According to EPA, Water and Wastewater Agency Response Networks (WARNs) are comprised of “utilities helping utilities” within a state respond to and recover from emergencies by sharing resources with one another. WARNs are governed by a common mutual aid agreement. The WARN agreement allows utilities to share resources in an expedited way, compared to other mechanisms that may require a formal disaster declaration. Benefits include increased emergency preparedness and coordination, and enhanced access to specialized resources. WARNs are built on a strong base of utility members. Utility responders, once notified, are typically on the ground within 24 hours.  

Sometimes water and wastewater utilities face emergencies that require outside assistance. Emergencies such as main breaks, low pressure in the system, water shortages, contamination, earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and flooding require quick repairs and recovery. System outages are detrimental to the community and reducing this outage time is of great importance. One way you can prepare is to join your state’s WARN.

All types of water utilities – drinking water, wastewater, public, private, large and small – can benefit from joining their state WARN, which exist in 49 of the 50 states, as well as the National Capital Region. 

There are many benefits to joining WARN, including: 

1. Single agreement links utilities statewide 
2. Spells out how liability, workers’ compensation, insurance and reimbursement will work
3. Increased response time by aid providers
4. Access to resources (financial and equipment)
5. Decreased recovery time
6. Voluntary No cost to join  

State WARN listings can be found at:

https://www.epa.gov/waterutilityresponse/mutual-aid-and-assistance-drinking-water-and-wastewater-utilities#2 

More resources are available at:

https://www.awwa.org/Resources-Tools/Resources/Risk-Resilience/WARN-Resources

https://www.epa.gov/waterutilityresponse/mutual-aid-and-assistance-drinking-water-and-wastewater-utilities

The post Benefits of Joining Water and Wastewater Agency Response Networks (WARNs) first appeared on Southwest EFC.

Are you interested in where our drinking water comes from, or how our cities and towns handle all of the wastewater that is generated by our modern society? Do you care about the health of your community and its future? Are you looking for a career that pays well with the potential for growth? If so, then a career as a water utility operator might be just what you are looking for.

Certified drinking water and wastewater utility operators are in high demand these days. The industry is seeing the retirements of those operators that went to work in the 70’s and 80’s and is in need of new, trained, and certified operators to carry on the infrastructure that supports our communities. As this transition in the workforce continues, our smallest water utilities that serve our smallest communities will be most challenged to hire qualified personnel.

So, how do you go about getting trained and certified to do this sort of work? It doesn’t take much to start, just a high school diploma or GED, some on the job training, and a willingness to learn. Within just 6-12 months of working at a water utility, you will be able to sit for an exam to become a certified drinking water or wastewater operator. Passing that exam and having that certificate lets everyone know that you are a professional with the knowledge and the experience to operate your community’s infrastructure and protect their health.

For many of us, preparing for, taking, and passing the water operator exam will be the biggest road block on our road to career riches. Maybe you haven’t taken a standardized exam since you were in high school and even then you never liked them? Maybe you know the material but freeze up when it comes to the exam? Maybe you don’t know how to study or your brain just doesn’t work that way anymore? Preparing for, taking, and passing the water operator exams can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be if you follow these tips:

– Identify subject areas where you need to study
– Develop a study plan leading up to the exam that specifies when and what you will study
– Gather together your study materials from trainings you have attended, state training manuals, and other free or paid sources
– Manage your study time to ensure that you cover all of the material you need to cover
– Take notes while you study and draw sketches to help visualize the information
– Test your knowledge with practice exams or flash cards
– Avoid memorization
– Study with a partner

On exam day, make sure you are well rested and well fed before the exam. If you followed all of the tips above, then you are prepared and know the materials. Take your time, relax, and don’t second guess yourself. You have already done all of the heavy lifting and the exam gives you the opportunity to show it!

Becoming a certified water utility operator is both challenging and rewarding. There is the opportunity to learn something new every day, serve your community, and protect the public’s health. There is a huge need for people like you to take up this career and help move us forward into the future. It has been said that water is life and that has never been more true when it comes to the life of our communities.

The post Becoming a Water Utility Operator: Test-taking Strategies first appeared on Southwest EFC.

