Thursday is the deadline for tens of thousands of people to submit claims for a share of the $626 million Flint water crisis settlement.

More than 50,000 people applied to be part of the settlement earlier this year. But plaintiffs’ attorney Channing Robinson-Holmes said only a little more than 20,000 have submitted official claims

She expects lines outside her office in Flint this week.

“We’re preparing to have a lot of people come in,” said Robinson-Holmes, “We have our whole team that will be ready and willing to help and we’re hoping that, like I said, that the class really shows up to get their forms in.”

From April 2014 through October 2015, the city of Flint received its drinking water from the Flint River, as it waited to be linked to a new water pipeline from Lake Huron. But the river water was not properly treated, releasing lead and other contaminants into Flint’s drinking water.

The decision to switch Flint’s drinking water source was made by an emergency manager appointed by Michigan’s governor as a way to save money and eliminate the city government’s budget deficit.

The result was a massive public health crisis.

The state of Michigan, the city of Flint and two local businesses agreed to create the pool of settlement money to pay for claims against them tied to Flint’s lead tainted drinking water.

Nearly 80% of the money is earmarked for those who were children during the water crisis, with most of that share going to very young children who face potentially the most serious long-term health problems.

The rest of the money will be divided among adults and those who suffered property damage due to the water crisis.

The settlement doesn’t settle all outstanding lawsuits tied to the Flint water crisis. Some plaintiffs opted out of the settlement to focus on their individual lawsuits against the state of Michigan, the city of Flint, McLaren Flint Hospital and Rowe Professional Services.

There are also lawsuits pending against the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Two engineering firms — Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews and Newnam — brought in as consultants on Flint’s water system are also facing lawsuits. A jury in Ann Arbor is currently hearing a case against the firms. It’s referred to as a bellwether case, since it may serve as a guide for future lawsuits.

Back in May, U.S. District Court Judge Judith Levy granted an extension to give people more time to submit their paperwork in the settlement claims process. She is not expected to grant a second extension.

Originally Appeared Here

Scottsdale City Council strengthened its commitment to water sustainability last week by adopting a set of water-management principles.

“These principles are a set of nine compiled from existing Scottsdale Water’s policies and practices with the intent of providing a transparent framework for sustainable water solutions for Scottsdale … They span the width and breath of what we do in Scottsdale Water,” said Scottsdale Water Executive Director Brian Biesemeyer.

The principles are 1. Water Quality 2. Water Conservation 3. Water Resource Planning 4. Water and Land Use Management 5. Water Recycle and Reuse 6. Water Recharge and Recovery 7. Infrastructure 8. Financial Planning 9. Climate Change and Drought.

The most significant may be number four, which states the City will develop policies that require any General Plan amendment or rezoning request that shows a water use above 100,000 gallons per day (excluding fire flow) to report certain information in a water demand exhibit.

That information includes: Total estimated water use per day on a sustained basis; net water use determined by a complex formula; and proposed conservation measures beyond those in the City Code.

Commercial and mixed-use developments also would have to show the annual economic value of the project on a per-gallon-of-use basis.

However, when questioned by Councilwoman Linda Milhaven, Scottsdale Water Policy Manager Gretchen Baumgardner confirmed that principle is only a tool to help guide decisions but is not a binding policy.

Baumgardner noted that developments that use 100,000 or more a day are few and far between, but they do exist. “We’re talking about very large commercial developments,” she said.

In comparison, Baumgardner said the average Scottsdale home uses about 100 gallons per person, per day.

Mayor David Ortega asked if the 100,000-gallon number is adjustable, based on state and federal requirements to cut water usage with the worsening of the regional drought, which is going on 22 years and counting.

“It is certainly open for discussion,” Biesemeyer said. “They’re not overarching guidelines, but with, say the 100,000-gallons-per-day requirement, as we get deeper into our drought management plan, that might be something the drought management team could come back and recommend to Council – that we lower that threshold because water is just that more important.”

Scottsdale’s action came less than a week after a federal official told a congressional panel that Lake Mead’s level was dropping faster than initially projected and that the Biden administration will impose stricter water-use requirements on tribal nations and seven Western states – including Arizona – if they don’t act first.

Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Committee that climate change and hotter average temperatures throughout most of the nation are threatening many cities’ water supplies but those that depend on the Colorado River face the greatest danger.

“Significant and additional conservation actions are required to protect the Colorado River system infrastructure and the long-term stability of the system,” she said.

The Colorado provides 70% of Scottsdale’s water via the Central Arizona Project.

Ensuring water quality, is “a key pillar” of what Scottsdale water does, Biesemeyer said.

“Water utilities are unique in the fact we provide a consumptive commodity to everybody’s home on a 24-hour a day basis,” Biesemeyer said.

He noted that Scottsdale’s water treatment facilities are designed in such a way that the treated water is at least 50% less than state and federal maximum contaminant levels.

