Daniel Salzler No. 1085
EnviroInsight.org Five Items January 15, 2021
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Enhance your viewing by downloading the pdf file to view photos, etc. The attached is all about improving life in the watershed. If you want to be removed from the distribution list, please let me know. Please note that all meetings listed are open.
Enhance your viewing by downloading the attached pdf file to view photos, etc.
The attached is all about improving life in the watershed.
Also, read this newsletter at EnviroInsight.org
1 Air Pollution In Maricopa County.: Be A Part Of The Solution, Not A Part Of The Problem. In an effort to reduce air pollution produced by gasoline powered lawn mowers and garden equipment, the Maricopa County Air Quality Department and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, created the “Mowing Down Pollution Program”. This lawn and garden equipment replacement program is available to residents of Maricopa County, providing up to $200 in voucher toward the purchase of electric or battery powered lawn mower and/or gardening equipment. For more information on the program, go to cleanairmakemore.com/lawn.
Glendale residents can earn cash for removing the need for lawn equipment all together if you convert water thirsty grass to a desert friendly xeriscape. Save time, water, energy and money by switching your grass to a water-wise xeriscape.
Example of turf conversion:
Rebate Amount Grass Removed
$150 500 – 1500 ft2
$300 1501 – 2500 ft2
$450 2501 – 3500 ft2
$600 3501 – 4500 ft2
$750 + 4501ft2
After grass removal, call 623-930-3760 to schedule a landscape inspection before receiving your rebate.
Free “How To’ information is available to explain the grass to cash conversion is available by either calling 623-930-3760 or online at www.glendaleaz.com/waterconservation.
You also should to know that single family residences must remove at least 500 feet2 and participate in the Landscape Water Budget Program. If you would like help in planning a sustainable landscape, Glendale’s Conservation and Sustainable Living staff can provide assistance. Check with your town, city or county for assistance they may provide.
2. It Is Time To Fix Things Around The House That Leak Water. Across Arizona, many counties, cities and towns use your household water consumption to set your water and sewer rates. Check for leaky faucets, toilets and showerheads. Repair pool and irrigation leaks. Adjust your irrigation monthly. Your lawn and garden don’t need as much water as often month by month as you needed in July, August and September.
To calculate your home water usage per person per day, look at your Monthly Water bill (eg. 9 = 9,000 gallons) divided by the number of people in your household divided by the number of days in the month equals gallons per person per day.
1. Climate Change Is Hitting The Colorado River ‘incredibly Fast And Incredibly Hard’
3. The warming climate is intensifying drought, contributing to fires and drying out the river’s headwaters, sending consequences cascading downstream.
Over the past two decades, rising temperatures have intensified the dry years across the Colorado River Basin. Warmer conditions are eroding the flows of the tributary streams as vegetation draws more water and as more moisture evaporates off the landscape.
Much of the river’s flow begins as snow and rainfall in the territory of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, which includes 15 counties on Colorado’s West Slope. Andy Mueller, the district’s general manager, said the extreme conditions over the past year offer a preview of what the region should prepare for in the future.
Over the past year, the relentless hot, dry months from the spring to the first snows left the soil parched. The amount of runoff into streams and the river dropped far below average. With reservoirs sinking toward new lows, the risks of shortages are growing.
“Climate change is drying out the headwaters,” Mueller said. “And everybody in the Colorado River Basin needs to be concerned.”
Mueller saw the effects while backpacking in Colorado’s Holy Cross Wilderness in the summer with his 19-year-old daughter. Above the tree line, at an elevation of 12,000 feet, they expected to see mushy green tundra. Instead, they found the ground was bone dry.
When the fires erupted, they burned intensely, ravaging high-elevation forests that once were dubbed “asbestos forest” because they stayed moist and historically didn’t burn.
“That’s what this year wrought upon our natural systems up high. And what that meant is that down below that, the humans who depend upon the flow didn’t have the water that we need,” Mueller said.
