The sun illuminates a canal in Buckeye, Arizona. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

The Bureau of Reclamation’s $4 Billion Drought Question

On the morning of August 4 during a briefing to his board, Patrick Dent, the Central Arizona Project’s assistant general manager for water policy, mentioned an idea circulating among farm districts in southern Arizona and California to help protect depleted reservoirs upstream. 

A few hours later – and a few thousand miles eastward – that funding suddenly materialized. 

To secure her vote for the Inflation Reduction Act— the largest federal investment in clean energy programs in history—Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema requested $4 billion for the Bureau of Reclamation to respond to dry conditions in the American West, with special emphasis on the Colorado River and other basins in long-term drought. 

The text of the bill provides some direction, but it is both mercifully brief and maddeningly vague. It outlines three spending categories for the $4 billion:

1. Pay water users not to divert water. This is the objective of the Arizona and California farmers. 
2. Reduce water demand and use through conservation and efficiency projects like drip irrigation. 
3. Restore ecosystems and habitats impaired by drought. The shrinking Salton Sea, a priority for California’s Imperial and Riverside counties, could be eligible.

The bill, which the Senate passed on August 7th, also adds $550 million to provide reliable household water service to disadvantaged communities in the region. It builds on a five-year, $8.3 billion allocation in the federal infrastructure bill for drought response.

Farm fields resemble a mosaic in California’s Imperial Valley. The Imperial Irrigation District holds more rights to Colorado River water than any other user in the basin. Photo © Brent Stirton/Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

Arizona and California Farmers, Targets for Colorado River Cuts, Draft Their Conservation Strategy

A Kentucky National Guard flight crew aided in flood relief efforts. Photo © Jesse Elbouab / U.S. Army National Guard

Eastern Kentucky Floods Continue Cycle of Poverty

The initial shock of catastrophic flooding in Eastern Kentucky is wearing off. What comes next may be just as traumatizing.

In Eastern Kentucky, as in many of America’s poorest communities, poverty and flood risk are two halves of a brutal cycle: low-income people are more likely to be located in flood zones, and less likely to access relief funds to repair the damages.

Many of the flood victims will be applying for government aid, but demand for housing assistance far outstrips the available funding, in Kentucky and nationwide. Only about one in four U.S. residents eligible for federal rental assistance receives it. Families wait an average of two and a half years to receive housing vouchers. 

In times of disaster, this chronic deficit becomes a crisis. Global climate change is only accelerating this cycle. Intensifying downpours have caused an uptick in flash flooding outside river floodplains, rendering previous flood risk maps virtually useless. The eastern U.S. is seeing a steep increase in the number of extreme rain events. This trend is projected to continue with further warming.

Experts say the climate outlook underscores the imperative to find an alternative to risky development. 

Prior to restoration in 2018, the Lower Muskegon River site reconnected 53 acres of natural floodplain wetlands to the Muskegon River, a tributary of Muskegon Lake. Photo © GEI Consultants
 

Two Generations and $70 Million Later, Muskegon Lake Is Restored

For more than a century, West Michigan’s Muskegon Lake was contaminated by sawmills, chemical plants, energy installations, and raw sewage with reckless abandon. By the time it was declared an “area of concern” under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1987, it was all but ecologically dead. 

Much like other toxic cleanups throughout U.S. history, the remediation of Muskegon Lake was expensive and time consuming. Nearly 30 years after cleanup began and $70 million dollars later, local, state and federal officials gathered at Heritage Landing, a former industrial-scrapyard-turned-waterfront park on Muskegon Lake’s south shore to declare that the project to restore Muskegon Lake was complete.

In Muskegon, a community that has long struggled to establish itself as a tourist destination along the shores of Lake Michigan, life after delisting holds the promise of economic revitalization.

Yet, ecological challenges still exist on Muskegon Lake. Threats from invasive species, PFAS contamination, and climate change loom. Moving forward, community leaders must grapple with the perception that their work is done.

The American West is experiencing its most severe drought in twelve hundred years. Dry conditions are setting records nearly every week. As western states grapple with the effects of drought and a drying climate, arid land, shrinking water supplies and intense heat have become the norm.

Every Thursday morning, the National Drought Mitigation Center releases a map called the US Drought Monitor, which tracks the latest data on dry conditions throughout the country. It’s a white map of the United States covered in some configuration of orange, yellow, and red – each color denoting how dry an area is.

Last week, the Drought Monitor reported that forty-two states are in some form of drought. More than seventy percent of the West is experiencing moderate drought or worse.

On this new episode of Speaking of Water, Circle of Blue reporting intern Delaney Nelson speaks with Curtis Riganti, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center, about the latest map and what the data means for the drying American West.

Dry: A Weekly Western Drought Digest — August 9, 2022

• Drought conditions look similar to last week’s numbers. As of August 2, 43 percent of the U.S. and Puerto Rico are in drought, down over two percentage points in the last month.
• Colorado River tribes demand the Department of the Interior and basin states include them in river-use reduction plans.
• The U.S. Senate passes a major climate bill, which includes $4 billion to tackle drought.
• Cities in the Rio Grande Valley implement water restrictions as reservoirs reach near-historic lows.

A critically failing sewage works in Springbok in the Northern Cape is one of 334 in the country which obtained a Green Drop score of 30% or less. The cause of the failure was not investigated but is typical of broader municipal service failures. Photo © Steve Kretzmann / CCIJ
 

‘A Tsunami of Human Waste’: Half of South Africa’s Sewage Treatment Works Are Failing, Says Report

Joining the guppy development program, a training course offered by the Milnerton Canoe Club in Cape Town, Rudy Hanse learned how to paddle a canoe and swim at 13—and, for a few hours a week, escaped the poverty and cacophony of Dunoon township, where he lived with his parents. 

Now, Hanse earns a decent income in guest services in the United Arab Emirates. “If it wasn’t for [that training course], I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he said.

But for young children living in Dunoon township today, the program is no longer an option. For years, the water has been too polluted by sewage to risk children being exposed to it, and the canoe club had to close down its guppy development program about eight years ago.

But this is not an isolated incident, CCIJ reports. According to a long-awaited report, rivers and water bodies across South Africa have become too polluted for use, and the government is doing an increasingly poor job of addressing the situation.

The Green Drop report, a regulatory audit of the country’s wastewater treatment, paints a bleak picture. More than half of wastewater treatment works in the country fail to treat sewage properly and, in many cases, fail to treat it at all.

Adjacent to the small community of Millstone, in Letcher County, the North Fork of the Kentucky River has notoriously high fecal coliform measurements due to raw sewage. Photo © Brett Walton / Circle of Blue
 

Straight Pipes Foul Kentucky’s Long Quest to Clean Its Soiled Waters

In the mountains of eastern Kentucky a creek is often steps away from the front porch or back door. Here in Loyall, several dozen homes rim a bend close to the Cumberland River. Amid the brambles on the bank at least one white PVC pipe, a couple inches in diameter, pokes out of the ground and points toward the water.

Though it could be coming from a gutter or laundry room, the pipe displays the characteristic stealth of a drain straight from a toilet. Straight pipes, as they are known, are a dangerous and illegal scourge in this economically disadvantaged region of Kentucky. Circle of Blue reported in 2018 that although the state has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to build contemporary treatment systems, straight pipes still proliferate, flushing raw human waste directly into creeks, streams, lakes, ravines, and backyard sumps.

Straight pipes in Kentucky join malfunctioning treatment plants and failing septic systems in producing a sewage pollution crisis in eastern Kentucky that is worse than water contamination from coal mining, according to state surveys.