The story of a midnight culvert

Staying away from public places due to pandemic concerns, one can read only so many books, watch only so many movies, write only so many emails, check in on only so many friends and send only so many hours preparing the gardens before taking a break to find refuge in memory.

Here’s one such memory; it’s suited to this blog since it involves water.

As a Peace Corps volunteer in southern India in the late 1960s, I surveyed and designed small irrigation canals.

The single biggest irrigation project that I oversaw involved the construction of a dam perhaps 40 feet across and three feet high that interrupted the flow of a  small stream in the little town of Dachepalle in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The impoundment behind the dam fed a narrow canal that had to be blasted through rocky terrain; the dam construction and canal blasting were handed by a group of several farmers whose 15 acres of marginally productive land was the intended recipient of irrigation water.

The canal ran about 150 feet before it came up to a two-lane road on the other side of which lay the targeted 15 acres. A culvert was needed. To get the culvert installed per local government tradition would require time, more time, still more time, and, in order to move things along, a bit of cash placed in the right hands.

The farmers had put considerable time and their own money into building the cement-topped stone dam and then blasting the canal. They really had nothing left. All they had, ultimately, was a combination of resourcefulness and courage; in the dark of one night, with an efficiency that few if any local public works officials would have been capable of imagining, the farmers dug up the road, installed the culvert and repaved the road. Immediately water began flowing to the 15 acres.

During the remainder of my Peace Corps term of service, there were no government reprisals against the farmers for this independent initiative.

I returned to the area six years later and was happy to reconnect with the farmer whose land was now supporting profitable rice paddy cultivation.

I did not ask the farmer whether he'd gotten into any trouble after I had left, nor did he mention any such a thing as having occurred. It struck me (and perhaps him) that it was best to leave the matter of the midnight culvert unacknowledged, lest any attention be drawn to it even in the privacy of our own minds.

The other day I returned to Dachepalle. My means of travel this time was Google Earth.

Dachepalle has clearly grown in the last 50 years. The settlement has expanded in all directions. I went looking for the little dam but I could not spot it, perhaps due to its small size. Still, I could make out a small impoundment that seemed to be where I remembered it, and then I followed what would have been the course of the canal that the farmers had built.

I came to the road, and on the other side of the road I saw acreage that was green.

I noticed one other thing, which was that the road had been widened quite a bit in the intervening years – an engineering feat that surely would have required the replacement of the original pipe.

I am left to wonder how that new, longer culvert got installed, and at what time of day – or night – it got put in.

Detection tool: crappy water

As previously observed in this space, water has a vital role in the defense against Covid-19, specifically through the cleansing function of regular hand washing.

 But there’s another role that’s less obvious, and that’s the ability of water to help indicate the presence of the virus in communities where few if any people are showing up sick.

The water in this case isn’t just any water. It’s wastewater of the sewage sort..

 In the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States scientists are looking to public sewers to detect the presence of certain virus-related gene fragments that are carried along in urine and poop.

 Wastewater surveillance is particularly important at a time when conventional testing for the coronavirus isn’t all that available and also where so many carriers have no symptoms.

Confirmation of that comes from Europe where, according to recent findings from the Netherlands- based KWR Water Research Institute, sewage testing picked up evidence of the virus when health authorities were aware of only 82 virus-sickened patients in the entire country.  Here’s a report on KWR’s work.

Wastewater surveillance isn’t specific to individuals in the way that conventional tests are, but it has value nevertheless for putting out early warning signals that could prompt community leaders to develop precautionary strategies that call for such behaviors as social-distancing.

Early-alert capabilities might not seem all that important in communities that already know they’ve got a pandemic on their hands, but think of next autumn or later, after the surges in hospitals are over and the public’s mind has strayed, and the virus begins making a return. With so many victims showing no sign of illness for considerable periods of time, such early detection can be pretty important.

 One source of expertise in wastewater surveillance is a start-up in Boston called Biobot Analytics. (The second part of the first name refers to the robotic tool that collects sewage samples.)

Biobot is the product of a teaming up of two MIT graduate students – one a biologist and the other an architect, both of them women. An early focus several years ago was opioid abuse; if sewage analysis could turn up drugs in a community, that information would be useful to community leaders wanting to know whether to allocate public health resources to the problem.

 The use of sewers to detect worrisome happenings in a community isn’t all that easy. After all, wastewater isn’t necessarily just sewage; in many cases wastewater also contains stormwater, industrial waste and even some stuff that shouldn’t go down the toilet such as baby wipes.

But it remains that  much of what goes into sewers comes out of humans and therefore has the potential to identify urban health problems. And that’s what makes mining the sewers for data all the more worth trying.

Water and disease

Water’s been associated with illness over the centuries. The deadly pathogens of typhoid and cholera, for example, are carried along in water. And in undeveloped parts of the world today the vast majority of sickness is sourced to fecal matter that gets into water.

 The Covid-19 virus that disrupts our lives today is different. Water’s not part of the problem; rather, it’s part of the prevention. We’re told to protect ourselves by vigorously washing our hands many times a day.

 Covid-19 is a contagion: the word derives from the Latin contages – “contact, touch.” In this case a viral infection moves from person to person via sneezes and coughs and touch.

Little else is known about the disease, however, which opens the door to all sorts of imaginative ideas, a recent one being that if you drink a lot of water after infection you’ll be fine. The BBC recently reported about this supposed remedy, which goes on the idea that drinking water every 15 minutes will flush the virus down the esophagus to where it can be killed by stomach acid. Gastric acid is potent, to be sure, but medical experts say that it won’t rid you of the virus.