He added thatthe city has thousands of back-flow devices to ensure waste water does not enter the potable water supply.

“Principle 2, water conservation, outlines two main objectives of the conservation program, Baumgardner said. “One of those is to provide the resources and tools to all of our customers so they can conserve water.

“The next one is to provide educational opportunities so these customers understand that we’re a desert city and water is a finite resource. They are stewards of it. All of them are. How do they do that? By conserving water on each one of their properties.”

Water resource planning is “a great topic for right now because we all understand in the news what is happening right now is very critical in the state and desert southwest planning,” Baumgardner said.

There are two main focuses to this principle: water resource regulatory compliance and long-term planning.

Regulatory compliance requires that Scottsdale Water will remain in compliance with the assured water supply program and annual reports; that it will, when available, recharge imported surface water underground for future use and that it will actively pursue water rights.

Long-term planning entails remaining engaged in local, state, and federal discussions on water resources planning, examining future potential extended long-term drought/shortage supply issues and examining potential future water supply acquisition opportunities

The principle of water recycle and reuse has five components: Remain engaged in regional, state, and national discussions and negotiations on the use and regulation of reclaimed water; expand recycled water systems where possible to replace potable water use’ and maintain standards for the equipment and infrastructure that are unique to the conveyance, treatment and distribution of reclaimed water.

That principle also recommends ordinances and policies that require the use of reclaimed water, where appropriate and maintaining education programs that focus on what reclaimed water is and its benefits to the city’s water portfolio and citizens.

The principle of water recharge and recovery includes reducing groundwater pumping, increasing the use of renewable water supplies and increasing the amount of recharge and emphasizing recharge within the Scottsdale water service area.

The principle of infrastructure states planning is incorporated in Scottsdale Water’s capital improvement plans and developed in coordination with the integrated water resources master plan (which operates on a 5- year cycle), the infrastructure improvement plan (3-year cycle) and technology master plan (5-year cycle).

Financial planning notes that Scottsdale water is a self-supporting enterprise fund, so it is completely financed by rates and fees. Reserves are required and fully funded, requiring approval from city council to access. Bond covenants requirements are met and development fee programs exist for capital expenses attributed to new development.

The principle of climate change and drought involves addressing changes that impact long-term water resources by examining both demand management and supply.

That means that now that Scottsdale a drought management plan, Scottsdale Water will participate in the city’s sustainability planning efforts as well as in regional, state, national, and international discussions and projects on water supply augmentation.

Councilwoman Betty Janik said, “I’m asking all of us to start conserving water and try to reduce your use by 5%.”

Councilwoman Tammy Caputi said water does not have to be a scary subject.

“Water is a scarce resource, we live in the desert, but I just want to say our city is doing a fantastic job of this … We are planning,” she said. “We don’t make off-the-cuff decisions. We’re actually taking into account water usage based on what we’re doing going forward tracking development. We are planning carefully, we have a drought management plan.”

Originally Appeared Here

ANDOVER — The Department of Public Works is working to address lead in drinking water following a 2021 Annual Drinking Quality Report, which showed that lead was found at or above the acceptable or healthy levels in six homes.

The report stated that 31 homes were tested with six scoring at or above the so-called “actionable level.” However, according to Water Treatment Superintendent Brain Peña, the 31 chosen homes were all at locations that the town knew already contained lead-lined services.

Peña said that the town is committed to bringing the level of lead in drinking water to zero.

According to Department of Public Works Director Chris Cronin, part of the reason that some homes tested above the actionable level this year was because that level had recently been lowered.

In total, Peña said, there are around 150 homes in Andover that the town knows have lead-lined services. Peña added that residents who bought their homes recently have already been informed if their home has lead-lined services. These residents will also be receiving correspondence from the town in order to let them know that they are eligible for a free water service replacement, said Peña.

However, there are a number of homes where the type of plumbing is unknown, said Peña. He estimated this number at around 1,300 homes and said that the town has committed to investigating 400 of these homes per year.

Residents who are part of this group will be receiving a letter in the mail in order to set up an inspection, said Peña. Peña said the inspection will take at most 15 minutes. So far the town has conducted 100 of these investigations and found only seven homes to have lead-lined services, said Peña.

Another part of the problem, Cronin said, is that the part of the services that contains lead is usually owned by the homeowner instead of the town, and thus requires the permission of the homeowner to be fixed.

The lead-lined services are usually found in older homes in Andover, in older parts of town like Ballardvale, he said.

Peña said that for the 2022 report the town will be testing twice a year, rather than once, and test 60 homes rather than 30, per new regulations.

Originally Appeared Here

Every day, Morris Malambile loads his wheelbarrow full of empty plastic containers and pushes it from his home to the nearest running tap. It’s much further than the usual walk to the kitchen sink – just a little under a mile away – but it’s not the distance that bothers him.

It’s the bumpy road – which runs between tightly packed shanty dwellings and beige public-funded houses – that makes balancing containers filled with 70 litres of water on his return a pain.

