1. FEBRUARY 14 LUNCH AND LEARN: WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT WATER?
When:02/14/2018 11:30 AM – 1:30 PM
Location: 1720 E Camelback Rd Phoenix, AZ 85016
Registration
- Arizona Sustainability Alliance and their Guest – $25.00
- Comp Presenter
- Green Living and their Guest – $25.00
- Member and their Guest – $25.00
- Non-Member and their Guest – $35.00
WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT WATER?
Arizona’s economy and our lifestyle here in Arizona depend on a stable water supply.
Water policy in the face of Arizona’s 18 year drought is the most pressing issue facing the Arizona legislature this session and the biggest challenge we, as Arizonan’s face. Arizona gets 40 percent of its water from the Colorado River and a declining Lake Mead puts Arizona’s most precious natural resource at peril. Chris Kuzdas, agricultural water project manager for the Environmental Defense Fund, Jim Buster, Arizona Green Chamber’s Public Policy Chair, and Nicole Gonzalez Patterson, policy director of Business for Water Stewardship will discuss what we can do to meet the challenges that lie ahead.
Join us at the Blue Water Grill, 1720 E Camelback Rd Phoenix, AZ 85016, to hear from these leaders in water policy discussions:
- Ariona Association of Environmental Professionals
DATE: Tuesday, January 23, 2018 6-8 pm
Speaker: Kelly P. Steele Associate Professor, Applied Sciences and Mathematics Arizona State University
Topic: “The Saguaro: its past, current life and future”
The presentation will discuss the saguaro beginnings with its genome, related species, current distribution, interactions with other species and implications for its future as affected by human activities including climate change.
Location: Macayo’s Depot Cantina, 300 S. Ash Avenue, Tempe. This location is near the ASUcampus and 3rd Street in Tempe.
Cost – $20 for AZAEP members, $25 for non-members (includes dinner).
Please RSVP to AZAEP@azaep.org by no later than noon, Friday, January 19th.
Mulch for your garden. Mulch retains moisture in the soil, adds nutrients, and enhances the appearance of a landscape. If you want a large amount of mulch chips, you can pick them up at the Los Reales Landfill while supplies last. TreeCycle runs through Jan. 15.
TreeCycle/Merry Mulch (chips) information poster (pdf): http://1.usa.gov/1mwiebZ
Los Reales Landfill: http://bit.ly/2j8dbPB
- Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, or Fungi. What is It? Do you know what Kingdom this newlyrecognized item belongs in? Nederlandse koolkerhondje
AnimalVegetable
Mineral Fungi
See last page for answer.
- In Tucson, Subsidies For Rainwater Harvesting Produce Big Payoff. The Arizona city has spent morethan $2 million subsidizing rainwater harvesting systems. Consultant Gary Woodard explains that results from a new study he is leading show such systems don’t just collect water, they also change behavior.
The City of Tucson, Arizona, officially got serious about rainwater harvesting five years ago viewing In 2012, the city’s water utility, Tucson Water, began offering rebates to its residential customers to subsidize installation of rainwater catchment systems, both to divert water onto landscaping and store it in cisterns. Later, it expanded the program to include grants and loans to help low-income households harvest rainwater.
Now it is one year into a three-year study to find out how effective those subsidies have been, and the results look good. Gary Woodard, a consultant with Montgomery & Associates in Tucson, is leading the study. He says the first year of data gathering confirms that residential rainwater harvesting has reduced the city’s overall potable water demand.
And it hasn’t merely reduced demand equal to the size of the rainwater harvesting systems, but significantly more. To learn more about the results so far, Water Deeply recently spoke with Woodard, a longtime Tucson resident who previously served as deputy director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona.
Water Deeply: How common is rainwater harvesting in the area? Woodard: As of this summer, the city has spent over $2 million in rebates to encourage people to put in rainwater harvesting systems. It started in the summer of 2012.
Gary Woodard, standing next to a cistern, teaches a course in Tucson, Arizona, on rainwater harvesting. Working as a consultant for the city of Tucson, Woodard has found that rainwater harvesting reduces potable water consumption beyond the capacity of the harvesting systems themselves, because it also changes consumer behavior. (Photo Courtesy Gary Woodard)
The community has really embraced it. For example, the food bank has a very large garden, and they put in a very large rainwater harvesting system to irrigate their garden. It’s sort of become a common thing around town. It doesn’t rain often here, but when it does it can rain very hard. And the ground doesn’t soak up water very well. So rainwater harvesting is a way to deal with stormwater runoff. little over half of our annual rainfall comes in the summer monsoons.
Water Deeply: And what has your work for the city on rainwater harvesting been about? Woodard: I have a contract with the city to answer the question, If you want to figure out what’s going on with rainwater harvesting, how would you do it? You need three things. You need a rain gauge on site, because the precipitation is very different across short distances during the monsoon. You need a pressure transducer at the bottom of the cistern, which correlates to height of water and volume. If you read that frequently, you can see over time when it rains, how much the captured water is used. Those two are hooked up to a data logger with a built-in cell phone to upload data every night. So we can measure inflows, overflows and outflows. In our third angle of research, over three or four years we built dynamic simulator models for residential demand for a number of water providers, including Tucson Water. And we just got some funding from Tucson Water and from the state Department of Water Resources to update and enhance the model. We’ve added rainwater harvesting to the model. In order to do that, we had to understand what happens to potable demand when people put in these rainwater harvesting systems.
Water Deeply: What lessons can you offer other communities that want to support rainwater harvesting? Woodard: For it to make sense from a cost-benefit analysis, your local climate can’t be too wet or too dry. It would not work in Yuma, Arizona, for example, where they only get four inches of rain a year. The payback period would be decades. I’m guessing it also doesn’t make sense in Seattle. You need places where the demand of the landscape greatly exceeds the rainfall, and does so at a time of year that comes shortly after it may have rained. You really have to compare the evapotranspiration of a typical landscape species, and its timing, with the amount and timing of precipitation in the community.
5. Water Treatment Plant Aims To Keep Chemical Out Of Lake Mead. Environmental regulators and water officials gathered Thursday at the Las Vegas Wash to mark the completion of a temporary treatment facility designed to keep pollution from an industrial site in Henderson from seeping into the wash and flowing downstream into Lake Mead and the Colorado River.
The temporary plant near the Clark County Wetlands Park’s Pabco Trailhead went online Tuesday. Over the next 18 months or so, it is expected to remove up to 3 tons of the hazardous chemical perchlorate from contaminated groundwater as it is pumped out of a construction site where the Southern Nevada Water Authority is building two flow-control structures called weirs to curb erosion in the wash.
JoAnn Kittrell, spokeswoman for the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection, said the treatment plant cost between $18 million and $25 million to permit and build. It was paid for out of a $1.1 billion settlement the federal government secured in 2014 from the owners of the chemical site responsible for the contamination.
Perchlorate is a common ingredient of rocket fuel that was once manufactured in Henderson.
In the late 1990s, the chemical was found in Lake Mead and the Colorado River water that supplies farms and cities across the Southwest, including Las Vegas.
The contamination was traced back to the old Kerr-McGee chemical plant, northeast of U.S. Highway 95 and Lake Mead Parkway, where regulators discovered the nation’s largest plume of perchlorate.
5. Free Asbestos Seminar In Yuma
| Answer to question: What Kingdon does this belong in? Nederlandse |
| koolkerhondje |