Water, therefore, is neither a carrier of the coronavirus nor a cure for the illness that it brings on..

Still, in many parts of the world today water is a direct and indirect transmitter of disease, and that’s worth knowing if only to grasp what it takes to assure safe water.

To get a sense of the dimensions, check out “Emerging Issues in Water and Infectious Disease” – a report by the World Health Organization. Among other recently discovered contaminants, the report cites the nation’s troubling experience with cryptosporidium – a remarkable resilient parasite that due to human error and equipment failure in the Milwaukee public water system in 1993 caused 400,000 illnesses and 100 deaths. There’s no cure, nor a defense against that parasite except a healthy immune system.

 Here’s another report about water and health from Lifewater, a California-based Christian organization that’s focused on safe water and sanitation issues around the world.

 These and other accounts illustrate some of the many ways that diseases can get to us – get into us – through water.

 Malaria, for example. That’s not a waterborne disease, but the mosquitoes that carry the disease use fresh and brackish water to breed. So, malaria is tied to water by hosting its carriers.

 Another indirect tie between water and disease: Increasingly hard rains that have a way of overwhelming wastewater plants in ways that cause untreated fecal matter to get into rivers, sometimes upstream of intake pipes for public drinking water systems. Illness can come of that.

So, water and disease can have connections that aren’t always all that obvious. That’s true even in the case Covid-19.

For example, water and wastewater treatment plants need adequate staffing to operate as designed. But what if infection by the virus — or workplace precautions that we take against it — leave staffing too low to operate those plants as designed, hence open to error that can let pathogens pass through?

That’s speculation, of course. But alarmist? No, just something to think about when planning defenses against this frightening pandemic.

Ohio’s waters

Some places experience more commotion around fresh water than others. Ohio is one such place. To see how is to glimpse how complicated our relationship with water can be.

 Memorably, in June, 1969 sparks from a passing train set the Cuyahoga River on fire. The river that runs through Cleveland had long been fouled by industrial waste, and it had gone up in flames at least a dozen times before, but this last blaze came at a time of rising general concern about the environment.

 The image of a river on fire helped stir a range of pollution-control actions across the nation that included the creation of federal and state environmental protection agencies and the passage of the landmark federal Clean Water Act in 1972.

 The Cuyahoga eventually got better. Last year – the 50th anniversary of the 1969 fire – the Ohio EPA declared that fish caught in the river were safe to eat.

 A happy turn of events. But not all is happy around the waters of this one state.

Last year, voters in Toledo established a Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The action -- coming in the wake of a massive toxic algae bloom that disrupted the lives of the half-a-million people who drink the lake’s water – essentially gave the public guardianship over the lake, meaning that citizens could represent the lake in court.

 The Lake Erie Bill of Rights – the first such act in the United States -- was in the spirit an international Rights of Nature movement that grants personhood to aspects of Nature.  The action prompted a politician in New York to draft a similar measure that’s now in a legislative committee.

In Toledo, farmers had battled the Bill of Rights drive, worried that they’d wind up being held responsible for future algae blooms through fertilizer runoff from their lands. The chamber of commerce joined farmers in opposition, and Houston-based BP Corp. of North America donated more than $300,000 to their cause.

 Still, 61 percent of Toledo voters backed the Bill of Rights ballot initiative in early 2019, only to hear a federal district court judge declare one year later – just last month -- that the measure was unconstitutionally vague.

 The judge also ruled that the city lacked jurisdiction over the entire six million-acre lake.

 “Lake Erie is not a pond in Toledo,” he wrote. “It is one of the five Great Lakes and one of the largest lakes on Earth, bordering dozens of cities, four states, and two countries.”

The judge suggested that Toledo consider a different approach: Restrict the use of phosphorous-heavy fertilizers in the city, a step that Madison, Wisconsin had successfully imposed a dozen years earlier.

Meanwhile last year Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, sensitive to problems with his state’s waters,  announced a wide-ranging water-protection plan called H2Ohio.

 The plan – backed by $1 billion of government money over the next 10 years and supported by both farm interests and conservationists – encourages farmers to modernize their uses of fertilizer, the fuel for algae blooms. Among other things the state would help pay for soil tests, and farmers would be asked to consider changing how they drain their lands and how they apply fertilizer so as to reduce nutrient run-off into the water.

H2Ohio money would also go into extending public water lines to neighborhoods that don’t now get public water.  

Further, the plan would direct hundreds of millions of dollars into restoring wetlands – a significant step since Ohio, more than most other states over the years, has paved over and otherwise eliminated more than 90 percent of its wetlands. Among other things, the loss of wetlands has heightened the state’s vulnerability to flooding at a time of increasingly severe rains.

The H2Ohio initiative set the state on a progressive path – a clear break from the past when, far later than other jurisdictions, Ohio in 1988 got around to banning phosphate detergents, the cause of awful algae blooms in Lake Erie.

So, then, will all be well soon with Ohio’s waters?

Yes and no. The focus on fertilizer runoff has promise, but it’s a voluntary program, and experts believe that not enough is being done to hit phosphorous contamination targets for Lake Erie that US and Canadian interests previously set for 2025.

And, meanwhile, environmentalists in the southern part of the state are upset that a multi-state water commission decided last year to roll back longstanding pollution controls for the Ohio River, leaving it to locals to set their own rules.

So, as elsewhere, the story of water in the Buckeye State – a setting for nearly 30,000 streams and rivers and hundreds of miles of Lake Erie shoreline – has many chapters, some good and some not.

 The story confirms the extent to which water – clean or not – is part of society’s alternately promising and uncertain relationship with Nature.

Nature and us

 We define where we are relative to Nature by the language that we use.

