Growth of large private water companies brings higher water rates, little recourse for consumers

(Water is the essence of life...why shouldn't they charge us more for it, right?--jef)

By Jeremy Schwartz and Eric Dexheimer

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, Dec. 18, 2011

PFLUGERVILLE — When Robert White opened his water bill last month, his jaw dropped: $250 for a month's worth of water and sewer service. The 63-year-old construction contractor, who shares a three-bedroom home with his wife in the bucolic Springbrook Centre subdivision, said he likes to keep his lawn green and expects hefty water bills. "I just don't want to be hijacked," he said.

White's water service is provided by a private utility owned by California-based SouthWest Water Co. LLC. Just across the four-lane Pflugerville Parkway, where White's neighbors in the Springbrook Glen subdivision — a nearly identical grid of neatly arranged brick-faced homes — get their water from Pflugerville, rates are on average about 60 percent less.

And White's bill for water service may nearly double soon, if SouthWest Water gets the latest rate increase it has requested. "I have never felt so helpless," he said.

He's not alone. Across the state, a growing number of suburban Texans are getting their water from large, private corporations owned by investors seeking to profit off the sale of an essential resource. State figures show private companies are seeking more price increases every year, and many are substantial.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which regulates water and sewer rates for nonmunicipal customers, doesn't keep numbers, but "their rate increases tend to be 40 and 60 percent," said Doug Holcomb, who oversees the agency's water utilities division.

For years, small private companies have played a crucial role in Texas, providing water and sewer service in new developments outside of cities. Analysts say private companies will continue to fill an essential need in the future, when public money is projected to be insufficient to make the billions of dollars in costly upgrades needed in water and sewer systems.

Increasingly, however, the companies are neither small nor local. Over the past decade, multistate water utilities have expanded aggressively in Texas, drawn by the state's booming population and welcoming regulatory environment. A September report prepared by utility analysts for Robert W. Baird & Co., a financial management company, identified Texas water regulators as the most generous in the country for private water companies. Today, three out-of-state corporations own about 500 Texas water systems that serve more than 250,000 residents.

For residents living outside cities served by private utility companies, the state environmental commission is charged with setting "just and reasonable" water rates based on a company's cost of doing business plus a guaranteed profit. In exchange, the companies enjoy a monopoly on their service area.

Yet critics say the agency is unprepared to handle the recent influx of corporations that have exploited a regulatory system more accustomed to handling rural mom-and-pop operations. Meanwhile, Texas laws provide fewer consumer protections to residents facing water rate increases than electricity and gas ratepayers.

"We are in the midst of a transformation in this state, and the state is ill-prepared to move into that transition," said Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, who co-chairs a legislative subcommittee to investigate the rates charged by investor-owned water utilities. "It feels like it's happening at warp speed."

Industry officials say their rates reflect the true cost of rehabilitating and expanding older water systems, and that without their deep pockets, such systems would languish. The "larger Investor-Owned Utilities have invested in small, rural water and sewer systems that have gone decades without meaningful improvements in their infrastructure and often do not meet minimum environmental standards set by the state," SouthWest Water spokeswoman Janice Hayes said in an email, adding that the companies have poured millions of dollars into new equipment and upgrades.

But in some places, the rate increase s following those improvements have been so high as to inhibit economic growth. Just south of Austin, SouthWest Water seven years ago purchased rights to provide water on the eastern edge of Kyle. Today, officials say, its rates are about double those of the city.

As a result, the company's service area is one of the few desirable commercial locations — just off Interstate 35 — where fast-growing Kyle has remained underdeveloped, said Diana Blank, the city's director of economic development. "We've lost projects because of that," she said. Prospective employers "will look at the map and say, 'Who serves the area for water?'"

SouthWest's latest rate request, which would increase rates for some suburbanites to more than three times what Austin residents pay, has caught the attention of lawmakers. A half-dozen legislators said they will introduce changes to the law during the next session to provide more consumer protections.

"This may be the poster child for the kinds of reforms we need," Watson said. "Some utilities will stretch the law as far as they can stretch it."

'Shock and awe'

In Texas, state agencies oversee consumer rates charged by utility companies, which must persuade regulators that rate increases are necessary. But nonmunicipal private water companies enjoy an advantage over electric and natural gas companies: They can raise rates before they've been approved.

