As North Carolina continues to recover from the devastation and flooding caused by Hurricane Florence, many residents lack access to clean drinking water.
Prior to Hurricane Florence’s arrival in the Carolinas, concerns were raised about the environmental and health risks of the storm. There was fear that torrential rain may flood power plants, industrial sites or animal-manure lagoons, causing toxic waste to threaten drinking water.
Freshwater is crucial for drinking, washing, growing food, producing energy and just about every other aspect of modern life. Yet more than 2 billion of Earth’s 7.6 billion inhabitants lack clean drinking water at home, available on demand.
Only 43 percent of school districts in the United States test for lead in drinking water used by students in 2016 or 2017, according to a federal government report released Tuesday.
Lead contamination in our schools is more pervasive than previously thought, according to water testing data from 20 states published in a national interactive map by Environment America and U.S. PIRG.
Droughts have been making headlines across the world in recent years, from the California water crisis to Cape Town’s severe water shortage, and research suggests 25 percent of the globe could eventually be left in permanent drought due to climate change. But what if you could simply pull water from the air?
Wildfires can contaminate nearby streams and watersheds through mobilization of sediments, nutrients and dissolved organic matter, straining the capabilities of downstream municipal treatment facilities, a new report co-authored by CU Boulder researchers shows.
Bottled water beats out soda as the best-selling U.S. beverage, but that popularity spotlights the environmental costs of so many plastic bottles being used once and then tossed aside.
Cristobal Chavez has every reason to believe that for 11 years, he and his family were drinking water containing four times the legal limit of nitrate, a possible carcinogen. He moved to his current residence – a 20-acre ranch in rural Tulare County, a few miles outside the town of Porterville, California, – in 2003. In 2014, he had his well tested, and a lab analysis revealed that the water was essentially undrinkable.
The Environmental Justice Working Group released a series of recommendations to support more fair and inclusive management of California’s public lands and waters. The recommendations call on the California State Lands Commission to honor the relationship of Indigenous Peoples to state lands, help accelerate a just transition to clean energy, and help reduce the impact transportation and commercial activities have on low-income communities and people of color.
All people should have access to clean, safe drinking water. A big obstacle in the U.S. is the infrastructure that carries the water. DYK: The U.S. received a “D” grade for its drinking water infrastructure based on the 2017 Infrastructure Report Card.
Half a million lead water pipes would have to be replaced in Michigan under the new drinking water rules scheduled to take effect in June. The project is expected to cost $2.5 billion.
After testing more than 250 bottles of water from nine countries including China, USA, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, Mexico, Thailand, and Germany, researchers from State University of New York found tiny pieces of plastic in the water in 93 out of every 100 of the bottles. Effects on human health are unknown at this time.
The global use of antibiotics is growing, driven by a number of developing countries that face more antibiotic-resistant infections. University of Oxford’s Abhilasha Karkey explains the link between antibiotic use and having access to clean water.
The irony of our “blue planet” is that most water on Earth is unusable to humanity. Fresh water — which is essential for life and needed for agriculture, industry, and society — makes up less than 3 percent of the total water on Earth; and only 0.03 percent is easily accessible in lakes, rivers, and swamps. As the human population continues to grow, it puts an even greater strain on the amount of fresh water available per person.
While it's not the responsibility of plants to clean up the mess we humans seem to make of the planet, it is certainly kind of them to show us how it's done. The latest plant to offer an assist in environmental clean-up looks to be Warnstofia fluitans, otherwise known as floating hook moss.
A new report from the Environmental Working Group reveals that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is failing to enforce a key farm bill provision, with dire consequences for drinking water in the Midwest.
World Water Day, on 22 March every year, is about focusing attention on the importance of water. This year’s theme, ‘Nature for Water’, explores nature-based solutions (NBS) to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.
Some 3 in 10 people worldwide, or 2.1 billion, lack access to safe, readily available water at home, and 6 in 10, or 4.5 billion, lack safely managed sanitation, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.
Most of us take for granted our ability to turn on the tap and drink the water that flows from it. More than 1 million Californians, however, cannot take this basic human right for granted. Their water is not safe to drink and, in some cases, may not be safe for any household use. Instead they have to spend thousands of dollars a year on bottled water—dollars that residents of the impoverished communities most impacted by this problem don’t likely have. Flint, Michigan may have brought a national spotlight to water issues, but many low-income families have been living with the lack of safe water for years.
While President Trump and his California resistors dominate the spotlight, a little outfit without much pizazz is trying to draw state government’s attention to sickening drinking water in the San Joaquin Valley.
The Trump administration's new infrastructure plan aims to ease regulatory checks on US waterways. The administration says this will help fast-track more building projects and reduce permit delays. But some water experts are worried that it could put some of the country's most fragile drinking water systems at risk, and put the expensive burden of water cleanup onto cities.
Despite a lack of VC funds, there’s a steady flow of entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur started investing in water tech startups a few years ago. A small fraction of venture capital dollars currently goes into tech to manage or clean water.