Although it has been proven that customers are willing to pay for increased service when they desire it, decision-makers, who operate under the common belief that customers want water to be cheap, look for places where budgets can be cut. Oftentimes, the first line item to be cut is maintenance: a decision which focuses only on immediate cost reductions but ignores the long-term costs. In reality, cutting the maintenance budget is the more expensive option because you end up replacing equipment sooner and in an unplanned manner. Oftentimes this unplanned maintenance and replacement (otherwise called reactive maintenance) makes your job much harder and much costlier. So how does maintenance help?

Water utilities provide a set service at a defined cost and effective maintenance will extend the life of the many assets used at a water utility, therefore saving costs in the long-run. An asset’s condition declines with use over time until it reaches a point where it is no longer capable of providing the level of service needed and ultimately reaches failure. If intervention is completed before reaching that point, by completing maintenance on the asset, the asset’s condition is improved, extending the life of that asset.

Assets throughout the system are different and while some assets should be allowed to run to failure without intervention, others should have routine maintenance done, and others still should have routine and preventive maintenance completed.  Finally, the highest dollar assets likely should have predictive maintenance completed.  Research has shown that doing preventive maintenance saves money versus operating in reactive mode,¹ while selectively adding predictive maintenance has been shown to save even more.²

The benefits of preventive maintenance are well established.  Now you must decide what to do and when to do it.  Luckily, there is a tool to help you answer those questions.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released an electronic preventive maintenance tool.  It is an interactive PDF file designed to be used electronically or in printed format.  The tool is called the “Preventive Maintenance for Small Public Water Systems Using Groundwater”  and it was designed with the following system characteristics in mind:

– Designed to help small systems:

1. Plan and record O&M activities
2. Create a permanent print or digital record of those activities

– Intended for ground water systems with up to:

1. 6 wells & well pumps
2. 4 storage tanks and/or pressure tanks
3. 4 chemical feed pumps
4. 4 booster pumps

– Could be used by surface water systems as part of O&M program.

The files can be downloaded here.  The SW EFC recently hosted a webinar that walks you through downloading and using the tool.  The webinar can be viewed here.

Sources:

1 “According to a case study by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, practicing Periodic component replacement in the form of preventive maintenance saves an estimated 12 to 18 percent over reactive maintenance.”  Making the Transition to Proactive Maintenance, Jeremy Write www.machinerylubrication.com

2 “Condition monitoring can decrease your motor operations and maintenance (O&M) expenses by up to 25 percent” How does condition monitoring prevent motor failures?  Nicole Dyess, Uptime https://reliabilityweb.com/articles/entry/how-does-condition-monitoring-prevent-motor-failures

The post Electronic Preventive Maintenance Logs first appeared on Southwest EFC.

I thoroughly enjoy having my conventional thinking turned on its head, which is even more fun when it affects conventional wisdom in general. So here goes…

What gap are we talking about here? We often think of the gap as the difference between the money we have and the money we want or need to complete all the projects on our list (including maintenance, repairs, and replacements.)  For the typical water, wastewater, or stormwater utility in the U.S., the gap is often quite large.  The gap usually includes pipe replacement, treatment plant upgrades, and years of neglected maintenance (often called deferred maintenance, implying we will do it “some day.”) The way the gap is viewed in most places is that it is a financial hole that someone needs to fill by giving the utility the money.  That someone may be the federal government (everyone’s preferred choice), the state government, the local government, a non-profit or private entity.

The new thinking is that this difference in finance (what we need/want minus what we have) is not a gap that someone is going to fill but rather a trade-off the decision-makers have made to fund one activity over another.  This thinking was introduced to me at the recently concluded Infrastructure Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) conference in Perth, Australia.  This thinking does not treat the gap as a hole that will be filled but rather looks at a community with all of its needs and financial resources and sees the choices to attain and spend all of its collective revenue as a series of trade-offs.

For example, a community may choose not to raise water revenue because property taxes, income taxes, or sales taxes were just increased.  While the water rates do not directly tie to these taxes in most cases, nor is the water or wastewater utility likely to benefit from the increased revenue the taxes may generate, the increased fees may feel like such a burden to businesses or residents (who are also voters) that adding additional fees onto customers may not be acceptable.  Therefore, decision-makers may choose to forgo a rate increase because of the tax increase(s).  The decision-makers, in essence, traded off the higher taxes for no increase in the water rate.

Trade-offs may also be made within a utility.  A utility may choose replacement of assets over maintenance for existing assets or to replace a water main under new road construction as opposed to a water main that had priority for replacement but wasn’t related to road repaving. These choices are made every day in utilities but we may not always see them this way.