 Consider these words:  “And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

 The passage, from Genesis, pretty well describes the inclinations of a European culture that over the last couple of hundred years in North America has reshaped rivers and lands, and Nature generally. The key word is dominion.

 Now consider some alternative language. The following comes from an Abenaki headman in Maine in 1739 who travelled to Boston to a file personal complaint with British authorities about a water-power dam that a British officer had built on the Presumpscot River.

 The man, who comes down in history simply as Chief Polin, explained that the dam interrupted the movements of migrating fish that constituted an important part of his people’s diet. The official transcript quotes him this way: “I have something to say concerning the river which I belong to. It is barred over in sundry places.”

 The fact that Chief Polin’s people harvested and ate fish in the river establishes a sense of dominance that would fit into Genesis. Message: Humans in control.

But the part about Chief Polin’s statement that caught my eye was his reference to “belonging” to the river – a relationship that hones closer to respect bordering on reverence.

This blog posting is about how Northern American indigenous people perceived Nature, including its streams and rivers and ponds, before Europeans showed up.

The perception borders on the spiritual. Here’s a song with these simple lyrics: “Water, we love you/We thank you./We respect you.” The song emanated from a phenomenon known as the Mother Earth Water Walk mainly in the upper Midwest.

Here’s another song -- the Algonquin Water Song – which also conveys a sacred theme.

 The songs are short. Give a listen, and meanwhile imagine how the music and tone and words could do us all a little good — and also benefit Nature of which we are a part.

A lesson in sewers

America’s earliest urban sewers were pretty simple: We piped human waste directly from neighborhoods into rivers.

We changed that in the second half of the 20th century with treatment plants that basically processed human poop into sludge, leaving cleansed water to be piped into rivers.

Despite that, raw sewage occasionally still gets into public waters, due to (a) the way that many older sewer systems were set up and (b) hard rains.

These older systems take in both sewage (which generally comes from toilets)  and stormwater (which generally comes from rain on city streets and other impervious surfaces). These arrangements are called combined sewer systems.

With these disposal methods, when rains fall particularly hard -- as is increasingly occurring -- stormwaters can overwhelm sewage plants to the point where both stormwater and raw sewage wind up going straight into public waters. There’s a term for that. It’s called “combined sewer overflows” -- CSOs for short.

The problem is big enough to justify holding conferences about it. The other day I attended a conference put on by the Massachusetts-based Merrimack River Watershed Council that focused solely on the problem.

CSOs don’t happen everywhere. Some cities have set up ways to send stormwaters directly into rivers, leaving sewer plants to handle waste alone. The photo accompanying this posting, which was taken on the campus of Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, indicates a municipal system that has two parts: an arrangement of pipes that sends stormwater directly into a local river and a separate arrangement of pipes that sends waste to the local sewer plant.

That two-part system means that hard rain storms won’t overwhelm Keene’s sewage treatment plant. Enlightened. An added bonus in Keene is the prevalence of rain gardens in public and private places that soak up rainfall , thereby reducing the volume of stormwater that winds up flowing across pavements, into storm grates (picking up contaminants along the way) and then going into the river that flows through Keene.

There are other ways to avoid -- or reduce the frequency of – CSOs, some of them pretty dramatic. Among other cities, Portland, Maine, which in most cases sends both sewage and stormwater to its treatment plant, has taken to building huge stormwater retention tunnels and other underground storage facilities to store stormwater until it can be gradually sent to the city’s wastewater treatment plant and thereby avoid overwhelming it.

Here’s a collection of photos of a such a tunnel in Portland.

You can imagine that these tunnels don’t come cheap. For example, Washington DC is planning to spend $2.7 billion on three stormwater storage tunnels to avoid combined sewer overflows.

The enormous cost of such projects has put some communities into a panic. One result: Congresswoman Lori Trahan, whose district includes the Merrimack River area, has asked that the EPA’s budget for the new year include $500 million for federal grants to help out; she’s so focused on the matter that she’s come to be known in the halls of Congress as  “the sewer lady.”

Another result: cities have lobbied the current administration to delay spending on CSO-avoidance schemes, leaving untreated sewage to flow into public waters for years to come as hard rains increasingly hit city streets. According to The New York Times, they’re finding a receptive ear in the Trump administration.

A lesson in all this is that not all problems around fresh water go away entirely; some problems simply change. Where once we intentionally piped raw sewage into rivers, now we’re unintentionally letting that happen when stormwaters run strong. That calls for new solutions, which in time might lead to new problems — and then yet newer solutions — that we can’t imagine today.

When ice made money

If all goes according to schedule several days from now, a team of people will walk onto the frozen surface of Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire and put saws to work. They’ll spend the rest of the week cutting as many as 3,600 blocks of ice before hauling the harvest — 200 tons of it — to specially prepared storage sheds.

As the year goes on these 120-pound blocks will be used to fill ice boxes in cabins at the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps and also provide refrigeration at a local farm.

Ice harvesting on Squam has been going on for more than a century, starting back when natural ice was the only means of refrigeration.

Ice harvesting was common in many northern parts of the nation to serve both local needs and those of customers far, far away. And what a business it was! I’ve seen records from Milton, New Hampshire where ice harvesting in the 1850s was busy enough to fill 50 rail cars a day rolling off to other parts of the country during warm months.

The industry was big enough nationally to support its own trade journal: The Ice Trade Journal, later renamed  Refrigerating World after electrical refrigeration came along.

