BANGKOK (Reuters) – Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha on Tuesday urged people to turn off taps and shower less to cope with a drought afflicting northern and central Thailand.
Last week, Bangkok’s water authority said the capital’s tap water was becoming saline as seawater pushed up the depleted Chao Phraya river, a source of much of central Thailand’s water.
For three decades, Georgia and Florida have been battling over how to share a precious resource: water. Georgia has it, and Florida, which is downstream, says it’s not getting its fair share. The dispute is once again headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Florida wants the justices to cap Georgia’s water use. But a court-appointed special master recently rejected that idea.
More than 6 million people depend on water that starts at Lake Lanier, a reservoir northeast of Atlanta. It generates hydropower as its water is released from a dam into the Chattahoochee River.
POWAY — A piece of rope “inexplicably” became lodged in a valve separating a 10-million gallon reservoir from a storm drain in late November, causing a nearly week-long, costly boil-water advisory in Poway, a report prepared by the city for the state concludes.
Officials say it is unknown how the sizable piece of rope got stuck in the valve, which was supposed to remain closed but instead became stuck open, thereby allowing muddy water to enter the city’s reservoir — called a clearwell — near Lake Poway during a storm.
Three California state agencies today released a draft water resilience portfolio intended to help the state manage more extreme droughts and floods, aging infrastructure, declining fish populations and other challenges.
The California Natural Resources Agency, California Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Food and Agriculture developed the draft to fulfill Governor Gavin Newsom’s April 29, 2019 executive order calling for a portfolio of actions to ensure the state’s long-term water resilience and ecosystem health.
“The portfolio approach to water supply reliability is a significant advance in how our most precious resource is managed statewide, in line with our long-term strategy in San Diego County,” said Sandra L. Kerl, general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority. “As we review the details of the new plan, we will continue collaborating with the state agencies and other partners to turn this vision into a reality that benefits our region.”
Several weeks ago, the Imperial Irrigation District Board of Directors approved a resolution committing the district to doing two things on the Colorado River in the year ahead:
First, that IID will engage with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the broader river community to negotiate a successor agreement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines, which end in 2025. Second, that the district will do nothing to harm the Salton Sea.
No, you’re not going be fined for taking a shower and doing laundry on the same day. A news story by a Los Angeles area television station and carried through the internet on New Year’s Day wrongly stated just that as an effect of upcoming water efficiency laws.
KTLA has since taken that story down, but not before people across the state shared it, stating each person in the state could only use 55 gallons of water a day before being fined starting January 1.
Until recently, any time Long Beach firefighters practiced using their high-powered hoses, the water they sprayed ended up in the drain.
In any given year, that added up to millions of gallons that washed away during training exercises.
“The old way of doing training was either doing it dry or, if you really wanted to do training while flowing water, that water went directly into the gutter and was completely wasted,” Long Beach Fire Engineer Mike Shrout said.
That changed in 2018 when the Long Beach Fire Department acquired something called a Direct Recycling Apparatus Firefighter Training & Sustainability Unit, or DRAFTS Unit, for short.
Drinkable water is becoming increasingly scarce. Population growth, pollution and climate change mean that more cities are being forced to search for unconventional water sources. In a growing number of places, drinking highly treated municipal wastewater, called ‘reused water’, has become the best option — and, in some cases, the only one (see ‘What is reused water?’).
CORONADO — The San Diego County Department of Environmental Health lifted a water contact closure Monday for the Coronado shoreline and beaches from Avenida Lunar through North Beach.
Water quality testing confirmed Tijuana River flows are no longer impacting those beaches, according to the Department of Environmental Health, which had placed water contact closure signs to alert Coronado beach-goers to sewage-contaminated flows from the Tijuana River.
For 10 years, central Chile has been gripped by unrelenting drought. With 30% less rainfall than normal, verdant landscapes have withered, reservoirs are low, and more than 100,000 farm animals have died. The dry spell has lasted so long that researchers are calling it a “megadrought,” rivaling dry stretches centuries ago. It’s not so different from the decadelong drought that California, some 8000 kilometers away, endured until last year.