At the Public Utility Commission, which oversees electric companies, and the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates gas companies outside cities, agency accountants typically review applications and negotiate with the utilities over the proposed rates. Only after that process, which can take months or longer, do the charges go into effect. Other states do the same, with proposed rates negotiated before customers ever receive a higher bill.

By comparison, the Texas "file and use" system generally permits private water companies to impose new, higher rates as soon as they're filed. Protests are addressed later and can go on for years.

"It doesn't really matter how long the rate case takes if you're already earning what you think you're going to get," Heike Doerr, a national utility analyst, said in a recent speech in which he identified Texas as friendly to water companies.

"The people who want to oppose it are always on the defensive," added Tom "Smitty" Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer and environmental advocacy organization.

If fewer than 10 percent of a utility's customers complain, the new rate typically becomes permanent. If customers do mount a campaign against the rate, they're on their own.

That highlights another difference in the way in which water companies outside cities are regulated. When electric companies petition the Public Utility Commission for rate increases, ratepayers are represented by a separate taxpayer-funded office, the Public Utility Counsel, whose accountants and attorneys review the request and advocate for consumers. It can also hire consultants on their behalf.

Other states have a similar system for water customers. Arizona set up the taxpayer-funded Residential Utilities Consumer Office nearly 30 years ago to represent ratepayers in contested cases.

In Texas, however, private water customers who live outside cities must foot their own bill to fight rate increase s. Although the state environmental quality commission has an office called the Public Interest Counsel, it is prohibited from offering legal advice to customers, much less representing them.

One Henderson County community has hosted bake sales and chili suppers to raise money to fight SouthWest's proposed 50 percent water rate increase s. In Comal County, customers have been asked to donate money to protest SJW Corp.'s proposed 71 percent rate increase — its third in three years, said community leader Geoff Miller.

"If you don't have qualified professionals equal to those hired by the water company," he said, "then your chances of being successful are very small."

Texas law also entitles private water companies to recover the cost of the rate-making process through customer billings. In 2004, a multistate investor-owned water company called Aqua America requested a rate increase for several Texas developments and cities. It wrapped up in 2007 after more than three years of wrangling. Aqua's legal and consulting costs were more than $2.5 million, a figure the company tacked onto customer bills.

Even if they win, Texas ratepayers have no such recourse. Requiring residents to take on big companies on their own dime while paying the new higher rates pressures them to settle disputes as quickly as possible, critics say.

At the same time, they say it encourages private companies to use a strategy Watson termed "shock and awe" during a contentious Senate hearing on the subject over the summer: Hit customers with a large rate increase , then drag out the case.

"I believe your company does engage in that," Watson told SouthWest's vice president. "And I believe you and your company tend to be rather smug about that."

Agency overwhelmed

In 1986, when water rate-making authority was moved from the Public Utility Commission to the Texas Water Commission, now part of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the arrangement seemed to make sense: The private water landscape was overwhelmingly populated by small, local companies with few customers each. The agency's role, said Joe Freeland, an Austin attorney who represents water customers, was often more to assist the often-struggling companies than to police them aggressively.

But with more small companies being snapped up by large corporations, he and others say the environmental agency can be overwhelmed by corporate attorneys and accountants representing their clients. In 2007, an agency analyst evaluating an Aqua rate case testified it was "25 times larger" than any case he'd tackled previously.

Critics point to examples in which, given the same case, city and state regulators obtained much different results for consumers.

When private utility companies want to raise rates on customers in their service territory who also live within a city's limits, city officials — not the state's — consider the case. In 2002, a private company called Tall Timbers, which had customers in and outside the city of Tyler, filed to increase its sewer rates. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality signed off on the increase for the company's out-of-city ratepayers.

The City of Tyler, meanwhile, "conducted a more thorough review," recalled utilities and public works manager Greg Morgan, and concluded the rates should actually be lowered by $10 a month.

Tall Timbers objected, and the case went next to a state administrative law judge — who calculated the "just and reasonable" rate for the utility's Tyler customers was even lower than the city had found.

Since then, the environmental commission has signed off on another rate increase for the utility's customers outside the city. Today, Morgan said, those customers pay twice as much as their neighbors in Tyler, "so we've ended up with two classes of citizens."

In recent years, private water companies have asked for rate increases more frequently. In 2006, the environmental agency received 70 requests. Last year, it was 129 — an 84 percent jump. At the same time, the agency's water rate review division has seen its budget shrink over the past three years.