“We’re really seeing the effects of climate change hit locally in the Upper Basin incredibly fast and incredibly hard,” he said.
The effects are traveling downstream from the high country to the reservoirs that supply water for farmlands and millions of people.
The water behind Glen Canyon Dam has fallen to just 42% of Lake Powell’s full capacity. Downstream behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Lake Mead now sits 39% full and approaching shortage levels.
Farmers, city officials, environmentalists and managers of water districts have been talking about ways to adapt. There are procedures in place to deal with shortages, but there are also scenarios in which water deliveries could be abruptly cut in some areas, potentially triggering a crisis.
In Colorado and the other three states in the river’s Upper Basin — Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — officials have been studying the possibility of adopting what they call “demand management” plans, which would pay some water users who would voluntarily and temporarily turn over some of their water to help boost Lake Powell.
Representatives of the four states committed to look into starting such a program in 2019 when they signed a set of agreements called the Drought Contingency Plan.
“Climate change is drying out the headwaters,” Mueller said. “And everybody in the Colorado River Basin needs to be concerned.”
Mueller saw the effects while backpacking in Colorado’s Holy Cross Wilderness in the summer with his 19-year-old daughter. Above the tree line, at an elevation of 12,000 feet, they expected to see mushy green tundra. Instead, they found the ground was bone dry.
When the fires erupted, they burned intensely, ravaging high-elevation forests that once were dubbed “asbestos forest” because they stayed moist and historically didn’t burn.
“That’s what this year wrought upon our natural systems up high. And what that meant is that down below that, the humans who depend upon the flow didn’t have the water that we need,” Mueller said.
“We’re really seeing the effects of climate change hit locally in the Upper Basin incredibly fast and incredibly hard,” he said.
The effects are traveling downstream from the high country to the reservoirs that supply water for farmlands and millions of people.
The water behind Glen Canyon Dam has fallen to just 42% of Lake Powell’s full capacity. Downstream behind Hoover Dam near Las Vegas, Lake Mead now sits 39% full and approaching shortage levels.
Farmers, city officials, environmentalists and managers of water districts have been talking about ways to adapt. There are procedures in place to deal with shortages, but there are also scenarios in which water deliveries could be abruptly cut in some areas, potentially triggering a crisis.
In Colorado and the other three states in the river’s Upper Basin — Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — officials have been studying the possibility of adopting what they call “demand management” plans, which would pay some water users who would voluntarily and temporarily turn over some of their water to help boost Lake Powell.
Representatives of the four states committed to look into starting such a program in 2019 when they signed a set of agreements called the Drought Contingency Plan.
The idea, if the states eventually agree to participate, would be to reduce the risks of a scenario called a “compact call,” in which the three states in the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — could demand the Upper Basin send their allotted water downstream under the obligations of the 1922 Colorado River Compact. If that were to happen, it could trigger mandatory cutbacks for some Upper Basin water users, starting with entities that have lower-priority junior water rights. The deals between the seven states are designed to temporarily lower the odds of Lake Mead and Lake Powell dropping to critical lows over the next five years. The states’ representatives have yet to wade into the details of negotiations on what shortage-sharing rules will look like after 2026, when the current agreements expire.
Still unresolved are difficult questions about how to deal with the shortfall over the long term. What’s increasingly clear is that the status-quo methods of managing the river are on a collision course with worsening scarcity, and that eventually something will have to give. “We’re bound by that river,” Mueller said. “All of us, regardless of our legal rights, regardless of what’s on paper, we need to consider how we can use less water. And we need to take action immediately.”
Last winter, after a dry year, the Rocky Mountains were blanketed with a snowpack that was slightly above average. Then came extremely hot and dry conditions, which shrank the amount of runoff and flows into tributaries and again baked the soils dry.
Mueller said the change occurred abruptly at the end of the snow season in the spring.
