Switchboard, from NRDC › Noah Garrison's Blog

NRDC Beach Water Quality Report Shows The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly at California's Beaches

2014-06-25T14:34:29Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

“Rain, rain go away…” might be popular as a nursery rhyme, but it’s a hugely unpopular sentiment right now in California, as this epic drought puts increasing strain on communities throughout the state. And even though stormwater remains a leading cause of pollution at California’s beaches, hoping for less rain is not a long-term solution.

Finding a way to reduce pollution is absolutely critical for California’s thriving beach and coastal economy. According to NRDC’s annual beach water report, Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches, released today, 9 percent of water quality samples collected last year at California beaches contained bacteria levels that failed to meet the most protective threshold for swimmer safety set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – putting California, sadly, on par with a 10 percent failure rate for the country’s beaches overall. Far too many of the state’s beaches are failing to meet this benchmark for safe water 20, 30, or 40 percent (and upwards) of the time, putting beachgoers at increased risk of swimming in polluted water that can cause serious waterborne illnesses like stomach flu, pinkeye, and even respiratory ailments and neurological disorders.

Malibu Beach by the Malibu Pier in Los Angeles County was listed as a "Repeat Offender" for pollution in today's report (Photo: -Scipio-)

Today’s report, the 24th annual release, collects and analyzes the latest water testing results from the EPA and state beach coordinators at nearly 3,500 beach testing locations nationwide. It examines the various causes of water pollution that plague America’s beaches and identifies opportunities for all of us – government leaders, homeowners and beachgoers – to keep pollution out of our beaches, lakes, and rivers.

Beaches across the state are polluted by a variety of contamination sources and major environmental stresses, including the largest known source of beach water pollution -- stormwater runoff from our urban and suburban environments. And even though 2013 was recorded as one of the driest years for much of California since the state started keeping records 150 years ago – meaning less rainfall flushing pollution out to our coastal waters – an unacceptable number of California’s beaches saw high levels of pollution last year.

Hoping it rains even less is obviously not a solution to this problem. Instead, we need to be capturing rain where it falls by using green infrastructure solutions to turn this potential source of pollution into a valuable resource for our communities. Green infrastructure techniques like rain gardens, curb cuts, rain barrels, and porous pavement can help recharge groundwater or harvest rainwater for non-potable uses like landscape irrigation and toilet flushing, saving on both water use and bills.

However, in addition to dirty runoff, our local waters are threatened by sewage spills, climate change, and a lack of federal policies that could fully protect the streams and wetlands that help sustain clean beaches. Wetlands and small streams help ensure that beaches downstream remain safe for swimming and fishing by removing pollutants from the water that passes through them and by retaining stormwater that often causes pollution problems. Thankfully, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers are working to ensure that tributary streams and wetlands are protected from pollution under the Clean Water Act. The agencies recently proposed a Clean Water Protection Rule, which will help better protect our beaches and the local economies that depend on them. The proposed rule, officially known as the “Waters of the U.S. Rule,” is open for public comment until October 20. By clicking on this link, YOU can take action to make sure the rule fully protects California’s (and the rest of the country’s) beaches.

In all this, though, there IS good news: despite the pollution challenges we face, California also has a number of world class beaches that are generally safe for swimming, including one, Newport Beach at 38th Street, identified as a “Superstar” Beach in NRDC’s report.

Newport Beach in Orange County (Photo: flickr/Ken Lund)

But this means two things: first, people need to make sure they know what’s in the water at the beaches they visit, and to choose their beach carefully. Because California has such clean, healthy beaches right next to others that may be polluted or unsafe for swimming, it’s critical that people check out the beaches they’re visiting to make sure it’s safe to swim. And second, we need to keep working on preventing pollution from reaching our shores in the first place, so that the pollution problem we face doesn’t continue to overshadow what’s good about California’s beaches.

We need it to rain in California. We need water to flow in our rivers and streams. And we need for our beaches to be safe for everyone when it does.

Some Details on California’s Beach Water Quality for the 2013 Year:

In 2013, California reported 729 coastal beaches and beach segments, 501 of which were monitored. Of all reported beach monitoring samples, 9% exceeded the Beach Action Value (BAV) of 60 enterococcus bacteria colony forming units (cfu) per 100 ml marine or estuarine water in a single sample. NRDC considers all reported samples individually (without averaging) when calculating the percent exceedance rates in this analysis. This includes duplicate samples and reported samples taken outside the official beach season, if any.

The beaches with the highest percent exceedance rates of the BAV in 2013 were Aquatic Park in San Mateo County (64%); Lakeshore Park in San Mateo County (48%); Candlestick Point, Windsurfer Circle in San Francisco County (47%); Inner Cabrillo Beach, San Pedro in Los Angeles County (44%); and Newport Bay, Newport Boulevard Bridge in Orange County (44%).

Making the most of California's rain - new report shows how capturing stormwater can help make our water supplies more reliable.

2014-06-10T17:42:26Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

For much of California, 2013 was the driest year since the state started keeping records more than 150 years ago. In May, measurements of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which normally provides about one-third of the water used by the state’s farms and cities (as well as by natural ecosystems) as it slowly melts through the spring and summer, were at only 18 percent of average for that time of year, and the state reported that it “found more bare ground than snow as California faces another long, hot summer.” Statewide, the average rainfall in 2013 was only 7 inches, far less than its long-term average of 22 inches, and the lack of precipitation poses a serious threat across the state—including placing communities at risk of running out of water (though this risk was thankfully reduced by rain, still below average, in February and March). Capturing that water when it does rain in our cities and suburbs can help communities increase their water supply reliability—so they have the water they need when it doesn’t.

United States Drought Monitor for June 3, 2014, showing large portions of California in “extreme” (red) to “exceptional” (dark red) drought (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/).

