Hi Alan: I’m writing to personally urge you join the Environmental Water Caucus’ detailed comments to the fifth draft of their Delta Plan.  This Plan, mandated by the State Legislature, will affect virtually every citizen and largely shape the water landscape in California for decades to come.  It will guide the path to restoring one of the world’s great estuaries or write its obituary.  It will determine the future abundance of our fisheries and the quality of our waters from the Sierra to the Sea and from the North to the South.  Unfortunately, the Plan is seriously deficient.

Below is a brief descriptive request that we’re circulating to the larger environmental and fishing community.  Attached is our comment letter.  Beyond asking Coast Action Group to join, we’re also requesting that you circulate this request to all organizations you believe might be willing to sign on and then follow up with them.  Let me know if you have any questions.  EWC’s website is http://www.ewccalifornia.org/home/index.php.  Thanks!!!  Cheers!

Please copy Nick Di Croce (Nick De Croce <troutnk@aol.com>) and myself the authorizing individual, organization and logo by September 27.  Thanks!  Cheers!

We are contacting you because the Delta Stewardship Council is developing a plan that will affect almost every major water body and every water user in the state.  Unfortunately, the plan memorializes the status quo and pays homage to the brotherhood of major water districts whose objectives for the state’s waters are far different from yours.

We are the California Environmental Water Caucus. For 25 years we have been fighting the battles of the Bay Delta and its tributary rivers. Our 31 member organizations range from conservation groups such as the Planning & Conservation League and the Sierra Club, to commercial and sportfishing interests such as the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, to river organizations such as Friends of the River and Sacramento River Preservation Trust, to tribes such as the Winnemen Wintu and Karuk, as well as water quality organizations such as the California Coastkeeper Alliance and Clean Water Action.

The Caucus has created a detailed response letter to the Council in which we identify the Plan’s legal and substantive deficiencies and recommend reasonable and achievable alternatives. Over the coming year, we will either begin the path to restoring one of the great estuaries of the world or write its obituary.  It is critical that the voices and interests of the broad environmental community be represented as the Delta Plan nears completion.

We request that you review the attached copy of our response letter and sign on in support of our expressed concerns and recommendations.  The following summarizes our main findings and recommendations:

• All of the following recommendations require the application of the Public Trust doctrine and the economic analyses that accompany a balancing of the Public Trust with other traditional alternatives.
• The Delta is over appropriated and unless exports are reduced to a scientifically permissible level, the Delta cannot be recovered in any scientifically acceptable sense.
• The over appropriation stems primarily from CVP and SWP contract levels which cannot be met in most years.  The contracts need to be reduced by the State Water Board to a more sustainable yield level.
• Delta outflow must be increased in keeping with the State Water Board’s Delta Flows Criteria, which will favorably impact Delta ecosystems and migrating fish species.
• An aggressive water efficiency program – more aggressive and of longer duration than the current state’s 20/20 program – is a necessary component for reducing reliance on the Delta and must include both urban and agricultural users.
• The water use reductions and savings shown in EWC report alternatives make major structural alternatives such as a canal or tunnel through the Delta and further surface storage unnecessary for water supply reliability.
• The Delta Stewardship Council should accept and support the Delta Protection Commission’s recommendation in their Economic Sustainability Plan to:  “Improve many [core] Delta Levees beyond the PL 84-99 [standard] that addresses earthquake and sea-level rise risks, improve flood fighting and emergency response, and allow for vegetation on the water side of levees to improve habitat.  Improvement of most core Delta levees to this higher standard would cost $1 to $2 billion. While this is a longer-term program, planning should be initiated immediately.”
• Irrigation water should no longer be provided to impaired farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley, in accordance with the state water code requirements for reasonable and beneficial use of water.
• The Delta ecosystems and wildlife cannot be restored without significant reductions of pollutants that are currently being poured into the Delta or without significant improvements in the habitats of the Delta.
• The Kern Water Bank, originally established as a statewide resource but now in private ownership, should be returned to public ownership.
• As recommended in recent federal biological opinions, evaluations of fish passage around major Central Valley dams connected to the Delta should be conducted in order to determine the possible benefits to endangered salmonid species.
• The state needs to ensure that low-income California communities are provided safe and affordable water for basic human needs.

The first five pages of our 46-page letter, as well as the above points, contain the essence of our concerns and alternative recommendations.  If you concur with our directions, we urge you to join us. We need your acknowledgment, your authorizing individual’s name and title, and a copy of your organization’s logo (via email) by September 27.

Bill Jennings, Chairman
Executive Director
California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
3536 Rainier Avenue
Stockton, CA 95204
p: 209-464-5067
c: 209-938-9053
f: 209-464-1028
e: deltakeep@me.com
www.calsport.org

What: U.S. EPA announcement on protecting America’s waters
Who: Nancy Stoner, Acting Assistant Administrator for Water (by
phone); Michael Shapiro, Deputy Assistant Administrator for
Water;
David Evans, Director, Wetlands Division, US EPA;
Representative from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers

Date:  Wednesday, April 27
Time: 1:30 p.m. EDT
Call-In #: 877-290-8017
Conf. ID:   61749007

Attached are a final ruling on our Scott/Shasta Rivers ITP lawsuit and a press release about the ruling. Please circulate as you see fit and let me know if you have any questions.

