 | | Ice Harbor Dam, on the Lower Snake River, is owned and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. It is one of 15 hydropower dams in the Columbia/Lower Snake basin that will be affected by a proposal to limit water temperatures in the river system to protect salmon. Photo courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons user salmonrecovery |
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| The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a long-awaited Clean Water Act proposal to limit water temperatures in one of the country’s largest river systems.
The limits, which apply to some 900 miles of the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers, in Oregon and Washington, are intended to protect endangered salmon and other aquatic species from overheating in waters that are exposed to several sources of thermal stress.
Actions to achieve the standards will likely center on operational changes at the 15 hydropower dams in the target area and enhancements to cold-water flows from tributary rivers. But bringing down water temperatures across such a large river system will be difficult, water managers in the basin said. |
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| Health experts and humanitarian organizations fear that an outbreak of Covid-19 inside the world’s refugee camps could threaten global containment efforts and be a death sentence for thousands of the world’s most vulnerable people. |
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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. |
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Dozens of gunmen descended last week on Intikane, a town in western Niger that had been hosting 35,000 displaced people. Damage was widespread. Three people were killed in the May 31 attack, and the community’s water supply was cut, according to reports from aid agencies.
The attackers also burned relief items and cut communications by destroying mobile phone towers. |
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What's Up With Water - June 8, 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 Brazil, where the government of São Paulo state announced that residents would not have their water, electricity, or gas turned off during the coronavirus pandemic if they cannot afford to pay their bills.
For news in the United States, federal researchers expect the size of the annual low-oxygen dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to be above the long-term average but smaller than last year.
Additional U.S. coverage looks at New Jersey, where state regulators formally adopted some of the strictest drinking water standards in the nation for two of the so-called “forever chemicals.”
Finally, this week's featured Circle of Blue story reports on sewage surveillance as a way to monitor the new coronavirus. It’s attracting a lot of attention, but has some obstacles to overcome before it is widely used for public health decisions. 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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 | | Bureau of Reclamation Fisheries Biologist Zak Sutphin checks a fish trap set in the San Joaquin River near the town of Newman in California’s Central Valley. The trap, also known as a “Fyke Net”, is used to catch salmon so they can be transported upstream by truck, bypassing obstacles, on their way to their historic spawning grounds near Fresno in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Photo © Matt Black / Circle of Blue |
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| Before the founders of the Family Water Alliance began installing metal screens at the end of the big pipes that draw water from the Sacramento River to irrigate Colusa County’s rice and vegetable fields, seasonal salmon runs often included sizable helpings of fresh fish flopping in the brown dirt of farm furrows. The pumps that transported water were powerful enough to suck migrating fish into the pipes and toss them out the other end, typically startled and very much alive.
Hundreds more fish screens have been installed on northern California’s other salmon spawning rivers. The result is that in the struggle to sustain California’s imperiled chinook, coho, and steelhead fishery, hundreds of thousands of spawning adults, newly hatched fry, and migrating juveniles are not perishing in irrigation systems.
Drought, warming water, big dams that block spawning grounds, and contaminated runoff from cities and farmland are said by wildlife researchers to be the primary causes of salmon deaths in the Sacramento River. Installing fish barriers at the end of irrigation pipes, though, is a small, elegant, and not terribly expensive step to help prevent California’s salmon runs from disappearing. |
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