‘We’ve Always Known Ours Was Contaminated’: the Trouble With America’s Water
Ageing infrastructure, legacy pollution and emerging contaminants across the US are driving a growing urgency to do something about America’s water crisis.
Ageing infrastructure, legacy pollution and emerging contaminants across the US are driving a growing urgency to do something about America’s water crisis.
Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic requires access to safe, clean water. While some Americans decry their “loss of freedom” by being told to wear a mask in public spaces, others don’t have the freedom to wash their hands with clean water.
Millions of families in America risk losing running water over unpaid bills as moratoriums on shutoffs expire across the country, despite record levels of unemployment and mounting fatalities from the coronavirus pandemic.
Running water had been guaranteed to about two-thirds of Americans as hundreds of utilities suspended disconnections amid warnings from public health experts that good hygiene, particularly hand-washing, was crucial to curtailing the spread of the virus.
Among being big, bold and beautiful, the Torrey Pine tree could also be the solution when it comes to helping with the world’s water crisis.
“As a child we would go hiking there [Torrey Pines] every single weekend and see how there were giant puddles under the tree.”
The early afternoon sun was pounding the parched soil, and Gus Whyte was pulling on his dust-caked cowboy boots to take me for a drive. We’d just finished lunch—cured ham, a loaf of bread I’d bought on the trip up, chutney pickled by Whyte’s wife, Kelly—at his house in Anabranch South, which isn’t a town but rather a fuzzy cartographic notion in the far west of New South Wales, a seven-hour drive from Melbourne and half as far again from Sydney.
Restaurants in Poway reopened Saturday morning after six days of darkness, with owners and employees happy to be back at work, but upset about the costly interruption to their businesses and lives.
A week ago, restaurants, bars and other businesses that handled food — about 190 in all — were ordered to close by the county’s health department after the state issued a boil-water advisory for the entire city.
Aging water treatment systems, failing pipes and a slew of unregulated contaminants threaten to undermine water quality in U.S. cities of all sizes.
Why it matters: There’s arguably nothing more important to human survival than access to clean drinking water.
The Ladakh region of northern India is one of the world’s highest, driest inhabited places. For centuries, meltwater from winter snows in the Himalayan mountains sustained the tiny villages dotting this remote land. Now, like many other places in India, parts of Ladakh are running short of water. A tourism boom has sent the summer population soaring, and the region’s traditional system of conserving water is breaking down. Water crises are unfolding all across India, a product of population growth, modernization, climate change, mismanagement and the breakdown of traditional systems of distributing resources. India is running out of water in more places, in more different ways, putting more people at risk, than perhaps any other country.
BANGALORE, India — Countries that are home to one-fourth of Earth’s population face an increasingly urgent risk: The prospect of running out of water. From India to Iran to Botswana, 17 countries around the world are currently under extremely high water stress, meaning they are using almost all the water they have, according to new World Resources Institute data published Tuesday. Many are arid countries to begin with; some are squandering what water they have. Several are relying too heavily on groundwater, which instead they should be replenishing and saving for times of drought.
It was bath time and Rosalba Moralez heard a cry. She rushed to the bathroom and found her 7-year-old daughter, Alexxa, being doused with brown, putrid water. “We kept running the tub, we turned on the sink, we flushed the toilet. All the water was coming out dirty,” Ms. Moralez said. For more than a year, discolored water has regularly gushed from faucets in the family’s bathroom and kitchen, as in hundreds of other households here in Willowbrook, Calif., an unincorporated community near Compton in South Los Angeles.