Documents on Water

by Paul Simon, US Senator from Illinois
Parade Magazine ... August 23, 1998

BY THE GIFT OF WATER You nourish and sustain us and a living things." These are the words used in the baptismal rite in Lutheran services. But in our world, increasing numbers of people cannot assume they will be nourished and sustained. Within a few years, a water crisis of catastrophic proportions will explodeon us-unless aroused citizens in this and other nations demand of their leadership actions reflecting vision, understanding and courage.

It is no exaggeration to say that the conflict between humanity's growing thirst and the projected supply of usable, potable water could result in the most devastating natural disaster since history has been recorded accurately, unless something happens to stop it.

The world's population of 5.9 billion will double in the next 50 to 90 years, depending on whose estimates you accept. Our renewable water supply, however, is constant. Compounding those grim realitiesis the fact that per capita water consumption is rising twice as fast as the world's population. It doesn't take an Einstein to understand that we're headed toward a potential calamity.

Wally N'Dow of Gambia, whom the Los Angeles Times describes as "the world's foremost specialist on cities," says bluntly: "In the past 50 years, nations have gone to war over oil. In the the next 50, we are going to go to war over water. The crisis point is going to be 15-20 years from now."

Nations fight over oil, but valuable as it is, there are substitutes for oil. There is no substitute for water. We die quickly without water, and no nation's leaders would hesitate to battle for adequate water supplies. A decade ago, U.S. intelligence services identified 10 potential flash points where war could break out over water. I no longer have access to that type of information since leaving the Senate, but I know the number is higher today and will be much higher a decade from now. At least 400 million people live in regions with severe water shortages. By the year 2050, it will be 4 billion.

There are more than 200 river basins in the world that are shared by at least two countries. More than a dozen nations get most of their water from rivers that cross the borders of neighboring countries which can be viewed as hostile. Even when nations are on the best of terms, like Canada and the U.S., there are serious disagreements over water-sharing issues. While we and our northern neighbor manage our problems without resorting to arms, who can say what will happen in the Middle East, where there are no water surpluses and where the relationships between countries are stormy.

Although water sufficiency problems are not nearly as severe in the United States as in most nations, three of the fastest-growing states-California, Texas and Florida-feel the squeeze on water supplies and soon will face major difficulties. As of 1996, five of the 10 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are in those states.It is significant that all three states, like many parts of the globe with serious shortages, have at their doorsteps huge amounts of water that still are too expensive to modify for major consumption purposes: seawater.

California. Like most of the world, California has water inabundance where people are not in abundance. Three fourths of its snow and rain fall in the northern part of the state, where one third of the people live. All CA water plans show a huge gap between need and supply. California's population will grow from 31 million today to between 48 & 60 million in less than 40 years.

Symbolic of California's problems is the story of Owens Lake. Early in this century, Los Angeles area water authorities understood that they'd face problems as the population grew, so they purchased the third-largest body of water in the state, Owens Lake. Today it is called Owens Dry Lake, because L.A. has sucked it dry. Butthe story does not end there. When the wind blows on a dry day, particulate matter from the "lake" is sent into the air to the point that, in some places, it is 20 times as high as the maximum safety standards for air pollution. The EnvironmentalProtection Agency rates this area the most polluted in the nation for dust particles. People in the area want Los Angeles to fill the lake again, but city officials say that would require 10 percent of their water, something they cannot afford.

Just last month, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power finally agreed to begin a project to ensure that the air around the lake meets federal health standards by 2006. The lake will not be refilled, but 10 square miles may be covered with a few inches of water to hold down the dust, according to a Los AngelesTimes report.

Florida. In some ways, Florida's problems are similar to California's: shortages, despite water at its doorstep (a desalination process is in use, but it's in its infancy); mushrooming population, with a larger rate of growth than California's but a much smaller body of land; and problems with drainage and irrigation. Florida developed a plan in 1995 for the state's five water-management districts.The foreword to the plan summarizes the situation: "In many areas of the state, the prospects for new ... inexpensive, clean sources of water no longer exist." The report notes that there are "both quality and quantity problems." It adds,"Ninety percent of the state's population depends on groundwater, and the ground water is highly susceptible to contamination from ... municipal landfills, hazardous waste dumps, septic tanks and agricultural pesticides."

