Water by the Numbers: Where Big Data Hasn’t Tread

Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What this is:

A pictorial representation of the data points for the last year EPA and USGS available for each 8-digit (i.e. largest size from 8,10, and 12) hydrological watershed in the country. Peach is 0 to 5. Red is 111-27925.

Conclusions:

1. Not all data out there is linked up to this collaboration. States and municipalities may not share or have their data available in a format to link up to EPA’s STORET system (and in fairness I can tell you California has its own system that should be cataloging far more data than presented her)e.

2. We are not pulling enough water samples to adequately monitor our watersheds.

Yes, we live in an era where we must mind what we spend. But this is an issue of priorities. Consider that for under $5,000, most municipalities could install a turbidimeter in one of their waterways and take a data sample every minute (0.5M data points a year). Consider that a grade schooler could get a $100 pH meter and data logger and grab a data sample every second (31.5M data points a year). A robust field work project that sends samples to labs should come back with at least 100 data points. Having an area with 50 data points over the last year is laughable. We cull terabytes of information because of a low-possibility high-damage threat of terrorism. How can the high-possibility moderate-to-high-damage threat of degraded waters be playing with a national database that cannot even break nine figures?

Concerns about water and wastewater quality are not going to be solved without a scientific understanding of what procesees are going on in a river. Indeed, one of the first few steps in developing a treatment plan in environmental analysis is to identify what data gaps exist. And as you can see above, chances are there are going to be some data gaps.

EPA Water to favor Build Up & Build In

As a consultant, I’ve occasionally found myself in some hand-wringing scenarios to manage stormwater. When it comes to designing stormwater management for a long road that will lead to a new set half-acre home lots, there’s almost always a location for a BMP. But a condo redevelopment project that plans to house 3 times as many people in a highly urbanized area can’t find the space or resizing capacity to treat the additional runoff it will create. But ask yourself, which of these projects is the real detriment to the environment here?

Regulators are beginning to come up with new paradigms to recognize that urban development and redevelopment provides additional value to an ecosystem that may not be traditionally captured in our metrics. Virginia’s recent runoff reduction method, for example, allows redevelopment activites to meet a 10 or 20% reduction of Phosphorous loads (size dependent) as opposed to traditional quantity reductions.

Similarly, the EPA announced this week that new national stormwater regulations will seek to encourage urban redevelopment.

The new rules would be employed to reduce the volume of stormwater runoff that transports pollutants into nearby groundwater. Retaining some rainfall on these sites through performance standards, either via green infrastructure or natural features, would “basically eliminate the discharge of any pollutants for that particular volume,” said Christopher Kloss, green infrastructure and stormwater coordinator in the EPA Office of Water, during a webinar on stormwater regulations.

More stringent standards for stormwater at newly developed sites versus less taxing standards at redeveloped sites may create an incentive for businesses to invest in urban redevelopment projects, he explained.

It is a promising move with its heart in the right place, though the details are going to make all the difference. Look for more news from the Office of Water as new stormwater rules move towards public comment.

Los Angeles Bans the Plastic Bag; A Brief Backstory

Am I showing my age in saying that I can remember when checkout clerks asked whether I wanted paper or plastic?

As more and more eco-conscious chains and brands have moved away from disposable bags, major metropolitan areas have gone ahead and taxed or banned one-use bags outright. Trust California to be the trendsetter on this issue. Malibu has had a bag ban in effect for more than three years, and Santa Monica is now at a year and a half. Take a look at this data map by KPCC to see what municipalities in SoCal have already taken action before this week.

Now after several months of study and debate, the City of Los Angeles is now moving ahead with its own bag ban.

To back up, the move is not an altruistic endeavor to attack the Pacific Gyre or reduce the average joe’s oil footprint. This is about trash in our waterways and the laws behind them. Trash in streams and bays has numerous negative effects on the surrounding community – typically destruction of wildlife habitat, loss of tourism and recreation revenue, and increased health care costs to treat those who go in or around the water.

Southern California loves its beaches – and all three of those impairments described above come to a very real dollar value. In order to set up a pollution management strategy, the EPA requires impaired waters to develop a Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, defining how much of a pollutant can safely go into a water body. The LA Region has even set a up a site where you can easily see what and where those TMDLs are – thanks Region 4!!

So how much trash is supposed to go into rivers and oceans? Well, zero, which is why you’ll see that each TMDL has a target of zero trash pieces for the water bodies. Is there a way to cost-effectively ensure that absolutely no trash enters the water (A discussion on TMDL efficacy for point-source and non-point source contributors to come later)? Probably not.