If we see our infrastructure spending more as a finite pot of money that must be spent on the most advantageous projects through a series of trade-offs rather than as set of funding holes that must be filled up by outside money, we can start to see infrastructure more as it is than what we want it to be.  This thinking will also drive communities to start thinking holistically about all of their infrastructure (water, wastewater, roads, buildings, bridges, community facilities, parks, etc.) in a comprehensive asset management way.  This process would start by evaluating the community’s desired level of service and their priorities for infrastructure.  How do community residents rank parks compared to libraries or roads compared to water, etc.?  This process is done routinely in New Zealand where local governments must reach out to community residents every three years to assess their priorities and their desired level of service.  In New Zealand, this assessment process greatly assists local governments in making the tough choices and trade-offs. When community members are deeply involved in the process, they share in the consequences of the decisions that are made.  This shared responsibility gives elected leaders the opportunity to make the tough decisions without the constant worry of being thrown out of office.

Viewing the gap as a trade-off changes the conversation greatly and allows for a different narrative – one that is much more constructive and sustainable over the long-term.  This conversation should be based on a well-done, comprehensive asset management program that includes all assets under the government’s leadership. In concluding this post, I offer a challenge to all elected leaders or decision-makers:  if you thought of a trade-off (making choices for collecting and spending revenue) instead of a gap (a money hole to be filled by an outside source), how would your day-to-day decisions change?

Access our Asset Management Guide

The post It’s Not A Gap, It’s A Trade-off. first appeared on Southwest EFC.

In the beginning, before you learn about asset management at all, you may be letting your assets manage you. What I mean by that is that you wait until something happens and then react to it. You do maintenance only when you notice a problem or only according to the manufacturer’s recommendation or based on “it’s the way we always do it.” You do not plan for asset replacement proactively and have no shared vision or strategic direction with regards to your assets. The assets just do what they do until they don’t. You replace them when they no longer work the way you want them to. This is a very unsatisfying way of running your facility and, although it may not initially seem like it, a very costly way. Customers are unlikely to be satisfied with the performance and employees will have very unstructured, unplanned days as they react to each failure. Overtime pay may be quite high and financial resources are unlikely to keep pace with the needs.

You may decide to move away from letting your assets manage you to a better way of doing things. You read about asset management or take a training and you decide to begin your asset management journey. Sometimes this process gets derailed and instead of looking at the program as strategic and overarching, it becomes focused on what you are going to do to individual assets – how you will manage them, what the best maintenance strategy is, when to intervene with preventative activities, etc. You may feel that you are practicing asset management, when what you are really doing is managing assets. Managing assets is certainly important, but it is not synonymous with asset management.

With asset management, the organization considers its overall strategic direction, the goals it is trying to achieve, its overall business risk and how it intends to manage it. The organization adopts a common terminology and practices asset management at all levels throughout the organization. Rather than looking at what is done to a particular asset, the organization looks at how all its assets as well as business practices fit within the overall goals, objectives, and strategic direction of the organization.

This topic came up a couple of times recently which led me to want to write this blog. First, there is a great video from Terrence O’Hanlon describing the difference between managing assets and what we mean by asset management.

The video discusses in very clear terms the need to be more precise with our language as well as the concepts of asset management. As an example, Terry describes how talking about the purpose of the organization is part of asset management. Talking about maintenance and reliability is part of managing assets. Organizational value, purpose, long-term outcomes, and understanding business risk are part of asset management, while understanding the risk of a particular asset and managing it to reduce that risk is managing assets. These two ideas merge, intersect, and overlap at various points but they are distinctly different meanings. It is crucial to understand the difference or you will not develop an asset management program that is robust and able to achieve the benefits you want. I recommend that you take a look at Terry’s video as it is very well done and educates in an entertaining way.

