World's Fresh Water Supply

"Is the world’s fresh water supply running out?" PBS NewsHour 6/17/2015

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SUMMARY:  Recent studies have found that humans are using up water at a faster rate than it is being replenished.  Judy Woodruff talks to James S. Famiglietti, a professor of Earth system science and civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, about what this dwindling supply of freshwater means, and whether we should be concerned about it.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Hundreds of millions of people around the world depend on the use of underground rock formations known as aquifers to get the clean water they need.  But a pair of new studies show many of the largest aquifers are being depleted at alarming rates.

As seen on this map, of the 37 largest ones in the world, 21 are losing more water than is being replaced, with those areas in orange and red showing much more serious problems with depletion.  These are located in countries like China, Russia and Australia, as well as India, where water resources are already a major problem.

The reports also identify declining levels for California’s Central Valley Aquifer.

Jay Famiglietti is a lead author on one of the reports from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he joins me now.

Welcome, Mr. Famiglietti.

Remind us, what is an aquifer, and how does it produce the clean water?

JAY FAMIGLIETTI, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory:  An aquifer is an underground soil or rock unit that contains — contains water in its pore spaces, and the way we get at that water is by drilling wells and pumping it up from the subsurface.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  So, what did these two studies find?

JAY FAMIGLIETTI:  We found that in the 37 world’s largest aquifers that we looked at, that over 21 of them are past sustainability tipping points, meaning that the rate of withdrawal exceeds the rate of replenishment.  And of those, we found that 13 are in a pretty bad way and threatened to exceed a point at which they may not come back.

TECHNOLOGY - Israel's Water Technology

"Could Israel’s water technology ease drought conditions in California?" PBS NewsHour 4/25/2015

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SUMMARY:  Could the technology used in Israel that successfully turned the country's water shortage into a surplus be implemented in California to ease the state's drought?  KQED Public Media reporter Daniel Potter joins Alison Stewart via Skype from San Francisco to discuss.

ALISON STEWART, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR:  Keeping Israel’s successful plan in mind, we wondered if or how Israel’s water technology, especially its use of desalination, could be put to use in drought-stricken California.

For more about that now, we are joined now from San Francisco by Daniel Potter.  He is a reporter for KQED Science.

So, Daniel, it’s sort of obvious.  People look and think, well, California’s is obviously right next to the Pacific Ocean.  Why isn’t desalination a bigger part of the conversation about the drought?  Why isn’t it?

DANIEL POTTER, KQED:  I think the short answer is because desalination is a really — setting up a desalination plant is a very long-term process.  It requires a lot of permitting and a huge amount of investment.  So, setting up a desalination plant, a lot of people I have talked to have said there is a good chance that plant would not be finished until long after the drought ended.

ALISON STEWART:  Are there desalination plant working, in progress in California?  I know there are a couple that are in the process of being constructed, correct?

DANIEL POTTER:  There are a few tiny ones that already exist and that are desalinating presently.  The biggest one is in Carlsbad.  It’s set to come on line probably this fall, and when it’s ready it will produce something like 7 percent of the water for San Diego County.  That project is on the order of something like $900 million or maybe $1 billion.

"Will Israel’s new water technology yield political gain in the arid Middle East?" PBS NewsHour 4/26/2015

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SUMMARY:  Over the past few years in Israel, the country's water shortage has become a surplus.  Through a combination of conservation, reuse and desalination, the country now has more water than it needs.  And that could translate to political progress for the country in the Middle East, one of the most water-stressed regions in the world.  NewsHour's Martin Fletcher reports.

SPACE - Super-Dry Exoplanets x3 Found

An artist's impression shows a Jupiter-sized planet passing in front of its parent star.

"Hubble Finds Three, Surprisingly Dry Jupiter-Like Exoplanets" by Kukil Bora, International Business Times 7/25/2014

Astronomers, who used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to look for water vapor in the atmosphere of three exoplanets, have found that the trio, orbiting stars similar to the sun, are surprisingly dry.

Astronomers previously believed that the three exoplanets, dubbed HD 189733b, HD 209458b and WASP-12b, were ideal candidates for harboring water vapor in their atmospheres.  However, the planets, which have temperatures ranging between 1,500 degrees to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, were found to have very little water, compared to the amount predicted by standard planet-formation theories.

“Our water measurement in one of the planets, HD 209458b, is the highest-precision measurement of any chemical compound in a planet outside our solar system, and we can now say with much greater certainty than ever before that we've found water in an exoplanet,” Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, England and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.  “However, the low water abundance we have found so far is quite astonishing.”

