Jump into the water

“I was taught that if you see a person drowning you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not.”
– Irena Sendler

A global clean-water shortage

Los Angeles Times article: A global clean-water shortage, November 10, 2006.

A global clean-water shortage

A U.N. agency report calls for action to save lives and energize economies by boosting supplies and sanitation.

By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff Writer
November 10, 2006

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — While people in wealthy suburbs of Africa use water to maintain lush lawns and fill swimming pools, many slum dwellers struggle to obtain the crucial resource and pay much more per gallon for what little of it they can get, according to a United Nations Development Program report calling for an end to “water apartheid.”

At the same time, dirty water is the second-leading cause of death among children globally, after respiratory infections. It kills 1.8 million children younger than 5 each year, more than do HIV/AIDS, malaria, war or traffic accidents, says the U.N. report released Thursday in Cape Town.

“In the year 2015 they plan to send a spaceship to Jupiter to search for water, yet in Africa or India we can’t get water to people who need it,” Kevin Watkins, the report’s author, said at a briefing for media in Johannesburg.

The report’s main contention is that if countries increase access to clean water and sanitation simultaneously, the rates of child survival in developing countries can rocket “almost overnight,” Watkins said. Globally, 2.6 billion people have no access to proper sanitation. The 1.1 billion people who don’t have clean water use about 1.3 gallons a day.

“It is hard to find anything that has a greater impact on human life than water,” Watkins said.

In cities such as Dar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, people pay more for water than do New Yorkers, Watkins said. The water and sanitation crisis in sub-Saharan Africa slowed economic growth by 5% of gross domestic product per year, more than the region receives in foreign aid, the report says. A big increase in spending on water and sanitation would pay for itself in economic growth.

“No other investment could bring greater benefits,” Watkins said.

Collecting water is a colossal waste of labor, he said, with the burden falling overwhelmingly on women and girls. Sub-Saharan African women spend about 40 billion hours a year walking and queuing to collect water.

Some countries spend much more on their military than on water.

In Pakistan, where diarrhea caused by dirty water kills 118,000 people each year, the government spends 0.1% of its budget on water and sanitation. It spends 47 times that on the military. India, where 450,000 die of diarrhea annually, spends eight times more on its military than on water resources, and Ethiopia, which has one of the highest rates of infant mortality due to lack of clean water and sanitation, spends 10 times more on the military.

The global cosmetics industry is $200 billion.

Massive well in Natwarghad, India

“Villagers gathered to draw water from a massive well in Natwarghad in the Indian state of Gujarat in June. During the region’s worst drought in more than a decade, the temperature rose as high as 111°”[Time]

International Water Decade

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/

Wonderwater Rain Catchment Systems

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.”

Visit SF Gate to read the complete article.

Rainwater harvesting in Texas

Into Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall. Why Not Bottle It?

By Nora Krug
New York Times – January 8, 2004

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 about Rain Water and Tank Town, visit rainwater.org.

Because 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
San Antonio 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 nine 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.

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 (ARCSA) — A 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 — This website explains the development of a system to collect rainwater for irrigating the landscape.

Most rainwater is wasted

The following story is from a recent article in the Sudan Tribune: Bankers, not tanks, will settle Nile row (highlighted passages by RainCatcher).

NAIROBI: It won’t be military muscle that settles a centuries-old struggle for access to the Nile. Instead, armies of engineers and financiers will slake the thirst of a war-ravaged region where generations of leaders have tended to arbitrate access to water at the point of a gun. That is the gentle vision of experts trying this week to defuse a potential source of 21st century conflict running up the spine of Africa from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean.

Problem

Suffering deforestation, soil erosion and erratic rainfall, east African nations fiercely oppose a colonial-era pact giving effective control of the 6,741 km (4,189 mile)-long Nile and its African origins to Egyptian users far downstream. Egypt, in turn, has long challenged any initiative that would squeeze the flow of the Nile to its frontiers. In a turnaround, the governments of the 10 Nile Basin nations this week said a cooperative solution may be in sight.

Solution

Gathering with bankers and aid agencies at a conference in Nairobi, the 10 governments set aside old rivalries to explore cross-border ventures in energy and irrigation to improve collection of rainwater, most of which is currently wasted. “We accept that sustainable management and development of the Nile Basin can only be guaranteed through cooperation,” Kenyan Vice President Moody Awori told delegates. The idea is that the ventures, due to start in the next two years, will please politicians by bringing more power and irrigation to Africa’s farmers and businesses. Tapping presently unharvested rainwater, they should not hit Nile levels.