The second time this came up was at an infrastructure conference in Perth Australia in August 2017 (The Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia Conference). I had a fantastic opportunity to talk with Dr. Penny Burns, who is someone I met many years ago when I was first beginning my asset management journey. Penny, from Adelaide, Australia, is one of the founders of the modern asset management movement that essentially began with Australia and New Zealand 20 years or so ago. She coined the terminology asset management to describe the approach they wanted to use. I was talking to Penny about this idea of “asset management” vs. “managing assets.” She described a similar dynamic in Australia to the one which Terry describes in the U.S. She noticed that communities were telling her that they were doing “asset management” when what they were really describing was managing assets. They were talking about maintenance and reliability-centered-maintenance and better ways to replace individual assets rather than focusing on the strategic vision and direction of the organization. While maintenance is an important activity for an organization, it is not by itself, asset management. Penny changed her language to “Strategic Asset Management” in an effort to create this distinction between what is being strategically done at the organizational level from what is being done at the asset level. Over the years, many organizations in Australia and New Zealand have developed and implemented strategic asset management programs but there are still those who are managing assets rather than practicing asset management.

Check out Penny’s organization TalkingInfrastructure.com to join the Asset Management conversation.

Next time you think about asset management, stop for a moment and think about what you really mean. Do you mean “asset management” or “managing assets.” If you happen to still be in the stage of letting your assets manage you, seek out assistance and resources on asset management to help you move along the journey. Some resources are available at the Southwest EFC website here. Please leave us a comment to let us know what you think of this topic.

The post Asset Management Vs. Managing Assets first appeared on Southwest EFC.

This past spring the SWEFC organized a pilot initiative designed to encourage undergraduate students at the University of New Mexico to explore careers in the water industry. The collaborative initiative with STEM University led to the six week long Water Utility Mapping Academy. Over the course of the Academy, Teresa Gomez, James Markham and Mark Ogrentz introduced students to water system components and taught them the basics of GIS data collection and mapping. The EFC’s goal was to sufficiently prepare students so that they could create water utility maps for small water systems around New Mexico over the course of the summer.

Below is a summary of the curriculum and activities our students completed over the course of the Academy.

Week 1:

After introducing them to the fundamentals of the water industry, Teresa took the students on a field trip around campus and taught them about various water system assets. Together they learned to identify valves, meters and hydrants as well as the purpose and function of each asset. Students also learned to estimate pipe locations with relation to the location of each of the above-mentioned assets. The skill-building homework assignment in anticipation of the next session was to draw a map of the valves, meters and hydrants in their own neighborhoods.

Image 1: Introduction to the water industry

Week 2:

Mark and James started the second session by going over the homework assignment and asking the students about their experiences. One student stated “ I had never noticed manholes before but now when I walk down the street I notice all the different kinds of manholes that are in the street and I wonder what is inside of them.” Next, Mark and James discussed asset inventories and the information needed to create an appropriate asset inventory before teaching students how to create mapping surveys using Fulcrum, a data collection application.

Image 2: Creating an asset inventory

Week 3:

Students walked around campus and used their phones and Fulcrum to collect GPS locations for UNM hydrants. They also used these applications to collect useful information about the hydrants such as hydrant manufacturer, design pressure, and hydrant condition. Thankfully, UNM Physical Plant staff agreed to provide students with a list of hydrants and their corresponding Asset IDs, estimated locations, and flow rates. This week, the homework assignment was to combine the office data they received from physical plant and the field data they collected on their own.

Image 3: Teresa shows students how to identify and collect hydrant information to input into Fulcrum, the mobile mapping app.

Image 4: Students identify and collect hydrant information to input into Fulcrum, the mobile mapping application.

Weeks 4 & 5:

Over the course of these two weeks, James and Mark introduced the students to ArcGIS. By the end of the fifth session, students created their own maps using the hydrant data they had collected in the field over the course of Week 3.

Image 5: Map of UNM hydrants

Week 6:

Teresa wrapped up the 6 week workshop series with a discussion about the various ways in which maps can be used in the water industry and possible water careers.  One student stated “I did not realize the variety of career options available in the water industry! I am going to go home and see what kinds of jobs are available around Albuquerque.”  Another student was curious about water industry careers in developing countries, while a third said that he was going to research which classes he would need to take to become a civil engineer.

Following the completion of the Mapping Academy, the SWEFC hired several students as interns to help communities around the state collect asset data and create GIS maps.  With the help of our interns, eight communities completed asset maps  We are very pleased with the outcome of this pilot project and hope that our interns’ careers will be shaped by the professional experience they accumulated while working with us over the course of the summer. Stay tuned for a blog post by one of our interns!

The post Water Utility Mapping Academy first appeared on Southwest EFC.

