Gallons Of Water Research Articles

Direct and indirect urban water footprints of the United States

AbstractThe water footprint of the urban environment is not limited to direct water consumption (i.e., municipal supplies); embedded water in imported resources, or virtual water transfers, provides an additional component of the urban water footprint. Using empirical data, our analysis extends traditional urban water footprinting analysis to quantify both direct and indirect urban resources for the United States. We determine direct water volumes and their embedded energy through open records requests of water utilities. The indirect component of the urban water footprint includes water indirectly consumed through energy and food, relating to the food‐energy‐water nexus. We comprehensively quantify the indirect water footprint for 74 metropolitan statistical areas through the combination of various databases, including the Commodity Flow Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Water Footprint Network, and the Energy Information Administration. We then analyze spatial heterogeneity in both direct and indirect water footprints, determining the average urban water footprint in the United States to be 1.64 million gallons of water per person per year [6200 m3/person/yr or 17,000 L/person/d], dominated by indirect water. Additionally, our study of the urban water cycle extends beyond considering only water resources to include embedded energy and equivalent carbon dioxide emissions. The inclusion of multiple sectors of the urban water cycle and their underlying processes provides important insights to the overall urban environment, the interdependencies of the food‐energy‐water nexus, and water resource sustainability. Our results provide opportunities for benchmarking the urban energy‐water nexus, water footprints, and climate change potential.

Addendum: Seeking Hawthorne’s Niagara

Addendum: Seeking Hawthorne’s Niagara

Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of the 20 th Century and the Making of Modern Los Angeles . By Jon Wilkman

Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of the 20th Century and the Making of Modern Los Angeles . By Jon Wilkman. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2016. viii + 327 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $28.00.) Minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928 the massive St. Francis Dam collapsed, releasing 12 billion gallons of water into the Santa Clara Valley of Southern California. By daybreak the torrent had killed some 400 people, victims of America’s worst civil engineering disaster of the 20th century. The ill-fated concrete dam had been built in 1924-26 under the direction of William Mulholland, the engineer responsible for the 233 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct that, starting in 1913, brought a bountiful flow of Sierra Nevada snowmelt to the City of Angels. … jacksond{at}lafayette.edu

Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster. By Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson

Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster. Western Histories Series. By Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. viii + 440 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, index. $55.00, £37.95). On March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam in the Santa Clara River Valley north of Los Angeles collapsed with 12 billion gallons of water creating a tsunami of death and destruction on its way to the Pacific Ocean. The flood killed an estimated 400-450 people and devastated the landscape. Except for the pioneering work of Charles Outland, few historians have conducted in-depth research into the causes and consequences of this tragedy. In recent years it has at last attracted scholarly attention, with studies by J. David Rogers and Jon … hoffmanaz{at}gmail.com