Texas. Part of the problem in Texas, as in many other places ,is the huge disparity in rainfall statewide. El Paso normally gets about 8 inches of rain a year, while the portion of the state along the Louisiana border receives 56 inches.
Aquifers (underground water sources) are being depleted. From 1930 to 1980, water use increased twice as fast as the population. As has become painfully apparent this year, Texas has a greater likelihood of suffering severe drought than most other states.As of July, rainfall was at least 10 inches below normal for the year in east Texas and 4 inches to 10 inches below normal in most of the rest of the state. On July 23, President Clinton declared Texas a federal disaster area.

What can be done to solve the water problem? Obviously, it's a complex and difficult issue. Once we muster the political will to focus on it, these broad areas should be addressed:

1) CONSERVATION. Conserving what we have is an immediate step we can take.

2) DESALINATION. Efforts to convert seawater to usable water must begin.

3) POLLUTION AND OVERPOPULATION. Both are big contributors to water shortages.

Water Is Life - More than 70% of the human body consists of water. It takes less than a 1% deficiency in our body's water to make us thirsty. A 5% deficit causes a slight fever. An 8% shortage causes the glands to stop producing saliva and the skinto turn blue. A person cannot walk with a 10% deficiency, anda 12% deficiency brings death. United Nations authorities note that 9500 children die every day from lack of water or, more frequently, from diseases caused by polluted water.

Source of this webpage: http://www.mtsd.org/district/technology/Technology_Integration/waterwar.html

Dumping Takes Lake Erie to the Brink

By NATALIE BAUGHMAN, MEGHAN GORDON

Stanley Prazer, now in his eighth decade of life, clearly recalls his first day as a Presque Isle State Parklifeguard in 1945. His job was to watch each child and parent who splashed around in the clear, shallow waters off Stone Jetty Beach.

Two decades later, Prazer's job still centered around Lake Erie as chief of the city's Bureau of Water, the predecessor to the Erie City Water Authority. By then it was a lake filled with so much untreated sewage that swimmers could spot floating feces. The sewage fed algae growth, which choked off the oxygen supply to the mayfly larvae living in the sediment.

The mayfly, a harbinger of the lake's health, disappeared with little notice. And when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, the national media proclaimed Lake Erie near death.

In the 30 years since Lake Erie's demise was declared, Prazerhas seen many changes. He even took part in some that helped stop the lake, the fourth largest of the five Great Lakes, from transforming into a giant marsh. As a water commissioner, he helped build a wastewater treatment plant to slow the dumping of raw sewage into Presque Isle Bay. He worked with the U.S. Department of Public Health to monitor the lake's water quality.

He witnessed crackdowns on industrial polluters. He saw legislation passed to make dumping in the lake illegal and to create a uniform water quality standard. He was present when the state and federal governments gave money to communities to upgrade their sewage systems, and fine them if they didn't.

And not that long ago, Prazer, now retired, saw the mayflies return.

In the beginning In the late 1800s, fish hatcheries dotted Lake Erie's shoreline.More than 100 fishing tugboats chugged out into Erie's harbor every day, on their way to pulling in fish by the thousands. Coolers of ice lined the quarterdecks waiting for a day's catch to be cleaned and prepared.

"The workers lowered gigantic white nets into the water,"Prazer said. "Many times, the fish were so abundant that they would break through them. At the time, Lake Erie was probably the largest fish producer in the world. The water was almost pristine. It was so clear, so beautiful."

Right after the turn of the 20th century, however, industry located along the lakefront and replaced the once prosperous hatcheries. The companies needed water for their operations -- for everything from cooling to waste disposal. Over time, the crystal clear water became murky and polluted, Prazer said.

"It became an industrial free-for-all," he said."There was no treatment, no regulation. Just when we needed the hatcheries to replenish several species of fish, they were shutting them down."

Even the ordinary housewife contributed to pollution, Prazersaid, by using laundry detergents that contained phosphates. Every pound of phosphorus produced about 800 pounds of algae, which coagulated in the water and eventually washed up on shore.

"The algae was coming in so thick that it plugged all the water filters within a half-hour," said Prazer,who worked at the city's Bureau of Water for more than 40 years and was its chief for 20 years. "We continuously did surface sweeps to keep the algae in suspension."

