WaterWired

OU International WaTER Prize Winner: Dr. Stephen P. Luby

Stephen P. (Steve) Luby, MD, is the winner of the inaugural OU International WaTER Prize.  Luby is with the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B).

Steve was nominated by WaTER Prize Juror Daniele Lantagne of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who also prepared and delivered the PowerPoint tribute highlighting Steve's remarkable career:

Download Luby.ppt

 Luby is best known for his seminal study on the efficacy of handwashing in preventing disease in children:

Luby, S.P. et al., 2005. Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 366(9481): 225-233.

The fact that handwashing works may sound like a no-brainer, but until Luby's work, there had been no documentation of that fact.

Here are some related papers:

Download Luby_Chully.pdf

Download luby_waterhandwashing.pdf

The five jurors each nominated one person. In addition to Lantagne, the other jurors were: Malcolm S. Morris (Millennium Water Alliance and Living Water International); Greg S. Allgood (Procter and Gamble); Henock Gezahegne (Population Services International - Ethiopia); and yours truly.

Other nominees were: Dr. George C. Greene, III (Water Missions International); Dr. Stephen E. Silliman (University of Notre Dame); Dr. Rob Quick (CDC-Safe Water Systems); and Dr. Thomas F. Clasen (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine). They were a remarkable group, and the selection of just one was indeed difficult.

The OU WaTER Center Directors - Drs. David Sabatini, Randy Kolar, Bob Nairn, and Robert Knox, were wonderful hosts and treated us like royalty.

And mark your calendars for the first OU WaTER Center Conference, 26-27 October 2009, in Norman, OK. It will be quite an event, and Dr. Luby will receive his prize there and deliver a keynote address.

"If you want peace, work for public health." -- Dr. Steve Luby

T. Boone Pickens: No Water Pipeline

The October 2008 issue of U.S. Water News reported that T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Water, Inc., has suspended plans to build a water pipeline to ship ground water, pumped from the Ogallala aquifer beneath Pickens' Roberts County ranch, to Texas cities. 

Mesa has been unsuccessful in locating a buyer for the water although talks are underway with prospective buyers. 

Pickens will continue his efforts to obtain rights-of-way to build a 170-mile transmission line to distribute energy from his proposed wind farm, which is slated to generate 4000 megawatts.

The paper also reported that Pickens has spent $58M in TV ads featuring Pickens himself touting his plan to wean the USA from foreign oil. 

I've actually heard Pickens mentioned as a dark horse for Secretary of Energy. Sure, he's out to make money, but if he can 'think outside the box' and help the USA get on the right track, who cares? Not I. Where have the previous Secretaries of Energy gotten us? 

It's appropriate that I am posting this from Pickens' home state Oklahoma, although I am not at his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, but at the University of Oklahoma.

I heard from my OU colleagues that Dallas wants to buy water from Oklahoma and is planning a pipeline to the Texas-Oklahoma border, pending successful negotiations with Oklahoma. It's funny that Dallas doesn't want to buy water from Pickens. His price must be quite high.

“I have always believed that it's important to show a new look periodically. Predictability can lead to failure.” -- T. Boone Pickens

OWRD-USGS Response to Cascades 'Mother Lode' Article

A little over a week ago The Oregonian published an article by Michael Milstein on the ground water systems of the Cascade Range of Oregon and northern California. The Oregon Water Resources Department (Douglas Woodcock, Ground Water Manager) and the USGS Oregon Water Science Center (Marshall Gannett, Hydrologist) prepared an Op-Ed piece in response but it has not yet been published (Note: it was published on 31 October 2008 - see Abby Brown's comment below).

I also posted about Milstein's original article.

I will post the OWRD-USGS response and paste it in below.

Download OWRD_USGS_OpEd.pdf

The Oregonian’s recent article about ground water (Cascades Hide a Mother Lode of Water, October 20, 2008) was off the mark in its assertion that there is a vast, previously unrecognized and unused reservoir of ground water underlying the Oregon Cascade Range. In truth, ground water in the Cascade Range is well understood and, for the most part, already spoken for.

The large regional ground-water system in the Cascades, and its importance to stream flow in adjacent basins, has been known to scientists and water-resource managers for many decades. Hydrologists recognized over 80 years ago that ground water in the young lava of the Cascade Range was responsible for the stable year-round flow of rivers in adjacent basins, including the Deschutes and Metolius Rivers, as well as critical tributaries of the Klamath and Willamette rivers.