The three exoplanets, also known as “hot Jupiters” are located between 60 and 900 light-years away from Earth.  Astronomers believe that the new results, published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could have major implications in the search for water on potentially inhabitable Earth-sized exoplanets.

“We have to revisit planet formation and migration models of giant planets, especially ‘hot Jupiters,’ and investigate how they're formed,” Madhusudhan said.  “We should be prepared for much lower water abundances than predicted when looking at super-Earths.”

In order to determine the amount of water vapor in each of the planet's atmospheres, the astronomers used Hubble to observe the planets’ near-infrared spectrum, NASA said, adding that detecting water on transiting planets is almost impossible from the ground because of the amount of water in Earth's atmosphere, which contaminates the observation.

“There are so many things we still don't know about exoplanets, so this opens up a new chapter in understanding how planets and solar systems form,” Drake Deming of the University of Maryland, said in the statement.  “The problem is that we are assuming the water to be as abundant as in our own solar system.  What our study has shown is that water features could be a lot weaker than our expectations.”

CALIFORNIA - State Shuts Down Oil/Gas Injection Sites

"California Halts Injection of Fracking Waste, Warning it May Be Contaminating Aquifers" by Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica 7/18/2014

State’s drought has forced farmers to rely on groundwater, even as California aquifers have been intentionally polluted due to exemptions for oil industry.

California officials have ordered an emergency shut-down of 11 oil and gas waste injection sites and a review more than 100 others in the state's drought-wracked Central Valley out of fear that companies may have been pumping fracking fluids and other toxic waste into drinking water aquifers there.

The state's Division of Oil and Gas and Geothermal Resources on July 7 issued cease and desist orders to seven energy companies warning that they may be injecting their waste into aquifers that could be a source of drinking water, and stating that their waste disposal "poses danger to life, health, property, and natural resources."  The orders were first reported by the Bakersfield Californian, and the state has confirmed with ProPublica that its investigation is expanding to look at additional wells.

The action comes as California's agriculture industry copes with a drought crisis that has emptied reservoirs and cost the state $2.2 billion this year alone.  The lack of water has forced farmers across the state to supplement their water supply from underground aquifers, according to a study released this week by the University of California Davis.

The problem is that at least 100 of the state's aquifers were presumed to be useless for drinking and farming because the water was either of poor quality, or too deep underground to easily access.  Years ago, the state exempted them from environmental protection and allowed the oil and gas industry to intentionally pollute them.  But not all aquifers are exempted, and the system amounts to a patchwork of protected and unprotected water resources deep underground.  Now, according to the cease and desist orders issued by the state, it appears that at least seven injection wells are likely pumping waste into fresh water aquifers protected by the law, and not other aquifers sacrificed by the state long ago.

"The aquifers in question with respect to the orders that have been issued are not exempt," said Ed Wilson, a spokesperson for the California Department of Conservation in an email.

A 2012 ProPublica investigation of more than 700,000 injection wells across the country found that wells were often poorly regulated and experienced high rates of failure, outcomes that were likely polluting underground water supplies that are supposed to be protected by federal law.  That investigation also disclosed a little-known program overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that exempted more than 1,000 other drinking water aquifers from any sort of pollution protection at all, many of them in California.

Those are the aquifers at issue today.  The exempted aquifers, according to documents the state filed with the U.S. EPA in 1981 and obtained by ProPublica, were poorly defined and ambiguously outlined.  They were often identified by hand-drawn lines on a map, making it difficult to know today exactly which bodies of water were supposed to be protected, and by which aspects of the governing laws.  Those exemptions and documents were signed by California Gov. Jerry Brown, who also was governor in 1981.

State officials emphasized to ProPublica that they will now order water testing and monitoring at the injection well sites in question.  To date, they said, they have not yet found any of the more regulated aquifers to have been contaminated.

"We do not have any direct evidence any drinking water has been affected," wrote Steve Bohlen, the state oil and gas supervisor, in a statement to ProPublica.

Bohlen said his office was acting "out of an abundance of caution," and a spokesperson said that the state became aware of the problems through a review of facilities it was conducting according to California's fracking law passed late last year, which required the state to study fracking impacts and adopt regulations to address its risks, presumably including underground disposal.

California officials have long been under fire for their injection well practices, a waste disposal program that the state runs according to federal law and under a sort of license — called "primacy" — given to it by the EPA.