Most of that is just a memory now – except at the Rockywold-Deephaven Camps and at a few other spots, another being the Thompson Ice House Harvesting Museum in South Bristol, Maine that’s scheduled its harvesting this year for February 26. The yield will be used to make ice cream at the museum’s annual ice cream social in July, and also for use by local boaters, campers and hunters.

Ice harvesting traditions are also kept alive at other places, according to the blog Alcademics (“Cocktails, Spirits, Science and … kind of a lot about ice”).

Here’s a fine set of photos and video clips from Maine that show how the work was done.

Those traditions date to a time when harvested ice meant a lot economically: it boosted the expansion of such industries as dairy and beer distribution after railroad lines were laid down, and for the same reason helped farmers in the Midwest and West access Eastern markets.

In fact, ice harvesting isn’t entirely a thing of the past. It’s merely taking on new forms that our ancestors wouldn’t likely have imagined, a recent example being iceberg harvesting, aimed at supplying fresh drinking water, not keeping things cool.

How long that newer use of ice can go on is a question that’s bigger than ice itself, given recent reports of glaciers melting and seas that are moving in a warming direction.

Giving water a second use

Worries about worsening water shortages have led to heightened interest in water recycling. The method can be simple, such as reusing water from the shower to flush toilets. Alternatively, water re-use can be technologically sophisticated, what with advances in membrane and filtering technology, to involve washing machines that can use water over and over again.

Actually, water reuse isn’t new. The early Greeks and Romans put wastewater – mainly sewage – to use as fertilizer in fields.

Modern wastewater technology can now make the foulest water potable. That and other possibilities led 30 years ago to the founding of the Water Reuse Association – an industry group that works toward expanded water reclamation.

The range of possibilities is impressive. Consider the field of activity of Sustainable Water, a Virginia-based firm that promotes its possibilities in healthcare, military bases, manufacturing, airports and more.

The prospects for water re-use aren’t restricted to large settings such as factories.

At its big annual innovation event last week in Las Vegas the Consumer Technology Association handed out a big award to a Dutch firm called Hydraloop for a domestic water recycling system that recycles 85 percent of water in the home, one effect being a 45 reduction in water consumption.

Then there are the sorts of things that you can do at home today, right now and without any technological wizardry, to recycle fresh water; (a) irrigate house plants with water from the home aquarium that you were planning to flush down the drain, (b) do the same thing with the water that you used last night to cook spaghetti or wash vegetables, (c) toss old ice cubes out on the lawn.

These and similar steps do more than give water a new use; they also reduce water consumption, which saves on the energy that it takes to provide fresh water to your home.

In a way, such steps mimic the natural movement of water on the planet. Water is always in motion as H2O molecules move from the liquid state in lakes to the evaporated state in clouds to the precipitation that brings the water back to earth and then perhaps down to subsurface aquifers only to be pumped out later for another round through the hydrologic cycle.

In sum: it’s one big water circle.

How pollution can get around

When considering how pollution gets into water, picture a pipe with something awful pouring out,  and if not that then a boat that’s leaking fuel through a fractured hull.

But in fact water contamination can happen by other means. For example, rain runoff in urban settings or chemical fertilizer and herbicides washing in from farms.

And, as we learned with acid rain, contaminants can also travel through the air, starting with power-plant emissions in one place and ending up with deadened lakes downwind.

There are still other ways that pollution can get into waterways, one being over the road, which is the subject of this blog post.

In 1980  the city of Lowell, Massachusetts began running a wastewater treatment plant in a spot called Duck Island, and at various times during the last 10 years it expanded its operations by taking in sludge and leachate from out-of-town customers that included towns, factories and landfills in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

Less than one percent of what gets processed at Duck Island comes from these external sources, but the addition has made a fiscal difference. A recent memo by the Lowell Wastewater Utility explains that, due to the strength of these imported wastes, disposal fees are “significant.” Hauled waste income from the Turnkey Landfill in Rochester, NH. alone this year amounted to $520,000.

But some of that is ending.

Recently the Duck Island facility stopped taking in leachate — a watery residue — from three landfills following a news report that the stuff that was being hauled in from one of them contained chemicals that are tied to human health problems.

The Duck Island facility isn’t equipped to filter out the chemicals, which are known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs, for short). That meant that the plant’s discharges into the Merrimack River contained PFAs – alarming information since hundreds of thousands of people downstream of the plant get their drinking water from the Merrimack.

Some drinking water treatment facilities can filter out PFAs, but not all, and in any case there are worries in some quarters that treating for PFAs can in fact harden the offending chemical compounds, which are known in some quarters as “forever chemicals” for how long it can take them to degrade.

The leachate that set off the recent alarms originated in the largest landfill in New England, located in Rochester, NH. It’s the 1,260-acre Waste Management Turnkey landfill, which annually takes in more than 1.4 million tons of trash. For the last several years, trucks hauled the leachate six days a week over the roughly 60 miles from the city of Rochester to the Duck Island treatment plant.

Following a recent Boston Globe article about the PFAs in the waste stream, Lowell stopped accepting landfill leachate. Waste Management now disposes of the stuff on its own vast property, where most of its leachate was already being deposited.

This episode reminded me of an incident that I described in “Water Connections” – the book that spawned this blog — that also involved water, pollution and a landfill. The setting was Charleston, the capital of West Virginia. In 2014 leaking storage tanks sent a coal-washing solvent into a river upstream of Charleston’s water treatment plant, which wasn’t equipped to screen out the contaminant. A frightful mess resulted.

In the clean-up that followed, disposal companies mixed the leaked solvent with sawdust and then trucked the stuff to a nearby community’s landfill, after which neighbors began complaining about smells.

In the controversy that followed, the companies were fined $600,000 and ordered to monitor for leaks for the next five years.