“The restructuring of cooperation across this basin has taken several years and will take several more years,” David Grey, senior water resources advisor at the World Bank said. “The imperative meanwhile is to get results on the ground, put in development projects and show benefits to poor people.” Arab Power Egypt says it is ready to provide technical and financial help to impoverished upstream countries for investment in watershed management, irrigation and water storage systems…. To date, few outside a cabal of technicians and development agencies seem aware of the inventive solutions these experts are devising for the rapidly growing region of 300 million people….

Some governments now accept they need to do a better job of informing their people about the brightening outlook for water.

Chinese build water silos in Nigeria

From People’s Daily Online:

LANZHOU, May 28 (Xinhuanet) — Eight Chinese specialists will be sent from northwest China’s Gansu Province to Nigeria on Saturday to teach locals expertise on rain water utilization.

…During their stay, they will help build silos and train local residents in rainwater collection…

…In addition, the Chinese specialists are also expected to help locals build a number of small water irrigation facilities and solve difficulties in obtaining drinking water for both human beings and livestock.

Gansu, where the climate is arid, leads the world by using rainwater to meet the needs for agricultural production and daily life. A total of 2.52 million farmers in the province have bid farewell to a history of having difficulty finding drinking water,thanks to the construction of 2.53 million water silos.

Moreover, 304,667 hectares of farmland are now irrigated by irrigation works based on rainwater collected…

Water is Life

From a Time magazine article:

Keeping Water Out Of Private Hands

Rudolf Amenga-Etego wants to make it affordable for all

By SIMON ROBINSON

Rudolf Amenga-Etego is no stranger to conflict. As a college student in the early 1980s, Amenga-Etego protested Ghana’s military rule; government officials threw him in prison and threatened to execute him. A sympathetic army captain helped him escape. These days he’s fighting global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The subject of his protests: water.

Amenga-Etego became interested in water in 1999 when a group of his neighbors in the capital, Accra, complained that their water was cut off after rates nearly doubled and they fell behind in their payments. Backed by the World Bank and the IMF, Ghana’s government was readying its water system for privatization. “I realized that if we subjected water to market forces, we were going to price out a lot of our citizens from accessing safe water,” says Amenga-Etego, a lawyer by training who lives with his wife and three children in Medina, a mixed middle- and working-class suburb of Accra. He quit his job at Ghana’s Internal Revenue Service and challenged the water-privatization plans in the courts and on the streets. The government backed down last year and suspended privatization.

So what is Amenga-Etego’s alternative? He champions a community government model that breaks with the conventional wisdom that water systems should be run either solely by the state (often at a loss and providing poor service) or by the private sector (at a profit, providing better service but only for those who can afford it). Under Amenga-Etego’s model, the government supplies a town with bulk water, and the local community handles distribution, tariff collection and maintenance. Local management makes the system more accountable, he believes: “It’s putting power back into people’s hands. Water is life, and if people have control over their lives, they are empowered to be more productive.”

— Reported by Daneet Steffens/Accra

The key to economic & social progress is water

Cebu watersheds remain at risk — Philippines

“We, concerned Cebuanos, living under the same serious threat knowing that hardly 40 percent of Metro Cebu’s population is served with potable water system and considering the degraded condition of our watersheds and aquifers, have banded together…to arrest the trend of overstepping the threshold limits of water sustainability,” CUSW members said.

They pointed out that the key to economic and social progress is water.

Formed in January 1995, CUSW comprises national government agencies, local government units and business, academe, women, youth, upland residents, farmers, fisherfolk, landowners, professional, urban poor, nongovernment and people’s organizations.

The alliance has been lobbying for the protection and proper management of legally protected watersheds in central Cebu, as well as other water sources, to ensure sustainable water.

It is also helping the Cebu City Government improve an ordinance on rainwater collection as a way to conserve water resources.

Alingasa noted that many people are still apathetic to problems affecting water sources, which include pollution.

“It seems that all efforts …devoted by CUSW to increase awareness about these situations amount to only ‘a drop in the ocean’”, he said. “We still have a huge and difficult challenge to awaken people from their complacent attitude towards the creeping water crisis.”