United Nations Declares 2005-2015 International Water Decade.

On December 23, 2003, the 58th session of the United Nations General Assembly established March 22, 2005 as World Water Day. That day also marks the beginning of the International Decade for Action—Water for Life. According to the estimate made by the U.N., half of the world’s population, approximately 3.5 billion people, will face grave shortages of water by 2025. International Decade for Action—Water for Life was established to "decrease the number of the people who cannot physically or economically afford safe drinking water by 2015".

For more information visit www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/

Green pioneers
Noe Valley spec house touts conservation, including rain catchment system

Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 22, 2006

Even before its buyers move in, a new Noe Valley home touted by its builders as "the greenest house in San Francisco" is bringing down some walls -- in San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection, that is.

The 2,600-square-foot house on Clipper Street showcases every high-end Earth-friendly feature that Lorax Development partners Mike Kerwin, Joel Micucci and Pat Loughran could find a way to incorporate, including the city's first approved rooftop rain catchment system.

The system, by Mount Shasta's Wonderwater Inc., collects an average of 18,000 to 20,000 gallons of annual rainfall, cleans it and stores it in tanks below the house to be used to flush toilets, wash clothes and water gardens.

Wonderwater president and founder Dylan Coleman notes that his rain harvesting systems perfect a practice that is 3,000 years old, but, he said, "There hasn't exactly been a flood of activity," in part because city permit boards don't know what to make of it.

On a rainy day in San Francisco, he said, 465 million gallons of rain goes into city sewers, to be treated as sewage -- a practice Coleman says is "stupid, and it's a waste of energy."

"I see a day in San Francisco when you can't get a permit unless you collect a certain amount of water, and when you are charged for excess runoff," Coleman said. "But right now there's some real political stuff out there, and it might just go case by case until we get things going."

To read the complete article visit wonderwater.net

More stories? - click on November 2006 in Archives

In Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall. Why Not Bottle It?
New York Times - January 8, 2004
By: Nora Krug

Dripping Springs, Texas
Ever tasted a raindrop and wondered, Why doesn't someone bottle this stuff? Well, someone has and called it, aptly, Rain Water. Rain Water, the product, comes from Dripping Springs, where it is collected and bottled by Richard Heinichen, a 57-year-old former blacksmith. He fills about 1,500 bottles a day with the "cloud juice" that falls on Rain Water headquarters, wich he calls Tank Town. Mr. Heinichen (pronounced like the beer) said he sold about 170,000 16-ounce bottles last year - at about $1 each - and has more than a quarter-million gallons of water in storage.

For more stories go to rainwater.org


Besause Texas gets an average 2" of rain per every month of the year, it has become the leader in rainwater harvesting in the US. The following is one family's rain catching story.


HOMEOWNERS TAP CLOUDS FOR THEIR WATER NEEDS


Tracy Hobson Lehmann
Express-News Home & Garden Editor
Like everyone these days, John Kight is looking for rain. Like the rest of us, he wants relief from the miserable heat and drought. But Kight has another interest, perhaps a more significant one: He made a vow to his wife. "He promised me I would always have water," says Mary Evelyn Kight.

Unlike most folks, the Kights rely solely on rain for their water needs. Every drop of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, cleaning and lawn irrigation at their house north of Boerne comes via the clouds. And even with the dry spell that's lingered since December 2004, the Kights aren't concerned about being parched.

The big green tanks out back still hold about 21,000 gallons of water, roughly two-thirds of the 30,000-gallon capacity, captured from rooftop runoff. Even without a drop of rain, Kight figures that amount would keep the faucets flowing for the better part of a year without any lawn watering. "With 2 to 3 inches of rain, we'll be full again," he says.

Kight, 71, designed and installed the rainwater collection system for the hilltop home he and Mary Evelyn moved into in August 2002. They lived in the finished-out garage for a year as their 3,500-square-foot house was being built. All the while, they've relied on rain, with no backup water supply. In planning the system, the retired engineer pored over climate data and studied his household water use. His meticulous records show daily water use indoors of a fairly steady 70 gallons per day. Factor in last year's landscape watering, and the number more than doubles to an annualized average of 146 gallons a day.

