WIP Editorial
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Service And Conservation Programs Can Lead To Infrastructure Careers
7/20/2022
Funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is starting to flow across the country, accelerating thousands of transportation, water, energy, and other projects. But those are just the beginning of the $860 billion in investments over the coming years that will reach transportation departments, water utilities, and other infrastructure owners and operators at a state and local level.
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Water We Talking About? Smart Irrigation Month
7/18/2022
Among other celebrated fare this month, July is National Blueberry Month, National Peach Month, National Baked Bean Month, National Picnic Month, and National Grilling Month. But none of these acknowledgements could be possible without irrigation, so we here at Water Online find July most notable for being Smart Irrigation Month.
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Water Utilities vs. Climate Change: A Plan For Securing Our Future
7/15/2022
The U.N.’s Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely considered to be the world’s foremost authority on what may be humankind’s most existential threat, and this year The Working Group II of the IPCC released its Sixth Assessment Report on the state of the crisis. It reviewed not only the impacts of climate change throughout ecosystems and communities, but also the “capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt.”
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Smart Irrigation For Agriculture Leads To More Efficient Carbon Capture
7/7/2022
Farmers are key to carbon capture, though many plans to reverse greenhouse gas emissions — such as the one described in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's 2020 report on California's efforts, Getting to Neutral — largely ignore them.
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General Considerations For Treating Water For Difficult Pollutants
7/6/2022
As a matter of course, we normally consider removing various pollutants by direct means such as microbial degradation, chemical treatment that results in a change in the pollutant in some way that is to our benefit (usually oxidation/reduction), or in some manner that results in products easily removed such as gases, various precipitants, or even degraded compounds that are no longer toxic. Some methods are entirely physical, such as centrifugation and filtration, even settling; others are semi-hybrid measures, such as exploitation of various adsorption criteria that do not require chemical change.
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Water Is Energy
6/21/2022
More than 2,000 years ago, Greek and Roman engineers harnessed the power of water to drive grain mills, and the technology soon spread as far as China, where it was used to forge iron. By the 4th century, the Romans had scaled up water wheel technology to build a massive flour plant in Arles, France, powered by 16 overshot water wheels. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out visions of water-driven sawmills, forges, factories, and spinning works.
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Calling On Utilities To Combat Legionella
5/5/2022
The risk level linked to delivered drinking water from municipal utilities is very small, even if some high-profile examples of failure (see Flint, MI) have degraded public confidence to a degree. Our treatment professionals usually hit their targets, so the onus then shifts to the research and guidance that determines the safe level of various constituents through U.S. EPA protocols. But there is one contaminant that rulemaking hasn’t quite caught up to and which is downright deadly — Legionella pneumophila.
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Water Is Food
4/28/2022
Celebrating Earth Day always reminds me of the great Arthur C. Clarke's observation that we shouldn't have called our planet "earth," but "ocean" instead — after all, it's mostly water. The same is true of food: most food is literally largely water, and every morsel of our food figuratively floats on a sea of water that was necessary to produce it.
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Reflections Of A Global Civil Engineer And Candidate For ASCE Utility Engineering & Surveying Institute (UESI) Governor
3/30/2022
ASCE has been a premier civil engineering body for over 170 years when we were compelled to design civil structures strong enough to survive new threats — two world wars, seismic loads, floods, environmental pollution, and epidemics, to name a few. We have been fortunate that we had the trust of the public behind us in our pursuits. When a sewer line is designed and built in town, during the unveiling of the sewer no member of the public would ever dare to ask, “What is the return on the public investment into the new sewer?”
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Billions In Funding Now Available For Resilience Projects
3/23/2022
Companies with service offerings and/or capabilities associated with resilience projects would be wise to check their current registration status with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Small and minority firms should definitely reach out to check their status and learn more about special benefits.