More than 2.3 million Puerto Rican residents were served by water systems which drew at least one sample testing positive for total coliforms or E. coli after Maria devastated the island in September.
An innovative project would see seven Tulare County towns plagued by polluted wells sharing a water treatment plant, but political infighting stalled the proposal days before a funding deadline.
It will take decades to slow nitrate contamination in groundwater from industrial agriculture in parts of the state of California, so communities are taking matters into their own hands to get clean drinking water.
Decades after declaring 1,2,3-TCP a carcinogen, California is finally regulating the toxin. But the cost of remediation will be high and communities are turning toward litigation to pay for water treatment.
Decision time is approaching for the agencies that will have to pick up the nearly $17-billion tab for building two massive water tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the heart of the state’s water works.
East Porterville was the hardest-hit community during the drought, when nearly 1,000 people were without water. Efforts to find a long-term fix have been successful but came with a big price tag and some important lessons.
The Environmental Protection Agency has so far found perchlorate in 45 states, tainting water supplies of roughly 16 million Americans. Yet, there is no mandate that water utilities outside of California and Massachusetts test for the toxic chemical or let residents know when it’s in their tap water.
As parents, we know that our first duty is to keep our children safe. We must all do our part to make sure that drinking water at California schools is safe and healthy for our children.
Drought conditions continue for thousands of rural residents in the San Joaquin valley who rely on groundwater. And the race to dig deeper wells is a losing game for small communities and those on private wells.
Rita Sudman is longtime observer of the California water, and even led the Water Education Foundation. In 2016, she co-authored "Water: More or Less." In an interview with ABC10, Sudman talked about her book and the future of California's water policy.
More than 1 million people in the region have been exposed to unsafe drinking water in recent years from pesticides, arsenic, nitrate and uranium. And many communities also face multiple environmental health threats.
It’s too risky for tens of thousands of children in the San Joaquin Valley to drink water at their schools due to chronic contamination by chemicals, pesticides and other toxins.
Working to expand water supplies for California’s next drought, a coalition of 12 Bay Area water agencies took a significant step toward an $800 million expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir.
Do people only care about water during extreme drought, like California’s recent one? It turns out most Americans care a lot about water and have strong feelings on infrastructure spending and other water-related issues.
The epicenter of the state’s drinking water catastrophe is in the San Joaquin Valley, where 200,000 people have struggled to obtain clean, safe water for decades.
There is so much water in the state’s vast plumbing system that for weeks, the big government water projects have reduced exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Yet there is more room than ever in one of the state’s most capacious storage spaces: the San Joaquin Valley aquifer.
In the Central Valley of California, hundreds of wells that provide water to a million people are tainted with a chemical that some experts say is one of the most powerful cancer-causing agents in the world. The state is poised to take the first step Tuesday to regulate the substance — called 1,2,3, TCP — but test data compiled by an activist group show it's also been detected by utilities across the country.
California would be the second state, after Hawaii, to establish a threshold for the former pesticide ingredient and industrial solvent known as TCP (1,2,3-trichloropropane) in drinking water.
California has much more potential to store water underground in aquifers than in surface reservoirs. The state should be focused on this opportunity for future years, writes scientist Mohammad Safeeq.
“We’ve done a lot for this global environment, but we’ve done very little for the needs of these communities,” said Garcia, a Mexican-American who heads the Assembly Natural Resources Committee.
Tulare Lake is gone (although it makes a partial reappearance during very wet years like this one), but what the California Department of Water Resources now dubs the Tulare Lake Hydrologic Region is the most productive agricultural region in the state -- making it, by extension, the most productive agricultural region in the U.S. and probably the world.
The degree of pollution of rivers resulting from human activities is assessed using different biotic indices. The latter reflect the ecological status of a river based on the quantity and diversity of organisms selected as bioindicators, due to their ecological preferences and tolerance to pollution.
Millions of homes across the state are connected to water sources contaminated with a cancer-causing chemical called 1,2,3-Trichloropropane (TCP) and until recently, few Californians knew about it, let alone had any way to fight it.
A significant amount of the limited freshwater resources in the world are contaminated by pollutants from industry, farming, energy generation, and other human activities.
A new poll finds Americans are more concerned about their drinking water than they are about any other environmental issue. Drinking-water scares like the lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, appear to have had a lingering impact on Americans’ concerns with their drinking-water supplies.
As Los Angeles continues to receive more rainfall, many are advocating for the construction of storm water capture projects to maintain the region's water supply.
This article helps Californians identify their source(s) of drinking water, learn more about how drinking water is treated, and learn how to help prevent pollution of our groundwater and surface water supplies.
California is expected to set a strict state-level maximum contaminant level for a probable human carcinogen ― 28 years after the state’s Water Resources Control Board first detected the chemical in its drinking water system.
If sediment in California's dams were cleared and recycled, the state could expand water storage capacity and provide sand for beaches and spawning beds for steelhead trout.
Oroville Dam not only faces a spillage crisis, but a seismic one as well. Scientists say the filling of the reservoir could produce a damaging earthquake in a generation.