For decades, the way we’ve dealt with rain, and the stormwater runoff it produces, in our urban and suburban areas is to direct it away from development as quickly as possible—through curbs, gutters, and buried drainage pipes—to be discharged into the nearest body of water. And our cities and suburban areas produce a lot of runoff. A one-inch rain storm in Los Angeles County can result in more than ten billion gallons of runoff flowing through its storm drain systems, with most of that water ultimately ending up flowing out to the Pacific Ocean. Not only do we end up wasting all that precious water, but worse, we turn it into a source of pollution; as the rain falls on paved surfaces such as streets, parking lots, and sidewalks in our cities and begins to run off, it picks up car fluids, pesticides, pet wastes, metals, trash, and other contaminants it flows over, and carries this pollution with it to whatever river or beach it is dumped into.

But there is a huge opportunity to turn that rain and runoff into a resource for our communities. An analysis released today by NRDC and the Pacific Institute shows that capturing stormwater runoff for water supply across urban areas in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area could increase local water supplies by between 420,000 and 630,000 acre-feet per year, roughly the amount of water used by the entire City of Los Angeles on an annual basis. By directing runoff to areas where it can soak into the ground and “recharge” groundwater, or capturing rain from rooftops in rain barrels and cisterns to irrigate landscapes or flush toilets, we can dramatically increase the amount of water available for local supply. Even during this period of extreme drought there is tremendous opportunity to make use of the rain that does fall, and in wetter years we can capture that runoff and store it in groundwater basins and aquifers, so we have the water we need when drought does return. Even better, in turning the rain into a resource, we reduce the amount of runoff, and pollution it picks up, that reaches our rivers and beaches.

A rain barrel at a residence in Santa Monica (photo credit: EPA/Abby Hall).

There’s a lot we can do to make use of the resources we have. For more information about the 21st Century water supply solutions for our cities, suburbs, and homes, which together can offer enough water savings and demand reductions to meet California’s water supply challenges, check out our Water Supply Solutions website.

Spreading grounds in Los Angeles County used to capture stormwater runoff for groundwater recharge (photo credit: Water Replenishment District of southern California).

The Susitna River Dam - A bad idea rises in Alaska

2013-10-03T18:44:40Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

The Susitna River in Alaska charges icy, blue, sediment-laden snowmelt through a spectacular wilderness of tundra and boreal forest for 313 miles from its headwaters in the Alaska Range to the Gulf of Alaska. It drains an area larger than the states of Massachusetts or New Jersey and is one of the few remaining American rivers that travels freely from its glacial source to the ocean. A vibrant haven of aquatic diversity, it is home to five species of salmon, including one of Alaska’s largest runs of Chinook salmon, and more than 15 fish species overall, supporting thriving commercial and sport fishing communities. The upper river provides habitat for caribou, moose, bear, wolves, and eagles.

It is a terrible place to put the second highest dam in North America.

20,237-foot high Denali and the peaks of the Alaska Range rise over the Susitna River

The State of Alaska is pressing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to license a 735-foot high dam and hydroelectric plant on the Susitna (at a projected cost of $5.2 billion), which would drastically alter the river’s physical characteristics and create a 42-mile long, up to 5-mile wide reservoir that would flood approximately 25,000 acres of pristine wilderness, an area larger than the island of Manhattan. A myriad of secondary construction projects—access roads, transmission lines, and even a runway big enough to land commercial airliners—would further degrade the local environment. All of this is being proposed at a time when, as the New York Times reported earlier this year, “large dams are being taken down, not put up.” More than 430 dams have been removed across the U.S. since 1999 alone, and with good reason: dams kill rivers.

The Susitna River upstream from the proposed dam site—much of this wilderness would be flooded by an up to 5-mile wide reservoir.

One of the most destructive impacts of the dam will be to its salmon. Chinook, Coho, and other salmon start their lives in the Susitna or the countless tributaries that feed it. They migrate the sometimes hundreds of miles needed to reach open ocean as smolts or young salmon, then ultimately return to their birthplace, surging back upstream to spawn as adults. But dams change flow patterns—as my colleague Monty Schmitt notes, operation of the dam would increase the river’s flow by more than eight times its natural volume during winter months, washing away gravel and other small pebbles used by salmon to build protective nests for their eggs. The dam would also block the passage of salmon as they migrate up and downstream. An intrepid Chinook salmon was spotted in the Susitna this summer more than 300 miles upstream from the river’s outlet at the Cook Inlet, only a few miles from its source at the Susitna Glacier. But this trip would be impossible with a 735-foot high wall of concrete blocking the way.

The changes in flow, sediment patterns, temperature, and too many other characteristics of the Susitna River this dam would cause could destroy entire ecosystems, taking with them resources that people depend on. The annual run of salmon on the Elwha River downstream of Washington’s Olympic National Park numbered around 400,000 before construction of a dam in 1913. After construction, the run dwindled to roughly 3,000. Thankfully, the Elwha dam was removed last year, and Chinook salmon were spotted upstream in the park for the first time in a century; we’ve learned from our mistakes. But while the rest of the country looks for ways to restore rivers and their fisheries, Alaska is driving ahead with its effort to raise a dam on the Susitna. This effort should be stopped. Dams kill rivers, and this dam is a bad idea.

Photo credits: Noah Garrison

They're giving away free water: capturing rain from our rooftops

2012-02-14T20:28:24Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

When I boarded my plane Monday morning in Portland, Oregon it was (not surprisingly) raining. When I landed in Los Angeles a few hours later, it was raining. It was raining most places I flew over in between the two cities. And it rained in Nevada, Arizona, and a good chunk of the Midwest. South through Texas and Louisiana, which saw up to four inches of rain. East into Georgia. Rain fell over Portland and Oakland, Medford and Modesto, Reno and Plano, and Corpus Christi and Baton Rouge. Most of that water ended up funneled into a storm drain and dumped into the nearest river, lake, or beach. Which is a shame, because the opportunities for capturing that water to increase local water supplies are tremendous.