“All of a sudden, the faucet turned off in April,” he said. “And what we saw were, again, higher temperatures, less precipitation and it made all of us in the water community very nervous.”
What he and others had hoped would be a good runoff season instead turned out to be way below average. Lake Powell took in less water than had been anticipated.
“We saw the soil soaking up whatever water was available,” Mueller said. With the heat, some of the snow didn’t melt but instead evaporated directly into the air, which scientists call sublimation — something that has been happening more over the past two decades. The flows in streams dropped over the next few months, and then August brought record heat, which dried out the headwaters and fueled the fires through the fall.
After the hot spring came a dry summer. The lack of monsoon rains compounded the drought. And then came August, Holcomb said, when a map of record-hot temperatures hugged the Colorado River Basin like a “massive red handprint.”
In areas of western Colorado that drain into the river, it was the hottest and driest August on record, breaking the previous temperature record by 2 degrees F, said Russ Schumacher, Colorado’s state climatologist and director of the Colorado Climate Center.
The state usually gets its largest wildfires in June and July. But with the severe drought, the fires burned through August, and then exploded in October with unprecedented speed and intensity. The ultradry conditions, together with high winds, contributed to the three largest wildfires in Colorado history, which together devoured more than half a million acres.
In the future, rising temperatures will lead to more of these scorching summers.
“Already, what would’ve been an extremely hot summer in western Colorado in the mid-20th century is basically an average summer so far in the 21st century,” Schumacher said.
The Colorado River and its tributaries provide for about 40 million people and farmlands from Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Demands for water have outstripped the available supply for many years. Most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed into a dusty stretch of desert decades ago, leaving only a smattering of natural wetlands.
The hot drought has hit especially hard over the past year, leaving the river’s reservoirs at 46% of their full capacity, down from 52% a year ago.
When the soil is so parched, it will always “take the first drink” before water reaches the streams, Burk said. “We need a lot more snow for many years to come to really replenish the soil moisture deficits that we’re seeing now.”
Arizona gets nearly 40% of its water from the Colorado River. Much of it flows in the Central Arizona Project Canal, which cuts across the desert from and Tucson. In 2020, Arizona and Nevada took less water from the river under the drought agreement among Lower Basin states, and in 2021 they will again leave some of their water in Lake Meade. The latest projections show Lake Havasu to Phoenix.
Mead could fall below a key threshold by summer, which would trigger a shortage declaration and larger cutbacks in 2022.
Risk of Colorado River shortage is on the rise, could hit within 5 years, officials say. Lake Mead,” he said. “We think Lake Powell is doomed.”
As runoff has decreased, the water level in Lake Powell has fallen. The surface of the reservoir now shimmers in the sun 117 feet below its full capacity, marked by a white line of minerals along the reddish-brown rocks.
The sides of the canyon slope down in undulating rock formations to the water, which has declined about 26 feet over the past year.
As the reservoir sinks lower, the risks of shortages continue to grow.
Source: Ian James is a reporter with The Arizona Republic who focuses on water, climate change and the environment in the Southwest Read the entire article and blue linked articles at azcentral.com
4. Michigan State University is leading a research effort to offer the first worldwide view of how climate change could affect water availability and drought severity in the decades to come. By the late 21st century, global land area and population facing extreme droughts could more than double — increasing from 3 percent during 1976-2005 to as much as 8 percent, according to Yadu Pokhrel, associate professor in MSU’s College of Enginering Source: Brown and Caldwell.
5. Biohazardous Medical Waste Rulemaking – Part II ADEQ will conduct a virtual rulemaking workshop to gather more stakeholder input on Biohazardous Medical Waste rules. The focus will be on definitions and clarifications discussed in the November 5, 2020 workshop.
Date: Friday, Jan. 15, 2021 Time: 12:30 p.m.
Location: Virtual Meeting Register via Zoom >
We created a document providing more information on the relevant topics for discussion and invite you to review prior to the workshop: View/Download/Print Discussion Materials for Jan. 15 >
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