The point here is that contamination can get from one place to another by more than a few means, trucks included. An important consideration is that contamination’s actual starting place isn’t always clear. For example, the Turnkey landfill takes in garbage from all over; in fact, 60 percent of the trash comes from outside New Hampshire.

From which of those sources might have the suspect PFAs come?

A reasonable question, with no clear answer.

About those water-saving shower heads ...

Several decades ago officials in the city of Keene, New Hampshire (population 24,000) began scouting out new sources of water. They were worried that the existing supply from two reservoirs and several wells might not keep up with projected demand

But it turned out that the new supply, which engineers said could cost many thousands of dollars to build and operate, never got built.

One reason: Local manufacturing, which ordinarily consumes a lot of water, waned.

Another reason: Household water use leveled, thanks to new efficiencies in plumbing fixtures.

Those efficiencies resulted from the Energy Policy Act of 1992, a law signed by President George H.W. Bush that mandated low-flow toilets, shower heads and faucets. The new math: 1.6 gallons per flush versus 3.5 gallons, and, for shower heads, 2.5 gallons per minute versus more than 5 gallons. (The standards had been included in the 1992 law for the energy it takes to treat and otherwise process water).

The changes came to mind the other day when President Trump said that the efficiency standards made no sense.

“You turn on the faucet, you don’t get any water, “ he told small business owners at a White House meeting.  “They take a shower and water comes dripping out.  It’s dripping out — very quietly dripping out.  People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.  They end up using more water.  So, EPA is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion.”

The president needn’t have used hyperbole, nor need he have claimed credit for getting the government to take a fresh look at plumbing fixtures. Last year, on its own initiative and without disparagement, Congress ordered up such a review on the logic that the standards had been in place for 27 years and could benefit from an update.

Who knows what will come of that review. But it’s a fact that the U.S. hasn’t been alone in looking to the bathroom as a place to rein in water consumption.

A couple of years ago, when Cape Town faced a severe water shortage, advocates there began promoting two-minute showers; they came up with a package of lively two-minute-long songs to help with the timing.

The Cape Town crisis eventually receded, and the songs got some of the credit.

And in Ireland, a group called Global Action Plan Ireland last year encouraged people to keep their showers to four minutes to combat a drought-induced shortage. Toward that end the organization offered free shower timers to the public.

None of this is to say that water scarcity worries can be allayed principally by short showers. That’s because  most water use, here and elsewhere, isn’t in the bathroom, but rather on the farm.

But water efficiency in the home does make sense, given how our use of fresh water there has changed over time. Back when outhouses were in use and there was no running water, the average American consumed only several gallons of water per day; now we’re up to around 90. 

Reducing that consumption only a little can cause some politicians grief, but it’s also made a difference, including helping cities such as Keene, among others, avoid spending money on new water supplies.

A pioneer in water science

Water pollution in the second half of the 19th century was common enough to suggest that people back then simply didn’t care about how urbanization and industrialization were harming rivers and ponds.

In fact, the problem wasn’t lack of caring but rather lack of knowledge; few people at the time knew much about the principles of contamination.

That situation began to change as scientists began looking into water. A key figure was William R. Nichols, who in 1873 investigated river pollution for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. His studies are well described in a book that I highly recommend: Nature Incorporated – Industrialization and the Waters of New England by Theodore Steinberg (1991). 

This blog entry isn’t about Nichols. Instead, it’s about one of his early assistants whose accomplishments are all the more remarkable for her gender at a time when women weren’t welcomed in science.

She was Ellen Swallow Richards, a Massachusetts native who enrolled in the relatively new Vassar College in 1868 after saving up tuition money from house-cleaning and teaching. It was at Vassar where she developed an interest in chemistry. Following graduation she applied unsuccessfully for work in industrial laboratories. A chemist at one of those labs suggested that she approach the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which at the time didn’t accept women. To MIT’s credit, it enrolled her as a special student, establishing her the first woman in the nation to be accepted into a scientific school.

In due course Richards received a BS degree, and then began a career of teaching at MIT. Along the way, she helped start and fund a laboratory to facilitate women’s studies there.

In 1884, she was appointed instructor at the university’s new laboratory of sanitary science, the first such facility in the nation. Three years later, at the request of Massachusetts health authorities, she conducted a study of 40,000 samples of local sources of drinking water that led to the first state-level water quality standards in the United States. Not long afterwards the first modern sewage treatment plant in the nation was built in Lowell, Mass.

Meanwhile, Richards found time for other activities. She helped start what’s now the American Association of University Women. She helped launch the field of home economics; in that spirit, she wrote books about science for use in the home, including Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning.

Another book -- Food Materials and their Alterations -- led to the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in Massachusetts.

She also maintained a private practice in sanitary chemistry that included testing water, air and food, and also the testing of wallpapers and fabrics for arsenic.

Richards continued teaching at MIT until her death in 1911. In 1973, on the centennial of her enrollment, MIT named a professorship in her honor.

Given Richards’ interest in science and water, it’s fitting that MIT would be her chosen university, for it’s a leader in water science innovation, most visibly in recent years through its Water Club.

If she were to return today, Richards would find challenges and uncertainties of a high order. The contaminants that she encountered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (raw sewage and largely organic waste from textile mills) are now either pretty much under control or long-gone — unlike the new classes of synthetic chemical contaminants such as PFOAs that water-treatment scientists know little about.

Loons in danger

Among popular American movies “On Golden Pond” stands out for a couple of reasons. The cast included film greats Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in what was his last screen acting job. And, among other things, the story accorded a role to wild birds, namely loons.