“Home feels far when you are pushing 70kg of water in a wheelbarrow,” said the 49-year-old resident from the South African township of Kwanobuhle.

Morris Malambile says pushing a wheelbarrow filled with water containers is an exhausting morning ritual and necessity. (Riaan Maraid for CNN)

Taps ran dry in parts of Kwanobuhle in March, and since then, thousands of residents have been relying on a single communal tap to supply their households with potable water. And the township is just one of many in the affected Nelson Mandela Bay area of Gqeberha city – formerly known as Port Elizabeth – that rely on a system of four dams that have been steadily drying up for months. There hasn’t been enough heavy rain to replenish them.

A week ago, one dam was decommissioned as levels dropped too low to extract any actual water – its pipes were just sucking up mud. Another is just days away from emptying out.

Now much of the city is counting down to “Day Zero”, the day all taps run dry, when no meaningful amount of water can be extracted. That’s in around two weeks, unless authorities seriously speed up their response.

The wider Eastern Cape region of South Africa suffered a severe multi-year drought between 2015 and 2020, which devastated the local economy, particularly its agricultural sector. It had just a brief reprieve before slipping back into drought in late 2021.

Leonard Matana. 69, filling up a plastic container with water at a communal tap in the township of Kwanobuhle in South Africa. (Riaan Maraid for CNN)

Like so many of the world’s worst natural resource crises, the severe water shortage here is a combination of poor management and warping weather patterns caused by human-made climate change.

On top of that, thousands of leaks throughout the water system means that a lot of the water that does get piped out of the dams may never actually make it into homes. Poor maintenance, like a failed pump on a main water supply, has only worsened the situation.

That has left Malambile – who lives with his sister and her four children – with no choice but to walk his wheelbarrow through the township every single day for the past three months. Without this daily ritual, he and his family would have no drinking water at all.

“People who don’t live here have no idea what it’s like to wake up in the morning, and the first thing on your mind is water,” Malambile said. His family has enough containers to hold 150L of water, but each day he fills around half that while the rest is still in use at home.

“Tomorrow, those ones are empty, and I have to bring them again,” he said. “This is my routine, every day, and it is tiring.”

A water collection point (one of many set up around the city) in the Walmer suburb of Gqeberha, South Africa. (Samantha Reinders)

Counting down to Day Zero

The prospects of meaningful rain to help resupply the reservoirs here is looking bleak, and if things keep going the way they are, around 40 per cent of the wider city of Gqeberha will be left with no running water at all.

The Eastern Cape relies on weather systems known as “cut-off lows.” The slow-moving weather systems can produce rain in excess of 50mm in 24 hours, followed by days of persistent wet weather. The problem is, that kind of rain just hasn’t been coming.

The next several months do not paint a promising picture either. In its Seasonal Climate Outlook, the South African Weather Service forecasts below-normal precipitation.

This isn’t a recent trend. For nearly a decade, the catchment areas for Nelson Mandela Bay’s main supply dams have received below average rainfall. Water levels have slowly dwindled to the point where the four dams are sitting at a combined level of less than 12 per cent their normal capacity. According to city officials, less than 2 per cent of the remaining water supply is actually useable.

Fresh in the minds of people here is Cape Town’s 2018 water crisis, which was also triggered by the previous, severe drought as well as management problems. The city’s residents would stand in lines for their individually rationed 50L of water each day, in fear of reaching Day Zero. It never actually reached that point, but it came dangerously close. Strict rationing enabled the city to halve its water use and avert the worst.

And with no heavy rain expected to come, Nelson Mandela Bay’s officials are so worried about their own Day Zero, they are asking residents to dramatically reduce their water usage. They simply have no choice, the municipality’s water distribution manager Joseph Tsatsire said.

“While it is difficult to monitor how much every person uses, we hope to bring the message across that it is crucial that everyone reduce consumption to 50L per person daily,” he said.

To put that in perspective, the average American uses more than seven times that amount, at 372 lires a day.

While parts of the city will probably never feel the full impact of a potential Day Zero, various interventions are in the pipeline to assist residents in so-called “red zones” where their taps inevitably run dry.

Rhett Snyman standing next to one of his several water tanks he has set up at him home in the Kamma Heights suburb of Gqeberha, South Africa. (Samantha Reinders)

Earlier this month, the South African national government sent a high-ranking delegation to Nelson Mandela Bay to take charge of the crisis and to implement emergency strategies to stretch the last of the city’s dwindling supply.

Leak detection and repairs were a focus, while plans are being made to extract “dead storage water” from below the supply dams’ current levels. Boreholes were drilled in some locations to extract ground water.

Some of the interventions – including patching up leaks and trucking in water – mean some who had lost their water supplies at home are starting to get a trickle from their taps at night. But it’s not enough and authorities are looking to bigger, longer-term solutions to a problem that is only projected to worsen the more the Earth warms.