She gave me the following letter, which was written by the third-grade students:

I found their letter adorable so I agreed to come and talk to the class.  When I arrived, the students were well behaved and sitting on a rug towards the front of the class. I introduced myself and guided the class discussion around a few questions.

Question 1: What is the difference between storm water and waste water?

Their responses:

• Waste water is dirty water. Storm water is rain water.
• Waste water is from the toilet, storm water is from the sky.
• Waste water comes out of your house, storm water falls off the roof.

They were on the right track. They knew that storm water is caused by rain and wastewater is caused by us.

Questions 2: Why do communities clean their stormwater?

They looked at me with blank stares and were not sure how to respond. So, I asked them to imagine they were a little droplet of water in the sky and imagine where that droplet would go as it fell onto a community.

Our imaginary droplets’ trajectory looked like this:

• First the droplet falls onto a rooftop.
• Then it slides down the roof, down the gutter and onto the drive way.
• Then it rolls down the driveway, onto the street, into the street gutter and into an arroyo.
• The droplet then travels into the Rio Grande.

We concluded that the droplet probably wasn’t very clean when it arrived at the river because it had picked up gunk along the way. The students said the droplet would have dust from the rooftop and trash from the street. I reminded them that our streets are very oily because of all the cars driving on them and so the droplet would have also picked up oil. In the end, we concluded that storm water probably gets very dirty and that is why people try to clean it.

Question 3: Does waste water and storm water have different contaminants?

They talked about this for a long time and we brainstormed what the different contaminants could be. Here is a table of their ideas:

Question 4: How much wastewater do you think Albuquerque cleans each day?

Their Guesses:

• 200 gallons
• 1000 gallons
• 56,000 gallons

It seemed that the biggest amount of water the kids could imagine was 56,000 gallons.  When I told them it was a lot more than 56,000 gallons the class ooed and awed. Their eyes grew big and they were very shocked when I informed them that Albuquerque cleans 76 million gallons of water each day.  They were happy to find out that most of that water gets recycled and is used to water our parks and golf courses, but were saddened by the fact that Albuquerque does not clean its stormwater. The students did not like to think about all the trash, oil and dead animals they had described earlier flowing into our arroyos and the Rio Grande.

Conclusion:

I finished the lesson by reading them The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks where we got to learn about how water is cleaned and all the pieces that come together to ensure that drinking water is available to us.

Overall, I was very impressed by the students’ vocabulary. They knew about alum was and the purpose it serves. They also knew both the English and Spanish words for aquifer. They were very curious about what one had to do to have the job that I have. Did you go to college? they asked. They thought I was a teenager and were confused as to how I was working as an engineer. Do you have to go to college to do what you do? they asked and I shared with them about my college experience and how I decided to study Environmental Engineering. I think it is wonderful that these students have such a great understanding of how water gets cleaned and why it is important.  Living in a desert, water is scarce and instilling a greater understanding of its value in our children at a young age will contribute to greater stewardship in the future.

There are many ways to educate local children about water. For example, you could work on a rain barrel project with your kids! Or you could take them walking along the acequias and talk to them about water rights and irrigation.  As water industry workers, one can invite local school children to go on a field trip and tour the water system.  Water Operation is an aging industry. We should think about ways to recruit younger generations to the field. As water professionals, one option would be to reach out to local technical high schools and talk to the students the role and responsibilities of a water operator, the value of this profession and the steps the can take to become a water operator.

What experiences have you had with water and children outreach?

What ideas do you have with regards to educating our youth about water?

Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

The post Educating school-aged children about the water industry first appeared on Southwest EFC.

Dawn: I am a “water baby” born in February; my sign is “Aquarius” and I have always been drawn to water.  When I was young, after a rain storm, if a drain was clogged you could find me with a stick trying to get the water flowing again.  Water is so many things in my life: sport, health, career, family fun — the list goes on and on.  When I think specifically about drinking water I think about how overlooked and taken for granted it is in the U.S.  I think of places that don’t have enough drinking water or adequate infrastructure. I think of the impact those deficiencies have on everything from the health to the economy of those communities.  I wonder how many Americans have ever pumped water from a well or carried water from a spring.  It hasn’t been that long since those were the only ways to get water into our homes.  How far we’ve come and how far we have to go to protect the mighty resource that is drinking water.  My hope is that the work we are doing is putting us farther down the path of protection.