We have a lot of work to do still in the Scott and Shasta Rivers of Northern California, but this judgement sets an important sideboard in place as we seek a solution that can truly work for fish, farmers and the people who depend on healthy rivers and aquatic life throughout the Klamath Basin. Many thanks to EarthJustice and its skilled attorneys and press team for their hard work on this case.

In another piece of related good news, California Senator Doug LaMalfa withdrew SB665 from the legislative hearing schedule this week, so it doesn’t look like that sneak attack on CDFG Section 1602 permits and permitting authority in CA will go anywhere for now.

ET

042011 Decision Granting Writ of Mandate

SS_Coho_PR_FinalSS_Coho_PR_Final

SS_Coho_PR_Final

Hope you’re not tired of hearing from me, but when I make a new song I figure it’s worth sending out to everybody… This one is an evil practice known as hydraulic fracturing, which is ruining lives, land and water (not to mention a lot of private property) throughout the US and Canada, including most of the state of Pennsylvania.

I don’t need to tell you more, you know how to enter “fracking” into a search engine. Click on the link for the video I made with my iPhone, and the lyric below, with the song description.

www.youtube.com/drovics#p/a/u/0/AflRT0gBgL0

David

TROJAN HORSES - A new analysis finds evidence of widespread contamination of water supplies with amoebas, such as the three Acanthamoeba cells shown here. Each contains many bacteria (some shown, red arrows), which can be toxic to humans. The light circle is a cyst, an amoeba resting inside a heavily protective shell. F. Marciano-Cabral/Va. Commonwealth Univ. Sch. of Med.

Amoebas – blob-shaped microbes linked to several deadly diseases – contaminate drinking-water systems around the world, according to a new analysis. The study finds that amoebas are appearing often enough in water supplies and even in treated tap water to be considered a potential health risk.

A number of these microorganisms can directly trigger disease, from a blinding corneal infection to a rapidly lethal brain inflammation. But many amoebas possess an equally sinister if less well-recognized alter ego: As Trojan horses, they can carry around harmful bacteria, allowing many types to not only multiply inside amoeba cells but also evade disinfection agents at water-treatment facilities.

Even though recent data indicate that amoebas can harbor many serious waterborne human pathogens, U.S. water systems don’t have to screen for the parasites, according to study coauthor Nicholas Ashbolt of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Cincinnati. He coauthored a study of amoebas’ “yet unquantified emerging health risk” in the Feb. 1 Environmental Science & Technology.

He and Jacqueline Thomas of the University of New South Wales in Sydney analyze data from 26 studies conducted in 18 countries. All had identified amoebas in drinking-water systems. Some reports had focused on measurements at treatment plants, others in exiting water; some even extracted the parasites from tap water. Indeed, among 16 studies that looked for tap water contamination, 45 percent reported finding amoebas.

In 2003, Francine Marciano-Cabral of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and her colleagues identified one species of amoeba that is directly lethal – Naegleria fowleri – in water throughout the plumbing of an Arizona home where two young boys had recently died. The amoeba explained the boys’ fatal encephalitis, a brain disease. “We suspect they got it from submerging in the bathtub,” Marciano-Cabral says. The family’s private water supplies had not been chlorinated, a disinfection process that can limit amoeba contamination.

DEADLY SCAVENGERS - Naegleria fowleri amoebas, like these, can glom onto nerve endings in the nose of an exposed individual and motor along them into the brain. There they can trigger encephalitis, a nerve infection that is quickly lethal. Feeding cups on their surface are where they take in bacteria from the environment or bits of tissue while living within a human host. F. Marciano-Cabral/Va. Commonwealth Univ. Sch. of Med.

Thomas and Ashbolt reviewed six studies that together included data from 16 different water-treatment plants and probed for sources of the amoebas that the studies had turned up. Five of those studies reported finding a high prevalence of the parasites – in anywhere from 75 to 100 percent of the surface waters, such as rivers, that were sampled. After water treatment, often using carbon filtration or chlorination, contamination levels dropped somewhat, to fewer than 50 percent of water samples.

In general, the new analysis points out, water treatment appears to reduce amoeba concentrations to a tenth or one-hundredth of starting concentrations, “but breakthrough events do occur and release potentially high numbers of free-living amoebae” – roughly 110 of the parasites per liter – into drinking water distribution systems.

For instance, Megan Shoff of the Ohio State University in Columbus and her colleagues analyzed water from storage tanks above home toilets throughout Broward, Palm Beach and Dade counties in Florida. These free amoebas – ones not shielded by a slimy biofilm – turned up in 55 of 283 samples, or almost one in five. Eight samples contained Acanthamoeba, a type that other studies have associated with corneal infections in contact lens wearers.

