Offering a high-level view of key distribution system water quality issues that utilities will confront in the coming decades, and a new view of an integrated treatment process, this book covers such topics as microbial regrowth and recontamination, risks associated with release of trace metals from system scale, and impacts of secondary disinfection practices. This resource targets water utility managers, water quality professionals, policy makers, regulators, consultants, and educators.
Environmental engineers support the well-being of people and the planet in areas where the two intersect. Over the decades the field has improved countless lives through innovative systems for delivering water, treating waste, and preventing and remediating pollution in air, water, and soil. These achievements are a testament to the multidisciplinary, pragmatic, systems-oriented approach that characterizes environmental engineering. Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges outlines the crucial role for environmental engineers in this period of dramatic growth and change. The report identifies five pressing challenges of the 21st century that environmental engineers are uniquely poised to help advance: sustainably supply food, water, and energy; curb climate change and adapt to its impacts; design a future without pollution and waste; create efficient, healthy, resilient cities; and foster informed decisions and actions.
Protecting and maintaining water distributions systems is crucial to ensuring high quality drinking water. Distribution systems-consisting of pipes, pumps, valves, storage tanks, reservoirs, meters, fittings, and other hydraulic appurtenances-carry drinking water from a centralized treatment plant or well supplies to consumers' taps. Spanning almost 1 million miles in the United States, distribution systems represent the vast majority of physical infrastructure for water supplies, and thus constitute the primary management challenge from both an operational and public health standpoint. Recent data on waterborne disease outbreaks suggest that distribution systems remain a source of contamination that has yet to be fully addressed. This report evaluates approaches for risk characterization and recent data, and it identifies a variety of strategies that could be considered to reduce the risks posed by water-quality deteriorating events in distribution systems. Particular attention is given to backflow events via cross connections, the potential for contamination of the distribution system during construction and repair activities, maintenance of storage facilities, and the role of premise plumbing in public health risk. The report also identifies advances in detection, monitoring and modeling, analytical methods, and research and development opportunities that will enable the water supply industry to further reduce risks associated with drinking water distribution systems.
This book focuses on 21st century geospatial technologies (GT). It highlights their broad range of capabilities and their essential role in effectively addressing and resolving critical everyday issues, such as environment, sustainability, climate change, urban planning, economy, culture and geopolitics. Featuring chapters written by leading international scientists, it discusses the application of GT tools and demonstrates that the problems requiring such tools transcend national boundaries, cultures, political systems and scientific backgrounds on a global scale. In addition, it enhances readers’ spatial understanding of, and geographical reasoning in connection with, societal issues. The book will appeal to scientists, teachers and students of geography, the earth sciences and related areas, as well as decision-makers interested in the application and capabilities of geospatial technologies and new, spatial methods for addressing important issues.
Protecting and maintaining water distributions systems is crucial to ensuring high quality drinking water. Distribution systems-consisting of pipes, pumps, valves, storage tanks, reservoirs, meters, fittings, and other hydraulic appurtenances-carry drinking water from a centralized treatment plant or well supplies to consumers' taps. Spanning almost 1 million miles in the United States, distribution systems represent the vast majority of physical infrastructure for water supplies, and thus constitute the primary management challenge from both an operational and public health standpoint. Recent data on waterborne disease outbreaks suggest that distribution systems remain a source of contamination that has yet to be fully addressed. This report evaluates approaches for risk characterization and recent data, and it identifies a variety of strategies that could be considered to reduce the risks posed by water-quality deteriorating events in distribution systems. Particular attention is given to backflow events via cross connections, the potential for contamination of the distribution system during construction and repair activities, maintenance of storage facilities, and the role of premise plumbing in public health risk. The report also identifies advances in detection, monitoring and modeling, analytical methods, and research and development opportunities that will enable the water supply industry to further reduce risks associated with drinking water distribution systems.
Evaluating Water Quality to Prevent Future Disasters, volume 11 in the Separation Science and Technology series, covers various separation methods that can be used to avoid water catastrophes arising from climate change, arsenic, lead, algal bloom, fracking, microplastics, flooding, glyphosphates, triazines, GenX, and oil contamination. This book provides a valuable resource that will help the reader solve their potential water contamination problems and help them develop their own new approaches to monitor water contamination. - Highlights reasons for potential water catastrophes - Provides separation methods for monitoring water contamination - Encourages development of new methods for monitoring water contamination
This document is intended to provide an overview of the major components of surface and ground water quality and how these relate to ecosystem and human health. Local, regional and global assessments of water quality monitoring data are used to illustrate key features of aquatic environments, and to demonstrate how human activities on the landscape can influence water quality in both positive and negative ways. Clear and concise background knowledge on water quality can serve to support other water assessments.
The concept of sustainable development appeared almost twenty years ago, adapting traditional policies to new circumstances, and promoting progress capable of satisfying the necessities of both present and future generations. It is widely believed that the need for a proper and sustainable management of water will be a problem which
AS ALEX PRUD’HOMME and his great-aunt Julia Child were completing their collaboration on her memoir, My Life in France, they began to talk about the French obsession with bottled water, which had finally spread to America. From this spark of interest, Prud’homme began what would become an ambitious quest to understand the evolving story of freshwater. What he found was shocking: as the climate warms and world population grows, demand for water has surged, but supplies of freshwater are static or dropping, and new threats to water quality appear every day. The Ripple Effect is Prud’homme’s vivid and engaging inquiry into the fate of freshwater in the twenty-first century. The questions he sought to answer were urgent: Will there be enough water to satisfy demand? What are the threats to its quality? What is the state of our water infrastructure—both the pipes that bring us freshwater and the levees that keep it out? How secure is our water supply from natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Can we create new sources for our water supply through scientific innovation? Is water a right like air or a commodity like oil—and who should control the tap? Will the wars of the twenty-first century be fought over water? Like Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect is a masterwork of investigation and dramatic narrative. With striking instincts for a revelatory story, Prud’homme introduces readers to an array of colorful, obsessive, brilliant—and sometimes shadowy—characters through whom these issues come alive. Prud’homme traversed the country, and he takes readers into the heart of the daily dramas that will determine the future of this essential resource—from the alleged murder of a water scientist in a New Jersey purification plant, to the epic confrontation between salmon fishermen and copper miners in Alaska, to the poisoning of Wisconsin wells, to the epidemic of intersex fish in the Chesapeake Bay, to the wars over fracking for natural gas. Michael Pollan has changed the way we think about the food we eat; Alex Prud’homme will change the way we think about the water we drink. Informative and provocative, The Ripple Effect is a major achievement.
This Book includes selected papers that has been published in the Water journal Special Issue (SI) on Water Supply and Water Scarcity. Moreover, an overview of the SI is included. The papers selected for publication in the SI include review and research papers on water history, on water management issues under water scarcity regimes, on rainwater harvesting, on water quality and degradation, and on climatic variability impacts on water resources. Overall, the issue identify and highlight the main challenges in water sector, and particularly in management and protection of water resources and in use of alternative (non-conventional) water resources, especially in areas with demographic change and climate vulnerability in order to achieve sustainable and secure water supply. Furthermore, general guidelines and possible solutions for an improved and sophisticated water management system are proposed and discussed, such as the adoption of advanced technological solutions and practices that improve water-use efficiency and the use of alternative water resources, to address the growing environmental and health issues and to reduce the emerging conflicts among water users.
