Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Bluegills guarding water supplies Wired: "A type of fish so common that practically every American kid who ever dropped a fishing line and a bobber into a pond has probably caught one is being enlisted in the fight against terrorism. San Francisco, New York, Washington and other big cities are using bluegills -- also known as sunfish or bream -- as a sort of canary in a coal mine to safeguard their drinking water... "Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But electronic protection systems can trace only the toxins they are programmed to detect, Lawler said. Bluegills -- a hardy species about the size of a human hand -- are considered more versatile. They are highly attuned to chemical disturbances in their environment, and when exposed to toxins, they experience the fish version of coughing, flexing their gills to expel unwanted particles. The computerized system in use in San Francisco and elsewhere is designed to detect even slight changes in the bluegills' vital signs and send an e-mail alert when something is wrong. San Francisco's bluegills went to work about a month ago, guarding the drinking water of more than 1 million people from substances such as cyanide, diesel fuel, mercury and pesticides. Eight bluegills swim in a tank deep in the basement of a water treatment plant south of the city... "New York City has been testing its system since 2002 and is seeking to expand it. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection reported at least one instance in which the system caught a toxin before it made it into the water supply: The fish noticed a diesel spill two hours earlier than any of the agency's other detection devices. They do have limitations. While the bluegills have successfully detected at least 30 toxic chemicals, they cannot reliably detect germs. And they are no use against other sorts of attacks -- say, the bombing of a water main, or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water. Still, Lawler said more than a dozen other cities have ordered the anti-terror apparatus, called the Intelligent Aquatic BioMonitoring System, which was originally developed for the Army and starts at around $45,000." Category: 2008 Presidential Election 6:50:14 PM     Managing Drought and Water Scarcity in Vulnerable Environments YubaNet.com: "Odd as it sounds, in some places the smartest way to safeguard the water supply is to let it drain out of the reservoirs and soak into the ground. That's what been discovered in local water shortages in Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico - all of which could be microcosms of water shortage issues looming throughout the Western U.S. "In these three cases - Cedar Bluff Reservoir (Hays, KS), Optima Lake, (Guymon, OK), and Storrie Lake (Las Vegas, NM) - water losses from evaporation are so high that they can accelerate water supply emergencies for farms and cities, explains Tom Brikowski, a professor of hydrology at the University of Texas at Dallas. Brikowski and Wayland Anderson, a Denver engineer, are presenting their work at the Geological Society of America conference on Managing Drought and Water Scarcity in Vulnerable Environments: Creating a Roadmap for Change. The meeting takes place 18-20 September at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center in Longmont, Colorado. "In the case of the City of Hays, the trouble starts 20 miles upstream at the Cedar Bluff Reservoir. Because of changes in farming practices, the reservoir gets only half the inflowing water it did when built in 1949. It now loses 75 percent of its inflowing water to evaporation. As a result, water losses most years now equal or exceed inflows. Reservoir releases were cut in 1979... "But how do you do that? In the case of Hays, nature had already provided for underground storage in the form of the Smoky Hill River aquifer. The aquifer has provided half the city's water supply for decades. Since the building of the Cedar Bluff reservoir, however, stream flow on top of it has dropped by 50 percent. That stream water recharged the wells, which, in turn, kept alive the town of Hays, Brikowski explains. "At the behest of the City of Hays, Brikowski and Anderson created a detailed three-dimensional model of the sandy, gravelly ('alluvial') ground beneath the Smokey Hill River. Anderson analyzed the water balance of the reservoir. Next they simulated what had happened to the dropping water table, how much groundwater the aquifer could store, and how long a drought it could endure." Category: Colorado Water 6:22:02 AM     Vision statement? Managing water transfers out of the Arkansas River basin is the subject of this article from the Pueblo Chieftain. They write, "What began as a contentious discussion about farmers' right to sell water, cities' growth, rural economy and water quality ended in a consensus on the need for a vision about what the Arkansas Valley should look like in the future. An Arkansas Basin Roundtable committee met Monday to begin drafting a roundtable statement about guidelines for interbasin water transfers. Las Animas Mayor Lawrence Sena chairs the committee, which was appointed in response to his suggestion at a June roundtable meeting that the roundtable support requirements for cities to have adequate water supplies before growth is allowed. "Sena developed a detailed set of proposed guidelines as well as a longer list of related issues to be forwarded to the state Interbasin Compact Committee. In response, Colorado Springs and Aurora presented a counterproposal set of guidelines at Monday's meeting. After approximately two hours of wrangling over specific points in both sets, the committee took a collective step back and agreed to try something much simpler: Develop a vision statement." Vision statement? You can't make this stuff up. Category: Colorado Water 6:03:13 AM

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