Kalispell

Kalispell Maria Anderson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Craig drove home with his three-month chip in his pocket. His mom used to call night drives insect massacres, and he’d always been sad to see all the bug bodies plastered against the front of the car after. But driving at night was beautiful, especially out here, past the dark, [End Page 16] looming mountains, the stars so weird and bright they pricked your eyes. He rolled down his windows and took big breaths of the night air. A moth bleared into his windshield and left a puff of powdered sugar and yellow gook. It was then that he saw a light on in his house. He was a [End Page 17] few miles out. Soon the light grew into a lush and friendly orange. The color deepened mile by mile, and then he knew. When he turned onto the dirt road, losing traction and swerving and regaining it, there were fire trucks outside his house. Bob’s house. The sound of the burning was loud, and he smelled charred cedar. It was then that he noticed Ben barking from the upstairs deck. Kayden was standing there with a wet face. He got out of his truck and stood next to her. Firemen worked the hose without speaking. She squeezed his hand in small pulses. She smelled like sour sweat, or maybe he did. Had he left something on? A burner on the stove? What else was there to leave on? He couldn’t think of anything he might have done wrong. He felt like he’d blacked out. There was no way the fire was not his fault. Everything that went wrong was his fault. He bent over to throw up, but nothing came out. The firemen tried to get a ladder up to the deck, but it kept slipping off. The deck was too high; the angle was wrong. They couldn’t reach the collie. Ben’s screams sounded like a child going Wahoo! Wahoo! Craig watched the ladder slip off again and again. He’d only heard a dog make that noise once. At work a guy had dropped off two tame-looking pit bulls to board at Bob’s kennels and didn’t mention that they were trained for fighting. He’d walked them with a pit bull pup named Mikey that he thought might like some father figures. The bigger dogs tore Mikey apart. Craig had been high. The firefighters stopped with the ladder and focused on hosing the flames, which ate thousands of gallons of water and hissed. “Do something! Do something! Fucking do something!” Kayden yelled. Craig tried not to think about Ben. Seeing so much burn at once mesmerized him. “There’s no way to get to him,” a dirty face told Kayden, mistaking her for the dog’s owner. “We’ll have to focus on saving the structure.” Craig found himself thinking of Kayden’s ex, picturing the douche bag lighting a nice dipper somewhere and smoking himself up into the atmosphere. He pictured the ex on top of Kayden, his sweat dripping onto her neck. He dropped Kayden’s hand, sucked down some air, and ran into his house before anybody could stop him, wrapping his coat around his hand to open the hot front door. Inside, it was so smoky he could not breathe. [End Page 18] He took a step forward, then another. The metal chip in his pocket radiated heat. Two firemen dragged him back outside by his armpits. Wahoo! Wahoo! Ben shrieked, unevenly now. There was another groan from the house. In one long, slow moment, the second story collapsed. Ben disappeared from sight. Kayden was quiet. She stared at where the dog had been. They all did. Craig was shuttled against his will to the hospital, so he could owe money to somebody new. The sixth time Craig’s loved ones decided he needed to clean up, he chose Warm Springs. The name made its program sound simple. Pleasant. Not like Promises Addiction Treatment, his first. There had also been Rocky Mountain Treatment Lodge, Cirque Center, Missoula Ranch, and, worst of all...

Where Does Water Go During Hydraulic Fracturing?

During hydraulic fracturing millions of gallons of water are typically injected at high pressure into deep shale formations. This water can be housed in fractures, within the shale matrix, and can potentially migrate beyond the shale formation via fractures and/or faults raising environmental concerns. We describe a generic framework for producing estimates of the volume available in fractures and undamaged shale matrix where water injected into a representative shale site could reside during hydraulic fracturing, and apply it to a representative site that incorporates available field data. The amount of water that can be stored in the fractures is estimated by calculating the volume of all the fractures associated with a discrete fracture network (DFN) based on real data and using probability theory to estimate the volume of smaller fractures that are below the lower cutoff for the fracture radius in the DFN. The amount of water stored in the matrix is estimated utilizing two distinct methods-one using a two-phase model at the pore-scale and the other using a single-phase model at the continuum scale. Based on these calculations, it appears that most of the water resides in the matrix with a lesser amount in the fractures.

Suspension of oysters reduces the populations of Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus.

Vibrio parahaemolyticus (Vp) and Vibrio vulnificus (Vv) are associated with the consumption of raw oysters and cause illnesses ranging from simple gastroenteritis to life-threatening septicaemia. These halophilic bacteria are frequently found in marine and estuarine systems, accumulating within the tissues of a number of aquatic organisms and passing on to humans after consumption, through contaminated water, or via open wounds. As benthic organisms capable of filtering 40 gallons of water per hour, sediment is an important source of potentially pathogenic vibrios in oysters destined for raw consumption. This research used off-bottom oyster culture to reduce vibrio concentrations in oysters. Colony hybridization was used to enumerate Vp and Vv in bottom and suspended oysters. Vv and Vp concentrations were generally lower in oysters suspended off-bottom, and suspension decreased vibrio loads in oysters by an average of 13%. Suspension of oysters reduced vibrio concentrations. This study found that oyster suspension significantly reduced some populations of potentially pathogenic vibrios. These results indicate that oyster suspension could be a viable approach for preharvest treatment to reduce illness in consumers of raw oysters.