For one, experts say that aquifers the states and the EPA once thought would never be needed may soon become important sources of water as the climate changes and technology reduces the cost of pumping it from deep underground and treating it for consumption.  Indeed, towns in Wyoming and Texas — two states also suffering long-term droughts — are pumping, treating, then delivering drinking water to taps from aquifers which would be considered unusable under California state regulations governing the oil and gas industry.

In June 2011, the EPA conducted a review of other aspects of California's injection well program and found enforcement, testing and oversight problems so significant that the agency demanded California improve its regulations and warned that the state's authority could be revoked.

Among the issues, California and the federal government disagree about what type of water is worth protecting in the first place, with California law only protecting a fraction of the waters that the federal Safe Drinking Water Act requires.

The EPA's report, commissioned from outside consultants, also said that California regulators routinely failed to adequately examine the geology around an injection well to ensure that fluids pumped into it would not leak underground and contaminate drinking water aquifers.  The report found that state inspectors often allowed injection at pressures that exceeded the capabilities of the wells and thus risked cracking the surrounding rock and spreading contaminants.  Several accidents in recent years in California involved injected waste or injected steam leaking back out of abandoned wells, or blowing out of the ground and creating sinkholes, including one 2011 incident that killed an oil worker.

The exemptions and other failings, said Damon Nagami, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in an email, are "especially disturbing" in a state that has been keenly aware of severe water constraints for more than a century and is now suffering from a crippling drought.  "Our drinking water sources must be protected and preserved for the precious resources they are, not sacrificed as a garbage dump for the oil and gas industry."

Still, three years after the EPA's report, California has not yet completed its review of its underground injection program, according to state officials.  The scrutiny of the wells surrounding Bakersfield may be the start.

CALIFORNIA - Mandatory Restrictions on Water Use

"California’s ‘water cop’ urges residents to take drought seriously with mandatory restrictions" PBS NewsHour 7/16/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  California officials are putting mandatory restrictions on water use in place as a result of that state’s ongoing drought.  Several Western states, including Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico, have large regions suffering a severe to extreme drought.

But California’s problem has lasted longer than most, and now the state says it’s time to ramp up conservation.

Dried-up lakebeds and water shortages have become depressingly familiar sights across California, and state water regulators moved Tuesday to impose new conservation rules.

State Water Board chair Felicia Marcus:

FELICIA MARCUS, Chairwoman, State Water Resources Control Board:  We're focusing on outdoor irrigation because that’s a place where people tend to, even without realizing it, they over water.  It really behooves all of us to figure out how to use the water that we do have as wisely as we can.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  Starting August 1, the new rules could mean daily fines of up to $500 for people who waste water on lawns and car washing.  California is now in the third year of its worst drought since the 1970s.

SATURN - The Moon Enceladus Has Water

"New report shows water on Saturn’s moon" PBS NewsHour 4/6/2014

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HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  A report published this week in Science magazine offered new remarkable details about the presence of water on one of Saturn’s moons.  It once again stirred talk about the possibility of life elsewhere in our solar system.  For more, we are joined from Los Angeles by David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology.  He co-authored the article.

So tell us about this moon, Enceladus.  You knew about it, quite a bit about it before.  Tell us what you found and how did you find it?

DAVID STEVENSON, California Institute of Technology:  So we knew already that Enceladus has geysers.  Water coming out of cracks near the south pole.  But we didn’t know what was beneath the surface.  What we’ve now done by tracking the Cassini spacecraft, which is in orbit around Saturn, is figure out that there must be excess mass underneath the ice at the south pole.  And water will do that because water is more dense than ice.  This is an ocean that is about the size of Lake Superior, perhaps even larger and it is about 10 kilometers thick.  So it’s a lot of water.

COAL - Ash Spill Raises Questions

Again, this begs the question of WHY states allow such facilities near rivers and lakes?

"North Carolina coal ash spill raises questions about enforcement of environmental regulations" PBS Newshour 2/17/2014

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  A major spill of toxic coal ash is raising questions again about the safety of water and the government regulators overseeing industry.  This time, the accident was reported in North Carolina on February 2, specifically in the Dan River in the city of Eden.

The Duke Energy company said more than 50,000 tons of coal ash had leaked from a containment pond into the river, as seen in these photos taken by the Waterkeeper Alliance.  Parts of the river look like a gray sludge.  The ash, which contains arsenic and other dangerous metals, is produced from burning coal.

Today, at a state hearing, Duke Energy officials apologized for the spill and said they would clean it up.  But big questions remain, including about coal ash containment ponds elsewhere.