 The 1981 movie was filmed on and around Squam Lake, a 6,700-acre water body in central New Hampshire where, in fact, loons had long had a remarkable presence.

 Indeed, loons and their haunting calls had such an enduring place in Squam’s habitat that it came as a real shock a little more than a dozen years ago when their numbers declined dramatically; in 2017, in a real shocker, only one loon chick hatched on Squam — the lowest number of hatchlings since monitoring began in 1975.

 Research has turned up several potential causes for poor egg development, including high levels of chemical contaminants in the lake’s waters. The pollutants included DDT (which had banned from the marketplace in 1972) , PCBs and chemical components in flame retardants, stain repellants and other modern products.

 Loons’ diet is principally fish, hence the birds are near the top of the food chain where they absorb contaminants that get into fish. The effect has been eggs that aren’t viable.

 In this light loons are a bio-indicator, in sort of the same way that aquatic bugs tell us whether stream waters are clean by their existence in them.

But the disappointing experience in Squam is mysterious, because the loon situation there isn’t being duplicated elsewhere. Other Northeastern lakes aren’t seeing loon populations decline as they have in Squam – a lake whose water has long thought to be pure.

 A couple of years ago New Hampshire journalist David Brooks described some of the problem in his Granite Geek column.

Research continues, the latest example being a report that came out last month under the title “Squam Lake Loon Initiative” by the Loon Preservation Committee.

Other loon studies of national scope are being carried out by the Maine-based Biodiversity Research Institute under the program title Restore the Call.

 Here’s a fresh report on restoration of loons following an oil spill in Rhode Island.

Having said all this, water pollution isn’t the only threat to loons. Lead fishing tackle also poses a significant danger, which is why use of lead sinkers has been banned. But the birds may still be ingesting lead fishing tackle that was lost years ago – a reminder that humans’ impact on nature can be harmful long after corrective steps are taken.

Water on the campaign trail

Presidential candidates talk about all sorts of issues on the hustings: immigration, health care, gun control, taxes, climate change and foreign affairs, among the biggies.

 They talk about water, too, though often in the context of other concerns.

 Climate change, for example. Climate change is about many things, including the furious rainstorms that are increasingly pounding parts of the country and that lead to damaging floods and polluted waters. Each of the Democratic candidates, and all but one of the Republican aspirants for the presidency (that would be President Trump) believe that climate instability is a problem and deserves attention.

A common proposal among many Democrats is the Green New Deal, a massive jobs-energy-spending initiative that in varying degrees concerns the safety of water supplies. Axios recently summarized the Democratic candidates’ positions.

Take note: The Green New Deal is generally silent on fracking – a petroleum mining practice that contaminates a lot of water -- but some of the candidates have expressed individual views on that.

Water also comes up in reference to economic justice. Among the candidates, California Senator Kamala Harris has been among the more outspoken about how it’s the poor who get hurt the most when public water gets fouled. Here she is talking about a Water Justice Act that she introduced in September.

 Exhibit #1 on the water justice agenda is Flint, Michigan – particularly during a candidate debate in nearby Detroit that ABC summed up quite well.  

In Detroit most candidates insisted that water infrastructure needs attention. (Left unacknowledged in those prescriptions, however, is the fact that infrastructure spending isn’t a sure-fire winner in all cases; the 2014 lead-contamination crisis in Flint originated in an infrastructure project that switched the supply of water from one source to another.)

For his part, President Trump has indicated that spending on pipes and treatment plants is needed; but a plan issued by the White House in early 2018 was panned by critics for being short on federal dollars and excessively reliant on local governments and private businesses to get the job done. Here’s the Natural Resources Defense Council on that.

Finally, befitting our wide-ranging relationship to inland waters, the candidates’ discussions about water aren’t all about drinking water. For example, if a Democrat were to win the presidency a year from now, expect the winner to reinstate the Waters of the United States Rule – a step by President Obama in 2016 that extended to small streams the same environmental protections that the Clean Water Act granted to large bodies of water; the Trump administration suspended that rule this fall.

 And, if Andrew Yang were to win the presidency, expect some innovative engineering initiatives that grant water in its frozen state a special role in addressing climate change, including a plan to shore up glaciers to help limit global warming.

Paying for rain runoff

In recent years cities have been changing the way they deal with hard rains. For quite some time they used gutters and pipes to send stormwater off to their sewage systems; later many of them set up separate stormwater arrangements that carried storm runoff to local streams or ponds; and, lately, some cities have been building rain gardens and other physical structures that let rain settle into the ground close to where it falls, thereby reducing runoff.

 Whatever the approach, these stormwater management systems are being taxed in serious ways by the mounting frequency of heavy downpours – a consequence of climate instability.

 A consequence is that cities, with their vast expanses of impermeable surfaces such as sidewalks, streets and parking lots, are finding that they have to spend big money to redesign or upgrade their stormwater infrastructure.

The question is: who’s to pay for those changes?

Should all residents share equally in the cost, or should the costs of these capital projects fall more heavily on people whose properties cause more runoff than others – say, shopping centers with acres of parking lots, or homeowners with more impermeable surfaces than others?

The answer in Houston is “both.”

Voters there recently approved a $2.5 billion bond to make the area more flood-safe, and the city also levies a stormwater fee on property-owners based on size of their lots – at 0.032 cents per square foot. That can come to more than a few hundred dollars per year per homeowner, and about $125 million per year in total receipts.

The generic term for that fee is a stormwater utility fee. The concept is similar to that of water fees or sewage fees, which customarily are based on usage. In the case of stormwater utility fees, the charge is based on how much water your property sends into the city’s network of gutters, pipes and other infrastructure.