Matt: Being an advocate for something means that you publicly support and work towards a specific cause.  As we celebrate Drinking Water Week in 2017, one of the most important roles we can play in our communities is by being an advocate for safe and affordable drinking water. This role is particularly important in our small communities where a single person is often the driving force to ensure that their community has access to safe drinking water. In our large cities, water utilities, water boards, elected officials, corporations and citizens are all stakeholders in ensuring a safe and affordable supply of drinking water, but in our small communities it is that single person that can make an impact in sustaining the life force that is safe drinking water.  If that person is no longer able to play that role, then our small communities are in danger of losing that life force and dying.  Whether you live in a large city or a small town, I encourage you to think about advocating for safe drinking water. You have a chance to make a difference in your community, not only in 2017 but beyond.

Heather: Interestingly the “biggest challenge in drinking water” and the “importance of water” go hand in hand.  The biggest challenge — the fact that customers don’t want to pay a sustainable rate for water and elected leaders don’t want to charge a sustainable rate — is related to the fact that, in general, people greatly undervalue water.  Water comes into a home, safe to drink, under pressure, any time day or night through just a turn of the tap at far less than a penny per gallon. There is no more important product to support life and health, but there is also no less expensive product.  The water industry has been a victim of its own success in this regard. We have been able to provide such excellent service at such a low price that people have come to expect that high service/low price water forever. What customers may not realize is that much of the early infrastructure was installed with grant funds and the infrastructure is now reaching the end of its useful life.  Now that much of that infrastructure needs to be replaced (and the costs of replacement can be extraordinarily high), the rates need to go up in order to sustain the water utilities.  If the rates stay the same, we risk infrastructure failures which can result in short or long-term water outages, the potential for public health related concerns, or the potential to lose businesses due to an inability to provide reliable water service. Realizing that water is the foundation of our communities may lead customers and elected leaders to view paying rates not in a negative way, but rather as a positive, long-term investment in the community.

Francine: Growing up in Romania, I have many memories of our water service being interrupted – both with and without notice. The water-related memory that sticks with me the most is from the mid 1990s when hot-water services were only available twice a week for two hours at a time. I remember my sister and I having to interrupt our hide-and-seek games to rush home and take a shower before the service was interrupted again. Even when we were on time, the hot water would sometimes cut off mid-shower—now, twenty years later, I can still picture my mom carrying a steaming pot of hot water through the apartment to make sure I could rinse the shampoo out of my hair.  Some years later, soon after moving to a small town on the East Coast, I remember our landlord and neighbors happily reporting that there was no need for us to limit the duration of our showers since the water was free in that part of town. Although I did not realize the implications of those sorts of financial decisions until I began working for the Environmental Finance Centers, I continue to use water in a thoughtful manner and often have conversations with my friends and family about the importance of preserving this limited resource.

Mark: As part of a study conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)¹, it was determined that climate change will impact the availability of water in the contiguous United States in upwards of 1,100 counties by mid-century. Of the 1,100 counties predicted to be affected, 400 could face extreme water shortages resulting in the water users’ demand exceeding available supply. Planning now for the effects of our nation’s impending water supply shortage due to climate change will determine the success or failure of future agricultural yields, the accessibility for domestic use, and the availability of power due to a decreased supply to power plant cooling systems. It is apparent that the consequences of moving forward under the current approach to climate change is untenable for our future. We must make it the mission of this generation to find an environmentally conscientious way of managing our depleting resources, while simultaneously shifting to clean alternative options for meeting the exponentially growing demand for power in the United States and developing countries. 

Teresa: A few days ago I listened to a radio talk show when the hosts began a conversation about the poor access to water quality around the world. One of them then told the story of a friend who had volunteered with an NGO to drill a well in an African country.  How I wish things were that simple! Access to a reliable source of clean drinking water would be so much simpler if all we needed to do was to drill a well! Instead, what if that well is not adequately protected and becomes contaminated? What if the community does not know how to operate and maintain the well? How will the water from the well get disinfected? How will the water be safely transported from the well to people’s homes?

