ARTICLES BY JIM LAURIA

• You Shouldn’t Splash That S**t Around

  The novel coronavirus pandemic has brought a wide range of health issues into sharp focus, including the spread of pathogens through aerosols, tiny droplets of liquid that can hang in the air for minutes or even hours.

• When It Comes To Water, Is Hindsight 20/20?

  Back in October 2018, when I started looking to the past to gather wisdom from what people have said about water through the ages, I figured when it comes to water, it’s 50/50 that hindsight is 20/20. So I needed a large sample size. I started collecting quotes from all sorts of people — scientists and screenwriters, poets and philosophers and politicians and pop singers — hoping to provide insight into water and the issues around it. (For more details on my journey, see last year’s World Water Day post.) Some of those quotes can even help us peek into the future.

• Dangerous Waters In A Changing World

  Americans and Canadians got a peek into the future when the City of Toledo shut its drinking water taps in 2014, issuing a do-not-drink order on the municipal water supplies serving 500,000 people. Levels of microcystin, a potent liver toxin produced by blue-green algae, were more than double the World Health Organization's safe limit. More than 700 square miles of the Lake Erie surface was covered by a harmful algal bloom (HAB), and drinking water plants couldn't remove the algal cells and the toxins they produced.

• Irrigation Consumer Bill of Rights: Smart Irrigation Starts With Smart Choices

  As we celebrate Smart Irrigation Month, it's a great time to highlight not only smart technologies, but the smart people and smart decisions behind them. One remarkably smart tool that ties all three of those elements together is the Irrigation Consumer Bill of Rights by Dr. Charles Burt of the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo.

• How To Introduce New Products Into The Water Space: A Case Study

  Innovation is vital in the water industry and continually moving ahead is a must — even if the company you're trying to surpass is your own. By listening to a wide range of customers and distribution chain partners, Mazzei Injector Company upgraded its revolutionary Pipeline Flash Reactor (PFR) and introduced it to the marketplace with great impact.

• How To Cannibalize Your Own Technology

  Business people love to talk about "disruption." They pride themselves on eating their competitors' lunch. Where their markets used to be about raving fans, now it's about inspiring craving fans, fueled by "hunger marketing" and the fear of missing out. There's a lot of dog-eat-dog philosophy...which is why it's important for companies to be willing to cannibalize their own technologies.

• And I Quote: "To Know Water Is To Love Water"

  It all started with Mark Twain. Or someone who actually wasn't Mark Twain after all.

• The Water Industry Wants You: Careers In Water Are A New Way For Veterans To Serve Our Country

  Beyond Independence Day or Veterans Day, it's always a great time to thank our nation's veterans for their service and reflect on the sacrifices they and their families have made on our behalf. This year, it's also a great time to add a plea — and an opportunity — for further service in the defense of our country: to take the skills they learned in the military and apply them to the water industry.

• An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos: Use Your Resources To Protect Our Most Precious Resource

  Economist Harold Pollack's New York Times article suggesting priorities for your philanthropic work was a fun read for those of us who would love to imagine what we would do with $131 billion. Unlike Pollack, I'm not going to tell you how to give away your money — you earned it, it's yours, and you can do what you want with it.

• What Abbott And Costello Can Teach Us About Water

  World Water Day (Thursday, March 22nd this year) does a great job of focusing our attention on water issues. And especially with storms on the East Coast and drought in the West, not to mention the looming possibility that officials will have to shut off the taps in Cape Town sometime this summer, a lot of the messaging around water is pretty much like being smothered in a wet blanket.

• Is Cryptocurrency Going Down the Drain?

  Talk about making waves. Cryptocurrency — digital “tokens” or “coins” rooted in computer code and valued for the very fact that they are disconnected from governments and banks — have experienced spectacular rises and falls in recent months. The crypto-economy is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars (REAL dollars!), and it’s anyone’s guess how fast it will grow after that.

• Lessons From Leonardo: What Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us About Water

  Salvator Mundi sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Walter Isaacson’s latest biography is a breakaway hit. Management guru Michael Gelb’s book accessing the thought techniques of history’s most accomplished Renaissance Man — in every literal and figurative sense of the word — is still a bestseller. Almost 500 years after his death, Leonardo da Vinci is still a superstar.

• Water And Food: One Man’s Vision

  Angelo Mazzei has always thought locally and acted globally. Born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley — one of the world’s most productive farming regions — Angelo worked for his uncle’s 10,000-acre farming operation after graduating from college. There he saw a pressing need for a system that would allow farmers to safely and efficiently inject fertilizer into their irrigation water — a task made even more challenging with the 1968 introduction of high-pressure water supplies through the California Aqueduct, a 400-mile-long water conveyance system. A new approach was vital.

• Power Plant Water: Wanted Dead And Alive

  Water is the lifeblood of electrical power plants, whether they are water-cooled steam plants or turbine-spinning hydroelectric installations. Regardless of how the facility generates electricity, there is a growing awareness that each power plant is part of its own, unique industrial watershed — drawing water from the environment, altering its contents and temperature, releasing some to the atmosphere as steam, and returning the rest to receiving waters.