The Depths of Hydraulic Fracturing and Accompanying Water Use Across the United States.

Reports highlight the safety of hydraulic fracturing for drinking water if it occurs "many hundreds of meters to kilometers underground". To our knowledge, however, no comprehensive analysis of hydraulic fracturing depths exists. Based on fracturing depths and water use for ∼44,000 wells reported between 2010 and 2013, the average fracturing depth across the United States was 8300 ft (∼2500 m). Many wells (6900; 16%) were fractured less than a mile from the surface, and 2600 wells (6%) were fractured above 3000 ft (900 m), particularly in Texas (850 wells), California (720), Arkansas (310), and Wyoming (300). Average water use per well nationally was 2,400,000 gallons (9,200,000 L), led by Arkansas (5,200,000 gallons), Louisiana (5,100,000 gallons), West Virginia (5,000,000 gallons), and Pennsylvania (4,500,000 gallons). Two thousand wells (∼5%) shallower than one mile and 350 wells (∼1%) shallower than 3000 ft were hydraulically fractured with >1 million gallons of water, particularly in Arkansas, New Mexico, Texas, Pennsylvania, and California. Because hydraulic fractures can propagate 2000 ft upward, shallow wells may warrant special safeguards, including a mandatory registry of locations, full chemical disclosure, and, where horizontal drilling is used, predrilling water testing to a radius 1000 ft beyond the greatest lateral extent.

Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center

Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA’s infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. Complicating surveillance beyond the NSA, as also already imbricated with various social media companies, this article questions the emplacement and impact of corporate data centers more generally, and the changes they are causing to the landscape and local economies. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for activism in this case, and how it may eventually help transform the public’s conceptualization of Big Data, as deeply material.

Closing the Water Cycle

This article discusses how wastewater can be recycled for consumption if there is scarcity of water. It gives the example of the Orange County plant that is in operation since 2008, and is the largest “indirect to potable reuse” plant in the world. It is “indirect” because that water does not flow straight from the plant to the faucet. Instead, after being treated with microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and then ultraviolet light, the water is pumped back into the ground. Pumping water to an underground basin gives the county time to react if there’s a problem. The soil also works to remove accidental contaminants. The Orange County facility processes some 70 million gallons of water a day, using 14 different reverse osmosis units. Currently, the water is tested – for total organic carbon – at the point where it is all mixed to a single stream.

Evolution of Public Supply Water Withdrawal in the USA: A Network Approach

SummaryWater is essential to life, and tracking trends in the withdrawal of water is paramount if we aspire to become more sustainable. Traditional statistical indicators, such as mean and standard deviation, are useful to track these trends, but they can sometimes fail to capture relevant and nontrivial properties. In this work, we first highlight the limits of these traditional statistical tools and we then offer a new network approach to study water withdrawals. Public supply water withdrawal data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for the years 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2005 were used in gallons of water per capita per day for all U.S. counties. Essentially, a network is formed between counties when they have withdrawal values within a certain range, ± ξ, of one another. A giant cluster rapidly emerges, containing more than 80% of the nodes for a ξ of 1%. The counties with the highest number of connections are associated with the mode of distribution, and we found multimodal patterns for earlier years. Moreover, the average shortest‐path length can be seen as the spread of a distribution. Overall, beyond a possible process of homogenization, water withdrawal patterns do not seem to have evolved much from 1985 to 2005, and no spatial correlation was detected. Though the methodology is yet to be formalized, it manages to give meaningful insights to supplement traditional statistical analyses.