South Africa is naturally prone to drought, but the kind of multi-year droughts that cause such misery and disruption are becoming more frequent.

A desalination plant – to purify ocean water for public consumption – is being explored, though such projects require months of planning, are expensive and often contribute further to the climate crisis, when they are powered by fossil fuels.

People in Kwanobuhle are feeling anxious about the future, wondering when the crisis will end.

At the communal tap there, 25-year-old Babalwa Manyube fills her own containers with water while her 1-year-old daughter waits in her car.

“Flushing toilets, cooking, cleaning – these are problems we all face when there is no water in the taps,” she said. “But raising a baby and having to worry about water is a whole different story. And when will it end? No one can tell us.”

A sign urging residents to restrict their water usage in the suburbs of Gqeberha, South Africa. (Samantha Reinders)

In Kwanobuhle, the public housing is for people with little to no income. Unemployment is rife and crime is on a steady rise. The streets are packed with residents hustling for money. Old shipping containers operate as a makeshift barbershops.

Just on the other side of the metro is Kamma Heights, a new leafy suburb situated on a hill with a beautiful, uninterrupted view of the city. It is punctuated by several newly built luxury homes, and residents can often be seen sitting on their balconies, enjoying the last few rays of sunshine before the sun dips behind the horizon.

Some residents in Kamma Heights are wealthy enough to secure a backup supply of water. Rhett Saayman, 46, lets out a sigh of relief every time it rains and he hears water flow into the tanks he has erected around his house over the last couple of years.

His plan to save money on water in the long run has turned out to be an invaluable investment in securing his household’s water supply.

Saayman has a storage capacity of 18,500 litres. The water for general household use, like bathrooms, runs through a 5-micron particle filter and a carbon block filter, while drinking and cooking water goes through a reverse osmosis filter.

“We do still rely on municipal water from time to time when we haven’t had enough rain, but that might be two or three times a year, and normally only for a few days at a time,” he said. “The last time we used municipal water was in February, and since then we’ve had sufficient rain to sustain us.”

He added, “Looking at the way things are heading around the city it’s definitely a relief to know we have clean drinking water and enough to flush our toilets and take a shower. Our investment is paying off.”

Residents in many parts of the bay area are being asked to reduce their consumption so that water can be run through stand pipes – temporary pipes placed in strategic locations so that water can be diverted areas most in need.

Workers constructing a water collection point, one of many set up around the city. (Samantha Reinders)

This means some of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods, like Kama Heights, could see huge drop in their water supplies, and they too will have to line up at communal taps, just as those in Kwanobuhle are doing.

Looking ahead, local weather authorities have painted a worrying picture of the months to come, with some warning that the problem had been left to fester for so long, reversing it may be impossible.

“We have been warning the city officials about this for years,” said Garth Sampson, spokesperson for the South African Weather Service in Nelson Mandela Bay. “Whether you want to blame politicians and officials for mismanagement, or the public for not conserving water, it does not matter anymore. Pointing fingers will help no one. The bottom line is we are in a crisis and there is very little we can do anymore.”

Countries with the highest military expenditure in the world

According to Sampson, the catchment areas supplying Nelson Mandela Bay need about 50 millimetres of rain in a 24-hour period for there to be any significant impact on the dam levels.

“Looking at the statistics over the last several years, our best chance of seeing 50mm events will probably be in August. If we don’t see any significant rainfall by September, then our next best chance is only around March next year, which is concerning,” he said.

“The only way this water crisis is coming to an end it with a flood. But fortunately, or unfortunately – depending on who you ask – there are no forecasts suggesting rain of that magnitude anytime soon.”

Originally Appeared Here

JACKSON, Miss.

Residents and businesses in Mississippi’s capital are under a citywide boil-water notice until further notice.

The alert was issued Friday because of water pressure issues at the O.B. Curtis Water Plant, city officials said in a news release. It affects all surface and well water customers.

Jackson has longstanding, expensive-to-fix problems with its aging water system, and the EPA issued a notice in January that the system violates the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The order directed the city to outline a plan to “correct the significant deficiencies identified” in an EPA report within 45 days. It was not immediately known whether the city had complied.

Friday’s boil notice comes days after the city issued a water conservation advisory because of an anticipated high demand during the ongoing intense heat. The city says ongoing mechanical issues with filtration equipment at the plant, combined with higher than normal demand due to prolonged high temperatures, have led to low water pressure in the system.

Once pressure drops below 65 psi, the city is required to issue a citywide notice because of the possibility that untreated groundwater can enter the systems through cracked pipes. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Mississippi Department of Health have been notified.

Customers are advised to boil their drinking water until adequate pressure is restored to the system. Water should be brought to a rolling boil for one minute for cooking or baking, making ice cubes, taking medication, brushing teeth, washing food, mixing baby formula or food, mixing juices or drinks feeding pets, washing dishes and all other consumption.

