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Trump Signs The Water Infrastructure Act

/in , /by /Pacific Standard (Santa Barbara)by Emily Moon

President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan water infrastructure bill into law on Tuesday, authorizing billions of dollars for state-level projects aimed at improving the nation’s rivers, harbors, and drinking water. The law will also defund programs Congress deems “inefficient,” the Hill reports. Provisions that made the cut include funding for studies on wetland restoration and risk management in flood-prone areas, such as Tangier Island, Virginia; extending a program to improve contaminated drinking water in Flint, Michigan; prioritizing lead testing in low-income schools; and requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to appoint at least one employee to serve as a “liaison to minority, tribal, and low-income communities.”

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OPINION: Here’s What Trump Gets Wrong About California’s Water Supply

/in , /by /Pacific Standard (Santa Barbara)by Kate Wheeling

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump fanned the flames of a long-standing debate in California between the state’s environmentalists and farmers. At the White House State Leadership Conference, Trump called California’s dry and fallow fields “one of the most ridiculous things” he saw on the campaign trail in 2016, when the state was still in the midst of a record-setting drought. At a campaign rally in Fresno that year, Trump claimed the government was “taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” and promised to deliver more water to Central Valley farmers.

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Sick Of Paying $5 For Bottled Water? Tap App Will Find You A Drinking Fountain Instead

/in , /by /Forbesby Andria Cheng

The epiphany moment for Samuel Ian Rosen came when he found himself at an airport shelling out $5 for a bottle of Evian water. “Nobody up till now has built a Google Map for (drinking) water,” Rosen, a serial entrepreneur, said in an interview. “Finding water is inconvenient. When I go to Google Map and type ‘water fountain,’ there is nothing. We solve it by building Google Map for water….We are a search engine. We tell you where the water is.”

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Austin Boil-Water Mandate Could Last Less Than A Week As City Faces Possible Shortage

/in , /by /National Public Radioby Vanessa Romo

Travis County emergency management officials told Austin residents on Tuesday they’ll need to boil their tap water for the next several days, and urged residents to cut water consumption as the city faces a potential shortage. In a meeting with county commissioners, Chief Emergency Management Coordinator Eric Carter said Austin Water could take 10 to 14 days to stabilize all three treatment plants and restore production to last week’s preflood levels.

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Water Bond Would Spread Money Across The State — But Pour It On The Central Valley

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Bettina Boxall

Excessive groundwater pumping by San Joaquin Valley farmers has caused a stretch of the Friant-Kern Canal to sink so much that it has interfered with irrigation deliveries to more than 300,000 acres of cropland. A fix could come from Proposition 3, the water bond on the November ballot, which earmarks $750 million in state taxpayer funds to repair the aqueduct and other infrastructure damaged by land subsidence.

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New App Aims To Help You Stop Buying Bottled Water

/in , /by /Fox5 San Diegoby CNN Wire

A new startup called Tap has a bold ambition: convince people to stop buying plastic bottles of water. Tap launched an app Tuesday that displays nearby clean drinking water locations, from restaurants and retail stores to public water fountains, so you can refill your water bottle. It’s like Google Maps for clean drinking water.

 

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States Along Colorado River Work To Finish Water Agreements As Lakes Mead And Powell Reach Critical Levels

/in , /by /The Weather Channel by Ron Brackett

Even as seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River for water hammer out final agreements to protect reservoirs on the river, the two lakes are less than half full. Jennifer Pitt, who works on Colorado River policy for the National Audubon Society, told the Grand Canyon News that without changes to how Lake Mead and Lake Powell are managed,levels could fall below the point where no more water can be released. “If that happened, that would be a catastrophe for this region’s economy,” Pitt said, “For all of the people who depend on the Colorado River and for all of the wildlife that depends on it as well.”

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San Joaquin Valley Farmers Hoping Trump’s Water Policy Would End ‘Water Grab’

/in , /by /ABC10 (Sacramento)by Lena Howland

For Don Barton, a fourth-generation walnut farmer and the president of the Gold River Orchards, water is everything. That’s why a President Trump-signed memo last week promoting water delivery has Barton and other farmers across San Joaquin County hoping it may stop the so-called “water grab.” “We view this as clearly a positive, the President has intervened directly on an issue that has really been a big road block for California farmers for a number of years now,” he said.

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How Do We Cope With Demands For Water As We Enter An Era Of Scarcity?

/in , /by /Phys.org (UK)by ​Edmund L. Andrews

Urban water systems in California and elsewhere face a time of reckoning, warns Richard Luthy, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Groundwater aquifers are being depleted and rivers are drying up, even as demand for water keeps climbing. Yet cities can no longer meet society’s thirst by importing more water from far away. Luthy, however, is optimistic. As director of the National Science Foundation’s ReNUWIt effort—short for Re-Inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure—he helps to develop alternative sources through wastewater recycling, stormwater capture and desalination.

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Colorado River Crisis Demands Focus on Farm Conservation Programs

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Hannah Holm

If it hadn’t been for the salt in the soils beneath his farm near Hotchkiss, Colorado, Tom Kay likely would not have been able to fully irrigate his corn field this past summer. Because he has salty soils, Kay was able to get government assistance to replace an old flood irrigation system with a center-pivot sprinkler system several years ago. Sprinklers place water more precisely where the crop needs it, so less water soaks below the root zone or runs off the fields. That means less salt from the soil gets carried into the Gunnison River and, subsequently, the Colorado River. Salty irrigation water causes crop losses downstream, which is why government money is available to do things like help Kay buy sprinklers.

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