The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair (review)

Reviewed by: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair Diane Dufva Quantic The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning. By Julene Bair. New York: Viking, 2014. 278 pp. $26.96 cloth. Near the end of The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning, Julene Bair sums up her relationship with the High Plains of far northwest Kansas: “I’d been on this Ogallala road since birth. I’d grown up slaking my thirst with Ogallala [aquifer] water and bathing in it. I’d gotten much of my financial support from Ogallala crops. And ever since I was a young woman and had knocked open the pipe gates myself, I’d been thinking Ogallala thoughts. … I wasn’t going to get off that road anytime soon, and I didn’t want to.” The Ogallala Road picks up the stories that Julene and her brother, Bruce, told in their accounts of childhood on the Bair farm, One Degree West and GoodLand. Here Bair weaves her intimate knowledge of the water deep beneath the High Plains that her family pulled from the Ogallala aquifer with the struggle to hold onto their farm after their father’s death. The irrigated crops paid the bills. The love and reckoning of the title refers to the farm northwest of Goodland, Kansas, and to Ward Albright, a rancher Julene meets while searching for ponds once filled with water, now filled with sand. Her love for Ward and for the land reflect her conflicted relationship: Ward is a grass man, not a dirt man. Hazardous chemicals and irrigation boost crop production that enables Julene and Bruce’s family to live well away from the farm. The solution, Julene wants to believe, involves her hope that Ward can help her save the farm. As she tells this story, Bair recalls the years she and her young son took refuge from a failed marriage on the farm, sparring with her stubborn, demanding father, learning the intricacies of farm management, and trying to leave but getting pulled back even after her move to Laramie, Wyoming. Because she keeps the farm’s water usage records, after her father’s death Bair becomes increasingly aware of her own complicity in the “planned depletion” of the aquifer and the deep divide between her concerns and Ward’s defense of unabated water use. The inevitable reckoning comes for Julene, Bruce, Ward, and the Bair farm. She realizes how much water the farm uses in a year. Knowing that other farmers use just as much or more and that the fossil water of the aquifer will never be replaced, she asks herself, “Did I need to become an activist? … As long as my family was part of the problem, what legs would I have to stand on?” Julene opts for activism, Bruce tires of making complicated decisions concerning the farm, and their faithful on-site manager is ready to retire. Keeping the farm becomes impossible, but selling—to a corporation that turns even the pastures into irrigated corn—brings deep, deep pain. It’s a conundrum that farmers up and down the arid High Plains face as they draw millions of gallons of water to raise the corn to feed the cattle to support the beef industry that sustains the region’s economy. Those concerned about the continuing viability of the High Plains and the family farm and those who enjoy a good story by a gifted writer will value Julene Bair’s account of love and reckoning along the Ogallala Road. Diane Dufva Quantic Derby, Kansas Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Citizen Coke: the making of Coca-Cola capitalism

Coca-Cola's success in building a global empire drew on more than a secret formula and brilliant advertising. The secret to Coke's success was its strategy to offload production costs and risks on to suppliers and franchisees. Outsourcing and a trim corporate profile enabled Coke to scale up production of a low-price beverage and realise huge profits. But the costs shed by Coke have fallen on the public at large. Coke now uses an annual 79 billion gallons of water and its reliance on corn syrup has helped fuel our obesity crisis. Bartow J. Elmore explores Coke through its ingredients, showing how the company secured massive quantities of coca leaf, caffeine, sugar and other inputs. Coke became a giant in a world of abundance. In a world of scarcity it is a strain on resources and all who depend on them.

Energy Education Incentives: Evaluating the Impact of Consumer Energy Kits

Measuring the energy and environmental impact of residential energy education efforts is difficult. The E-Conservation residential energy management program uses consumer energy kits to document the impact of energy-efficient improvements. The consumer energy kit provides an incentive for individuals attending energy education workshop, helps consumers identify simple energy-saving technologies, and provides consumers with accessible energy-saving actions. As a result of consumers installing the compact fluorescent light bulbs and low flow showerheads in the energy kits, measureable savings in terms of annual energy savings, kilowatt hours, gallons of water used, and CO2 reduction are achieved.