Earlier this year, the Sunset Advisory Commission, which reviews state agencies, recommended legislators move water rate regulation from the environmental quality commission to the Public Utility Commission, which has a larger staff experienced in fielding complex rate cases.

Representatives of the large water companies protested, contending the environmental agency was doing an adequate job. Legislators did not act on the advisory commission's recommendations, leaving rate reviews with the agency.

"TCEQ is not as sophisticated as some public utility commissions" in other states, SJW Corp. CEO W. Richard Roth told analysts in a December presentation. "That can be good, and that can be bad."

Numbers questioned

In Central Texas, no private water company has caused more of an uproar than SouthWest Water, which in 2000 purchased two water companies in Pflugerville and eastern Travis County, where population was projected to grow rapidly.

Over the next decade, SouthWest aggressively acquired other small companies, seeking to cluster them into regional water providers. State regulators and lawmakers have promoted such regionalization to encourage economies of scale within the state's patchwork of nearly 700 private water and sewer service areas.

In 2004, SouthWest made a key acquisition: Tecon Water Co., which served 21,000 water connections, including many along the eastern edges of Kyle and Buda. The $66 million purchase represented more than just a bet on a high-growth area; it also came with a special legislative exemption that Tecon had been granted a year earlier.

State law requires water companies to have separate rate schedules for each of their water utilities — unless they can prove the utilities are "substantially similar" (the idea being that ratepayers in one area shouldn't subsidize those in another). The Tecon clause allowed the company to bypass state law and consolidate various water companies under one entity with a single tariff. Seven years later, the exemption would become the basis for SouthWest Water's current rate increase proposal, affecting 46,000 water and sewer customers.

In 2010, private investors advised by J.P. Morgan bought publicly traded SouthWest for $430 million, a high price, according to some experts. "Observers are still scratching their heads trying to figure out how the investors will actually earn a return on the premium valuation that they paid for the company," Debra Coy, a leading water utility analyst, wrote in the trade magazine American Water Intelligence.

A year later, SouthWest Water began the process of raising rates so much they became the focal point of hearings at the Texas Senate.

Using the Tecon exemption, SouthWest Water first applied for permission to merge eight of its Texas water utilities under the Monarch Utilities banner, then asked for a single rate that would produce bills nearly three times the size of the average water bill for municipal customers in Texas.

SouthWest officials say the rate request isn't linked to the 2010 purchase that took the company private but is instead needed to pay for a $70 million upgrade to old water systems — much of which was mandated by state regulations. To encourage such upgrades, state regulators give private companies rates of return of up to 12 percent on the equity they invest.

Yet critics have questioned other numbers in Monarch's 1,700-page application for a higher rate, especially nearly $10 million in corporate management and utility group fees. "Our suspicion is that there must be some kind of corporate overhead price that others don't charge because they don't have a parent company owned by J.P. Morgan," said Simon Sequeira, president of Quadvest, a small investor-owned water company northwest of Houston. Sequeira and other small-utility owners have formed an association seeking to distance itself from what it calls the unreasonable rates sought by the larger newcomers.

TCEQ officials also have questioned $4.3 million in "public company costs" given that SouthWest is no longer publicly traded, and another $1.2 million for computer and IT services in California, where SouthWest is based. SouthWest officials said management fees go toward legal, financial, engineering and customer service-related work.

SouthWest Water ratepayers, including residents from Bulverde, near San Antonio, and Blue Mound, outside Fort Worth, have organized to protest the rates. Because they would also affect residents within cities, several municipalities, including Pflugerville and Kyle, have hired an attorney to fight the case.

Customers said they fear the proposed increase would deplete family budgets, make homes harder to sell and inhibit commercial development in their neighborhoods. Austin's Colony, a neighborhood of moderately priced homes in eastern Travis County served by Hornsby Bend — a small company that SouthWest bought in 2000 — has experienced one of Travis County's highest foreclosure rates. When the proposed rates temporarily went into effect over the summer, residents saw their water bills jump by about half.

Lucio Camarillo, a construction worker who lives in the neighborhood with his daughter, said he began paying water and sewer bills of about $150, in addition to the $130 a month he spends to pay for a water softener system, which he says was necessary because of the quality of the water. He said he had to cut his cable service and carefully ration water.

"If I had known it was going to be like this, I probably would have bought in the city," Camarillo said.

SouthWest Water also provides wholesale water to Kennedy Ridge, a nearby low-income subdivision where rates sparked an investigation by the state attorney general's office. After the company was charged with violating the Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act, SouthWest this year agreed to credit Kennedy Ridge nearly $77,000 in restitution and to follow certain rules on increasing rates.