NRDC has released a report titled “Capturing Rainwater from Rooftops: An Efficient Water Resource Management Strategy that Increases Supply and Reduces Pollution.” The report demonstrates that at a time when many communities across the country are facing increasing risks of water shortages from, among other causes, prolonged periods of drought and the effects of global warming, capturing rainwater from rooftops can be a simple, cost-effective way to supply water for non-potable uses such as lawn watering and toilet flushing. It profiles eight U.S. Cities, and shows that even under a conservative set of assumptions, each city could capture hundreds of millions to billions of gallons of rainwater from rooftops each year, equivalent to the total annual water use of tens to hundreds of thousands of residents. And by using the rainwater, rather than allowing it to run off, pick up pollutants like trash, animal waste, metals, oils, and bacteria from paved surfaces, and then dump them in the nearest water body, the practice not only reduces strain on existing water supplies, but also reduces a leading cause of surface water pollution.

There’s a wide variety to the lengths cities and states are going to in order to promote or authorize (or in some cases unfortunately, prohibit) the use of captured rainwater, particularly for indoor non-potable purposes, as I’ve talked about previously here. Some states, such as California, that have an obvious need for the added water supply are still struggling to expand use of the practice. Others locations, such as Tucson, Arizona, now actually require all commercial development to provide 50 percent of their landscape irrigation water from harvested rainwater. As changes in water availability increase pressure on urban users, farms, cities, counties, and states to meet their water needs, it should be clear that anywhere there is a rooftop, there is an opportunity to increase water supplies. And it’d be nice to look down on all those rooftops the next time I’m in the air on a rainy day, and know that they were really only a quick stop for the rain on its way into someone’s storage tank.

When it rains in Los Angeles, do canoes get to use the carpool lane?

2011-11-22T07:20:24Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

This past weekend saw one and one-third inches of rain fall over Los Angeles, just enough to foul the beaches with stormwater pollution, bury the 405 freeway in mud, and send torrents of rainfall runoff down Sepulveda Boulevard to flood the tunnels that bypass LAX. Water pumps that are supposed to clear the tunnels during storm events failed to turn on as the runoff cascaded in, resulting in, as is prone to happen in LA, an instantaneous and massive traffic snarl. But even taking into account the mechanical failure, this was largely a flood of our own making. Having paved over the majority of available ground surface near Sepulveda Boulevard (and for 20 miles in every direction that doesn't end in the ocean), there’s really nowhere for the rain, which under natural conditions would soak into the soil or be taken up by plants, to go but downhill and into oncoming traffic.

Last week, NRDC released a report called Rooftops to Rivers II, which profiles 14 cities around the country that are using green infrastructure—development practices that use infiltration, evapotranspiration, and rainfall harvesting and reuse techniques—to capture rain where it falls, reducing the frequency of flood events and preventing stormwater runoff from carrying pollution to their beaches, rivers, and lakes. These are practices that could greatly benefit many cities around the country, including as this past weekend showed, the City of Los Angeles. The city has taken a strong first step to managing stormwater runoff with green infrastructure, recently passing an ordinance requiring new and redevelopment sites to manage roughly the first 0.75 inches of rain from a storm event on-site. But we need for states, cities, and individuals to tackle the paved surfaces already covering our urban environments and contributing to flooding and polluting our waters. And given that the forecast is calling for more rain in LA this coming weekend over the busiest travel days of the year, people may want to consider whether the fastest route to the airport is by boat.

NRDC's Report Shows that Green Infrastructure is Spreading to all Corners of the Continent

2011-11-19T01:26:22Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

This past week, NRDC released a new report called Rooftops to Rivers II: Green Strategies for Controlling Stormwater and Combined Sewer Overflows. The report discusses the considerable problem that stormwater runoff, which carries pollution to our rivers, lakes, and beaches and causes sewage system overflows, poses for our communities, and ways that cities are using green infrastructure practices to clean up their waters, literally greening their cityscapes in the process.

My colleagues David Beckman, Jon Devine, and Rebecca Hammer have pointed out this week that green infrastructure is a simple and powerful solution to water pollution that makes cities function, from a water perspective, more like the natural landscape by reducing the amount of hardened, paved surfaces that generate rainfall runoff; that cities that use green infrastructure practices to capture rain where it falls have improved their ability to manage stormwater and reduce runoff pollution while saving money and beautifying neighborhoods at the same time, success stories that should encourage the EPA and local officials to adopt policies to drive similar approaches and outcomes nationwide; and, provided specific examples of initiatives cities are taking to stop flooding, reduce pollution, and use green infrastructure practices to take on their own unique water management challenges. Overall, Rooftops to Rivers II profiles the approaches taken by 14 cities in the U.S. and Canada (as well as provides examples from several others), revealing just how far the use of green infrastructure has spread and just how adaptable it is to different regions and climates, to changes in geography and geology, and to the various issues faced by each city. Green infrastructure works everywhere.

For example, Pittsburgh, PA, whose metropolitan area’s 4,000 miles of sewer pipes and 450 combined and separate sewer overflow structures release 22 billion gallons of untreated municipal waste into surrounding waters every year, has enacted a stormwater ordinance that requires development sites larger than 10,000 square feet in size to retain the first one-inch of rainfall from any storm event on-site, using practices that infiltrate, evapotranspirate with plants, or capture and re-use the rain. Publicly funded projects are required to retain 1.5 inches of rainfall on-site. The city has also begun a “Green Up Pittsburgh” initiative that offers support for community greening efforts. The effort has led to more than 120 vacant city lots being transformed into functioning green spaces, removing blight and safety hazards, inspiring community pride and providing environmental benefits.

Toronto, ON, Canada, stands out for its investment in and long term vision for green infrastructure to clean up and protect Lake Ontario, which was listed as an “Area of Concern” in a 1972 agreement between the U.S. and Canada. In 2003 Toronto adopted its Wet Weather Flow Master Plan, a 25 year, $1 billion comprehensive strategy to use both traditional and green infrastructure to eliminate the adverse impacts of stormwater runoff. Both separately and under the plan, Toronto has taken a multitude of steps to incorporate green infrastructure into city planning and development, including:

Establishing specific runoff volume reduction targets to encourage infiltration and rainwater harvesting

Initiated a voluntary pilot downspout disconnection program for property owners whose downspouts were directly connected to the city’s combined or separate sewer systems. Based on the success of the program, in 2007 the City Council voted to make downspout disconnections mandatory throughout the city

Formed a Green Roof Task Force to investigate and promote the benefits of green roofs. A 2005 study estimated that if green roofs were installed on every flat roof in the city, Toronto would save $270 million in municipal capital costs and nearly $30 million annually in benefits. In 2009 the City Council adopted construction standards requiring all new buildings and retrofits with more than 2,000 square meters (21,500 square feet) of floor area to include a green roof in their design.

