Archive

Uncategorized

When do we get serious about sea level rise?

March 18, 2013
Banking industry, Climate, Development loans, Environment, finance, groundwater, infrastructure, Insurance, Leadership, management, planning, sanitary sewer, sea level rise, stormwater, sustainability, Tidal flooding, Uncategorized, water sewer management, water supplies
Leave a comment

Based on my last blog, his inquiry came to me.  And I think I actually have an answer:  when bakers and insurance companies decide there is real exposure.  Let’s see why it will take these agencies.  There is very little chance, regardless of good faith efforts, significant expertise, or conscientious bureaucrats to stop growth and development.  The lobby is simply too strong and local officials are looking for ways to raise more revenues.  Development is the easiest way to increase your tax base.  As long as there are no limits placed on develop-ability of properties (and I don’t mean like zoning or concurrency), development will continue.  But let’s see how this plays out.  Say you are in an area that is likely to have the street inundated permanently with water as a result of sea level rise (it could be inland groundwater, not just coastal saltwater).  For a time public works infrastructure can deal with the problem, but ultimately the roadways will not be able to be cleared.  Or say you are located on the coast, and repeated storm events have damaged property.  In both cases the insurance companies will do one of three things:  Refuse to insure the property, insure the property (existing) only for replacement value (i.e. you get the value to replace) but no ability to get replacement insurance, or the premiums will be ridiculous.  We partially have this issue in Florida right now.  Citizen’s is the major insurer.  It’s an insurance pool created by the state to deal with the fact that along the coast, you cannot get commercial insurance.  So Citizens steps in.  The state has limited premiums, and while able to meet its obligations, in a catastrophic storm would be underfunded (of course in theory is should have paid out very little since 2006 since no major hurricanes have hit the state, but that’s another story). 

As the risk increases, Citizens and FEMA, the federal insurer, have a decision to make.  Rebuilding where repeated impacts are likely to happen is a poor use of resources and unlikely to continue.  Beaches and barrier islands will be altered as a result.  The need will be to move people out of these areas, so the option above that will be selected will be to pay to replace (move inland or somewhere else).  Then the banks will sit up.  The banks will see that the value of these properties will not increase.  In fact they will decline almost immediately if the insurance agencies say we pay only to relocate.  That means that if the borrowers refuse to pay, the bank may not be able to get its money out of the deal on a resale.  We have seen the impact on banks from the loss of property values as a result of bad loans.  We are unlikely to see banks engage in similar risks in the future and unlikely to see the federal insurers (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) or commercial re-insurers like AIG be willing to underwrite these risks.   So where insurance is restricted, borrowing will be limited and borrowing time reduced.  That will have a drastic impact on development.  The question is what local officials will do about it?

There are options to adapt to sea level rise, and both banking and insurance industries will be paying close attention in future years.  Local agencies will need a sea level rise adaptation plan, including policies restricting development, a plan to adapt to changing sea and ground water levels including pumping systems to create soil storage capacity, moving water and sewer systems, abandoning roadways, and the like, and hardening vulnerable treatment plants.  Few local agencies have these plans in place.  Many local officials along the Gulf states refuse to acknowledge the risk.  What does that say about their prospects?  Those who plan ahead will benefit.  Southeast Florid a is one of those regions that is planning, but it is slow process and we are only in the early stages.