Like many older cities around the U.S., Jackson faces more water system problems than it can afford to fix. The city’s tax base has eroded over the past few decades as the population has decreased — the result of mostly white flight to suburbs that began after public schools integrated in 1970. The city’s population is now more than 80% Black, with about 25% of residents living in poverty.

After cold weather blanketed parts of the South last February, equipment froze in a Jackson water treatment plant. For weeks, thousands of people were left with no running water or water pressure that was dangerously low. The city ran distribution sites where people brought buckets to pick up water to bathe or flush toilets. The National Guard helped distribute cases of drinking water, and volunteers delivered bottled water to people without access to transportation.

In addition to water pressure, Jackson has also had water quality problems for years. Because of concerns about lead levels, the city has long told people to avoid using hot tap water for drinking or cooking and to only use filtered or bottled water for baby formula.

There’s no word on when the citywide boil order will be lifted.

Originally Appeared Here

PHOENIX – State lawmakers took the first steps Thursday to providing a secure and reliable source of water for Arizona.

And the director of the state Department of Water Resources said the most likely and affordable prospect could involve Arizonans drinking their own waste – and getting beyond the “ick factor.”

“While that sounds maybe yucky, it’s already happening,” Tom Buschatzke told members of the Senate Committee on Natural Resource, Energy and Water.

He said communities already are putting treated wastewater into the Colorado River. And that is being drawn out further downstream, albeit diluted by the regular flow of the river.

Sen. Lisa Otondo, D-Yuma, said the idea doesn’t bother her.

“God doesn’t make new water,” she said.

“Obviously, we’ve been using the same thing that’s been on the planet for a long time,” Otondo said. “So reuse is not disgusting to me.”

All this comes as the committee approved a 50-page plan to revamp the existing Water Infrastructure Finance Authority and provide it with $1 billion of tax dollars over the next three years to find new water.

SB 1740 would require that 75% of the cash to be spent to acquire water from outside of the state. And that has led to a proposal to build a desalination plant to treat water from the Sea of Cortez.

Only thing is, Buschatzke said, construction costs are estimated at about $3 billion. And the cost of delivering water would approach $2,500 an acre foot, the amount of water that, depending on usage, is needed to serve from two to four single-family homes.

So think possible $1,200 annual water bills per house for treated seawater. And that could be what makes treatment of effluent to drinking water quality – more colorfully referred to as “toilet-to-tap” – a viable option.

But what’s missing from the legislation, according to some, is a focus on a less expensive – and potentially more immediate – solution: conservation.

“We all know that augmentation will not come for at least a decade,” said Nick Ponder, representing a variety of interests from Mohave County and the Water for Arizona Coalition, which includes the Environmental Defense Fund, the Audubon Society and Western Rivers.

“Conservation is the most impactful benefit that we can get today,” he said.

Sen. Victoria Steele, D-Tucson, agreed.

“I know desalination plants and all of that are in the works,” she said. And Steele said that’s fine, and should be pursued as “critical pieces” of solving the state’s water woes.

“But these things are so much further into the future,” she said. “And we’re at Defcon 5 now.”

That was underlined by Buschatzke, who detailed not just prior cuts in Arizona’s share of Colorado River water but noted the cuts ordered earlier this month by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation based on current levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. He cited the possibility of even deeper cuts, and the lakes reaching “dead pool” when no water will be available.

And there’s another thing that some say is missing from this plan.

There already are regulations that govern water supply in “active management areas” that cover the state’s two major metropolitan areas as well as portions of Pinal and Yavapai County. But the rest of the state is pretty much the wild west, lacking not only regulation but even any sort of monitoring of how much water is being pumped from the ground.

“If we don’t know how much is there, if we don’t have the data, then how do we know how to protect it, how do we know how to protect our small farmers,” asked Steele. She said the nation and the world is reliant on family farms.

“It breaks my heart when I see huge conglomerates, huge corporations, coming in and sucking our wells dry and all the wells of the neighbors in the area,” she said. “And that’s criminal; that should not be happening.”

So far, though, there has been lukewarm interest in some rural areas in having the same kinds of regulation that exist in the active management areas.

Sen. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, D-Tucson said the state should look to even more creative solutions to the problem. One of these, she said, is technology that has been researched at the University of Arizona: installing solar panels over agricultural crops.

“It nets a triple win,” she said.

First, Stahl Hamilton noted, solar panels are less effective at higher temperatures. She said the evaporation from farmland cools them and makes them produce more electricity.

She also said that the panels cut water usage to a third and doubles crop yields.

The measure has strong support from the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation. And a lot of that is self-preservation.

Agriculture uses about 70% of the state’s water supply. And the organization’s Chelsea McGuire said any plans to increase the water supply “takes that target off the back of agricultural water users.”

Sen. Sine Kerr, R-Buckeye, who chairs the committee, was sensitive to that issue.