Not everyone is a fan of stormwater utility fees. Not long ago critics in Maryland lambasted enabling legislation in that state as a “rain tax.”

Closer to where I live in New Hampshire, the small coastal city of Dover – which has won widespread recognition for its innovations in stormwater management – experienced a case where critics of a proposed stormwater utility successfully blocked the plan in an anti-tax move.

But other parts of the country have been more receptive to charging separately to cover runoff-control expenses.

The Brookings Institution recently reported that one survey found more than 1,500 stormwater utilities operating around the country, generating more than $2 billion in annual revenue.

 Meanwhile, cities are changing how they regard rain runoff. It’s not just flood control any more. It’s worries about pollution, because it’s widely accepted today that most pollution of local streams and ponds doesn’t come from the usual suspects of the past – factories, leaking septic tanks, and so on – but rather rain runoff as its picks up crud on the surface of the land before being shunted to local water bodies.

 So, that means dealing with hard rains in new ways; stormwater utilities are a way to generate funds to design and implement those ways.

Talking about water

For the last half-dozen years Francesca Rheannon has been interviewing writers for a range of broadcast outlets across the United States, and she’s also placed the edited interview sound clips on podcasts. The project is titled “Writer’s Voice with Francesca Rheannon”.

Francesca’s a writer herself, and is currently working on a memoir titled “Province of the Heart” based on time spent in Provence after 9/11.

Last summer I felt honored to be interviewed by Francesca for a podcast that also included a session with Paul Rosalie about his work of fiction titled “The Girl and the Tiger.”

That installment of “Writer’s Voice” can be found here. On the home page simply search for the authors’ names.

One of the unexpected delights that came with the publication of “Water Connections” in June, 2019 has been the exchanges with skilled interviewers such as Francesca and people who show up at book-related events with questions and personal stories of their own about fresh water. The experience keeps me current on our changing connections to inland waters.

Common questions: What can an ordinary person do to help assure that rivers and lakes are clean? What about the effect of climate instability on inland waterways? Should the old mill dam be outfitted with modern hydro, or should that dam be taken down for the benefit of fish passage?

Here are a couple of other recent recorded sessions that were related to the book:

A presentation at Bookstock — “The Green Mountain Festival of Words” - provided by Woodstock Community TV

An interview with Dan Mitchell, a host of a talk show titled “Open Mic” at the Monadnock Radio Group in Keene, NH.

Water and soil

Increasingly the news is bringing us dramatic pictures of flooded farmland and, in the other extreme, land that’s little more than parched dirt.

 In these opposite images land is a victim; it’s a casualty of either too much water or too little.

 For a minute think of land in a new way; think of it as soil.

In recent years scientists have been looking at soil not as a passive victim of floods and droughts but rather as a potentially active agent in (a) absorbing water when rains fall especially hard and (b) also storing water for use when it’s needed later by the crops it supports.

The idea is that, when properly maintained, soil can absorb water like a sponge, and it can also better hold onto water in dry periods. Among the benefits during hard rains: reduced runoff that otherwise can cause damaging erosion.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently put out a publication that’s titled

‘Turning soils into sponges—How farmers can fight floods and droughts.”

Here’s a particularly revealing passage:  “Over the past several decades, agriculture has moved increasingly toward systems dominated by a few annual crops—typically corn and soybeans—often with fields left bare between growing seasons. This trend has degraded soil structure, leaving it less like a sponge and more like concrete, which exacerbates the damage done by floods and droughts. To combat these impacts, farmers have tried options such as investing in irrigation equipment or drainage systems. But these aren't always long-term solutions, and they can have damaging effects of their own.”

The Daily Yonder, a news and opinion platform, recently carried an article by Stateline, a unit of the Pew Charitable Trusts, that reported a surge in interest in new soil management methods:  “Just this year, 10 states have introduced new soil management policies that call for further research or data collection, or offer tax exemptions, technical assistance or even grant money to, among other actions, plant cover crops, diversify crop rotations and reduce tillage that can tear apart beneficial fungi.”

The implications extend beyond the farm to include climate change. Here are two explanatory pieces: A recent Newsweek article describes how climate change is degrading the ability of soils to absorb water. 

And The Climate Reality Project, an undertaking that was founded by former Vice President Al Gore, which published a report titled “Right Under Your Feet – Soil Health and the Climate Crisis.”

So, when you next look at the ground, don’t think of dirt — inert and vulnerable. Think of soil — a creative and productive substance that, properly cared for, can spare us a lot of woe.

Microplastics in the water

Science that’s put in service to commerce can sometimes bring troubles to waters.

 Decades ago, scientists at Procter & Gamble came up with a phenomenally successful detergent – the washday miracle “Tide” that lifted dirt off clothes in the washing machine and kept it off.

 Only later did the public discover that the phosphate components could harm rivers, lakes and ponds by nourishing algae that caused waters to stink, put rashes on swimmers, clog motorboat props and deprive fish of oxygen.

 It took fights in the halls of government lasting years, but governments got to banning phosphates from detergents. Algae blooms still happen, but not from clothes-washing.

 So, government action can successfully address contamination – but not always. Sometimes there has to be a corrective scientific step.

 Take PFOAs, the class of chemicals that go into a range of wondrous consumer goods such as non-stick cookware and also firefighting foams that effectively douse flames. Those chemicals have also been outlawed but there’s no solid agreement on how to get them out of the water (including drinking water) once they get in. Hence the disturbing nickname: the forever chemical.