And Kansas City, MO, which created a stormwater utility in 1999 that assesses fees based on the size of a property’s impervious, or runoff generating surface area, has recently broken ground on a 100-acre pilot project that represents the largest focused installation of green infrastructure as the sole control for combined sewer overflows in the nation. The Middle Blue River Basin Pilot Project, located in the city’s Marlborough neighborhood, will potentially save the city $10 million in capital costs relative to what would have been spent if only traditional stormwater infrastructure was used.

Dozens of other cities across the country have begun incorporating green infrastructure in a similar manner:

Indianapolis, IN has completed a Green Infrastructure Master Plan for the city and is using green infrastructure practices like tree plantings, rain gardens, and other techniques that absorb rainfall to meet the terms of a federal consent decree that requires a reduction in combined sewer overflows, achieving significant cost savings relative to traditional infrastructure in the process. Cleveland, Ohio and Cincinnati, Ohio are likewise looking to green infrastructure as a means of meeting the terms of consent decrees that require those cities to reduce the amount of combined sewer overflows that send polluted sewage into their waters.

Minneapolis, MN has a stormwater ordinance requiring public and private development sites of 1-acre or more to include on-site stormwater management, and is greening a 143-acre, formerly underserved community now known as heritage park in a project that will create a system of interconnected ponds and trails and bring park-like amenities to area residents while using natural systems to treat stormwater runoff

Jacksonville, FL has partnered with the EPA to focus resources on its neglected downtown urban core, using green infrastructure to reduce runoff and add open space for its residents. The city is in the process of developing a green infrastructure guidance manual as a tool for developers, architects, engineers, government employees, and anyone seeking clear permitting specifications for green infrastructure construction

Tucson, AZ, which receives an average rainfall of only about 11 inches per year, has embraced rainfall as a valuable resource, and now requires rainwater harvesting to supplement other available water supplies. The city adopted the nation’s first municipal rainwater harvesting ordinance for commercial projects, which took effect on June 1, 2010 and requires facilities subject to the ordinance to meet 50 percent of their landscape irrigation water demand using harvested rainwater.

Green infrastructure works. It works everywhere. And it provides benefits that extend well beyond water quality. As these, and other cities profiled in Rooftops to Rivers II demonstrate there’s a wide array of approaches, practices, and ultimately, solutions to the problems caused by stormwater runoff that green infrastructure can provide. And if your community hasn’t embraced the practice yet, then Rooftops to Rivers II provides plenty of examples for how green infrastructure can be used in your city, and how it can help cleanup your cities waters while saving your city money and creating a greener, healthier landscape

How I Met Your Mother gets into the environment. It's gonna be legen- wait for it...

2011-04-12T19:01:10Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

When your friends create a hit sitcom, you learn very quickly to be careful how much detail about your life you share with them – let slip something embarrassing and it’s likely to end up on TV.

Awkward first date? Into the script. Unusual personal hang-up? Get ready for several million people to laugh at it. Traumatizing, life-altering experience? Repurposed for comedy. It can result in a lot of conversations along the lines of “you’re not going to believe what happened to me last ni… I mean, nothing. Nothing happened to me last night. Especially not involving a donkey eating my pants. At all.” But then there are times when you’re happy to bury your friends in information, such as when they’re asking about important environmental issues they can highlight.

In last night’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother,” Marshall Eriksen finally quit his corporate law job at the (fake) Goliath National Bank, to volunteer with the (very real) Natural Resources Defense Council. Declaring, “I need to do better things with my life,” Marshall is excited by the opportunity to work with NRDC. “I’d be saving the oceans, saving endangered species,” he says. Or, “saving chicken bones and an old boot to make hobo soup” retorts his friend Barney. Except that as Marshall noticed in a previous episode, those chicken bones and the old boot are unfortunately floating out to sea and dirtying our oceans.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or as Marshall puts it, “Garbage Island”) is a swirling mess of bottles, bags, toys, packaging and plastic trash from all corners of the Earth forming an enormous plastic whirlpool in the North Pacific. As my colleague Kate Slusark has described previously, “Discarded water bottles from Iowa, takeout containers from New York City, flip-flops from California and plastic debris from the world over make their way from land into storm drains, streams, rivers and other waterways.” The plastic is carried out to sea, where it gets trapped by a vortex of currents to form a giant, floating trash dump. Seabirds, turtles, and other marine mammals mistake the floating plastic for food and ingest it, filling their stomachs with bottle caps, cigarette butts and fishing lures instead of food, ultimately causing them to starve. Scientists estimate that around the world, up to one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from eating plastic.

This problem plagues our oceans even before we consider the devastating impacts of oil disasters or the effects of global warming, which is turning our oceans to acid and destroying, or more accurately, melting, habitat for threatened species like polar bears. Not to mention that global warming has serious consequences for us, including worsened air quality, more frequent heat waves, flooding, and droughts, and increased risk of water shortages for our farms and cities. Marshall will definitely have his hands full, but thankfully there is still time for him, and all of us, to make a difference. We can recycle plastic and use reusable shopping bags instead of disposable plastic ones to reduce the amount of plastic trash we generate. We can ensure that our trash ends up in a trash can and not on the street where it can be carried by the wind into our lakes, streams, and oceans. We can create smarter cars, use cleaner fuels, and build more energy efficient homes and communities to help fight global warming. We can save our oceans, and ourselves in the process.