Last month, State Office of Administrative Hearings judges took the unusual step of setting an interim rate that rolled back rates in all eight SouthWest Water subsidiaries to their previous levels until the case is decided. They will next rule on whether SouthWest Water can merge and, if that effort is successful, will then take up the rate case again. A final decision is likely months or even years away.

Louisiana warns of brain-eating parasite in tap water

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW News

Friday, December 16, 2011

Officials in Louisiana warned this week that a brain-eating parasite known as Naegleria fowleri might survive in some of the state’s tap water, cautioning that if residents use the common cold remedy known as a neti pot, they should thoroughly boil their water first.
 
Neti pots work by injecting a hot water/salt solution into users’ sinuses, flushing out mucus and clearing the nasal passages. Although Naegleria fowleri is most commonly found in pond water, lakes and rivers, officials said that two people in Mississippi recently fell victim to to the amoeba, seemingly after they used tap water in their neti pots. The two male victims, both killed by their infection, were ages 20 and 51.

The link between Naegleria fowleri and tap water should not be cause for alarm, officials told a reporter for LiveScience.com.

“If you are irrigating, flushing or rinsing your sinuses, for example, by using a Neti pot, use distilled, sterile or previously boiled water to make up the irrigation solution,” Louisiana epidemiologist Dr. Raoult Ratard said in a statement to reporters. “Tap water is safe for drinking but not for irrigating your nose.”

The microscopic creature is not capable of doing any harm to people if the water is consumed as intended: instead, it only activates if it manages to get deep into the sinuses of its victim.

“Naegleria fowleri infects people by entering the body through the nose,” the Centers for Disease Control explained. “This typically occurs when people go swimming or diving in warm freshwater places, like lakes and rivers. In very rare instances, Naegleria infections may also occur when contaminated water from other sources (such as inadequately chlorinated swimming pool water or heated tap water <47°C) enters the nose. Once the ameba enters the brain, it causes a usually fatal infection called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM)."

Whether or not the two victims actually contracted the amoeba through tap water was still under investigation, but officials issued the warning anyway out of concern for public safety.

Bad News About Water Quality — and Quantity

(Sometimes I feel guilty watering my yard. Real life water rationing is right around the corner, and we won't have a choice. People will bitch--mainly business folks--but we won't have a choice. Soon "lost to history" will be water parks; and the backyard family pool will soon be a thing of the past. But someday soon, we will literally wake up and wonder where all the water went.--jef)

Friday, August 5, 2011 by The Toronto Star
by Antonia Zerbisias

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart practically cowered under his desk last month when journalist Alex Prud’homme appeared.



That’s because Prud’homme’s just-published The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century is 435 pages of bad news about how North Americans waste, contaminate and violate our water supplies.

“Water is a deceptively plain substance,” he notes in his introduction. “Yet it is the basis for life, and is considered an ‘axis resource,’ meaning one that underlies all others.”

Without water, there is no life. As we have seen this summer, droughts have ravaged the U.S. mid- and southwest, China and even France. In Somalia and Kenya, it’s a humanitarian disaster.

In North America, we’re spoiled.

On the phone from his home in New York City, Prud’homme says, “We really need to start thinking about water.

“Because we’ve become so good at collecting, transporting and treating water, people feel they can turn the tap on anytime they want and get as much water as they want, at any temperature they want, for as long as they want. So we’ve forgotten how important it is. But what we haven’t done is manage it very sustainably or wisely.

“But now conditions have changed. There are more people on Earth, we are using water more and more, the climate is shifting, our diets are changing, the ways we pollute water are shifting. Our indifference is a luxury we no longer can afford.”

On a per-capita basis, Canadians are just behind the world’s most wasteful water users, the Americans, reports the Conference Board of Canada. That’s a lot of water down the drain.

What’s more, says Prud’homme, we excrete Viagra, synthetic estrogen and other prescription drugs — as well as illicit substances — when we use the toilet. Some of us are even flushing chemicals and leftover pills away. We poison fish every time we wash with antibacterial soap. Our factory farms send rivers of runoff — including potentially E. coli-carrying manure — into lakes and streams. Turn on an appliance, including the computer on which you may be reading this, water is used to power hydroelectric dams, or cool nuclear plants, or run coal generators.