Groundwater Accelerates Sea Level Rise

March 14, 2013
Climate, communciations, Development loans, Environment, funding, groundwater, infrastructure, Insurance, Leadership, management, planning, sea level rise, stormwater, sustainability, Tidal flooding, Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Regardless of the causes, southeast Florida, with a population of 5.6 million (one-third of the State’s population), is among the most vulnerable areas in the world for climate change due its coastal proximity and low elevation (OECD, 2008; Murley et al. 2008), so assessing sea level rise (SLR) scenarios is needed to accurately project vulnerable infrastructure (Heimlich and Bloetscher, 2011). We know that sea level has been rising for over 100 years in Florida (Bloetscher, 2010, 2011; IPCC, 2007). Various studies (Bindoff et al., 2007; Domingues et al., 2008; Edwards, 2007; Gregory, 2008; Vermeer and Rahmstorf, 2009; Jevrejeva, Moore and Grinsted, 2010; Heimlich, et al. 2009) indicate large uncertainty in projections of sea level rise by 2100. Gregory et al. (2012) note the last two decades, the global rate of SLR has been larger than the 20th-century time-mean, and Church et al. (2011) suggested further that the cause was increased rates of thermal expansion, glacier mass loss, and ice discharge from both ice-sheets. Gregory et al. (2012) suggested that there may also be increasing contributions to global SLR from the effects of groundwater depletion, reservoir impoundment and loss of storage capacity in surface waters due to siltation. The loss of groundwater, mainly from confined aquifers, is troubling, and currently completely unknown. The contribution of carbon dioxide, commonly occurring in deep groundwater is also unknown. To gauge the risk to property in southeast Florida, Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact and Florida Atlantic University reviewed twelve different projections of SLR and its timing. The consensus was 3” to 7” by 2030 and 9” to 24” by 2060. From the literature review and analysis, it was concluded that approximately 3 ft. of sea level rise by 2100 would a suitable scenario and time frame to illustrate the methodology presented in this article. To allow flexibility in the analysis due to the range of increases within the different time periods, an approach that uses incremental increases of 1, 2, and 3 feet of SLR was considered for risk scenarios. An issue normally ignored in sea level rise projections is groundwater. The importance of the groundwater table in the model is that it is responsible for determining the soil storage capacity. Soil is composed of solids, water, and air (voids). Soil storage capacity depends on physical and chemical properties, water content of the soil, and depth to the water table or confining unit (Gregory et al 1999). As the rain infiltrates the soil, unsaturated pores quickly fill up, effectively raising the water table (Gregory et al 1999). For example efforts, a groundwater surface elevation map was derived based well site information available from the USGS (http://groundwaterwatch.usgs.gov) that had a minimum of 35 years of continuous data. Using GIS, an inundation model was created in GIS by subtracting the groundwater surface model from the digital elevation model with the difference in elevation being the soil storage capacity. The photo shows the evolution of these features as applied to a section of northwestern Miami-Dade County. What this indicates it that the impact of sea level rise on low-lying inland areas may be far different that the projections using the bathtub models. It also means that wellfields, sewer mains, roadways and storm water systems will be affected far more quickly than projected from bathtub models. The method used here suggested that the estimated may be off by a factor of two of three.

Market or be Outmarketed

March 10, 2013
communciations, finance, funding, Leadership, Marketing water, sustainability, Uncategorized, water supplies
Leave a comment

Municipal drinking water is strictly regulated by the USEPA.  We spend a lot of time testing our water, producing reports, and providing our customers with information on our results.  The results show it works, because the number of incidents of contaminated water are few, and rarely affect larger utility systems.  We are so good at providing water that the public expects their water to be safe, yet the buy bottled water?  Wait, huh?  Bottled water? Bottled water is not regulated by the USEPA and is not subject to the same requirements as potable water.  There are less than three full time people at FDA inspecting bottled water facilities, versus thousands reviewing public water supplies.  Water utilities run millions of analyses per year and must publish the results.  So why do they buy bottled water when our water is safe?

Keep in mind that in many areas of the world, the bottled water industries move in and compete for the same supplies as we currently use.  North Florida is rife with arguments over flows to springs as are other areas.  Some of the water is simply repackaged tap water.  So in addition to competing for our customers, they are competing with the sustainability of our drinking water supplies.  Then there are the hundreds of thousands of bottles that end up in landfills.  More impact on sustainability.  At the same time, bottled water is more costly that gasoline, which everyone complains about, but that does not stop the purchases?  So what’s up?

Marketing that’s what.  We don’t market water.  I noted in an earlier blog that we simply don’t market our product, which has allowed others to compete for the same dollars.  Customers complain about rate hikes, (averaging about 5% per year for the past 10 years according to the new AWWA study), yet they happily pay over $4/gallons for many of the popular bottled waters, more and more cable channels, fancy phones, etc.  Not that any of these commercial products are per se bad, but none are required for survival like water.