Further, the concept of a “secret stockpile” of water that “someone, someday may want to use” is not only incorrect, but troubling because it implies that ground water in the Cascade Range is not already being used. In reality, ground water from the Cascades supplies much of the flow to major streams on both sides of the range, and, consequently, is already being relied upon by communities, irrigators, and important aquatic ecosystems. This is the same water people on both sides of the mountains have been working to manage for decades. For example, most Oregonians are familiar with the intense competition for water in the Klamath Basin. What is not as widely known is that much of the water flowing into Upper Klamath Lake originates as ground water from the Cascades. Additional use of ground water in the Cascade Range would diminish discharge to streams and exacerbate the water-supply problems that so many are working to resolve. In this sense, ground water in the Cascade Range is already spoken for, since most streams adjacent to the mountains are already fully appropriated.

Nor is the Cascade Range ground-water system immune to drought. The article states that despite eight years of drought, the Cascade Range aquifer system “is still brimming.” In fact, ground-water storage in the Cascade Range and discharge of ground water to streams diminishes in response to drought. Ground-water levels in wells in the Cascades dropped as much as 20 feet during the most recent drought and have only partially recovered. Late season flow of ground-water fed streams adjacent to the range, such as the Metolius River, dropped as much as 30 percent during the last drought.

State and Federal water resource agencies already factor Cascade Range ground water in their management strategies. The U.S. Geological Survey and Oregon Water Resources Department have several past and ongoing projects that characterize ground-water flow in and adjacent to the Cascade Range, and have developed robust computer models to quantify its interactions with streams and lakes in the adjacent basins. Additional study of the Cascade Range aquifer system is certainly warranted, but characterizing it as newly discovered and unused misleads the public into thinking it is an untapped resource ripe for development without consequence to stream flows and existing water uses.

 

Columbia River Diversion as a Public Revenue Source

Talk about provocative titles!

Aw, just what I need right now - another post like this following on the heels of my 'Cascades Water Farm' post. This time, it's the Columbia River someone wants to sell to fund education in Oregon.

State Senator David Nelson (R-Pendleton) is proposing to do just that, and describes his scheme in the attached white paper:

Download Columbia_River_Revenue.pdf

The appendices look very intersting but unfortunately, I don't have access to them.

Also see my11 August 2008 post about Nelson's plan,  described in Michael Milstein's article in The Oregonian.

When I chatted with him last spring, he spoke of diverting 1 MAF per year from the Columbia and selling it for a profit of $0.01 per gallon; that would net the State about $3.26B per year.

He will be visiting us at Oregon State on 29 October 2008 to give a seminar entitled Oregon's Oil. I won't be able to attend, as I will be en route to Norman, OK for the WaTER Center events.

In his white paper, Nelson  states that diversion from the Columbia River and transfer outside the basin will likely happen some day whether Oregon wants it or not, so we need to get on the bandwagon and do it so that we can profit. As you can imagine, this proposal has raised more than a few eyebrows and hackles.

All of a sudden I'm back in my early-1970s grad school days, when my U of AZ professors spoke wistfully of piping Columbia River water to the parched Southwest, or LA engineering firms got teary-eyed at the thought of NAWAPA. If they'd only known about Cascades ground water, they would have pined for that as well!

Wonder if the Senator has Pat Mulroy on speed-dial?

"Oregon's schools need money and the current tax and fee arrangements are not paying the bill. Higher education is locked in a permanent downward spiral. If Oregon fails to act now it is destined to become the Appalachia of the West." -- Sen. David Nelson

Can anyone spell S-A-L-E-S  T-A-X?

UNESCO Publishes Global Shared Aquifer Map

I received this announcement from a number of people. This map will be quite an asset to those of us involved in transboundary ground water resources. You can download a copy here (as a PDF or TIFF).

In 2005 I edited a theme issue of the journal Ground Water (volume 43, no. 5 - you will have to pay to access it if you are not an NGWA member) devoted entirely to transboundary ground water. It was the first journal to devote an entire issue to the subject. I also founded and chair the Transboundary Ground Water Interest Group of the National Ground Water Association.

And my colleague Todd Jarvis arguably knows more about transboundary ground water resources than anyone else.

Note: I take no responsibility for the term "underground aquifers". Ugh!

October 23, 2008

 UNESCO is publishing the first-ever world map of shared aquifers to  coincide with the submission to the General Assembly of the United Nations on Oct. 27 of a draft Convention on Transboundary Aquifers.