“I think there’s going to come a point, maybe very soon, (when we’ll have to decide) do we want green grass in our yards or do we want green vegetables on our plates,” she said.

There are other issues that lawmakers say need to be addressed when the measure goes to the full Senate.

Otondo said there is a provision in state law that says communities of more than 150,000 have to have a public vote before they can apply for federal financial assistance for things like water and wastewater treatment plants. She said that’s not fair when smaller communities do not have that hurdle.

But Kerr said changing that is “a policy question” that would have to be addressed as part of the overall plan.

There also are concerns by Democrats, whose votes likely will be needed for final approval, that the reconstituted board of the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority would be made up solely of people appointed by the governor, the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate, all of whom are Republicans.

Originally Appeared Here

For five months, Ngozi Hlungwani and Sarah Baloyi have been waiting in vain for a Vhembe District Municipality tanker to fill their empty water drums.

Photos: Bernard Chiguvare

• We visited Mtititi 18 months ago and villagers had access to water from a jojo tank and a borehole two kilometres away.
• The borehole has stopped working and the jojo tank has not been refilled for five months.
• Most of the villagers live on social grants.

Eighteen months after we last reported on the dire water situation in Mtititi, outside Thohoyando in Limpopo, the situation has only become worse, despite promises made by the district municipality at the time. 

The 650 RDP houses of Mtititi, built in 1999, have never had tap water. When we visited in November 2020, residents were fetching water from a borehole at Muhunguti village a couple of kilometres away. That borehole stopped functioning in December 2020. The municipal spokesperson said some boreholes have dried up, but did not answer specifically on this one.

The alternative for residents then was to fetch water from one of two 5 000-litre jojo tanks in Muhunguti. One tank had been broken since 2016. Vhembe District Municipality (VDM), which is responsible for water, promised to fix it but never has. The one intact tank has not been filled for the past five months.

Seventeen-year-old Mabasa Ongani works at this car wash. “I have very few clients since sometimes I have no water for washing the cars,” he says. He needs 1,000 litres (bought for R180 to R200) for five days. He says many customers have abandoned him and go to Malamulele town where they are assured of water to wash their cars.

GroundUp

In vain villagers like Ngozi Hlungwani, who is 80 this year, and Sarah Baloyi, 66, have been getting up at 6:00 to cart their empty 200-litre plastic water drums to the side of the road in the hope that the VDM water tanker will eventually show up. Such blue containers can be seen on nearly every street. In the afternoon the two women carry their empty containers back home. This has been going on for five months, they say.

Asked why there had been no deliveries, VDM spokesperson Mtodzi Ralushai said: “The municipality has limited water tankers, however tankers are deployed as per request.”

“Why should we request water tankers in Mtititi area? The VDM know very well that we do not have water!” said Given Magoveni, a community leader.

For the past months, villagers have resorted to buying water from private water tankers. They pay R5 for 25 litres. Most families survive on social grants and can hardly afford it.

Nomsa Maluleke stores and rations her water from 24 containers of 25 litres each. It costs R120 and lasts two weeks. She has a family of six and uses her child grants.

Maluleke said:

These politicians, when it comes election time, they regularly visit us promising to fix our water issue, but after voting we do not see them anymore.

“Not very far away is Nandoni dam which is 100% full, but the municipality fails to install water pipes in our town,” said resident Oscar Chauke.

Ralushai said that the municipality was working on a plan to resolve the water problems in the area, such as identifying underground water sources.

While visiting Mtititi, GroundUp also discovered that the pit toilets – each RDP house has one – are full and now most residents are using the surrounding bush.

Some residents said they would build new toilets, but without water, they cannot do the construction.

We want to hear your views on the news. Subscribe to News24 to be part of the conversation in the comments section of this article.

Originally Appeared Here

Drinking water has become costlier than petrol in Silchar town in South Assam, still grappling with the devastating flood. 

With no drinking water since the serious flood inundated his house at Sonai Road in Silchar town on June 20, Biju Das was left with no option but to buy two bottles of one-litre drinking water at Rs. 110 each on Friday. 

“By Thursday, the water we had in storage was exhausted. There has been no electricity since Monday and the inverter was under water. So it was not possible to water. It was not possible to go out due to strong water currents. On Friday, I walked about one kilometre in waist-deep flood water to buy drinking water. A bottle of one-litre drinking water, which is normally sold at Rs. 20 is being sold at Rs. 100 and even in some places at Rs. 150. I had no option but to buy two bottles,” Das, a high school teacher told DH over the phone on Saturday. 

Also Read: Acutely vulnerable Assam needs a plan

“People have no option as the administration is still unable to reach many lanes in Silchar due to water and strong currents,” he said. 

The level of flood water in the worst affected Silchar started receding on Friday but there was waist-deep water in many localities including in its adjoining areas even on Saturday. 