Which brings us to plastic bags. Time and again, studies (and engaged parties) observe that they are the trash item most often found in waterways. Similarly, they can easily be substituted for paper or reusable bags. Here, policy makers have identified a low-hanging fruit: eliminate or reduce plastic bags in the community and see trash counts drop dramatically.

To further incentivize such actions, the LA Regional Water Quality Control Board (who drafts and executes the TMDL programs) allowed bag-banning cities to get an extra three-years to figure out how to get to “zero trash”. I’m surprised so few other outlets have mentioned this. Don’t take my word for it, look at the adopted amendment for Santa Monica Bay:

If within three (3) years of Regional Board adoption date of this TMDL, a city or county voluntarily adopts local ordinances to ban plastic bags, smoking in public
places and single use expanded polystyrene food packaging, it shall receive a three-year extension of the final compliance date.

What does this mean for the actual health of the ecosystem? We’ll have to wait and see. Certainly less pieces of debris will likely be found in the local waterways, but will the beach cities observe any changes to water quality or wildlife populations? In full disclosure, I hope to look at this issue with some independent research.

Hopefully this served as an effective primer on plastic bag regulations and can serve you well as our more and more cities and advocates start to consider the same question.

Lake Loss from Landsat

Google Earth’s remarkable imaging database tinkered to demonstrate change in water bodies over time. (updated browser required)

Warning: May not leave you with a pleasant feeling for the weekend.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Diversion and De Nile

From the “Water is the Oil of the 21st century” desk:

Ethiopia’s parliament has ratified a treaty intended to replace colonial-era agreements that gave Egypt and Sudan the biggest share of the Nile’s water.

The move comes amid growing tensions with Egypt over Ethiopia’s plans for a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said on Monday he did not want war but would not allow Egypt’s water supply to be endangered.

He said that he was keeping “all options open”.

Cairo is worried that the dam will reduce the water supply vital for its 84 million people.

To be clear, no modern war has erupted entirely and explicitly over resource control (though it sure has helped some along), and it would be unprecedented and unlikely for a War over the Nile to actually erupt.

But this is a reality. East Africa is rapidly growing and grappling with how it will meet its resource needs. Water meets our needs in many ways. For Ethiopia, it can serve as a power source. For Egypt, it’s served as an agricultural resource for millennia. The laws governing distribution rights over water were made decades ago and could not be expected to have the foresight to predict the growth and demand projections of the region (same is true for the Colorado), and were made largely by European Empires. Now as the river reaches a critical juncture, renegotiation of these agreements will be made by governments with histories of less than two decades.

Upstream countries have agreed to a new governing body that will oversee distribution. But conspicuously absent are the two downstream countries of Sudan and Egypt, who have historically had significantly more power and say in what happens on the river. With their own populations in rather precarious economic positions, will they be willing to cede some of their power?

The immediate concern is Ethiopia’s new dam, which has begun diverting water from the Blue Nile to serve as the pool for hydroelectric power. Concerns are that water shortages would be felt by downstream Egypt in as few as two years.

Left undiscussed is how the silt and sediment that routinely flows from the Ethipioan and Sudanese highlands will ever reach the Egyptian delta and maintain and sustain river habitat. The environmental impacts of the project will very likely come in far behind concerns about satiating the immediate and short-term needs of a the local populations.

While there’s quite a bit of drama going on in the world, keep an ear out about news from East Africa. This is hardly the end of the story.

More reading material:

BBC – on the more immediate chronology of events

Washington Post – with some background of the political pressures facing the parties

Al Jazeera – with some historical context and the expectation of a peaceful resolution

The Aquifer and the Air Conditioner

Developing countries are awash in technologies that Americans would find antiquated. Mexico, for example, has a plethora of old energy inefficient air conditioners that haven’t been replaced with newer, cleaner, more efficient, and costlier ones you’ll find in America and Europe. Said the government and the UN, let’s incentivize the purchase and trade-in of these old units for new efficient A/Cs. Energy use will decrease, people will save money, and manufacturers will get new customers. It’s a triple win.

Actually, only one of those outcomes was true. Turns out that Mexican families were only using the A/C when it was unbearably hot. With their new and improved A/Cs, they were using them to keep things at 68 much more often. Energy usage actually increased.