Almost 96 percent of the planet's freshwater resources are to be found in underground aquifers, most of which straddle national boundaries.

 Despite its strategic importance, no global inventory of this resource had been compiled to date. Since 2000, UNESCO's International Hydrological Programme (IHP) has been participating in the establishment of a groundwater database. It is now presenting a detailed map of transboundary aquifers – available online – showing the delineations of aquifers that are shared by at least two countries. It also provides information about the quality of their water and rate of replenishment. So far, the inventory comprises 273 shared aquifers: 68 are on the American continent, 38 in Africa, 65 in Eastern Europe, 90 in Western Europe, and 12 in Asia.

 The aquifers, which contain 100 times the volume of fresh water that is to be found on the Earth's surface, already supply a sizeable proportion of our needs. The growth in the demand for water since the second half of the 20th century has been met by the increased use of underground resources. Globally, 65 percent of this utilization is devoted to irrigation, 25 percent to the supply of drinking water, and 10 percent to industry.

 Underground aquifers account for more than 70 percent of the water used in the European Union, and are often one of the only – if not the only – source of supply in arid and semi-arid zones (100 percent in Saudi Arabia and Malta, 95 percent in Tunisia, and 75 percent in Morocco). Irrigation systems in many countries depend largely on groundwater resources (90 percent in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, 89 percent in India, 84 percent in South Africa, and 80 percent in Spain).

 Although aquifer systems exist in all continents, not all of them are renewable. For example, those in north Africa and the Arabian peninsula were formed more than 10,000 years ago when the climate was more humid and are no longer replenished. In some regions, even if the aquifers are renewable – being fed on a regular basis by rainfall – they are in some cases endangered by over-exploitation or pollution. In the small islands and coastal zones of the Mediterranean, populations often use groundwater more rapidly than it is replenished.

 The aquifers in Africa, however, which are some of the biggest in the world, are still largely under-exploited. They have considerable potential, provided that their resources are managed on a sustainable basis. Because they generally extend across several state boundaries, their exploitation presupposes agreed management mechanisms in order, for example, to prevent pollution or over-exploitation by particular states.

 Mechanisms of this kind have begun to emerge in recent years. For example, in the 1990s Chad, Egypt, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and Sudan established a joint authority to manage the Nubian aquifer system in a concerted manner. In their project concerning the Iullemeden aquifer, Niger, Nigeria, and Mali approved in principle a consultative mechanism for administering the aquifer system. But such mechanisms are the exception.

 The draft Convention on transboundary aquifers, prepared by the United Nations International Law Commission with the assistance of IHP experts is intended to fill a gap in the law. The text to be submitted to the General Assembly calls on aquifer states not to harm existing aquifers, to cooperate, and to prevent and control their pollution.

 The Worldwide Hydrological Mapping and Assessment Programme (WHYMAP) was launched in 1999* to improve knowledge and management of the Earth's resources, particularly groundwater. In 2000 the IHP launched the International Shared Aquifer Resources Management (ISARM) project to compile an inventory and to evaluate the world's transboundary aquifer systems (delineating them, estimating their volume, their replenishment rates, etc.). A region-by-region evaluation has been launched. In its initial phase it will identify geographical locations and then itemize the legal systems of each country as they relate to aquifer management.

 * By UNESCO with the assistance of the Commission for the Geological Map of the World, the International Association of Hydrogeologists, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources.

Here is the WHYMAP site where you can obtain information and download maps. The aforementioned TB aquifer map is here - either as a PDF or TIFF.

Here is another take on the map and its implications from the New Scientist. Some choice excerpts follow.

"This [map] is a fantastic resource which a lot of us have been waiting for it for," says Mark Zeitoun, a water policy expert at the London School of Economics. "It highlights the importance of groundwater resources, which is generally misunderstood or ignored completely compared to surface water."

Zeitoun, who advises Palestine in its water-sharing negotiations with Israel, is one of many would like to see these variables formalised in an international legal framework for water management. "There is an urgent need for an international law on water sharing," he says.

At the moment, the only legal framework is a 1997 agreement under the United Nations relating to "non-navigable freshwater resources". The document was initially drafted to regulate the use of surface water, and attempts are underway to extend it to underground resources as well.

This brief article is worth reading.  

"The color of a cat does not matter as long as it catches mice." -- Mao Zedong