Through six seasons of “How I met Your Mother,” Marshall keeps returning to his passion for the environment and the show keeps bringing him back to NRDC. Even though he’s still figuring out where to go next in his legal career, I hope this story continues, that Marshall gets that full time job saving the oceans and endangered species, and that my friends keep asking about the environment and mentioning it on their show. And if I ever end up getting my pants eaten by an endangered species, I hope it at least gets good ratings.

Learn what real issues NRDC works on.

California Looks to Allow Captured Rainwater in the Indoors

2011-02-10T03:14:16Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

After a series of heavy storms in November and December dropped record breaking amounts of snow and rain in California, the state’s weather has taken a turn for the drier. California’s Sierra snowpack, the source of water supply for nearly one-third of the state's residential, industrial, and agricultural needs, received only 13% of its average monthly precipitation in January. The reduced precipitation now means less water for millions of Californians later. It’s encouraging then, that the California Legislature is looking at promoting the use of rainwater capture, a commonsense, but vastly underutilized practice, as a means of increasing water supplies in a state that has been hard hit by drought in recent years.

This past Monday, AB 275, the Rainwater Capture Act of 2011 was introduced into the California State Assembly. The bill would explicitly authorize landowners to install rain barrel systems or cisterns to capture rainwater for outdoor, non-potable uses such as landscape irrigation. This practice is, in general, already permissible in the state. However, the bill would also authorize landowners to install systems to capture rainwater for use, with proper treatment, in indoor non-potable applications, such as toilet or urinal flushing. Allowing rainwater to be used for indoor applications would greatly expand the opportunities to capture and use rainwater in the state. The more uses rainwater can be directed to, the faster storage tanks can be emptied, and the more water can be captured.

California is increasingly reliant on sources of water—the Sierra snowpack, the Colorado River—that are subject to unpredictable weather patterns and increasingly the effects of climate change. Yet, while the state struggles to meet its water supply needs, we treat rainwater as a waste product to be disposed of as quickly as possible, channeling and funneling it into the nearest river, lake, or the Pacific Ocean. Captured rainwater can instead be used in place of water from these other sources, reducing demand on the state's already strained supplies.

States such as Georgia, Virginia, and Oregon have all recognized the benefits of using rainwater to meet the state’s supply needs, and have directly permitted the indoor use of captured rainwater. The state of Texas directed its Water Development Board and other agencies to formulate recommendations for minimum water quality standards for non-potable and potable indoor uses. But in California, while capturing rainwater for outdoor uses has slowly been gaining popularity in the state as a means of increasing local water supplies, the use of captured rainwater for indoor applications has lagged behind. In the absence of statewide authorization, one of the few cities to permit the use of captured rainwater for indoor, non-potable applications is the City of San Francisco, which had to engineer a memorandum of understanding between its Public Utilities Commission, Department of Building Inspection, and Department of Public Health to permit the practice. California has largely overlooked rainwater as a resource, while other states realized it's invaluable.

In December, hundreds of billions of gallons of water rained down on California's cities and towns, only to run off of its rooftops, streets, and parking lots to be dumped into the nearest water body. Only one month later, the rain has been replaced by unusually dry weather, bringing with it a sense of uncertainty about the state’s water supplies for the coming year. California needs to permit and encourage the use of captured rainwater, for as many uses as possible, both indoor and outdoor, to ensure our water supply goals are met. While we will have to wait to see the final form that the Rainfall Capture Bill of 2011 will take, any step towards that end is promising.

West Virginia Looks to Smarter Practices on Land for Cleaner Water

2010-12-22T17:39:31Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

Stormwater runoff from our cities and towns remains a leading cause of pollution in rivers, streams, lakes and beaches across the country, but a West Virginia Circuit Court decision has given that state at least a fighting chance to clean up some of its waters.

Last week, the State Court upheld a progressive statewide permit regulating stormwater runoff and pollution under the federal Clean Water Act. The permit requires new development and redevelopment projects to use so-called low impact development or “green infrastructure” practices (think increased greenspace, green roofs, roadside plantings, porous pavement and rain barrels) to stop rain where it falls and prevent it from turning into runoff that carries pollution into West Virginia’s rivers and streams. The Court beat back an attempt by several cities to weaken or outright remove the green infrastructure provisions and other stormwater controls, which means West Virginians will now have cleaner water for drinking, fishing, swimming and other uses.

Across the country, our communities are covered in manmade, impervious surfaces like roads and parking lots, or building rooftops. These surfaces repel rainwater, preventing it from soaking into the ground naturally or being taken up by plants, and cause it instead to run off and carry pollution into nearby waterways. The more paved surfaces in a watershed, the more runoff pollution, and the worse the water quality in nearby waterways. As little as 5% impervious cover in a watershed can result in a significant decline in freshwater fish populations and diversity, with marked habitat degradation occurring at between 8 to 10% impervious cover.

Unfortunately, that number is exceeded by every single one of the 30 odd West Virginia cities regulated by these Clean Water Act stormwater provisions. Nearly 100% of the water bodies located in urban areas in the state are impaired by one or more pollutants, including bacteria that can make people sick and sediment that harms fish and degrades water quality. To address these impacts, the permit requires development projects to use green infrastructure to retain stormwater onsite—to soak it into the ground, capture and reuse it, or evaporate it so that it never mobilizes to carry pollutants to nearby waters in the first place. These requirements reflect a growing nationwide trend and are similar to those recently adopted throughout California, in major U.S. cities like Philadelphia, and for all federal buildings over 5,000 square feet nationwide.

Notably for West Virginia, the State Court found that, contrary to claims made by the group of cities challenging the permit, the green infrastructure requirements are indeed possible to meet. In part, the Court upheld the provisions because they allow for development to use an alternative means of stopping runoff pollution when site specific concerns make it infeasible to retain the water onsite. But the Court also dismissed arguments raised by the cities claiming the green infrastructure standards were improper overall because geologic and geographic conditions in the state made it impossible to comply with them. As the Court noted, the state’s environmental hearings board explicitly found that “West Virginia is not so unique in soils, climate, or topography that these requirements are automatically deemed unworkable.” Put another way, the Court agreed with what the U.S. EPA has said for years – green infrastructure works everywhere.