Interestingly when we do market, it reaps positive results.  New York and San Francisco have seen the wisdom of marketing for year.  They ship New York tap water to Florida to make Brooklyn style bagel because Florida Water doesn’t taste the same.  DC Water changed its name, and began a marketing campaign that changed public perception of the utility and has allowed it to start dealing with its infrastructure backlog.  Some of their ideas include branding the water, and having restaurants serve it in marked glasses, paid for by the utility.  Signs on drinking fountains, in schools and even sales of tap water in stores are options some utilities have started.  But the key is started.  Marketing takes dollars, to reap benefits.  Who knows, maybe tap water is the next bottled water….

OnSIte Power At Utility Plants?

March 6, 2013
Climate, Leadership, planning, power demands, power-water nexus, sustainability, Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Since Richard Nixon was President, the federal government has been talking about reducing our reliance of foreign oil.  Since 2008, our dependence has dropped from 57 to 42 percent.  The foreign oil has been replaced by domestic oil and gas, conversion of power plants to natural gas, and investments in renewable power like wind (4% US production and) and solar power.  Coal has remained a constant, although future regulations of coal plant emission may alter this.  Federal loans from DOE have included $13 billion for solar energy, 1.7 billion for wind and 10 billion for nuclear power.  All other renewables account for 1.2 billion.  Power companies have invested in the renewable technologies in part because of low loan rates from the federal government, and partly due to tax credits (2.2 cents/kW-hr), but power entities like NextEra Energy have made cleaner power a basis of their future.  So what does this have to do with water utilities?  First, water and wastewater plant are often the largest users on the power grind in communities.  This is why they are able to get load control agreements.  The peak demands are the load control agreements, which means power providers can construct fewer plants, and keep rates down.  At the same time water and wastewater utilities benefit fro reduced rates, but have construct backup systems (which are needed if the power grid fails anyway.  Benefit to both parties.  But as the demands for power on the grid increase, and as regional demands in areas that are substantially constructed already, locating new power is difficult.  Transmission losses are 6 or more percent, and involve complicated federal FERC regulations.  So the SMART grid issue is distributed power, and finding sites for distributed power might be tough.  Or maybe not.  Water and wastewater plants have land, so there is an obvious fit.  But the rub is that if the water and wastewater people own the facilities, it decreases the peak capacity, meaning the power entities must build more capacity.  So perhaps there is a means to get revenues (leases) to water folks, while helping the smart grid.  I am thinking about developing a project proposal for this.  Let me know if you are interested.  Meanwhile if you have a success story, I’d love to hear it.

Planning the Future or Not?

March 2, 2013
Climate, communciations, finance, funding, groundwater, infrastructure, Leadership, management, planning, power demands, power-water nexus, sustainability, Uncategorized
Leave a comment

Many of you will remember in the 1980s there was a book called Megatrends by John Naisbett, and a later update called Megatrends 2000 and a host of other megatrend documents.  The concept was to look for global or national trends that might impact out future.  I recalled this while I was reading an article from Forbes and Public Works magazines recently talking about the future, and development of megaregions.  They project 11 megaregions in the US that will develop by 2050.  Most are in process already and are familiar:  1) Pacific Northwest (Vancouver to Portland), 2) Bay Delta, 3) Southern California, 4) Front range (Cheyenne to Albuquerque, 5) Phoenix/Tucson, 6) Texas Triangle (Houston-Dallas-San Antonio, 7)  Gulf Coast (Houston to Mobile), 8)  Florida (I-4/I95), 9)  Piedmont (Atlanta to Raleigh), 10)  Northeast (Washington DC to Boston), and 11) southern Great Lakes (the old “Rust Belt”).  If you are looking for economic growth, all signs point to these 11 region.  Most are located along interstates which makes transportation by truck easier.  Several have port access and most rail.  The projection is for more people to move from the rural areas to these regions, and for the influx of immigrants to likewise migrate here.  But an issue not noted as a part of these projection is that only three of them are not water limited, and those three include the two oldest regions:  Rust Belt stats and the northeast where there is water.  In addition, three of these areas are characterized by potential adverse climate impacts (Pacific Northwest, Texas, and Front Range) that will adversely impact their future water availability.  In all but the historical cases, embedded power availability is lacking, creating competing interests with the water industry.  So where is the planning and forecasting models for 2050 and beyond for these regions?  Some jurisdictions have seen attacks on traditional planning activities as unduly limiting development, implement specific agendas, and other nefarious reasons.  Florida scrapped most of its growth management/concurrency requirements in this vein.  After all, why should you insure there is water in order to issue development permits right?  That might limit development! Why not manage an aquifer for 100 years, to insure a 100 year supply, not to insure the supply remains available indefinitely.  Both short term goals conflict with the theory of constraints which says that any system is limited in achieving its goals by a very small number of constraints; kinda the old idiom “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link.”  The concept requires the application and investigation of the situation in enough detail to gain an understanding of the constraints and to construct an optimized solution.  Keep in mind that often maximizing certain goals, will cause others to suffer.  A familiar example, you can have construction occur fast and with high value, but not at a low price.  You can achieve certain reliability of water supplies, and improve economics, but you need to understand other impacts.  Too often planners focus on meeting the goals of the client, while ignoring competing goals, which ultimately leads to greater costs down the line.  As these megaregions are well on their way to development, we need to begin the process (a bit late, but better late than never) to understand the limitations each region will face with respect to water supplies and how those water supplies impact competing economies.  Failure to do so could create constraints within the regions that restrict their growth and economic potential.

