Day: October 15, 2021

#California, #Arizona water agencies partner for large-scale recycled #water project — Smart Water Magazine #reuse

Water reuse via GlobalWarming.com.

From Metropolitan Water District via Smart Water Magazine:

Building on increased collaboration on the Colorado River, water agencies in Southern California and Arizona have forged a new partnership to advance development of one of the largest water recycling plants in the country – a project that would help restore balance to the over-stressed river.

Through an agreement approved Tuesday [October 12, 2021] by Metropolitan Water District’s Board of Directors, the Central Arizona Project and Arizona Department of Water Resources will contribute up to $6 million to environmental planning of the Regional Recycled Water Program, a project to purify treated wastewater to produce a new, drought-proof water supply for Southern California. Southern Nevada Water Authority signed a similar agreement with Metropolitan earlier this year.

If fully developed, the $3.4 billion project would produce up to 150 million gallons daily, enough to serve more than 500,000 homes.

“This project could help the entire Southwest. We know that eliminating the supply-demand imbalance that threatens the Colorado River will take both reducing demand, through conservation, and adding new supplies, like recycled water,” Metropolitan General Manager Adel Hagekhalil said. “That’s why our partners in the Lower Basin are interested in helping us develop the project.”

The initial investment from Arizona could lead to a long-term agreement with the agencies to help fund the project’s construction and operation – helping offset the project’s significant cost for Metropolitan – in exchange for Colorado River water, Hagekhalil said. But more research and planning must be conducted before such a long-term partnership could be developed, he added.

Environmental planning work on the project began last year and will take approximately three years, at a cost of about $30 million. The work, including a Program Environmental Impact Report and engineering and technical studies, will help determine the value and feasibility of developing the full-scale project.

Under the new agreement, the Central Arizona Project will contribute $5 million and the Arizona Department of Water Resources will contribute $1 million to this planning work.

“We are eager to further our partnership with the Metropolitan Water District to collaboratively explore and develop opportunities to improve the long-term reliability and resiliency of our shared resource – the Colorado River,” said Central Arizona Project General Manager Ted Cooke.

The latest agreement reinforces the long-standing commitment between California and Arizona to work together to develop solutions on the Colorado River, including supply augmentation, conservation and storage. This partnership, together with Metropolitan’s collaboration with Nevada, will be critical as the Colorado River Basin states begin to create new operating guidelines for the river. The current guidelines are set to expire in 2025.

“Increasing the reuse of recycled water is critical to augmenting water supplies and creating a more resilient Colorado River,” said Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke.

Expanding the value of the Regional Recycled Water Program to the entire Southwest could also help earn federal financial support for the project.

A year after #EastTroublesomeFire, #Colorado races to roll out new firefighting tech — KUNC

Credit: Center of Excellence
for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting

From KUNC (Scott Franz):

Sitting in front of a large computer monitor in the back of a Pilatus PC-12 airplane parked at the Centennial Airport, firefighter Adam Hanson says his work feels more important this year than it ever has before.

He flies in this plane alongside a small crew armed with an infrared camera that can detect an unattended campfire from 25 miles away.

And this year, the plane and its camera have detected at least 206 fires no human could see…

Bruce Dikken, who manages the state’s fleet of firefighting aircraft, says dozens of fires could have become bigger ones last summer had the camera not detected them shortly after they started…

Many are caused by lighting strikes in very remote areas.

A year after the East Troublesome Fire advanced with unprecedented fury and became one of the state’s biggest and most destructive blazes, the state’s firefighters say there is more pressure to detect and extinguish fires before they grow…

And Dikken says the state has been improving the aerial reconnaissance program since it started seven years ago.

“We can create a fire perimeter, draw a line around the edge of it, and then we can send that out to anybody that has access to the internet so they know where that fire’s at right now, including having pictures and video of the fire activity so they know what to expect,” he says.

But even with two of these infrared cameras monitoring the landscape around the entire state, blazes like the East Troublesome and the Cameron Peak fires convinced lawmakers this year they needed more tools to join the fight.

Looking to the skies

The most immediate step the state took in response to Colorado’s record fire season last year was ordering a $24 million aircraft called a Firehawk.

It’s a Sikorsky, military-grade helicopter modified to quickly drop water on approaching flames…

Colorado’s first Firehawk is currently being built in a hangar in Englewood and will take to the skies next year.

In the meantime, engineers in Colorado have been busy this summer testing and developing a brand-new technology they say is starting to revolutionize how firefighters battle wildfires down on the ground.

Adapting battlefield tech

Brad Schmidt starts a program on his laptop at the Centennial Airport and small dots start rapidly moving around a map.

Schmidt helps develop firefighting technology at his office in Rifle with the Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting.

He’s demonstrating the TAK app, a smartphone program that allows firefighters to see the location of their colleagues, fire engines and even aircraft in real-time.

“They’ve never had this type of real-time information before, and some of them have been working in fire for 20 or 30 years,” he said. “Typically, they’ll get one map of the fire every 24 hours, and a lot of cases it literally is a paper map of the fire.”

The smartphone app was originally developed by the military to give soldiers a better idea of what was happening on the battlefield.

And Schmidt says this new digital platform brings lots of benefits to firefighters.

“You’re out in the woods. You might not know at a fork in the road which way to go,” he said. “And rather than having to talk on a voice radio for a couple of minutes to figure out which direction, you could just look at your phone and see exactly where your boss is that that needs you to come down and meet with them.”

Schmidt says he tested the technology this year on the Muddy Slide Fire in Routt County near Steamboat Springs, as well as a large blaze in California.

Report: The changing face of floodplains in the #MississippiRiver Basin detected by a 60-year land use change dataset — Nature

Click here to read the report (Adnan Rajib, Qianjin Zheng, Heather E. Golden, Qiusheng Wu, Charles R. Lane, Jay R. Christensen, Ryan R. Morrison, Antonio Annis & Fernando Nardi). Here’s the abstract:

Floodplains provide essential ecosystem functions, yet >80% of European and North American floodplains are substantially modified. Despite floodplain changes over the past century, comprehensive, long-term land use change data within large river basin floodplains are limited. Long-term land use data can be used to quantify floodplain functions and provide spatially explicit information for management, restoration, and flood-risk mitigation. We present a comprehensive dataset quantifying floodplain land use change along the 3.3 million km2 Mississippi River Basin (MRB) covering 60 years (1941–2000) at 250-m resolution. We developed four unique products as part of this work: Google Earth Engine interactive map visualization interface, Python code that runs in any internet browser, online tutorial with visualizations facilitating classroom code application, and instructional video demonstrating code application and database reproduction. Our data show that MRB’s natural floodplain ecosystems have been substantially altered to agricultural and developed land uses. These products will support MRB resilience and sustainability goals by advancing data-driven decision making on floodplain restoration, buyout, and conservation scenarios.

Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change: Preparing for COP26 — Getches-Wilkinson Center

Click here for all the inside skinny and to register.

On October 31, the world will gather in Glasgow for COP26, a major summit on climate change. As the U.S. rejoins the Paris Agreement, Indigenous Peoples, their traditional knowledge, and relationship with the earth are also at the forefront. Join Colorado Law for a discussion with Indigenous leaders and advocates to learn what’s at stake for all of us.

Wednesday, October 20
12:00-1:15 p.m. MT

Join via Zoom at:
https://lawschool.colorado.edu/e/666563/AILP/7ytf54/1033369651?h=y2w6W-z1pQ9LDXdWI26_OB2HHg6YfmHG9nd1X4InY3s