Such findings indicate that these amoebas either survived the upstream water-treatment plant or entered the community distribution system, perhaps through cracks in feeder pipes, Thomas and Ashbolt say.

Acanthamoeba is but one of several genera of amoeba that can harbor Legionella pneumophila, the bacterium responsible for virtually all cases of Legionnaires’ disease. Indeed, Ashbolt says, studies have shown that residing in an amoeba “increases the virulence of Legionella,” the leading source of waterborne disease in America. So if these bacteria have spent time in an amoeba host, he says, “they are more likely to be infectious in us.”

Gunnar Sandström of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm is finding much the same with Vibrio cholerae germs. Cholera epidemics, he’s found, occur most frequently when the waterborne germs occur together with amoeba, including Acanthamoeba. And in the lab he’s shown that residence inside an amoeba increases the expression of 438 V. cholerae genes and reduces the expression of 396 others.

“We don’t yet know exactly what these genes do,” he acknowledges, but the end result is bacteria that survive better within amoebas – replicating to populations that can easily reach the 100 million cells that he says are needed to trigger human infection.

Sandström says his preliminary data show that “If we feed V. cholerae to one amoeba, the bacteria will grow until they reach around 100 cells. Then stop.” In the lab, if he then feeds one of those bacteria to a new amoeba, the bacteria won’t stop multiplying until populations inside the amoeba reach 10,000 cells. By continuing this iterative process, he has observed germ growth within a single amoeba of up to one billion cells.

He concludes that amoebas “appear to be a training ground for the Vibrio and key to the infectivity of cholera.”

The Thomas and Ashbolt paper “is a beautiful synthesis of prior work that was really much needed for progress on both the pathogenic-amoeba issue as well as for understanding Legionella disease” and the natural ecology of other bacterial diseases associated with home plumbing, says Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Amoeba contamination of drinking water probably should be regulated, Edwards contends, but can’t be until more data quantify the occurrence and risks associated with these pathogens. This new paper “is a critical first step” in that process, he says. Its synthesis of more than 100 studies “shows there’s just overwhelming evidence that this microorganism is occurring at levels that are a health concern in a large percentage of [water-distribution] sites.”

SUGGESTED READING :

• J. Raloff. Big water losses. Science News blog, October 22, 2008. Available here
• J. Raloff. The case for very hot water. Science News blog. October 23, 2008. Available here
• J.O. Falkinham, et al. 2008. Mycobacterium avium in a shower linked to pumonary disease. Journal of Water and Health 6(2):209. Available here
• G.J. Kirmeyer and M.W. LeChevallier. 2001. Pathogen Intrusion Into Distribution Systems [Project #436]. American Water Works Association Research Foundation.
• H.Y. Lau and N.J. Ashbolt. The role of biofilms and protozoa in Legionella pathogenesis: implications for drinking water. Journal of Applied Microbiology, Vol. 107, August 2009, p. 368. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2672.2009.04208.x. Abstract here

CITATIONS & REFERENCES :

• F. Marciano-Cabral, et al. Identification of Naegleria fowleri in Domestic Water Sources by Nested PCR. APPLIED ANDENVIRONMENTAL MICROBIOLOGY, Vol. 69, October 2003, p. 5864. DOI:10.1128/AEM.69.10.5864-5869.2003. Abstract here
• M.E. Shoff. Prevalence of Acanthamoeba and other naked amoebae in South Florida domestic water. Journal of Water and Health, Vol. 6, p. 99. doi:10.2166/wh.2007.014. Abstract here
• G. Sandström, A. Saeed and H. Abd. Acanthamoeba polyphaga is a possible host for Vibrio cholerae in aquatic environments. Experimental Parasitology, Vol. 126, September 2010, p. 65. DOI:10.1016/j.exppara.2009.09.021. Abstract here
• J.M. Thomas and N.J. Ashbolt. Do Free-Living Amoebae in Treated Drinking Water Systems Present an Emerging Health Risk? Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 45, February 1, 2011, p. 860. DOI: 10.1021/es102876y. Abstract here

“DELTA WATERMASTER SAYS INEFFICIENT WATER USE IS UNREASONABLE WATER USE”

On Wednesday Delta Watermaster Craig Wilson presented a report to the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) suggesting it should flex its power to enforce California’s Reasonable Use Doctrine more broadly across the state. Wilson specifically referenced a clause in the doctrine which states, “the waste and unreasonable use or unreasonable method of use of water” is to be prevented. Wilson says the state must work to improve the efficiency of the agricultural sector’s delivery systems and water use. Agriculture is the single largest demand for water in the state, about 80% of Delta water consumption, and the most difficult to monitor for efficiency.

In order to tackle this issue, Wilson recommended the SWRCB convene a Reasonable Water Use Summit and Reasonable Use Unit within the SWRCB. Although, most provocatively, Wilson suggested that enforcement begin with Cease and Desist Orders to waste and unreasonable use offenders. Wilson begun and closed his report stating, “Inefficient water use is unreasonable water use.”

Links:
80% of Delta water consumption -
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=671

–Larry