Optimizing Water Supplies in the Face of Climate, Economic and Population Demands

February 26, 2013
Climate, Environment, infrastructure, Leadership, management, power demands, power-water nexus, sustainability, Uncategorized, water supplies
Leave a comment

The world population is expected to grow to over 9 billion by 2050, an exponential trend that has continued for several hundred years and see no end it site.  Megaregions as people flock to cities and industry will be commonplace.  The question is how will water supplies be impacted, or impact this trend.  Interestingly it varies everywhere.  For example, China and India are not expected to reap major benefits from climate changes, so their economies will grow as will populations.  They continue to construct coal fired power plants, and impact carbon dioxide and pollution levels, which does not help the climate issues.   Recall that Beijing was basically shut down for several days recent due to smog – seems like I recall the first air pollution regulations stemming from Henry the VIII decision to move the coal plants out of London during his reign 500 years ago because of pollution, but perhaps we need to relearn history J.  Of course China and India are expected to be less affected than the more historically developed countries in the northern latitudes that have been moving to renewable and less impactful power solutions with good reason.  Aside from these two economies, the rest of the northern latitudes are likely to see changes in temperature, variation in precipitation patterns and drought frequency changes.  That has major impacts for a billion people who will see water supply shortages occur much more often, and create a whole host of “winners” and “losers” in the water supply category.  Conflicts may result from the need to change increase water supplies as desperation kicks in.  Lawrence Smith, in his book 2050, suggests that while the far northern countries, the US, Russia, the Scandanavian countries, and Canada may see more land for agriculture and more water (at least in some areas), those warmer countries in the sub-Sahara, will become more desperate and dangerous to the world order.  Water will be the new oil, and the tipping point for sustainability, akin to peak oil, needs to be developed.  The cost will be significant, but the failure will be catastrophic to global economies.  This is part of why the global pursuit of renewable power, local solutions and green jobs.  It is why the definition of sustainable water supplies continues to evolve as we understand that the impacts, or the constraints of water supplies is far more reaching than most engineers and planners have traditionally dealt with.  AWWA published a Sustainable Water CD several years ago.  It was a series of papers of different aspects of sustainability as applied to water resources.  The last paper summarized the findings and compared it to the initial paper discussion.  The conclusion was the concept is evolving.  Climate, power, agriculture, natural systems, local economies, local economic contributions to regional and national economies and politics all impact pure science recommendations for water supply allocation.  The question is can we overcome the politics to create a optimized science solution to sustain water supplies and economies.  An old Native American proverb comes to mind:  We do not inherit the Earth from our grandparents, we borrow it from our grandchildren.