Reporter Michael Biesecker has been covering this for the Associated Press.  And he joins us now from Raleigh.

CALIFORNIA - The San Joaquin River

"Money Flow Is Concern for California's San Joaquin River Restoration" PBS Newshour 7/12/2013

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SPENCER MICHELS(Newshour):  This is the once-mighty San Joaquin River, and much of it has been like this, dry as toast, since the 1940s.

That's when the federal government constructed Friant Dam near Fresno, California, which impounded the San Joaquin's water in a large reservoir, so it could diverted through a vast network of canals to farms and ranches in the San Joaquin Valley, leaving some sections of the river wet, some dry.

Today, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.  But the fish are gone, and the river is a ghost of its former self.

Now there is a controversial move afoot to cover this sand with water to restore this river.  Before the dam, the water began high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and flowed west, through the Central Valley, and eventually out through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean.

The survival of salmon that used to come up the river from the Pacific Ocean is a crucial reason for restoring the river.

Gerald Hatler works for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

WATER - Qatar's Solution to Aquifer Drying Up

"Could Agriculture Bloom in the Desert?  Qatar Works to Invent an Innovative Oasis" PBS Newshour 6/11/2013

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GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Next, we continue our weeklong look at food security and how climate change is affecting what we produce and how we eat.

Tonight, special correspondent Jon Miller reports from the tiny Middle Eastern nation of Qatar on inventive ways to get the most out of water in the desert.

It's part of our series “Food for 9 Billion,” in partnership with Public Radio International's "The World," Homeland Productions, American Public Media's “Marketplace,” and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

JON MILLER:  Every day, hundreds of tanker trucks line up at the Mazrouah pumping station outside Doha, in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar.  They start rolling in at 6:30 in the morning and keep filling up until 10:00 at night.

Their cargo is not oil or gas, the resources that have given Qatar the highest per capita income in the world, but water from an underground aquifer that's quickly drying up.

JONATHAN E. SMITH, Qatar National Food Security Program:  We have got about two years left of an adequate supply, a usable supply of high-quality freshwater in this particular aquifer.

HEALTH - Protecting American Drinking Water (Part-2)

"Decision Delayed on Dangerous Chemical Found in Drinking Water" PBS Newshour 3/15/2013

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JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour):  And now to part two of our investigative look at the safety of America's drinking water.

Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on the toxic chemical made famous in the movie "Erin Brockovich," its potentially harmful effect on human cells, and the agency charged with regulating it.

His report is the result of a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

AMIE HOLMES, University of Southern Maine:  There is some lead chromate in here and some zinc chromate.

MILES O’BRIEN:  At the Wise Laboratory at the University of Southern Maine, they are very wise indeed about a widely used heavy metal that gives millions of Americans shiny bumpers, vivid paint, and, possibly, cancer.  It is hexavalent chromium, or chromium 6.

HEALTH - State of Washington's Puget Sound Toxicity

"Scientists Search for Solution to 'Toxic Cocktail' in Washington's Puget Sound" PBS Newshour 3/14/2013

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SUMMARY:  In Washington state's Puget Sound, scientists have made discovery of a "toxic cocktail," made up of excess rainfall that flows into the nearest body of water, carrying pollutants along with it.  Kate Campbell from KCTS-9 in Seattle reports on efforts to prevent that runoff from making it into the sound.

Watch Seattleites Make Rain Gardens to Curb Stormwater Pollution on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

HEALTH - Protecting American Drinking Water (Part-1)

"Protecting Americans From Danger in the Drinking Water" PBS Newshour 3/13/2013

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GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien begins a two-part look at America's drinking water, and the regulatory system that is supposed to guarantee its safety.

His report is the result of a partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.  It begins in the small desert town that made Erin Brockovich a household name.

ROBERTA WALKER, Resident of Hinkley, Calif.:  Come on, you want some water?  Want to get some water?  Come on.

MILES O’BRIEN (Newshour):  Clean water is something most of us take for granted, but not Roberta Walker.  She, her dogs, and her family drink spring water that is either bottled or trucked in, because where she lives, people can't drink the well water.

Welcome to Hinkley, Calif.

CALIFORNIA - Water Wars

"California Water Wars: Will Thirsty Interests Divert More Water?" PBS Newshour 8/2/2012

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JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Now: California's water wars are back, as the state struggles to transfer a vital resource from where it falls to where it's needed.

NewsHour correspondent Spencer Michels reports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the area south of Sacramento where most of the state's water converges and an area that's crucial to new plans.