This is a strong victory for West Virginia, which will have a chance to repair damage to its rivers, lakes and streams, and a result that should spread well beyond this state’s borders. Green infrastructure does work everywhere. And this is good news, because it’s not only one of the best ways to clean up waterways, it’s often the most cost-effective way to do it, and it brings with it a host of other quality-of-life improvements. Who doesn’t want a solution for cleaner water that also means cleaner air, reduced flooding, new landscaping and construction jobs, and more trees and plants in their neighborhood?

Capturing the Rain Catches On

2010-10-20T00:20:57Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

As an unexpected series of thunderstorms washed ashore over the past few days, some good news seems to be coming with the rain: some of it is actually getting used. While reports that the water level in Lake Mead has hit its lowest point since the reservoir was first filled 75 years ago fairly depict the state of the region’s water supply (my colleague Barry Nelson points out the somewhat frightening implications of that situation here), efforts at capturing and storing the rainfall for irrigation and other non-potable uses are gaining traction in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. That’s welcome news as we head toward the rainy season, as a study by the City of San Diego recently showed that in addition to adding to local supplies of water, installing rain barrels and disconnecting downspouts at individual properties can significantly reduce runoff flows from rooftop surfaces and associated pollution - that would otherwise be discharged, untreated, to our local rivers and beaches.

To make sure that our water needs continue to be met, California is going to need for a whole host of practices to gain traction. Conservation and efficiency. Green building practices that harvest rainwater, recharge groundwater, and reduce pollution to our rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Creation of integrated regional water strategies and efforts to protect and restore our existing aquatic resources. But letting cities take the initiative to subsidize or offer free rain barrels to their residents is a good first step, and one that should be encouraged.

Ventura County's Stormwater Permit: If It Ain't Broke, Let's Break It

2010-07-13T02:06:07Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

I can think of no better way to describe how broken the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board’s process of deliberation is than to repeat what a technical consultant said to me after 14 hours of hearings before the Board last Thursday night:

“I have absolutely no idea what was just adopted.”

Last week, the Regional Board missed, or more accurately, aggressively threw away, a historic opportunity to protect Ventura County’s rivers and coastal waters. Stormwater runoff remains the leading cause of surface water pollution in the region, contributing massive amounts of metals, oil, grease, fertilizers, pesticides, bacteria, and trash to rivers and the ocean. As one EPA official put it, every time it rains “it’s like giving the city a bath, only then you have to figure out what to do with the bathwater.” In an unprecedented collaborative effort, environmental groups, together with the cities and County of Ventura, reached an agreement in early 2009 to establish strong, numeric requirements for the use of low impact development in a stormwater permit then up for adoption for Ventura County. The negotiated permit terms, which represented a substantial compromise on all sides, would shift attention away from stormwater controls that direct polluted runoff into drains and gutters to be discharged into into the ocean, and toward practices that retain the runoff onsite, using infiltration, capture and re-use, and evapotranspiration to prevent runoff and associated pollution from ever reaching coastal waters. At the urging of the environmental, city, and county parties, the Regional Board voted to adopt the groundbreaking permit in May 2009, an outcome that Environment Now applauded as the top coastal protection achievement of the year.

Unfortunately, the Regional Board has since managed to undo the best efforts of these groups. Due largely to a series of significant, inexplicable clerical errors by the Board and its staff occurring after the permit was adopted, the State Water Resources Control Board remanded the permit to the Regional Board for corrections. Rather than uphold the landmark agreement reached in 2009 and promote efforts of stakeholders and regulated entities to negotiate a consensus position, the Regional Board elected to tear apart the fragile coalition in order to accept changes to the permit proposed by the Building Industry Association. The math here is pretty simple. Practices that retain runoff onsite, like those adopted in 2009, prevent 100% of the pollution in that water from ever leaving the site and contaminating local waters or the ocean. In contrast, the changes proposed by the Building Industry called for allowing sites to use biofiltration, a method of filtering and then discharging runoff from a site that invariably does not remove 100% of the pollution from runoff, instead. By any measure, the Regional Board's decision to adopt these changes weakened protections for Ventura County’s waters.

This result alone is cause for concern. But perhaps more disconcerting was the last second, confusing, ill-thought out nature of the Board's action. The Building Industry’s proposed changes created several issues for implementation and in places contradicted language in the existing permit. In an attempt to address these issues, Board staff withdrew to redraft the proposed language, emerging 40 minutes later with language so convoluted that it left the entire room, including several board members, unsure of what the changes to the permit would actually require. At 11 PM, we were faced with:

Environmental groups opposing the proposed changes because they would weaken environmental protections and were confusing;
Representatives of the Ventura County cities proclaiming that they did not understand what the proposed changes would require;
The Building Industry Association stating that they could support the language in principle, but would need to confer with their technical people to assess what the proposed changes would actually require;
The U.S. EPA stating there was language in the redrafted changes they felt might grant adequate protection to the environment, but that they needed Board staff to explain what the proposed changes actually required; and
Multiple members of the Board openly expressing concern that none of the parties seemed to understand what the proposed changes required, or worse, that they themselves did not understand it.

Confusion reigns. In a 4-2 vote, the Regional Board went ahead and adopted the proposed changes anyway. Welcome to the theater of the absurd.

As disappointing as the Regional Board’s decision was (what possible incentive do stakeholders have now to negotiate with each other, when the Board will only throw away their carefully crafted agreements?), it is equally disappointing to note that this disarray and confusion are symptomatic of the Board's process in general. Only that morning the Board managed to entirely upend the adoption of a separate pollution control measure, prompting a government regulator to remark: “I feel like I’ve been run over by a bus.” When the Board allows poorly thought out, poorly understood, poorly supported measures to prevail at the eleventh hour, it abdicates its role to “protect ground and surface water quality in the Los Angeles Region, including the coastal watersheds of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.” The environment, and all of us in it, unfortunately lose.