And personal water usage is just a few drops in the bucket compared to what industry uses and pollutes on a daily basis.

Then there are the catastrophes. Last year’s BP Deepwater Horizon explosion spewed at least 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, ranking it as the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history.

But that’s nothing, according to Prud’homme, who notes that every day “millions of tiny leaks from the cars, trucks, motorcycles, lawn mowers, boats, planes, snowmobiles and other machines we use” get washed into sewers and flow into the rivers, lakes and the ocean.

Citing a National Research Council report, he writes that “humans spill more than 300 million gallons of oil into North American waters every decade, which is double the highest estimate of the BP spill.”

“This is not as photogenic as Deepwater Horizon or Hurricane Katrina, something where images can really sway people emotions,” he tells the Toronto Star. “The fact is, ultimately it’s far more destructive.”

But The Ripple Effect is about a lot more than water quality. It’s also about water quantity, which we take for granted.

In the U.S., water is literally poured into the desert.

That’s why Prud’homme zeroes in on the driest city in the driest state, Las Vegas, Nev., where the famous strip’s hotels boast extravagant water features, water slides, water shows and even shark tanks.

While Sin City has started to recycle and manage its water — that could be your used bathwater spurting out of the Bellagio’s famous fountain — it has also been snatching up ranch land to claim the groundwater beneath.

“Las Vegas is the city that wasn’t supposed to be,” says Prud’homme. “Despite the fact that they have implemented a lot of efficiencies, it’s still a city in the desert, which is kind of crazy. So they’re considering this project which would essentially build this pipeline up to central eastern Nevada where the basins are seemingly dry on the surface but there’s actually water beneath. The ranchers and the environmentalists and Native Americans are not happy about it and, most important, the state of Utah is not happy about it because that aquifer is shared between Nevada and Utah.”

Which brings us to water ownership.

Prud’homme devotes many pages to tycoons such as Canada’s Maurice Strong and American corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, who both own thousands and thousands of acres of land atop two of the U.S.’s largest aquifers. It’s a 21st-century bonanza.

“The hydrocarbon era is over. Water is the new oil!” says Pickens in The Ripple Effect.

Then there are the multinationals that are eager to buy water, bottle it and sell it for profit.

They’ll also tempt cash-strapped municipalities with offers of replacing aging infrastructure, such as century-old sewer pipes, in return for collecting fees for water.

“This gets to this really interesting moral question,” says Prud’homme. “Is water a common (good) like the air we breathe and therefore should be free to everyone, or is it a commodity like oil and natural gas that is extracted and processed and then sold in the market place?

“Sometimes private water can be good. They’ll come in and fix up your utility and they will run it more efficiently and you’ll get better water. Yes, there’s a price for that but it’s an affordable price.

“But there are other times where the dark side of human nature has gotten the better of water companies and they have seized on this essential resource. Private water companies have occasionally gouged their customers and started charging high water rates when people are desperate for a drink. This has happened in places like Central and South America, and it’s led to protests and riots.”

Like many, Prud’homme worries the coming water scarcity could lead to hostilities.

“That’s the great fear,” he says. “If you look at places like Pakistan-India, the two Koreas, China and its neighbours or the Tigris-Euphrates nations, there are certainly going to be tensions in the coming years, maybe even violence. There’s only so much water in the world, the population is growing, the climate is changing and people are using water in new ways.”

Canadians, who may feel smug about having one of the world’s largest supplies of fresh water, may need to, well, pour some of that water into their wine.

“Canada is water rich but it’s not so easy to pipe water from Quebec to Alberta, for example, and there are consequences,” cautions Prud’homme. “There is a way of managing water more holistically instead of having a hodgepodge of laws and initiatives.”

Pointing to the tiny island nation of Singapore, he says, “It’s an island nation and it’s ruled by an autocrat but they use water extremely efficiently. Their system is overseen by a body of highly skilled and educated managers who are well-funded and independent. It can make decisions based on what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient.

“Every drop counts there. They are always reminding citizens how important it is to be efficient and to conserve. There’s a great depth of education about water there that neither Canada nor the U.S. has.

“So these are lessons and strategies that can be adopted on a larger scale for nations like Canada and the U.S. We are going to have no choice over the coming decade.”

No Fracking Way

Monday, June 13, 2011 by OtherWords
In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America.
by Wenonah Hauter

 

Flames exploding from kitchen taps. Livestock dropping dead from tainted water. People in small towns noticing an unusual stench, experiencing acute headaches, and blacking out.