Untreated sewage was the main contributor to increased algae production, said Stan Zagorski, anaquatic ecologist and retired biology professor at Gannon University.

Soon, algae overproduction led to the rapid aging of the lake.

"The algae was so prolific that it couldn't be brought into the food web," Zagorski said. "It used up all the oxygen, and the fish living at the bottom of the lake died."

Sometimes bottom-feeding fish move to higher levels of the lake, Zagorski said. But as the algae built up, the oxygen there depleted as well, once again causing fish to die.

"It's a vicious cycle that keeps repeating until there's nothing left of the lake," he said. "The bottom builds up so much that it turns into a pond or marsh."

Between 1920 and 1970, the lake aged about 15,000 years biologically-- 300 times more rapidly than natural.

If environmentalists didn't step in, Lake Erie would become a marsh.

"Smelled like Vicks Vapo Rub" The algae wreaked havoc on the Erie Bureau of Water. Prazer saidthe bureau employees worked day and night, spinning the algae around to keep it from catching on the equipment. Between the algae,s ewage and industrial releases, the water quality was poor, Prazersaid.

"It smelled like Vicks Vapo Rub," he said. "You definitely couldn't drink it."

Between 1865 and 1910, however, Erie residents drew their water directly from the lake. The water wasn't filtered but instead treated with a small amount of hypochloride.

"Sometimes you would find a minnow swimming around in your glass of water," Prazer said. "It really wasn't a very sanitary system."

Things worsened for the lake as the population grew, said Bob Wellington, an aquatic biologist at the Erie County Health Department. The increasing population created more domestic sewage, which ran into a sewage tank but later was dumped into the lake untreated.

"People thought it was better in the lake than in their backyards with the rats, the flies and the stink,"Wellington said.

But the deposit of wastewater into the lake caused more problems than anticipated by the people ofthe day.

Rot in the central basin lowered the levels of oxygen significantly. The mayflies died off. Algaecoagulated on top of the water.

"The water smelled, the beaches were closed, there was raw sewage -- everything was just a mess. It was very discouraging," Wellington said.

It was also hazardous. The lake was spreading typhoid fever,Prazer said.

"That was the result of having waste released into the same harbor from which drinking water was drawn," he said. "The other result was that City Council blamed the Water Bureau and demanded that we pay the medical bills for the sick people."

Cleaning up By 1912, the city decided it needed a wastewater treatment facility and that sewage could no longer be discharged directly into the bay, Prazer said. Water commissioners constructed a facility at the foot of Wayne Street, which gathered all the sludge from the material passing through it. Farmers removed some for use as fertilizer for their crops. The rest was trucked to a landfill.

The commission extended the water intake pipes so they no longer brought in water from the same location where waste was released, Prazer said. The pipes, which began at the foot of Chestnut Streetand ran straight into the bay, were lengthened to pass through Waterworks Park on Presque Isle. They terminated inside a crib 30 feet below the lake surface. The crib prevented roughage from entering the treatment tanks.

"Things were good because we finally had nice, clean water coming in," Prazer said. "But we still were discharging waste into the harbor, and some people got sick."

By 1925, the amount of waste passing through the Chestnut Street facility was more than it could handle. Water commissioners added a couple of new filters, but even they couldn't handle the waste for too long.

About seven years later, the commissioners built the plant at the foot of Sommerheim Drive. The plant,which cost $1.5 million, contained eight filter units and could handle a greater volume of water. By the 1950s, however, the new plant could no longer handle the amount of waste that Erie produced. The Water Authority added six more filters.

In the early 1970s they added a large basin and a wastewater treatment facility, which would pump water back into Lake Erie. The renovated facility, which also contained underground pumps and a chemical building, could then handle 56 million gallons per day of water that would be treated and pumped back out into the lake.

Zagorski said the continued inaction of legislators and growing industry combined to trigger a downward spiral in the health of the lake.

In the less than two centuries since immigrants made the shores of Lake Erie their home, they had brought it to a critical point.

But before legislators, activists and regular citizens began giving back to the lake that they had taken so much from, their neglect festered for a decade longer.

Source of this webpage: http://www.mtsd.org/district/technology/Technology_Integration/dumplakerie.html