1. Cast your vote for OCWC Board of Directors!
Ballots are due by April 6th.
Oak Creek Watershed Council is electing three members to our Board of Directors. Click the links below to see biographical sketches for the three candidates and download the ballot. Please, print the ballot. Mark your choices, sign the ballot, scan it, and e-mail it back to Executive Director Sharon Masek Lopez. Or you can mail the ballot to Sharon.
Click here for biographical sketches.
Click here for ballot.
Voting ends April 6th. New board members will be installed during the April 13th Board of Directors meeting in the Hummingbird Room at Red Rock State Park. Directors will serve a term of three years.
Thank you for participating in the 2018 OCWC Board of Directors election!
Please visit our online calendar at http://oakcreekwatershed.org to view upcoming events and opportunities to volunteer
2. In 2013, students missed 13.8 million school days due to asthma, making the disease a leading cause of school absenteeism according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As recently as 2015, the agency reports that 1 in 12 children had asthma.
Asthma is a long-term, inflammatory disease that causes the airways of the lungs to tighten and constrict, leading to wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness and coughing. The inflammation also causes the airways of the lungs to become especially sensitive to a variety of asthma triggers. The particular trigger or triggers and the severity of symptoms can differ for each person with the disease
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lists the following common asthma triggers that can be found in our nation’s schools, they include:
- Cockroaches and other pests
- Mold resulting from moisture in the school
- Dander from animals in the classroom
- Dander brought in on clothing from animals at home
- Cleaning agents, perfumes, pesticides and other sprays
- Ozone
- Particle pollution
- Bus exhaust
- Secondhand smoke
- Dust mites
This potentially life-threatening respiratory disease can be controlled through the proper medical treatment and by managing exposure risks to environmental triggers that can cause an asthma attack. Air monitoring instruments and indoor environmental quality testing can identify the triggers listed by the EPA along with many other known asthma triggers, respiratory irritants and allergens. If detected at elevated concentrations, corrective actions can be taken to mitigate or eliminate exposure concerns to help students manage their asthma while at school or in any built environment. CSC’s industrial hygiene and indoor environmental quality professionals offer these important testing and consulting services. CSC Environmental Newsletter.
3. The WRRC conference, to be held on March 28th at the University of Arizona Student Union, features unique high-profile panelists discussing the critical water issues of our time.
The first panel of the afternoon, The Environment and the Business of Water, is no exception. Moderated by Kevin Moran, Senior Director of Water Program, Environmental Defense Fund, the panel includes Yamilett Carillo, Director, Colorado River Delta Water Trust, Ted Kowalski, Senior Program Officer of the Walton Family Foundation, Todd Reeve, Chief Executive Officer at Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and Taylor Hawes, Colorado River Program Director of The Nature Conservancy. Later in the afternoon, the Water and Economic Opportunity panel will continue the conversation. Moderated by Susan Craig, Communications Director for the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority, the panel includes Charles Flynn, Director, Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, Doug Von Gausig, Mayor, Town of Clarkdale, Ernesto Ruffo, Senator, Baja California, and Christine MacKay, Community and Economic Development Director, City of Phoenix. These groups of experts, who are both passionate and highly knowledgeable about their topics, will help us to better understand the interests and contributions of business relative to water for natural areas and the value of water to communities’ economic vitality.
4. Aqua Fria Watersheed. Tom Whitham has offered April 3 or 4 as dates we can meet at Horseshoe and have tour of Cottonwood Project. Wednesday, April 4 is superior for them. Please give me feedback if Wed works for you for next months meeting.\
Thanks,
Mary Re
5. Recycled Wastewater At Your Tap? It could Be Soon in Arizona. Arizona has been reusing treated sewage for more than 90 years. Now a new set of rules will allow highly treated wastewater to be plumbed directly into homes and businesses, explains hydrogeologist Chuck Graf.
MOST AMERICANS ARE familiar by now with the concept of recycled wastewater. We all may not be completely comfortable with the concept of reusing treated sewage, but most of us have at least heard about it, and in some communities we know that it helps parks and street landscaping thrive.
A handful of communities practice what is known as indirect potable reuse, which means using highly refined treated wastewater to recharge groundwater or a reservoir. This water is processed again in a conventional drinking water treatment plant before being delivered to customers.
The next and ultimate step is direct potable reuse, in which wastewater is treated so thoroughly that it meets drinking water standards, and is then plumbed directly into the drinking water distribution system. Texas was apparently the first state to permit this degree of reuse during its long drought in the early 2010s. But this was done on a case-by-case emergency basis, and Texas still does not have comprehensive rules governing the practice.