California's Water - Out of the Desert, not Quite out of the Woods.

2010-03-23T00:14:46Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

People in California have been breathing a seemingly collective sigh of relief at the news that the State’s snowpack, also the State's largest freshwater reservoir, has been slightly above its historical average so far this year. This is certainly good news for a State that’s been hit hard by drought for three straight years. Over that time, California’s steadily diminishing supply of fresh water has led to a degree of (somewhat) well-founded anxiety, to a lot of not so well-founded finger pointing, and ultimately, to rationing of municipal and agricultural supplies. So reports that the snowpack is seeing a normal to above average year is generally welcome in a state struggling to ensure the continued safe supply of water for all our water needs.

While the snow might be good so far this year though, this news is tempered by the fact that our water supply hasn’t necessarily caught up to the snow. As California Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin stated last month, “After three years of drought conditions and a number of mandated pumping restrictions even a wet year won’t get us out of the woods.” We don’t need to look any further than the State’s major reservoirs to see evidence of this problem; as of this morning, Lake Oroville is only at 58% of its historical average capacity, and Trinity Lake is only at 65%. And there’s no guarantee that by this summer we won’t be facing a fourth straight year of serious drought.

But there’s also hope that even if we did face continued dry conditions, California can find a way to meet its water needs. As my colleague Barry Nelson wrote today, in reality “California has an embarrassment of aquatic wealth.” Compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re positively soaked in the stuff. Michelle Mehta points out that, “Almost a fifth of the world’s population—over a billion people—lack access to safe drinking water,” while in California and the rest of the U.S. most of us can “turn on any number of taps in our house and get clean, fresh drinking water, day and night.” We have the water we need, we just need to be smarter about how we manage and use it. We need to conserve more water at home and at our places of work so we aren’t wasting water to perform tasks that actually require far less. We especially need to conserve more outside our homes, where irrigation and landscaping can consume roughly half of the water used by a typical household. And we need to stop ignoring sources of water that fall (literally) into our laps like rain, which can be captured or harvested for use onsite, or sources of groundwater we’ve contaminated with industrial, agricultural, or other pollutants, that could be cleaned up and restored for use by our communities. California can’t take for granted that the snow and rain this year have solved its problems. They haven’t. But California also has a lot of available water solutions, and they’re just waiting for us to take advantage of them.

Los Angeles Takes the Initiative on Low Impact Development

2010-01-22T23:36:43Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

When it rains in Los Angeles (which it really hasn’t stopped doing this week, except when it’s hailing instead), billions of gallons of water pour into the City’s storm drains and, carrying bacteria, pathogens, animal waste, metals, oils, and other pollutants, flow untreated into the Pacific Ocean and onto our beaches. Last week, the City of Los Angeles took a strong step toward protecting our coastal waters and toward making those billions of gallons of water available for use in a region struggling with chronic water shortages.

On Friday, the Department of Public Works unanimously approved a Low Impact Development (“LID”) ordinance for the City. As the L.A. Times reported, if ultimately adopted by the City Council and Mayor, the ordinance “would require newly constructed homes, larger developments and some redevelopments to capture, reuse or infiltrate 100% of the runoff generated on-site in a 3/4-inch rainstorm or to pay a storm water pollution mitigation fee that would help fund off-site, public LID” projects. Requirements like this are becoming standard practice in stormwater permits throughout the state, and with good reason. As my colleagues have discussed in earlier blog posts, because 100% of that runoff never leaves the site, it never picks up and carries pollutants to the storm sewers, preventing those pollutants from being dumped into the ocean or nearest river or lake. And because LID practices can help to mimic natural runoff patterns, they can help reduce the flooding that occurs when heavy seasonal rains (like those in California this week) come rushing off of paved surfaces.

Maybe most important for the region’s long term planning though, is that the rainwater captured in rain barrels or cisterns can be used for irrigation and landscaping or other non-potable uses instead of wasting fresh water for those applications, and water that is infiltrated into the ground can be used to recharge groundwater critical to the City’s safe supply of drinking water. In developing the LID ordinance, the City of Los Angeles cited to an initial NRDC analysis showing that LID practices could be used Countywide to infiltrate or capture enough water to supply nearly 930,000 people per year by 2030. Last summer, NRDC released a report detailing that use of LID in urbanized southern California and portions of the San Francisco Bay Area could increase local water supplies by 2030 enough to supply more than 810,000 families in California per year, while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the energy used to supply water in the state.

California needs the rain (though maybe not the hail). And when it comes, we need to make sure we make use of it, while protecting our other water resources. Los Angeles has taken the initiative, and an important step toward adopting a LID ordinance. Other Cities should follow its example.

That and $30 million will get you a cup of water

2009-09-25T04:29:43Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, "California's water crisis is even more troubling than critics contend." That's not exactly comforting news for a state struggling its way through a third straight year of severe drought. And by way of emphasizing how scarce water in the state has really become, we may be about to get a chance to see what the real value of water in California is these days. Which may not be such a bad thing.

The Chino Basin Watermaster is planning to auction off 36,000 acre-feet of water, enough for roughly 70,000 California families for the year. And the agency expects to turn a hefty profit in the process. Even with the rate increases it initiated this past year, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California only charges $579 an acre-foot to supply treated water to member agencies the region. In contrast, the Chino water agency expects that it will get between approximately $800 and $1,000 an acre-foot for the water it auctions, somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million in total, as water agencies, developers, and other groups compete for rights to the limited resource.

There's a couple of reasons why this could actually be a good thing. First, the water agency plans to use the profits from selling the water to pay for a facility to help replenish groundwater supplies. In an area that's been historically subject to groundwater overdraft (meaning water was pumped out of the groundwater basin faster than it could recharge naturally), any plan that provides better management and increased water supply is always welcome. But second, maybe it lets Californians, particularly Californians living in urban or suburban areas, see just how much their water is worth. Even though we hear we're in a crisis, and that water is in short supply, at the end of the day it still comes out of the tap and no one's been left without enough water to take a shower or do the laundry (though some lawns took a hit in southern California this year). For most of us in the state, water shortages can seem like an abstract idea seen on the news rather than a condition that directly impacts our lives, and it may not feel like there's a pressing need to change the way we use it.