Kight looked at annual rainfall in Boerne, which averages about 36 inches a year, and at the drought of record — in the 1950s — in which there was no rain for 100 days. From his standing-seam metal roof, which covers 6,400 square feet, he can collect 4,000 gallons of water from every inch of rain. Crunching all those numbers, and padding the days without rain to 120, he arrived at the 30,000-gallon storage capacity. "I always want to be a little bit conservative," he says. Now he's adding three 1,550-gallon tanks because, he says, Mary Evelyn sees water being lost in heavy rains.

Like the Kights, more people in the Hill Country are going back to the water-supply systems of our forefathers. Weighing the cost — and risk — of drilling a well against the cost of a rainwater-harvesting system was a factor for Kight. "The aquifers in the Hill Country definitely have sweet spots, but there's a risk of not getting water," says Chris Brown, a San Antonio-based water conservation consultant and principal co-author of the third edition of the "Texas Manual on Rainwater Harvesting," a publication of the Texas Water Development Board. Unlike previous versions of the manual, which focused mainly on using rainwater collection for landscape watering, the updated manual, released in spring 2005, devotes more attention to capturing potable water.

Brown estimates the cost of a whole-house rainwater collection system around $15,000, in line with what Kight spent on his system. Prices vary according to the size and material of the cisterns. At Bohnert Lumber Co. in Comfort, a 2,500-gallon polypropylene tank costs $800, says Steve Bohnert. Eight of the tanks would collect 20,000 gallons of water at $6,400. "A well is going to cost you three times that amount now," Bohnert says. Wood and metal tanks cost more, but Bohnert says he has seen homeowners disguise poly tanks by wrapping them with cedar stays or galvanized metal.

Polyethylene tanks that hold 3,000 gallons cost $1,000 each at Golden Eagle Landscape in Ingram, a company that sells equipment and installs rainwater-harvesting systems. The biggest cost variable in installation is in building a pad for the tanks, says landscape designer Katherine Crawford. Digging into a hillside, building a retaining wall and backfilling it will drive up the cost, she notes. Required filters don't add significantly to the cost, but homeowners do need to have sufficient rooftop areas, gutters and downspouts.

Some rainwater harvesters elect to build "rain barns," shedlike structures that conceal tanks and provide collection area for rain runoff. When Sandy and Raúl Peña explored water options for their property near Center Point nie years ago, they got a $12,000 estimate for a well. Like the Kights, they opted for rainwater collection and have installed four 3,000-gallon cisterns in the basement of the home they are building. "It makes so much sense to use the rain," says Sandy Peña. "It's free, and we're not punching another hole in the aquifer." The Peñas' tanks filled to their 12,000-gallon capacity with 10 inches of rain more than a year ago, and the Peñas have used only small amounts of the water in mixing mortar for the house. Now, they rely on tanks that capture 6,500 gallons of water from their workshop and the 12-by-16-foot cabin they live in.

Both the Peñas and the Kights note the high quality of their water. "By the time we actually drink our water, it's almost the quality of water used for kidney dialysis," says Sandy Peña, who resigned from her job as administrator of the department of human and molecular genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston when she and her husband moved to western Kerr County in 1996. Raúl Peña retired as a software developer for Shell Oil and has designed the rainwater-collection systems they use

"When friends come over, the first thing they want to do is have a drink of our water," she says.

Mary Evelyn Kight says they didn't use water from their system until it was analyzed in Kerrville. Now, John Kight refers to records from twice-a-year testing. The water is soft — but a different soft, because soap rinses off easily, the Kights note — and it measures 5 on total dissolved solids. Environmental Protection Agency standards cap total dissolved solids at 1,000 in public water supplies.

"That's about as close to nothing as you're going to get," says John Kight.

In each of the systems, water from gutters passes first through a roof washer that filters out dust, leaves, blooms and bird droppings. Kight uses a sock filter made of double-weave shade cloth primarily to catch oak blooms. "You do not want organic material in the storage tanks," he says. "It sours the water." From the cisterns, the Kights' potable water goes through a series of three filters. A 5-micron cloth filter catches the first particles, then the water passes through a 3-micron charcoal filter. "Remember, a hair is 30 microns," Kight notes.

From there, it goes through a UV filter to zap any bacteria. The result is crystal-clear water that doesn't leave sediment on fixtures — all thanks to the rain.

"All you have to do is collect enough water in rainy times to get you through about three months without rain," Sandy Peña says. "We have a year's supply of water."