SPENCER MICHELS: At the center of a century-long debate over California water is the delta, a jumble of rivers, sloughs, canals and islands surrounded by levees.

It's the spot where the water and snow that falls on the Sierra Nevada Mountains ends up, on its way to San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It's a beautiful area for fishing, boating and farming. The land is fertile. The water is plentiful. Farmers can pump right out of the Sacramento River for free, and the crops are robust.

Much of this water is pumped across the delta and sent to where the people are, in the arid and populous southern part of the state and to some parts of the San Francisco Bay area. But residents of this half-a-million-acre watery landscape in northern California are concerned that the state and federal governments, along with powerful, thirsty interests further south, some of them corporate farming operations, will divert more of their water and ruin their land and their livelihoods.

AFRICA - Man-Made Water Shortages

"What's Causing Water Shortages in Ghana, Nigeria?" PBS Newshour 3/15/2012

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STEVE SAPIENZA, special correspondent: Every day, millions of people across a wide swathe of West Africa struggle to get access to clean and safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 1,000 people in the region die each day from illnesses related to unsafe water.

The shortage is also hampering development here. In two of the biggest and richest nations of the region, Nigeria and Ghana, pollution, political unrest, and corruption have contributed to water shortages for decades.

What's different today is that a new generation of West African journalists is trying to hold government officials accountable for the failures. We followed two of them, Nigeria's Ameto Akpe and Ghana's Samuel Agyemang, as they did their jobs.

As a reporter for Nigeria's BusinessDay newspaper, Ameto's stories target the contradiction of a country with immense oil wealth and great water resources that are not reaching their citizens.

AMERICA - South West Looks at New Water Source

(click for better view)
"Why Californians Will Soon Be Drinking Water from Mexico's Ocean" by Ben Jervey, Good 4/26/2011

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Yesterday, the Department of the Interior released a pretty scary report about the impacts of climate change on water in the Southwest. The report (PDF) ("Reclamation, Managing Water in the West"), which "represents the first consistent and coordinated assessment of risks to future water supplies across eight major Reclamation river basins," paints a frightening picture of an already arid region that undergoing a long, painful desertification.

In the past, we've looked at the desalination of seawater as an option for providing drinking water in regions that lack freshwater, like Australia and the American Southwest. While I wish there were ways to keep demand for freshwater within the means supplied by natural systems, I'm of the opinion that desal isn't just going to be an option, but a necessity for some areas by mid-century.

So it was fascinating to read Rob Davis's voiceofsandiego.org feature on how lax regulation in Mexico could make it easier and cheaper to build desalination plants off the Baja coast, and how those could soon be supplying water to Southern Californians.

Desalination offers the promise of being a drought-proof local supply in an arid region that imports most of its water from hundreds of miles away. But it is highly regulated in California because of its environmental impacts, such as massive pumps that suck in and kill fish larvae and other marine life...

"They don't ask as many questions" in Mexico, said Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, the state agency that regulates coastal development. "They don't protect the environment like we do in California."

Right now, authorities are talking about building one desal plant in Mexico. There's another planned in the San Diego area, that's a similar size. But those aren't going to get us very far. On his blog, John Fleck digs into these numbers a bit:

But what struck me about this project, as Rob describes it, is how small it really is. 50 million gallons per day is about 56,000 acre feet per year. The average Lake Mead shortfall during the ’00s was 1.2 million acre feet per year. That’s the supply-demand imbalance we’re talking about. That would mean 20-plus desal plants just to close the current gap.

Conservation measures are, of course, essential, but I simply don't see any way that Southern California will be able to sate its thirst for drinking water without these massive, energy-sucking plants. We'd better figure out how to build and operate them without totally ruining the coastal ecosystems, and without using so much carbon-spewing energy that will just worsen the freshwater shortages in region.

"Mexico's Ocean Could Become U.S.'s Drinking Water" by Rob Davis, Voice of San Diego 4/24/2011

Excerpt

Just before the toll road stretching south from Tijuana enters Rosarito Beach, it veers inland, away from beautiful blue-water views, swinging wide around an industrial power plant complex, all filled with metal smokestacks and white fuel tanks, a major source of Baja California's electricity.

There, water suppliers from across the Southwest are studying what would be the first project of its kind: tapping Mexico's ocean as a source of the United States' drinking water.

This idea has been a long time coming. I can see that Environmentalist will have concerns, like what effect the "debrine" being returned to the ocean will have, but that does NOT mean this is not a good idea. It just needs to be well designed.