So maybe the price increase will help point us in that direction. When energy prices skyrocketed (albeit artificially) in the early part of the decade, California responded by being more efficient with its electricity use. When the price of gas spiked to over $4.00 a gallon in parts of the country last summer, the country collectively reduced the number of miles it drove for the first time in 35 years. And just for comparison, at $2.00 or more for a 12 ounce cup I think twice about buying coffee most mornings. Now I'm not claiming that seeing the price of water in Chino suddenly catch up to what it's really worth is going to make us all fundamentally change how we use water. But the fact is we really are in a serious water crisis. And anything that points out that there is a cost associated with water, and that maybe we haven't been paying it, can only help convince people that we need to use this resource better.

Downstream and Upwind - Wasting Water and Polluting the Air in California and the West

2009-08-24T23:19:49Z

Noah Garrison, NRDC alum, Santa Monica

"We've been using the atmosphere as a free sewer," says Dr. Stephen Schneider, a panelist at a recent UCLA climate change forum co-sponsored by Representative Henry Waxman. While Dr. Schneider was referring to the continuing tide of global warming pollution we're pouring into the air from our tailpipes and smokestacks, my first thought in response was that we're using most of the planet as a free sewer these days. One of the places this is most apparent is in our rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, which we tend to actually use as sewers. Unfortunately though, all of the various free dumping grounds that we're filling up with our waste are connected. The more we turn one resource into a free sewer, the more it can affect all the others.

As it turns out, in California and many other parts of the country water plays a critical role in connecting some of these dumping grounds together. My colleagues have insightfully discussed many of the challenges facing our water resources, and offered practical solutions such as using Low Impact Development practices that capture rainfall or allow rain to soak into the ground and recharge groundwater supplies to increase local water supplies, while reducing the amount of energy we use to supply water, or how efficiency and use of other alternative water supplies can be used to stem the environmental and economic harm drought and climate change are causing to the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the source of drinking water for more than 23 million Californians. But I thought it might be useful to illustrate just how connected these, and issues of climate change, air pollution, and other environmental harms really are, and how important it is that we deal with all of them together.

For example let's look at what happens when we pave over an acre of open space in California. This is a fairly common occurrence, considering the more than 750,000 acres of land developed for commercial and residential property (more than 1,100 square miles) in Los Angeles County alone. Once paved, a one-acre parking lot will produce as much as 16 times more runoff when it rains as say, a one-acre meadow, and create a host of environmental problems that all flow from that extra, man-made runoff. Rain that would have previously soaked into the ground, been used by plants, or just evaporated instead flows over paved surfaces and is channeled into gutters and storm drains, picking up trash, pet wastes, metals and oils from cars, and all sorts of other toxic pollutants on the way, before it is funneled through our storm sewers and dumped unceremoniously into the nearest water body. Before the pavement was laid down, much of the rainfall we're now flooding through our storm drains would have soaked into the open ground, percolating to depths where it could recharge the groundwater that many communities use for their water supply. In fact, as a staggering sign of waste, the amount of water that flows off of a one-acre parking lot in most areas of coastal southern California each year represents roughly enough water to supply two whole families with their water needs for the entire year. But having wasted it instead, and cut off a source of groundwater recharge, we now need to supply water from somewhere else.

If we're in southern California, we may need to supply this water by pumping it from the Bay Delta hundreds of miles away, which uses a tremendous amount of energy and causes additional environmental and economic problems in the Bay Delta itself. We get the energy to pump water across the state largely from burning fossil fuels, which sends vast quantities of greenhouse gases like methane and CO2 into the atmosphere. This contributes to global warming, which in California and much of the West is expected to have drastic consequences for our surface water supplies. The California Department of Water Resources has projected that the Sierra Nevada snowpack, California's largest reservoir of freshwater and a source of water for more than half the state, will decrease by 25 to 40% by 2050 as a result of climate change. As that supply melts away we have to look even farther to find water. As a result, some twenty ocean desalination plants are currently proposed to supply water in California, each of which would require as much energy, if not more, to supply water even to local users as it takes to pump water halfway across the state. Which means it would add more global warming pollution to the atmosphere. Which could cause sea level to rise, in turn causing salt water to flow inland and contaminate the Bay Delta, which isn't getting a steady supply of water anyway because the Sierra snowpack that feeds it is disappearing.

So by paving over a meadow we've polluted our rivers and coastal waters, spewed global warming pollution into the air, reduced our supply of water both locally and far away in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Bay Delta, and further damaged the Bay Delta ecosystem. Multiply that one-acre meadow by thousands of acres of parking lots, strip malls, and subdivisions, and we start altering whole river and groundwater systems, turning entire watersheds into free sewers. And it's a vicious cycle - the more rainfall we waste and the farther we look and more energy we devour to provide water, the more greenhouse gases we produce, and the more we shrink our existing supply of water, making us look farther for water once again.

So what do we do about this? Well, one way to start is that even at the individual level we need to use, and manage, our wastewater better. When you water your lawn, or even better, a garden of drought resistant native plants, make sure to water just the lawn or garden, and not the street, the sidewalk, and your neighbors' car, so that we don't waste valuable excess water by letting it run into the storm sewer. Install water efficient appliances and faucets that use less water to accomplish household or commercial tasks. Use Low Impact Development practices so that paved surfaces at residential and commercial properties divert rainfall to unpaved areas where it can soak into the ground, or capture runoff from rooftops in rain barrels and cisterns to use for irrigation or flushing toilets later on. It really can come down to a lot of little practices that add up to a big difference, that stop polluting our nearby waters, and stop polluting the air with greenhouse gases. California is known for its bright sunshine and endless miles of beautiful coastline. We should do everything we can to keep our water, and sky, clear, blue, and clean.