These aren't scenes from a horror movie. They're the increasingly common results of natural gas drilling throughout the United States.

Many state and federal lawmakers see natural gas as the answer to our nation's need for new energy sources. Yet extracting gas through a process called hydraulic fracturing — more commonly referred to as "fracking" — poses unacceptable risks to the American public.

Fracking requires large quantities of water and a cocktail of toxic chemicals that have been shown to poison water resources in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

To date, at least 1,000 cases of water contamination have been documented near drilling sites around the country. In some cases, residents can no longer drink from their taps, and in at least one instance, a home near a fracking site exploded after a gas well leaked methane into its tap water.

Fracking can also compromise air quality. People in Dish, Texas, located near 11 natural gas compression stations, know this from firsthand experience. Residents there complained of headaches and blackouts, a strange odor in the air, and a sudden rash of blindness among their livestock. A private environmental consultant sampled air from Dish and found that it contained high levels of neurotoxins and carcinogens, including benzene.

The correlation between fracking and serious public health problems is further reinforced by studies conducted by the Endocrine Disruption Network, which found that 25 percent of fracking chemicals could cause cancer, and 40 to 50 percent could affect the nervous, immune, and cardiovascular systems.

In addition to poisoning our water, homes, and bodies, fracking is eroding the quality of life in rural America. New wells bring fleets of noisy, polluting trucks to small towns. Scenic vistas are replaced by fracking wells, harming tourism and recreation industries. In Wise County, Texas, properties with gas wells have lost 75 percent of their value. While companies promise minimal impacts, the process often devastates farming operations when fracking fluids poison water supplies, sometimes even killing livestock.

Yet despite these problems, the United States is currently experiencing a boom in natural gas production, drilling into rock that is only now accessible thanks to so-called innovations within the industry. Between 2000 and 2010, fracked shale gas increased from 1 percent to 20 percent of the domestically drilled natural gas supply.

The natural gas industry's influence has fueled much of this growth. Between 2005 and 2010, the largest natural gas producers and two trade associations spent more than $370 million lobbying on behalf of industry interests.

Such unchecked influence has allowed the natural gas industry to expand while doing little to protect consumers from its effects. Fracking is exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and companies are not legally required to disclose the chemicals used in fracking operations, claiming them as proprietary "trade secrets."

In the absence of strong federal leadership, it's up to state and local governments to protect their residents. Last year, New York State passed a six-month moratorium on fracking. In late May, Eric Schneiderman, the state's Attorney General, launched a lawsuit against the federal government for not fully assessing the environmental impacts of proposed fracking operations along the Delaware River, which supplies drinking water for 15 million Americans. To date, at least 44 municipalities across the country have passed measures to ban fracking.

Such developments point to a public backlash against this dirty, polluting process, but federal government involvement is essential too. President Barack Obama should institute a national ban on natural gas fracking. Doing so would protect public health and our essential resources, sending the message that our communities are more important than the interests of the big oil and gas companies.

The report, The Case for a Ban on Gas Fracking, is available at http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org

My Water's On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song)

Peak Water Has Already Come and Gone

(Is water really a finite resource? This article says it is, what do you think?--jef)

+++++

Wednesday, March 23, 2011 by Inter Press Service

by Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada - Canadian Kevin Freedman is celebrating World Water Day Tuesday by living on 25 litres of water a day, instead of the North American average of 330 litres per day. And he has enlisted 31 others in his "Water Conservation Challenge" to go water - lean, using just 25 litres per day for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and sanitation for the entire month of March.

"People in Canada and the U.S. have no idea how much water they use or how much they waste," Freedman told IPS.

"Although people live on less, it is very difficult to use just 25 litres a day. You can't shower or use a washing machine," he said. "I'm hoping to raise awareness that water is a finite resource."

Nearly a billion people don't have good access to safe fresh water. In a single generation, that number could double as growing demands for water will exceed the available and sustainable supply by 40 percent, according a recent study. "Peak water" has already come and gone. Humanity uses more water than can be sustained, drawing on non-renewable reserves of water accumulated over thousands of years in deep aquifers.

"Water cannot be created, it can only by managed," said Margaret Catley-Carlson, a former senior official with both the Canadian government and at the United Nations, a renowned global authority on water issues, and a director at the Canadian Water Network.