 And now take microplastics, those tiny shards and tiny beads of plastic that wind up in oceans, lakes and rivers. They come from exfoliating soaps, beauty products, polyester clothes, discarded plastic cups, and such. Some of the junk winds up in the bellies of aquatic life – meaning, the food chain – and some winds up simply as floating garbage.

 In 2015 Congress passed a law that outlawed the sale of cosmetics that included microbeads, but the stuff remains in waters around the world to the consternation of clean-up experts. 

That’s worrisome because plastic pollution is seemingly everywhere, as documented by the USGS.

 The National Park Service has also weighed in with a report.

 The first message from all this is that we ought to stop the problem from getting worse by doing such things as improving recycling and discouraging the sales and marketing of single-use plastic products such as bottled water.

But what to do about all the plastic crud that’s in the oceans and lakes now?

There’s not been much good to report until this summer when an 18-year-old Irish lad won first place and $50,000 in a Google science fair by proposing to use a NASA-developed liquid to remove plastic particles from the water.

 Here’s the winning contest entry.

A PROMISING STEP! The winning teen concedes that there’s still a lot of work to do, but he’s got a start, by using science to do good to combat science that, so far as our waters are concerned, has done more than a little wrong.

The other dam-builders

There are two kinds of dam-builders – those that have two feet and those that have four. This report is about the four-footed ones.

Early after Europeans began populating North America beavers here went into decline thanks largely to fashion trends. Their fur was valued largely by hatmakers here and back in the Old Country.

There was also some culinary interest, the ultimate consequence being that the animal was almost entirely eradicated before animal protection and other conservation impulses turned things around in the 20th century – ultimately to the chagrin of settlers, roadbuilders and farmers whose own lives can be disrupted by ponds that show up where they aren’t planned.

Then, too, beavers tend to spread water-borne diseases, principally giardiasis, a diarrheal affliction carried by microscopic parasites that live in their intestines. Hence the term “Beaver Fever.”

From these inconveniences has emerged an industry in how to control beavers. Search the Internet for “How to Control Beavers” and prepare yourself for a lot of reading and also lessons in how resilient these mammals can be.

A study in Tennessee found that after hundreds of beavers were removed from one wetland area, an equal number moved back in within two years. As for the idea of demolishing beaver dams, the animals are quick to rebuild.

Hence, a wide range of alternative steps, including habitat alteration (meaning, remove the kinds of trees that beavers like to eat), fencing, repellants, frightening devices (firecrackers and strobes), trapping and shooting.

I’m inclined to the non-lethal solutions, among them water flow control devices that consist largely of underwater pipes that people install inside beaver dams that drain beaver ponds without causing any tell-tale noise that can alert beavers to a leak that needs to be plugged. A widely referenced design is the Clemson Beaver Pond Leveler.

Another non-lethal device that I particularly like is the Beaver Deceiver, a fencing system that was invented in Vermont. The New Hampshire Department of Transportation recently approved the use of the device near a busy road where flooding’s been a problem. 

One of my principal findings while researching the book “Water Connections” is that water’s a place for inventive minds – whether in designing new hydropower technologies or water treatment methods or water-saving devices in household appliances.

Beavers can similarly get the creating juices flowing. So long as they are building dams and blocking culverts for their own purposes – and so long as we’re inclined to non-lethal responses --  there’ll be opportunity for invention.

Water and history

On July 26 author Jim Rousmaniere discussed water and history during a segment at Bookstock, an annual festival of writing in Woodstock, Vermont.

The presentation focused largely on events and developments in the Green Mountain state — including an unrealized New Deal plan from the 1930s that would have installed a great many multi-purpose dams in northern New England a la Tennessee Valley Authority, but the broader messages raised in the presentation can be applied to water beyond that state’s boundaries.

What not to flush

We toss all kinds of stuff down the toilet that we shouldn’t, causing cost, inconvenience and worse.

For example, unused pharmaceuticals. Not all that long ago Americans were instructed to flush unused prescription drugs down the toilet, only later to be told that pharmaceutical residues can wind up in somebody else’s water. The instruction now: dispose of old drugs another way.

Then there’s the trash that winds up clogging waste water pipes – sanitary napkins, needles, condoms, kitchen grease, food waste, supposedly degradable diapers, and, increasingly in recent years, heavily marketed wet wipes.

There’s a word for the clogs that all this flushed garbage winds up causing: “fatberg” – a term now so commonly accepted that in 2015 it was added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online.

The clogging problem was initially reported to be a particular bother in England where it was partly attributed to aging sewer pipes, but the situation apparently knows no boundaries.

In 2018 a fatberg measuring 11 feet wide, 200 feet long and 6 feet tall blocked a city sewer pipe in Detroit.  In Baltimore, a mammoth blockage of fats, wipes and other waste caused a spill of more than a million gallons of raw sewage. New York City, which spends a reported $19 million each year removing fatbergs, runs a public awareness campaign that says that only the following four items are suitable for toilets: pee, poop, puke and toilet paper.

Sanitary wipes, a relatively new consumer product, are a big part of the problem, and are a big focus of an organization called the International Water Services Flushibility Group. Last April Forbes magazine reported that Canadian researchers had studied 101 varieties of single-use wipes and found that not a one passed a flushibility test.

 Pressure’s been brought to bear on wipes makers, but public education is also getting a heavy focus – and occasionally in entertaining ways.

 Notably, the Singing Sewermen of Thames Water (London) have been putting their voices to the problem since 2009.

 The wastewater minstrels from Britain ultimately inspired a single in Keene, New Hampshire, where the energetic style of Bruce Springsteen finds an unusual expression. Listen up. “Pink Cadillac” will never be quite the the same.

For the sake of our water, get the message: Don’t flush that!