In January, Arizona became the first state to reach that benchmark, adopting a complete regulatory approach to direct potable reuse. Water Deeply recently spoke with Chuck Graf, principal hydrogeologist at the Arizona Department of Environment Quality, to learn more about the state’s new regulations.
Water Deeply: It’s been a long road getting to this point with recycled water in Arizona, hasn’t it?
Chuck Graf: In Arizona, we’ve been using reclaimed water for a long, long time. In fact, our first rule regarding reuse of reclaimed water was back in 1972. I don’t know if that was a first in the nation, but it was probably in there somewhere.
Actually, we started using reclaimed water back in 1926. And that was at Grand Canyon National Park, when they built a wastewater treatment plant specifically to reuse treated wastewater for steam locomotives and toilet flushing. And they still use it for toilet flushing and landscape irrigation in a much-improved treatment plant.
When they built the first treatment plant in Phoenix in 1931, they actually started distributing that reclaimed water for agricultural irrigation way back then. So it was already being used by the time first rules came into existence in 1972. Then in 2001, we greatly modified our rules for reclaimed water. Arizona probably reuses somewhere above 50 percent, and maybe as much as two-thirds of our treated wastewater.
Water Deeply: What do the new direct potable use regulations allow?
Graf: We started revising the 2001 regulations a few years ago. The first installment of those rules was adopted on January 1 of this year. The big part that’s under this umbrella now is what we call “purified water for potable use.” Now we can issue a permit for a facility that does advanced treatment on reclaimed water, and produces water that’s suitable for putting in a drinking water distribution system.
Our new rule says the source water for this advanced reclaimed water facility would have to go through a multistage, multibarrier treatment process with controls, real-time monitoring, a whole lot of microbial monitoring and chemical monitoring. And the output from that facility is drinking water, and it could be put into a drinking water system.
Water Deeply: What’s the demand for this type of permit?
Graf: We know of no utilities out there that are waiting at the door to come in. The big thing, though, is by having this rule in place now, that utilities and communities can think about maybe this is something we could do in the future and start evaluating this. Because, I think, for any utility to develop a real plan is going to take a couple years with high-level consultant help. By then we should have our final criteria in place, which will probably be early next year, we hope. But if somebody did come in now, we could actually entertain that application.
Water Deeply: Where is Arizona on this compared to other states?
Graf: Texas is taking applications and issuing permits on kind of a case-by-case basis. And they’ve actually issued a couple permits. When they had the big drought there, in Big Spring, Texas, in particular, their reservoir ran dry and they had essentially no water. They had to treat their wastewater and put it in the drinking water system.
The California approach (yet to be finalized) has put in place very detailed specs on what’s involved with doing direct potable reuse. So I think the California approach is at one extreme, where you just have a lot of detail. It’s a very prescriptive approach.
What Arizona wanted was a merging of the two. We don’t want to leave out innovation by making the approach too prescriptive. But we want some detail there.
Water Deeply: In this context, what is the future of indirect potable reuse?
Graf: A number of big cities are doing indirect potable reuse, where they kind of use an environmental barrier: The treated wastewater is mixed with groundwater or surface water, and then you treat that mixture before it goes into the drinking water system. One of the arguments against that is you’ve treated this wastewater to an incredibly high level, and then you’re mixing it with surface water again, which is actually way lower quality. A lot of people are now saying it just makes more sense to start reusing that treated wastewater directly.
Water Deeply: Are consumers ready to start drinking treated wastewater straight from their taps?
Graf: I think once these direct potable reuse plants go in, the technology we’re going to be using is so high that people are going to start demanding some of that technology in normal treatment plants.
People talk about emerging contaminants, and a lot of surface water in the U.S. is influenced in some way by upstream discharges by wastewater treatment plants. You can go to almost any surface water and you can detect some of these chemical constituents – personal care products and pharmaceuticals – at these low levels and I’m sure we’re drinking them now.
The reason we looked at changing the rule is because the technology is here now. We can treat it to any clean standard we want. Also the real-time monitoring technology is there, too, so that you can monitor critical indicators at critical points in the process. That’s important, rather than having to culture a sample and wait 16–18 hours for a report. The combination of those two give us confidence that these plants can be built and operated properly.
6. Stormwter Solutions: Being Green. Join the many others who will be participating in the “It’s Not Easy Being Green” webinar, on March 30, 2018, 2:00 p.m. Eastern time.
The development of innovative storm water treatment and storage technologies is a rigorous, time-consuming and expensive process. But the result can be a system that optimally balances water quality, treatment or storage capacity, an extended service life, ease of maintenance, and affordability. This presentation will focus on the development, testing, and regulatory approval of the environmentally friendly BioPod™ storm water treatment system — Oldcastle Precast Storm Water’s second generation natural biofilter.