Kritiman Roy, a resident of Ulashpur, another badly affected area, said the water level was receding but managing drinking water was still a big problem. “The administration has not been able to reach out to many localities with water. They should have brought in more boats,” Roy, a civil engineer, who works in an MNC in Pune, told DH. “Some people are now trying to harvest rainwater for use. But that carries the threat of waterborne disease, if not filtered properly,” he said. 

Heavy rains on the hills of adjoining Meghalaya and Mizoram swelled the water level in the Barak river causing a breach in an embankment. This made the flood situation in Silchar and adjoining areas in Cachar district grim since June 20. 

Videos shared on social media showed people dangerously standing in waist-deep flood water even on Saturday for water bottles and food items being airdropped by IAF helicopters in Silchar. “The IAF is finding it difficult as there is no dry place to drop the food items,” said an official in Cachar district administration. The NDRF personnel also continued their rescue efforts while the administration stepped up efforts to distribute drinking water and food items. 

Subhadip Dutta, a resident of Tarapur near Silchar railway station, said water started receding in his area but electricity was not restored yet as the power transformer was still under water.

Death toll due to floods and landslides in Assam reached 117 on Friday, of which 21 were in Cachar district. Over 2.8 lakh people got affected due to floods in Silchar and nearby areas. The daily flood bulletin issued by Assam State Disaster Management Authority on Friday said over three lakh people remained affected by flood in 28 districts in Assam.

Originally Appeared Here

REDDING — When she saw the picture of the discolored water in the Facebook post, First Selectwoman Julia Pemberton said she was “horrified by it” even though the condition is found in many parts of town.

The picture in question — posted to a community social media page on June 17 — shows an inflatable pool filled with dark red and brown water for field day at Redding Elementary School. The discoloration is a result of high iron levels in the school’s water system, according to officials.

“We have very high iron content in our water in many areas of Redding. Town Hall’s water is not potable,” Pemberton said. “If you leave a cup sitting with any of the water in it, when the water evaporates, what you are left with is a dark mineral stain, like a black.”

School officials have known about the high iron content in Redding Elementary’s water for more than four years; but it was not until a week before the field day event and the Facebook post that any action was taken to correct it.

Jason McKinnon, superintendent of the Region 9 school district, acknowledged “the color of the water at field day,” according to a letter he sent recently to the Redding Elementary School community.

He said the district would tackle the project. The Board of Education voted earlier this month to direct his office to prepare a proposal requesting $32,000 of the town’s allocation of federal COVID-19 pandemic-relief to install a new water filtration system at Redding Elementary School, according to his letter.

“For the past several years, there has been a high iron content in the water at [Redding Elementary School] which produces a red color. Staff and students drink bottled water, and the board has spent money in our budget each year to clean and rinse the water storage tanks.” said McKinnon, who became superintendent last October.

“We frequently test water quality and provide bottled water where needed,” he added.

At a Redding Board of Education meeting June 6, McKinnon explained how, in 2017, school officials learned of water quality issues at Redding Elementary School.

A March 2017 correspondence sent to the Redding Board of Education from the state Department of Public Health, or DPH, documented “significant deficiencies” in the school’s water-filtering systems.

“The school has experienced discolored water events and as a result has been on bottled water,” DPH said. “This office believes that part of the problem is that the water is treated after storage.”

“A much more common practice is to treat [the water] before and then store ‘clean’ water in the tank,” DPH said. “This avoids the concern of slugs of iron and maganese sediment being periodically released into the distribution system.”

Based on the information, “a recommendation was made at that time for a new water-filtration system,” McKinnon told the Redding Board of Education earlier this month.

“I expect the project will be completed this summer, and we will test water quality before the start of school,” he said.

Redding Public Health Officer Douglas Hartline said Wednesday the high levels of iron are “naturally occurring” and said the water in the schools is “treated with iron removal units and it has been going through filters for a long time.”

“The water is drinkable,” he said. “Whether they use it or not is entirely up to them.”

Chris Parkin, chair of the Redding Board of Education and a member since 2017, said in an email Wednesday, “The iron content at RES is a known issue, and the board authorized the administration to seek funding to remedy it earlier this month.”

He said he could not say how long the “iron content” at the school has been a “known issue,” adding, “I don’t know without researching the issue and don’t want to guess.”

“[Redding Elementary School] has used bottled water exclusively for drinking and cooking for several years and will continue to do so,” he added. “I’m not familiar with the health department’s view on treatment … and I can’t comment on what makes water potable or not.”

A ‘known issue’

According to minutes of Redding Board of Education meetings, school officials became aware of water quality issues in 2017 when it hired a consulting firm, Leggette, Brashears & Graham.. For $13,500, the firm completed its water-quality analysis at Redding Elementary School and John Read Middle School.

The Redding Board of Education’s Facilities Planning Committee reviewed the firm’s final analysis in August 2018 and “advised that remediation actions should be considered against the cost/benefits of continuing usage of bottled water.” It also “recommended professional evaluation of domestic water piping to assess potential for corrosion related issues and treatment options,” according to the committee’s meeting minutes.