In many countries and regions water scarcity is a fundamental challenge to development, Catley-Carlson told IPS. A lack of access to water can lead to starvation, disease, political instability and even armed conflict.

"Governments see their role as delivering water to the public and industry," she said. "This has to change to sustainably managing water resources for society and the natural environment."

Policy-makers haven't treated water as a valuable resource and as a result water is wasted, with leaky water infrastructure losing 20 to 50 percent of the water it is supposed to deliver. Even water-poor countries in the global south don't make water a top priority because water availability is mainly an issue for women and the poor and they are not well represented in government, she said. Instead limited public funds are spent on things like the military and other priorities.

"It is so frustrating," she said. "We can do without oil but we can't do without water."

On Tuesday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged governments to make pro-poor investments in water and sanitation, particularly in urban areas where the need is acute and has grown by 20 percent in the last decade.

This is "a crisis of governance, weak policies and poor management, rather than one of scarcity," Ban said in a statement.

As the world population and economy grows, the water challenge becomes all the greater. By 2030 the global water demand will be 40 percent greater than today's "accessible, reliable, environmentally sustainable supply" according to the U.S.-led study "Charting Our Water Future" by consultants McKinsey and Company.

About one-third of the population, concentrated in developing countries, will live in basins where this water deficit is larger than 50 percent, the report found.

Agriculture accounts for approximately 71 percent of global water withdrawals today and the water challenge is closely tied to food provision, the study notes. Inefficient and inappropriate irrigation accounts for much of this water use. Thirsty crops like maize are grown in dry places like Spain, requiring enormous amounts of irrigated water. Even a low-value crop like sugar cane is grown under irrigation in some places, which Catley-Carlson calls "ludicrous".

Poor policies, subsidies, such as those for biofuels, trade agreements and bad habits are collectively responsible for much of the world's water misuse in food production, she says.

Domestic water use is just eight percent of overall water consumption. Industrial use is the other major user of water. All products have a water component, often called "virtual water", to describe the volume used to make something.

"A desktop computer, for example, requires 1.5 tonnes (1,500 litres) of water; a pair of denim jeans, up to six tonnes; a kilogramme of wheat, one tonne; a kilo of chicken, three to four tonnes; a kilo of beef, 15 to 30 tonnes," says Nicholas Parker, chairman of the Cleantech Group, an international firm that works to accelerate the development and market adoption of clean technologies.

The annual global trade in "virtual water" today is said to exceed 800 billion tonnes, the equivalent of 10 Nile Rivers.

"What people don't often realise is how much water there is in everything we make and buy, from t-shirts to wine," says Parker.

Everyone can become a better steward of water no matter who they are, says Kevin Freedman. The lessons learned through the month-long 25-a-litre-a-day water diet can be applied all year round, he says.

"Everyone in North America can reduce their water use by at least 25 litres. I challenge people to make a pledge to do it," Parker says.

CDC Admits Adding Fluoride to Water is Damaging Teeth

41% of US Adolescents' Teeth Damaged by Flourosis
Tuesday, 15 February 2011

http://www.spotsonmyteeth.com

Who's To Blame for Our Polluted Tap Water?

(Water and access to safe drinking water are to me the biggest issue under the radar. We all need it, and big corporations are doing everything they can to either obtain it and sell it at ridiculous mark ups, or pollute it so bad, it destroys whole regions of crops and people's lives. From Nestle and T. Boone Pickens buying up any aquifers and springs everywhere and selling it at prices most poor people can't afford, or the Natural Gas Industry destroying the water table in Pennsylvania with their fracking (so that folks can light their tap water on fire!), big corporations are out of control. Destroying access to water will be an extinction event if someone doesn't figure out how to stop these greedy shortsighted corporate dicks.--jef)

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The real culprits are the industries that dump pollutants into our water, and the elected officials who are failing to fund our drinking and waste water systems.
By Wenonah Hauter, AlterNet
Posted on January 8, 2011

Recent coverage of the revelations of increased levels of hexavalent chromium (also known as chromium 6) in some of our nation's water supplies vilified the wrong institutions: our municipal water utilities. The real culprits are the industries that dump this and other pollutants into our drinking water sources, and the elected officials who are short-sightedly failing to fund our drinking and wastewater systems.

I repeat: tap water and the public agencies that provide it are not the enemy.

A vital resource, tap water is sometimes taken for granted until something goes wrong. Unfortunately, this lax attention often starts at the federal level, where not enough money is allocated to modernizing and maintaining public drinking water systems, and a blind eye is often turned to the ways in which industries are allowed to exploit and pollute them.