Many of us do not realize how many puzzle pieces must come together so that we can have clean water flowing out of our taps in our homes. People who live in big American cities are fortunate enough to have water treatment plants that use chlorine, filters, ozone, UV and whatever combination of treatment methods is necessary to remove contaminants from their water supply. In other parts of the country (and the world), there are communities with fewer resources who must decide which treatment methods to forgo and what kind of risks they are willing to take with their water supply. Effectively treating and distributing clean drinking water is an expensive process. As a result, there are many communities in the United States whose water systems have been completely abandoned. Those water systems are known as ‘orphan systems’ because no one is available to operate or maintain or ensure that the water is potable.  As budgets get slashed and economic opportunities migrate from rural to urban settings, elected officials will face the challenge of ensuring the number of ‘orphan systems’ does not continue to increase.

What does drinking water mean to me? Drinking water is like a mirror: it reflects our economy, education, community health and sociopolitical priorities.

Rose: Water is life: no living thing would exist without it. Ironically, although 70 percent of the earth is covered in water, most of it is saline and safe drinking water is quite difficult to find. In some parts of the world people fight for water—for themselves, for their livestock, and for their plants. However, in other parts of the world drinking water is taken for granted until we are faced with its scarcity. Only then are we sadly reminded of its importance in our lives. If lucky enough to have both abundant and safe drinking water, this resource should be treasured and protected at all costs. The 2014 US National Intelligence Strategy report and other Global Water Security Reports predict that future global wars will be fueled by water issues. The challenge therefore is, how can we avert this prediction from becoming a reality?

James: I grew up in Seattle, surrounded (and often drenched) by water.  It was always there and we took it for granted – you turned the tap and clean water came out. I’ve lived in many parts of the United States and abroad, but it wasn’t until I moved to New Mexico that it really occurred to me how dependent we are on our supply of clean water, how limited that supply can be, and how odd our water consumption habits are in the US.  Here I began to value the resource and marvel at the ingenuity that goes into making water safe and delivering it to us.  For example, we get much of our water supply in Albuquerque from rivers on the other side of the continental divide.  That’s an amazing engineering feat, but is it tenable long term? While I marvel at the technical feats used to deliver clean water into our homes, I also marvel at the unwillingness of consumers to pay for that service.  Clean water comes from our taps at pennies a gallon, but rate increases to maintain and improve our drinking water infrastructure are routinely objected to by both customers and water boards.   The disparity in water rates across the country is also amazing.  It strikes me as supremely ironic that customers in Seattle, a place with seeming (though not actual) unlimited supplies of fresh water pay four times what we do in Albuquerque.  Seattle residents also use less than half as much water as we do in Albuquerque.

And yet, while consumers reject water utility rate increases, many support a bottled water industry we don’t really need.  Water is drained from aquifers in Fiji, desiccated central California, and many other places.  It’s bottled and shipped to grocery stores in 20 oz. plastic bottles, and sold for more than $7.00 a gallon.  Why?  We need to re-think our habits, our long-term priorities, and our strategy before the resource that has always been there, isn’t there anymore.

1 Climate Change, Water, and Risk. (2010, July). Retrieved from https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/WaterRisk.pdf

What are your thoughts on drinking water? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

The post Happy Drinking Water Week! first appeared on Southwest EFC.

It is almost that time of the year again when all community water systems across the country are required to communicate the quality of their drinking water to their consumers through the publication of their annual consumer confidence report (CCR). Federal guidelines suggest that these reports should be made available to the public by July 1st each year, as they are an important tool for public communication and involvement. For some systems, the CCR provides an opportunity to showcase the work accomplished over the past year, ranging from developments and improvements at the water utility to reporting on good water quality results. For other systems, the CCR can be an undesirable disclosure of ‘not so good’ drinking water quality results and even incurred drinking water violations. Regardless of the situation, consumers have a right to know crucial information about their drinking water and any issues associated with it. Similar to food labels on food packaging at the grocery store, CCRs ensure that the public is well informed of what they are consuming. Each tap water user needs an assurance that they are consuming a clean and safe product. An informed public is always key to promoting confidence with water utilities. To learn more about CCRs visit the EPA website.

The post Consumer Confidence Reports – Transparency with the public first appeared on Southwest EFC.

World Water Day is on March 22 every year.  The theme for this year is “wastewater.”  According to worldwaterday.org, World Water Day is about taking action to tackle the water crisis.  The theme of wastewater this year helps draw attention to the fact that the majority of wastewater flows back to nature or neighbors without being treated.

The worldwaterday.org website has stories about “wastewater and its enormous opportunities as a resource.”  You can learn more at http://www.worldwaterday.org/stories/

The post World Water Day 2017 first appeared on Southwest EFC.