The consultants found that the wells at both schools were contaminated with elevated levels of sodium and chloride that engineers said likely resulted from road salting, according to meeting minutes.

Obtained by the News-Times, a summary of the 2018 report into Redding Elementary School’s water quality shows the consulting firm found iron levels in the drinking water surpassed levels that affect its aesthetic, but not reaching limits that would make the water not potable.

The analysis also said “turbidity, iron, and maganese are settling in the 10,000-gallon atmospheric storage tank, which resulted in the need for quarterly cleaning.” It also recommended adding “water treatment equipment to reduce turbidity, iron, and manganese.”

Based on the investigation, the Redding Board of Education hired Ron Black of Watertown-based Water Systems Solutions and Designs Inc. as the school district’s “water system provider” in December 2019.

According to meeting minutes, Black maintained water systems for multiple districts, including the one at use at Joel Barlow High School. Nearly a year after he was hired, Black, who did not return a request for comment , presented an analysis of the water system designs at Redding Elementary and John Read Middle School.

In it, he “strongly” advised installing a “chlorination injection system” at the middle school to inactivate microorganisms, including bacteria and viruses, and recommended the school district drill new wells and to fund “quality and yield testing” at the existing wells.

In both schools, Black added, the design of the wells proved “inconsistent with the current codes and presents potential safety risks to technicians and staff servicing the equipment,” according to the minutes.

Later work performed at the middle school found a solution to the water-quality issues without requiring a new filtration system, but long-term recommendations to address the high iron content at the elementary school went unaddressed — creating short-term costs.

Recent budget documents for Redding Elementary and John Read Middle School show at least $35,000 allocated in the 2021-22 school year for items related to water quality.

Proposed figures for Redding Elementary School’s budget for this school year lay out $7,600 for its “water system operating contract;” $8,900 for “bottled water and supplies,” $3,600 for “water system repairs,” and $2,200 for “water testing.”

At John Read Read Middle School, this year’s budget includes line items for $7,200 for “bottled water and water cooler rentals,” $3,900 for the school’s “water system operator;” and, complete with an itemized caveat of a “possible increase needed” to a $2,200 line item for “water testing.”

ARPA request in the works

Pemberton said she was “not pointing the finger at anyone,” over the Redding Elementary School’s water quality issue. But criticism directed at the town for not supporting capital projects to improve the schools is unfair, she said. Neither the town’s voters nor the Board of Finance have “ever turned away a capital project that improved the water quality at a school,” she said.

“Everybody likes to point the finger at the town and what you are seeing on Facebook is, well, the Board of Finance ‘nickels and dimes’ the schools, and that is simply inaccurate,” Pemberton said. “If these problems are not presented by the school board to the town for resolution — we can’t address them.”

“It is the job of the Board of Education to adopt a capital plan for their schools. This would include resolution of any water issues that require capital funding,” she added. “That is solely in their purview.”

For now, the school board plans to pursue a new filtration system for the Redding Elementary School, with a request to draw $32,000 from Redding’s allotment of federal pandemic relief funding.

The town received $2.7 million from the federal government under the U.S. American Rescue Plan, or, ARPA.

As of June 2, a total of $462,567 had already been approved for six projects, including two submitted by the Redding Board of Education for $30,000 to support the outdoor learning space at John Read Middle School, known as Project COOL, and $40,000 to repave a recreation area outside Redding Elementary School.

Seven other requests recommended for approval from the Board of Selectmen total $503,489, including a proposal from the school district to use $39,922 in ARPA funding for a “Region 9 HVAC Tower,” according to town documents.

Redding’s school district has other projects it hopes to submit through the town’s ARPA review, but McKinnon told the school board that the water filtration system for the elementary school is the most “shovel ready.”

Originally Appeared Here

FCS&CA, Legal Metrology Inspects Petrol Pumps On NH; Review Toilet & Drinking Water Facilities

25 June, 2022, By Cross Town News

RAJOURI, JUNE 24: Assistant Director FCS&CA, Arief Lone and Assistant Commissioner Legal Metrology today inspected the petrol pumps on National Highway in the vicinity of Rajouri.

The inspection was carried out on the directions of the Deputy Commissioner Rajouri, Vikas Kundal to check provision of functional toilet and drinking facilities as per the government guidelines under Swachh Bharat Mission.

During the inspection, it was found that all the petrol pumps have these facilities but proper signages were missing. The inspection team asked the owners to install the signages for the convenience of the customers.

It is pertinent to mention that the Govt has issued guidelines to ensure that the fuel pumps adhere to the norms under Swachh Bharat Mission and measures are taken up to ensure availability of basic amenities like clean drinking water and proper toilets at the pumps.

The concerned officers also warned the petrol pump owners of legal action if they are found violating the Govt norms in this regard.

 

 

Originally Appeared Here