While hexavalent chromium can end up in water naturally, industrial pollution can cause it to reach levels that threaten public health. The current problem with hexavalent chromium reflects decades of insufficient government regulation of the chemicals used by major industries in the U.S. Every year, more than 80,000 chemicals, many of them suspected carcinogens, are approved for use by industry, and discharged into waterways that also happen to serve as drinking water sources.

The presence of hexavalent chromium in some municipal water is yet another sign that it's time for the U.S. to renew its commitment to providing consumers with safe, affordable tap water. Unfortunately, this requires money, and water utilities across the country lack the funds to meet Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations for drinking water quality, much less more protective ones to fix problems not addressed by the EPA. Inadequate federal funding for local public water systems only exacerbates these problems even more.

Rather than putting the onus on municipalities and taxpayers to clean up the mess left by major industries, the EPA needs to step up and do a better job of thoroughly testing the safety of chemicals before allowing them to be dumped into our water.

Consumers using this recent scare as an excuse to abandon tap water in favor of the bottled kind should think again -- almost half of all bottled water comes from tap water supplies. Moreover, independent testing by the Environmental Working Group found 38 contaminants present in 10 brands of bottled water.

Despite these recent developments that may suggest otherwise, U.S. tap water is among the safest in the world. And unlike bottled water, your local utility tests it hundreds of times a month for toxic chemicals. Tap water is also the most environmentally sustainable and socially equitable way to provide drinking water to the public. But in order to keep it that way, we must protect our source water by tightening regulation of the chemicals that threaten the integrity of this vital public resource.

TIME Magazine Lists Flouride as “Environmental Toxin”

Environmental Toxins

Chemicals in plastics and other products seem harmless, but mounting evidence links them to health problems — and Washington lacks the power to protect us

A report from TIME.com lists among other household Items – Flouride- as an “Environmental Toxin”.

Of course, activists and scientists have for years been aware of Flouride’s toxicity, but propaganda and Big Pharma have sought to keep these facts from the general public by showing flouride in a favorable light through the controlled corporate media.

The article went on to say that “Government studies support current fluoride levels in tap water, but studies on long-term exposure and cancers are ongoing”.

What It Is: A form of the basic element fluorine

Found In: Toothpaste, tap water

Health Hazards: Neurotoxic and potentially tumorigenic if swallowed; the American Dental Association advises that children under 2 not use fluoride toothpaste

What You Should Know: Government studies support current fluoride levels in tap water, but studies on long-term exposure and cancers are ongoing

So, What are the lethal levels for humans?

As of April 7, 1997, the United States FDA (Food & Drug Administration) required that all fluoride toothpastes sold in the U.S. carry the following poison warning:

WARNING: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help or contact a poison control center immediately.

Potentially fatal dose = 5 mg of fluoride per kg of bodyweight.

Ingestion of fluoride can produce gastrointestinal discomfort at doses at least 15 to 20 times lower (0.2–0.3 mg/kg) than lethal doses. A 2-year-old, for example, may experience gastrointestinal distress upon ingesting sufficient amounts of flavored toothpaste. Between 1989 and 1994, over 628 people—mostly children—were treated after ingesting too much fluoride from their toothpaste. Gastrointestinal symptoms appear to be the most common problem reported.

In 1986 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for fluoride at a concentration of 4 milligrams per litre (mg/L), which is the legal limit of natural fluoride allowed in the water. In 2006, a 12-person committee of the US National Research Council (NRC) reviewed the health risks associated with fluoride consumption and unanimously concluded that the maximum contaminant level of 4 mg/L should be lowered. The EPA has yet to act on the NRC’s recommendation. The limit was previously 1.4 – 2.4 mg/L, but it was raised to 4 mg/L in 1985.

Wikipedia

Excessive flouride consumption in studies has been shown to be the culprit in the following:

-A weakening of bones, leading to an increase in hip and wrist fracture
-Adverse effects on the kidneys
-possible liver damage
-Chromosomal damage and interference with DNA repair
-a correlation between increased fluoride and low IQ
-suppressive effects on the thyroid

While it is refreshing to see the truth about flouride being published in the mainstream media, it is disappointing to see, that when most people are told about the devastating effects of flouride in our drinking water, toothpaste, and other household items – they ignore the facts, or even categorize these facts as just another “Conspiracy theory”.