This result, reported in a study at this year’s AEA conference, is a typical result that is discussed in David Owens’ The Conundrum: the more efficient we do things, the more things we tend to do.

This week, this concept came up again during Farm Bill discussions. A recent (and a less recent) study identified that a program to incentivize water conservation on irrigated farmland in the American West backfired in just the manner described above.

A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, this year concluded that Kansas farmers who received payments under the conservation subsidy were using some of their water savings to expand irrigation or grow thirstier crops, not to reduce consumption.

Another study by researchers at New Mexico State University in 2008, which studied an area running from Colorado to New Mexico, came to the same conclusion.

“Policies aimed at reducing water applications can actually increase water depletions,” the researchers said.

As I’ve said often, these concerns are graver for water than they are for energy. We can’t swap how we get our water for a greener method – everything in your watershed is connected. And so when groundwater aquifers are drained to historic lows , that’s a decades-long problem now coming home to roost.

Increasingly severe droughts and record low rainfall have forced farmers to rely more heavily on groundwater supplies. But without changing current farming practices, these reserves will run out rapidly. Climate change will make droughts longer and hotter, while rain will only come in harsh storms that will flood crops and erode valuable topsoil without much of it making it down to the groundwater.

The problem in both cases requires policy makers and participants to expand their frame of reference. Looking beyond the transaction of payment for an individual practice, we need to look at performance of what we’re trying to protect. Tie incentives to the volume stored in the aquifer. Pay folks based on the difference in their electricity bills. Think big picture.

This discussion comes as the US Farm Bill comes up for debate. One hopes reform comes before the market and resource constraints cease the American West from being a food supplier to the world at large.

Source: The New York Times via Think Progress and Andrew Sullivan

Additional Reading: American Economics Association

Erosion (outta) Control

A routine weekend bike trip after a smattering of weekday rain storms came upon this glimpse of a construction site around Sterling.

That black material you see around the perimeter is called “Silt Fence.” It is an erosion control measure typically put around development sites to prevent dirt from leaving the site and entering storm sewers or water bodies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have that great of a track record. Take a close look; you’ll see that recent storms have caused some dips and breaks in the fence.

As this example site demonstrates, silt fence doesn’t always stand up to decent sized storms or winds. When not set up or graded properly, its can easily develop a weak spot that runoff will blitz right through. And when not routinely maintained, its effective life might only be a few weeks.

Controlling dirt from a site is never an easy problem, but silt fence typically seems like an easy solution for developers and regulators – cheap, visible, and effective at first glance.

Sure enough, this what Broad Run, a few yards next to the construction site, looked like:

Now there are many things that are likely contributing sediment to Broad Run. Circumstantial evidence implies that this dig site is one of those things.

Engineers are often the ones who come up with Erosion and Sediment Control plans. To some firms, they are a box-checking, after-the-real-work activity done in just a few hours. The consequences of such judgments are on display here; the protection of water bodies requires more than a minimal effort.

The Low Hanging Fruit and The Lawnmower

This weekend, I was driving through Reston, Virginia for some errands during one of the sunny respites of an otherwise rainy week. I found that others had also chosen to make hay; in the course of several miles I observed about five landscaping crews mowing and leafblowing city and commercial property. As a stormwater engineer – and a driver – I was also quick to observe that this waste was intentionally blowing into the middle of the road.

My mind immediately jumped to what would happen next: in the unlikely event that the surrounding sewer inlets are filtration devices (known as structural best management practices or BMPs), the imminent rainstorm is going to send all the leaves and grass right into the filter, shaving months off of its intended performance life. Filters are meant to catch and retain particulates and the occasional trash piece, not routine detritus. Given how infrequently maintenance is performed on most BMPs, the device might not even serve any purpose after a few months under such field conditions.

In the more likely event that the storm sewer system had no such BMPs, the leaves and grass will run right through the sewers, and into our natural water bodies where it will blanket stream floors. The clippings will provide more nitrogen and phosphorous than what the aquatic ecosystem was ever prepared for, and likely lead to algal blooms. Whatever was mixed with the clippings (e.g. trash, dog waste) will lead to another set of problems.

Thankfully, Reston’s storm sewers flow to giant BMPs-turned-Recreational-Benefits known as their man-made lakes. These overgrown ponds will trap and retain all of the nastiness and by the grace of insufficient interest and funding the lakes will remain off of EPA’s next 303(d) Impaired Waters List.

