 | | A water tower rises above a town near San Antonio, Texas. Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue |
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| Water and wastewater utilities and their customers were ignored in Congress’s three coronavirus relief bills.
The first two bills provided support to health and medical services through the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis. The CARES Act, the monumental third piece of legislation that was signed into law on March 27, unloaded more than $2.2 trillion in federal aid on individuals, businesses, and large cities — but still none for the utilities that deliver drinking water and purify sewage. (A fourth action last week replenished a worker assistance fund.)
The industry and its advocates view that as a grievous oversight and have regrouped. |
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 | | The Manzanita park and ride, located beneath Highway 101 in Marin County, floods during high tides, at least 31 times a year, according to Kate Sears, a county supervisor. “Those of those who live in this area of southern Marin get our feet wet with some regularity,” Sears told Circle of Blue. “It has a significant impact particularly in the Manzanita/Pohono area.” Photo © Brett Walton/Circle of Blue |
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| Parking lots, streets, tin roofs — all are hard surfaces that shed water instead of absorbing it. Rather than soaking into the ground, the water is swept quickly into rivers and streams where it increases flood hazards.
But how much of a hazard are these impervious surfaces?
A new study has estimated the size of the effect. For every additional percentage point of impervious surface in a watershed — going from 5 percent coverage to 6 percent coverage, for instance — the peak of the highest flood flow of the year increases by 3.3 percent. |
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 | | Well drillers for Hydro Resources drill a well near Sublette, Kansas. Photo © Brian Lehmann for Circle of Blue |
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| Global efforts on the scale of those to curb the devastation of SARS-CoV-2 are few and far between. These months could provide a template for reducing future environmental damage. |
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 | | The Supreme Court building exterior seen in Washington, U.S., January 21, 2020. REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger |
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| This story originally appeared in Reuters and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rejected arguments by President Donald Trump’s administration seeking to limit the reach of a landmark water pollution law in a Hawaii dispute over wastewater indirectly discharged into the Pacific Ocean – a ruling hailed by environmentalists.
The case involves whether Hawaii’s Maui County can be sued by environmentalists for allowing discharges from a sewage facility to reach the Pacific without a federal permit under the Clean Water Act. The wastewater was not directly discharged into the Pacific but rather into groundwater that ended up in the ocean. |
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The volume of Covid-19 news can be overwhelming. We've started a live blog, updated throughout the day, to help you sort through it. It's a library for how water, sanitation, and hygiene connect to the pandemic, both in the US and globally.
Featured Covid-19 + water coverage from this week include: |
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The World Food Programme and other aid organizations warn that the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic reverberations could cause a substantial spike in global food insecurity.
Based on UN estimates, around 820 million people worldwide face some level of food shortage. |
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What's Up With Water - April 27, 2020
For the news you need to start the week, tune into “What’s Up With Water” fresh on Monday’s on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and SoundCloud.
This week's episode features coverage on China, where the environment ministry said that last month’s spill of toxic pollutants from a dam that held mining waste was the the country’s largest such accident in the last two decades.
Additional international coverage looks at Lebanon,where the Associated Press reported that a Palestinian woman is the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in a refugee camp in that country.
For news in the the United States, we turn to the Southwest, where water officials in Las Vegas announced that they are abandoning a decades-long plan to extract water from a rural groundwater basin.
Finally, this week's featured Circle of Blue story reports on how the coronavirus pandemic is changing the way that governments and aid agencies respond to weather-related disasters. You can listen to the latest edition of What's Up With Water, as well as all past editions, by downloading the podcasts on iTunes, following Circle of Blue on Spotify, following on iHeart Radio, and subscribing on SoundCloud. |
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| From Circle of Blue's Archives: |
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 | | As businesses and industries shutter, water use patterns in U.S. cities are changing. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue |
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| The widespread closure of restaurants, manufacturing facilities, theaters, dentist offices, and universities will reverberate not only in jobs reports. The shutdown will also have immediate and potentially long-lasting consequences for America’s water utilities and the people they serve.
Not all of the country’s roughly 50,000 public water systems share the same vulnerabilities, analysts say. But all will be affected in some way by changes in water use patterns and prohibitions on turning off water service. They will have customers who are suddenly jobless and cannot pay their bills on time. |
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