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Water in Space

At H2Bid, we enjoy telling our readers about new challenges in water management, innovative technologies that could address the planet’s water needs and issues that relate to wastewater management. To start 2012, however, we’d like to expose our readers to a new topic - water in space. The search for water on Mars has been in the news a great deal in the pat few years with NASA’s twin rovers looking for evidence of ancient lakes and oceans on the red planet. In the context of Mars, finding water is critical to understanding if life could have once existed on Mars. Mars is only one facet in the broader search for water in space, however.
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Oregon Moving to Implement New Water Pollution Standards

The State of Oregon recently established the strictest guidelines for water pollution in the United States. The revised standards are aimed to protect people who consume fish as a large portion of their diet. Oregon’s Native American population is partly behind the push to decrease tolerance for contaminants in water; most tribes in the area have a long tradition of fishing that predates the settling of the area by Europeans.
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Using Gravity To Redefine Hydrology

Water planners and managers do their best to plan for water usage patterns but there are often many assumptions that have to factor into those plans. Specifically, how will private wells be used, and how will farmers use natural water sources such as streams and rivers adjacent to their land? How robust is the aquifer? What is the recharge rate of that aquifer relative to rainfall patterns? A poor assumption relating to any of these questions can unhinge a well-crafted plan. Now, planners may have a new tool for evaluating water sustainability – satellite imagery.
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MoMo Project

Water management is a tough business, even in regions where water is abundant. Imagine having the responsibility for managing water resources in a mostly-rural nation where rain is unpredictable and temperatures range from up to 30 °C in the summer and -40 °C in the winter. Couple that with a geography that features mountains over 3,000m in height and a desert that is among the driest and harshest on Earth and one can begin to understand the challenge that faces the water managers in Mongolia, a landlocked, central-Asian nation of nearly 3 million people.
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Lessons From Camden Ohio’s Water Emergency

Most residents of the United States take their overall water security as a given; certainly, some in the desert southwest worry that they will need to make choices between which fields to water and which to abandon but very few worry about where they will get their fresh drinking water. Imagine if that changed. For the residents of one small town in western Ohio, it did change; their town’s water supply became so fouled that it was impossible to supply the residents with drinking water and emergency measures had to be put in place. In this, the first of a three part series, H2Bid will examine this catastrophe and its impact on the town of Camden, Ohio.
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Is Chloramine a Better Disinfectant for Water Systems?

Water disinfection is critical to supplying clean, safe drinking water; many technologies and chemistries exist to aid water system managers in the task of supplying clean water. Ultraviolet disinfection, ozonation, and filtration are often employed. Additionally, chlorine is widely used; well known for its ability to disinfect water, chlorine was perhaps the most common means of water purification in the last century. One group of chemicals that is gaining in popularity are chloramines; chloramines are a potential alternative to chlorination that have been in use for decades, but some have questioned their use.
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Practices & Techniques for Watershed Protection

In a recent H2Bid article, Rivers Under Stress, it was noted that watershed protection and management was critical in reducing river stress and cultivating more sustainable freshwater resources. In a follow-up to that October, 2010, article, today’s piece will shed light on current practices and techniques for watershed protection. When discussing watershed protection many ideas are voiced, but one theme which runs throughout virtually all conversations is coordination. Without coordinated, organized efforts, the successful practices tend to be localized and have little if any impact in the larger freshwater system. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) are charged at the national level with watershed protection; the US EPA works with the Department of the Interior and numerous state and local agencies to implement a coordinated day-to-day watershed management approach in the United States and the NRCS plans and maintains the long term vision for US watersheds.
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Innovative Solutions For Sewer Sludge

Every day, millions of gallons of sewer grease are processed in the United States, alone. This mixture of fatty solids from restaurants, home kitchens and other sources poses a double threat to the wastewater industry. The sewer grease, or sludge, is energy intensive and thus costly to process and it is also corrosive and can damage the sewer infrastructure including sewer pipes and fittings. New technology has the potential to turn this nuisance into a benefit for the industry, however. By looking at sewer grease as a potential energy source, wastewater treatment facilities may be able to offset not only the cost of treating the sludge, they may also be able to reduce their overall operating costs in the process.
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Rivers Under Stress

Rivers, one of the greatest sources of freshwater on the planet may be in peril according to a new study recently published in the journal Nature. The study found, among other things, that rivers worldwide are experiencing similar stresses and are being degraded. Rivers most removed from human populations – in the arctic and the tropics – appear to be in the best state.
The symptoms of this degradation are almost as complex as the causes. Agricultural intensification, industrial development and river habitat modification were noted in the majority of the world’s watersheds. No longer limited to the developed world, the damage appears far-flung and crosses many economic and cultural boundaries.
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Challenge Of Delivering Safe Drinking Water To The Developing World

Addressing the challenge of delivering safe drinking water to the developing world would be a major step forward in reducing the incidence of disease and increasing life span. In recent years, a growing number of innovative solutions have been fielded in an attempt to directly solve this problem; in fact H2Bid has featured many of these solutions as a part of this regular column. The devices range from mechanical to chemical in design with the common thread being the inventors striving to keep their solutions simple and easy to operate. Joining these solutions is perhaps the simplest yet: SODIS or Solar Water Disinfection.
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Presumed effects of global warming on Water Sustainability

In July, 2010, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a report summarizing the presumed effects of global warming on water sustainability in the United States. NRDC worked with Tetra Tech, a consulting engineering firm specializing in waterways, water/wastewater management and environmental services. Together, the NRDC and Tetra Tech analyzed current water usage and population trends then coupled that data with models of global warming that predict climate shifts for the United States. What they found may be cause for concern; over 1,100 counties in the United States may be at risk of water under-supply or sustainability by 2050.
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Conserving Water with Flushless Urinals

Several months back, H2Bid featured a story about the invention and early application of so called “flushless” urinals. These urinals use a combination of hydrostatic pressure and eco-friendly chemistry to create a liquid barrier through which waste can move but sewer vapors cannot escape. After being invented, the early adopters of this technology were mostly novelty users and hard-core environmentalists; now, it seems, many other major consumers of water are finding value in these waterless marvels.