Wastewater Features
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Stormwater Management Is A Worldwide Challenge
2/6/2023
Last month, I wrote about San Francisco's great rain garden/bio-retention basin project. Strategically placed sunken curb cuts, swales, or park features collect stormwater and let it filter into the ground, reducing the pressure on overwhelmed storm drains and sewers.
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How To Mitigate The Environmental Impact Of Wastewater
1/31/2023
Wastewater refers to any liquid waste or sewage from homes, hospitals, factories, and any other building that uses water in its facilities. From flushing the toilet to the vast amount of wastewater that flows out of industrial plants, we all contribute to it. Unless sewage is adequately treated, it can harm public health and the environment.
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Rain Gardens Guarding San Francisco
1/27/2023
Laurie Lauria and I spent last week moving out of San Francisco up to Napa, California, dodging the raindrops and taking advantage of a few dry days in this remarkably stormy winter — weather that makes this a perfect time to talk about the need to capture rainwater and protect overwhelmed urban sewer systems.
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Demand For Mobile Water Treatment Systems Is Expected To Grow
1/23/2023
The North American mobile water treatment market was valued at $725 million in 2022. The market is expected to witness a single-digit growth rate during the forecast period, driven by the provisional need for a treatment system in case of plant downtime, facility maintenance, emergencies, or to meet regulatory requirements for effluent discharge. The key challenges in this market include intense competition, the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic volatility.
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As Heatwaves And Floods Hit Cities Worldwide, These Places Are Pioneering Solutions
1/23/2023
Climate change is going just as badly for cities as we have been warned it would. Extreme weather is increasingly common and severe globally. Australian cities have endured a number of recent disastrous events. It’ll get worse, too. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fact sheet outlining impacts on human settlements is a very sobering read.
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Flood Forecasts In Real-Time With Block-By-Block Data Could Save Lives — A New Machine Learning Method Makes It Possible
1/19/2023
I am a hydrologist who sometimes works in remote areas, so interpreting weather data and forecast uncertainty is always part of my planning. As someone who once nearly drowned while crossing a flooded river where I shouldn’t have, I am also acutely conscious of the extreme human vulnerability stemming from not knowing exactly where and when a flood will strike.
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Regulating Farm Pollution To Reduce Harmful Algal Blooms
1/11/2023
As nutrient pollution increases the incidence and severity of harmful algal blooms, it is obvious and important to point mitigation practices toward a prime culprit — the agriculture industry.
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Doing More With Less: Densified Activated Sludge (DAS) Systems For Water Resource Recovery Facilities
1/11/2023
As wastewater treatment plants — or water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs), more preferably termed — continue to strive for efficiency, DAS has emerged as a space-saving intensification solution.
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Adopting A 'One Water' Approach Through Integrated Master Planning
1/11/2023
A One Water master plan under development for the city of Winter Haven, Florida, serves as an example to other communities looking at the future through a One Water lens.
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How California Could Save Up Its Rain To Ease Future Droughts — Instead Of Watching Epic Atmospheric River Rainfall Drain Into The Pacific
1/6/2023
California has seen so much rain over the past few weeks that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. Yet, most of the state remains in severe drought. All that runoff in the middle of a drought begs the question — why can’t more rainwater be collected and stored for the long, dry spring and summer when it’s needed?