Singular count pseudo-partitives

Inversion-constructions, like too tasty of a cake and a disaster of a conference, have generally been treated separately from superficially similar-looking pseudo-partitives, like three gallons of water. I argue for an analysis that unifies the syntax and semantics of the two constructions through a proposal about the head of that appears in both. Both constructions involve the composition of two properties: one is contributed by the head noun; the other is contributed by the modifier, i.e., the measure-phrase in pseudo-partitives and the noun phrase or degree phrase in inversion-constructions. Moreover, while pseudo-partitives involve the composition of two properties of individuals, inversion-constructions involve the composition of two properties of states. A single semantic constraint—non-divisiveness of the property denoted by the modifier—is seen to play a role in both types of constructions, and, in particular, to predict both the monotonicity of modifiers in pseudo-partitives and the gradability of modifiers in inversion-constructions.

Corrigendum to: Process safety in using NH3 as refrigerant in Indian ice making plants: case studies followed by policy recommendations

Corrigendum to: Process safety in using NH₃ as refrigerant in Indian ice making plants: case studies followed by policy recommendations

Book Interview

ONE OF the more disturbing facts about the 21st Century is that we now live in a world where there are more mobile communications devices than there are toothbrushes. Getting on for a billion people don't have access to clean drinking water, are trapped in food, health and energy poverty, living on less than a dollar a day. In contrast, it takes 800 gallons of water to make a single hamburger

Microwave Incinerated Rice Husk Ash (MIRHA) and Used Engine Oil (UEO): Towards Sustainable Concrete Production

Rice is a primary source of food for billions of people and covers 1% of the earth’s surface. On average 20% of the rice paddy is husk, giving an annual total production of 120 million tones. Nowadays, there are two common methods used to dispose the rice husk which is either it is being dump or burnt. Rice husk ash (RHA) which is produced by burning paddy husk led to the issue of ozone layer depletion. It also causes damage to the land and the surrounding area where it is being dumped. Previous studies have pointed out that RHA produced contains more than 80% pure silica and if properly prepared, it is in an active form which behaves very much like cement. Same goes with used engine oil (UEO). Many people are aware that UEO shouldn’t be dumped, but recycled. It is incredibly toxic stuff and a gallon can contaminate one million gallons of water. Pouring it on land doesn’t reduce the risk either as it can seep down into the water table.The objective of this research is to obtain an optimum percentage of inclusion of microwave incinerated rice husk ash (MIRHA) as a cement replacement and UEO in order to produce a better concrete in terms of compressive strength compared to normal OPC concrete. The test results showed MIRHA concrete performed better than normal OPC concrete and the incorporation of UEO and MIRHA in concrete showed the compressive strength give better performance.

Can green solvents be alternatives for thermal stabilization of collagen?

“Go Green” campaign is gaining light for various industrial applications where water consumption needs to be reduced. To resolve this, industries have adopted usage of green, organic solvents, as an alternative to water. For leather making, tanning industry consumes gallons of water. Therefore, for adopting green solvents in leather making, it is necessary to evaluate its influence on type I collagen, the major protein present in the skin matrix. The thermal stability of collagen from rat tail tendon fiber (RTT) treated with seven green solvents namely, ethanol, ethyl lactate, ethyl acetate, propylene carbonate, propylene glycol, polyethylene glycol-200 and heptane was determined using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Crosslinking efficiency of basic chromium sulfate and wattle on RTT in green solvents was determined. DSC thermograms show increase in thermal stability of RTT collagen against heat with green solvents (>78°C) compared to water (63°C). In the presence of crosslinkers, RTT demonstrated thermal stability >100°C in some green solvents, resulting in increased intermolecular forces between collagen, solvent and crosslinkers. The significant improvement in thermal stability of collagen potentiates the capability of green solvents as an alternative for water.

Produced and Flowback Water Recycling and Reuse: Economics, Limitations, and Technology

The demands for the fresh water used in many hydraulic fracturing operations are placing pressure on water sources in some regions of the United States. Because of the high volumes of water needed for fracturing (e.g., in the Marcellus, a typical hydraulic fracturing operation for a horizontal gas well in a tight shale formation requires from 3 to 5 million gallons of water over a 2- to 5-day period), the competing demand driven by industrial, municipal, and agricultural users has in some cases decreased the availability of fresh water and increased associated costs.