But in countless other areas, the clippings will run right into a Chesapeake Bay feeder stream. Multiple times per year. Without anyone thinking much about it.

When we engineers make models of watersheds and try to figure out where pollution comes from and where it gets reduced, we like to think in terms of structures. A treatment plant here, a city there, a stream in between. But when it comes to pollution, just as important as human structures are human behaviors: where we build, where we choose to live and work, how we grow our food, and how we maintain our greenspace. In changing these (while frustratingly hard to model), we truly change how we impact our environment.

It therefore falls to public officials, and an engaged public, to make the case for behavioral changes. The costs of your additional maintenance crew time are eclipsed by the benefits of a bay that can contiue to provide us recreational and economic utility for years to come – and not make swimmers sick.

Recently, the Chesapeake Bay Program announced that since 2009, the three key pollutants had decreased by anywhere from 25, 27, and 32 percent. This is certainly good news to be heralded; the Bay TMDL Phase I got stakeholders to reduce their pollution contributions. But this comes with several caveats. Pollution measures of all sorts abated between this period thanks to a crippling recession, which resulted in less construction and industrial activities overall. Some will also question the modeling methods. More importantly, stakeholders used this opportunity to identify easy, glaring problems that could be fixed simply – the proverbial “Low Hanging Fruit.” Now, with just over 10 years to go for their final deadline, the coalition will need to find ways to eliminate that final 68 to 75 percent.

With DC Metro area development continuing unabated, this is going to be a tough challenge, and I certainly expect to see stakeholders claim that it is an infeasible goal, with all reasonable measures exhausted. The fruit is too damn high.

Allow me then to pre-emptively say: Nope, you missed a few.

Well, they had the better quarter

Google opted to honor Earth Day today with an interactive doodle focusing on this blog’s favorite resource …

The Guardian summarizes:

This year’s somewhat pastoral scene of hills, snow-capped mountains and a lake teeming with fish seems to be making a nod to the hydrological cycle, if I’m not over-interpreting the animation. If you click the clouds, for example, it rains, and there appears to be a spot of percolation with water making its way through the soil.

Google’s artist Leon Hong doesn’t explicitly call out the nod to the cycle. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency found other ways to commemorate the day…

Source: Google Doodle

Carbon: An Inconvenient Pollutant

MIT’s Faculty Forum again manages to be the most useful thing you can do with an East Coast Lunchbreak. This April saw Professor Christopher Knittel explain some of the difficulties that make climate change regulation so elusive, regardless of the political climate du jour.

One of the best things environmentalists have when collaborating with potential river and stream polluters is that the costs can be described in a clear and present form. Waste goes in the water, it flows downstream, people get sick, fewer people go to work, GDP goes down. Most air pollution even works the same way, with impacts being felt and calcualted downwind. The measurability helped Sulfer and Nitrogen trading schemes take off in the early 1990s.

Greenhouse gasses are uniquely different because there is no downwind. Quite simply we know not how, when or where global weirding is going to rear its ugly head. It is a problem that is immediately global (i.e. China’s smokestacks are just as much of a threat to me as my local ones) and it is a problem whose catastrophies are either being felt now, a generation from now, or 20 years ago. How can we know. All that we do know is mitigation is expensive.

This, Professor Knittel, argues, incentivizes short-term thinking to the exclusion of the long term. If I am not going to be able to measure any benefit, why should I change my behavior?

Even worse (for economists) is the free rider problem that the fragmented approaches that our protocols and communities have adopted. Greening California emissions through AB32 will do little if the coal energy the state previously bought is now just being sold to Colorado. Buying energy-efficient Brazilian Ethanol will do no good if the US sells Brazil back its own energy-intensive corn ethanol. The key is to think about all of the moving parts.

The solution? Sit down folks, because this time an economist is asking us to harness the power of government more than the markets. Because of the circumstances unique to climate change, Knittel pushes for the most comprehensive, all-encompassing, and top-down of approaches that we can politcally muster. A hard sell in this or most poltical climates (pardon the pun), but with the right marketing and the right structuring, it could be done. Focusing on the cobenefits – savings to health care, agriculture, infrastructure, etc – is the best way to bring more players in to demand it. Then identify a cost, set that price into a tax, and then let individuals determine how and where they will reduce and where they are comfortable paying extra.

Kudos to Knittel for having the chutzpah to bring to the table a solution that may be unpalatable but will undeniably work as his starting point. Let us see where debate may lead from there.

Source: Slice of MIT