Brown notes a weather adage that applies to the Hill Country: "Our climate can be adequately described as drought punctuated by flood." He adds, "Rain may come infrequently in Central Texas, but it does come."

Still, rainwater harvesters such as the Peñas and Kights must use water frugally.
"If you're going to use rainwater, you have to buy into the conservation lifestyle," says Brown.

The Kights have a front-loading washer, which uses about 16 gallons per load compared with more than 40 gallons for a standard top-loading model. Still, notes Mary Evelyn Kight with a smile, "he lets me take one long shower a week."

They also used drought-tolerant Sahara Bermuda grass in their landscape and put down about 8 inches of topsoil over the solid rock so the grass could establish a deeper root system. Mary Evelyn Kight irrigates only the small front yard, and only when it's stressed. The grass is deep green in the front, and she's run the sprinklers only twice this year. She will water more frequently — and take two long showers a week — when the new tanks are filled.

And her husband is keeping his promise of a lasting water supply.

tlehmann@express-news.net

Household Water Use
A three-person household would use about 99 gallons of water a day indoors and 45 outdoors. The daily rundown and the household total:
Faucets: 5 minutes per person, 1.5 gallons a minute. Total: 22.5 gallons.
Showers: 5 minutes per person, 2 gallons a minute. Total: 30 gallons.
Toilets: 6 flushes per person, 2 gallons per flush. Total: 36 gallons.
Washing machine: 3 loads per week, 16 gallons per load. Total: 48 gallons a week. (That's based on a front-loading washing machine; top-loading machines use about 40 gallons per load.)
Dishwasher: 4 loads per week, 8 gallons per load. Total: 32 gallons a week.
Source: John Kight

American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association
www.arcsa-usa.org
Group founded in Austin in 1994 to promote rainwater catchment in the U.S. Site includes links to suppliers of materials for rainwater collection systems.

Texas Cooperative Extension
rainwaterharvesting.tamu.edu
Site explains the development of a system to collect rainwater for irrigating the landscape.

The next horror in Somalia
Radical Islamists are preparing to take control of the impoverished country and start a regional war in East Africa.
By Garrett Jones, Garrett Jones is a retired CIA case officer who has served in the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
December 10, 2006

TO MOST Americans, Somalia is the place where "Black Hawk Down" happened, or the place with the pictures of the starving African children, or, for some, the biblical land of Punt. (Scholars quibble about locating Punt.) Americans tend to confuse African countries with one another except when our soldiers are dying there, and the violence in Sudan, Uganda, Congo or Zimbabwe can seem indistinguishable. But the anarchy in Somalia, which straddles the strategic Horn of Africa, is in a class by itself.

For more than 16 years, Somalia has existed without the pretense of a central government, surviving largely on foreign aid and remittances from its overseas diaspora, the best and brightest young Somalis. With the fading of the seasonal rains in December, the Somalis are preparing once again to inflict their intra-clan squabbling on their neighbors. Meanwhile, the neighbors are preparing a proxy war, and they plan to fight one another to the last Somali.

Experts call Somalia a failed state. This is a sophism. Somalia was a failed state in 1990 under the last central government of the mildly insane Mohamed Siad Barre. Nowadays, one could call Somalia a space between countries. Or simply a feral nation. This is the place that perfected the practice of extorting cash from international aid organizations in return for allowing the aid groups the privilege of feeding other starving Somalis. (Gangsters R Us, with Third World panache.) When the United Nations tried to intervene and establish a central government in 1993 (an admittedly naive effort), the Somalis united just long enough to drive off the foreigners and resume their embrace of warlords and clans.

I was there in 1993, running covert operations in Mogadishu for the CIA when the U.N. effort was wrecked. President George H.W. Bush had sent the Marines into Somalia to feed the starving children, and President Clinton was attempting to install a Jeffersonian democracy in a medieval culture. The Clinton theory was that the U.N. would use its peacemaking powers to force the Somali factions into a political accord, and then peace would break out.

Unfortunately, nobody told the Somalis. They viewed the U.N. and the U.S. as foreign invaders bent on Christianizing their Muslim culture while destroying the power of the clans and warlords. This dispute spawned a series of attacks that cumulated in the Battle of Mogadishu between the U.S. Task Force Ranger and Somali clan fighters, as portrayed in the film "Black Hawk Down." After losing 17 elite troops to an African mob in a single night, Clinton lost all stomach for further "nation building" involving U.S. casualties, and the U.N. effort collapsed. After that, the world largely went back to ignoring the Somalis.

Now the Somalis are poised to insist that the international community tune back in while they commit an auto-da-fe on CNN. Somali Islamists, modeling themselves on the Taliban, have taken control of most of the country, driving the warlords out of the cities and into the bush. The internationally recognized Somali interim government (an effort by neighboring countries to get the clans and factions to agree to some sort of consensus government with which the world can interact) is surrounded in the provincial city of Baidoa, about 160 miles northwest of the capital. When the roads are dry enough to allow military operations, the Islamists will swiftly overwhelm the interim government unless outside help arrives at the last minute.

Already, a team of Al Qaeda-style suicide bombers have blasted Baidoa. The Islamists make no bones about their plans to install a fundamentalist government and to begin "rescuing" their brethren in neighboring countries (read all of East Africa) from the oppressive rule of the Christian Crusaders. Somalia's neighbors are bracing for a regional war, and the U.S. State Department says 10 countries are taking sides in some fashion. Ethiopia, which has a restive Muslim south and a history of being a target for Somali brigandage whenever the Somalis pause in their intra-clan feuding, is sending troops to back up the interim government and oppose the Islamists.

The Eritreans, led by an increasingly paranoid, sociopathic president, are the sworn blood enemies of the Ethiopians. Seeing a chance to weaken their bigger neighbor, they are flying in arms and instructors to the Islamists.

Across the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi fundamentalists see the Christian Ethiopians embarking on a "crusade" to crush Islam. In response, they are providing cash through Wahhabi charities to their Islamic comrades, frightening and infuriating Washington.

Kenya's kleptocratic government, overwhelmed by an influx of refugees, is wringing its hands while endless talks take place in Nairobi hotels between irrelevant Somali politicians and clueless U.N. diplomats in search of a peace plan. The Islamists want no part of the talks; they are winning.

When the big, ugly regional war breaks out, the Islamists, with the help of Eritrean advisors, are likely to hold their own. Now add in your odd Somali warlord, drug-crazed clan gunmen and the Somali history of atrocities and you have a real mess in the Horn of Africa. Fighting will probably spill into Kenya, and destitute refugees will surge across East Africa. Bottom line: It is likely by this time next year that the Horn of Africa will host its own little Taliban wannabe, more or less in control of Somalia and at war with its neighbors. Along the way, there will be a lot of dead people and suffering refugees.

Although this is far away, and may not happen to anyone you know personally, it is going to become a concern of the U.S. soon. An Islamic fundamentalist haven on the Horn of Africa is more than a tragedy for the long-suffering Africans; it is a threat to the oil routes that fuel the West and pass just offshore. Recent domestic terrorist attacks have already shaken the House of Saud's iron grip on its population; a sanctuary where its fundamentalist enemies can regroup only a few hours across the Red Sea would be a dagger at its heart.

A terrorist Somalia would be difficult to contain. Most African governments have little ability to find, let alone effectively police, their own borders. If the Islamic fundamentalists establish a haven in Somalia, they could infiltrate or threaten the many weak secular governments in surrounding countries.

It simply is not prudent to ignore what is going on in Somalia, but everyone agrees the last thing the U.S. wants now is to embark on another adventure in East Africa. The only practical option is to interest the Islamists in talking. Right now, they do not need to talk; they are getting everything they want on the battlefield. If they suffer a military setback, talk may look more appealing.

To improve the odds of such an Islamist setback, the U.S. should provide training and equipment to Somalia's neighbors. Frankly, the track record is poor; in the past, most military aid has been used to suppress domestic critics rather than fight foreign enemies. And it's certainly true that the one thing Africa does not need is more guns. But it looks like it's getting them anyway, according to a November U.N. report on weapons smuggling.

Washington should also lean hard on the government of Saudi Arabia to crack down on the Wahhabi charity money that fuels the Somali Islamist war machine. If the Saudis don't want those petrodollars coming back at them in a few years as RPGs fired by antiroyalist fundamentalists based in Somalia, it behooves them to overcome the reservations they have shown about squeezing fellow Wahhabists.

However, even our best efforts will not stop a long, bloody conflict. Get ready for more pictures of starving African babies. Film at 11, death and suffering around the clock.