Looking for Leadership

February 24, 2013
communciations, Leadership, management, Uncategorized, water sewer management
Leave a comment

Hi all

I am in the process of trying to develop a project on leadership in the water industry, focusing of who our leaders are now (individual), how we develop new leaders, barrier and incentives for leadership and issues. I thought the 3 biggest issues in the water industry post a couple weeks back was great. Share and let’s see if we can gain some traction. Looking forward to hearing from you all

Sea Level Rise may Impact low lying areas faster than we think

February 23, 2013
Climate, communciations, Environment, groundwater, infrastructure, Leadership, Marketing water, planning, power demands, power-water nexus, sanitary sewer, sea level rise, stormwater, sustainability, Tidal flooding, Uncategorized, water sewer management
Leave a comment

One of the major issues involved with climate changes is sea level rise. Florida has experienced 9 inches of sea level rise since 1900. Projections are 2-3 feet by 2100, perhaps more. Modeling done by my students and I at FAU has demonstrated that in low lying areas, sea level rise will also impact groundwater levels, and accelerate inland flooding. The graphs above compare the traditional bathtub model used by most investigators and our adjusted for groundwater level model. You wee added inland areas of flooding which complicated storm water flooding issues much faster than sea level rise might indicate.

What do you believe are the three biggest water challenges in the U.S.? Part 2

February 20, 2013
Climate, Environment, finance, funding, groundwater, infrastructure, Leadership, management, Marketing water, sustainability, Uncategorized, water sewer management, water supplies
Leave a comment

This question has been asked a couple times on on-line discussion groups.  It usually results in a short list of answers.  In the last post, I outlined the number one answer –  getting a handle on failing infrastructure.  The next issue has to do with water supplies.  You hear the argument that we need to get people to respect that drinking water as a limited resource, develop where water supplies are plentiful as opposed to arid regions that are water poor and protecting water sources instead of rendering it unusable in the process of using it. People (and their jobs) are moving to “more favorable” (read: warmer, more arid) climates, so people are now actually trying to grow rice and develop golf courses in the deserts of the Southwest US and complaining about “drought” conditions. The sustainability of groundwater supplies is often noted as a problem because much of the west relies on groundwater for agricultural irrigation. Having a 50 or 100 year management plan for an aquifer, which is how to insure there is water to last 50 or 100 years, is shortsighted, even though it doesn’t sound like it. Long term these areas could run out of water which will create significant economic impacts to these communities. More professionals should be involved in this discussion: regional growth planners; federal and state funders that offer ‘incentives’ to businesses to relocate their workers; city and county governments that accept these ‘incentives’ to beef up their budgets.

But just as cities market their community to developers and industry, it is interesting that marketing services is another issue.  I had a conversation where an elected official said it was inappropriate for government to market. Yet the bottled water industry does, power companies do, and cell phone companies do. Utilities ignore the people that put fliers on houses asking our residents to take a sample of their water, and then attacking the quality of our drinking water by explaining that having calcium and chlorine in the water is bad, should have been addressed long ago. Of course calcium and chlorine are in the water! Chlorine disinfects the water and then keeps the distribution system clean (especially an issue in warmer climates with TOC in the water). Our public is uneducated and we have been out-marketed for scare dollars for 40 years. That is an elected official, but also a water official problem.

Will Federal Deficits Drag Water Utilities Down?

February 17, 2013
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

How serious is the federal deficit is sue, and how might it affect water utilities?  Great question, but I am cautious about any of the emails I receive.  For example, I received this email from one of the political parties.  The comment was “check out these statistics — they’re not only frightening, they’re downright unbelievable:

  • $16.5 trillion in debt
  • $5.9 trillion added to debt since 2009
  • $845 billion budget deficit in 2013”

Do we or don’t we have a spending problem. Well let’s see how serious we think this really is.  Banks usually figure you can spend up to 40% of your take home pay on your house expenses.  That includes electric and water, so let’s assume 1/3 of your take home pay.  If you earn $50,000 per year, your take home pay is in the $37,000 per year range.  That means you can spend $1000 per month your mortgage.  If the interest rate is 3%, you can qualify to buy a house loan of $235,000, or 4.7 times your total income, or 6.36 times your net income. 

So let’s see how serious the federal deficit is. The proposed federal government income for 2013 is 2.9 trillion, or 17.8% of the GDP.  Of course the Feds don’t pay taxes, so you can figure the 6.36 x net income yields So 4.7 times $2.9 Trillion is $18.4 Trillion.  The 3% percent is actually higher that the current rates the feds are paying (that’s our mortgage rate), so given that our current federal debt is $16.3 Trillion, so there is some room to spare and the feds could raise revenues, unlike you and I.  Paul Krugman is smiling because this supports his argument.

But is does speak to the need for one of two things:  either raise more revenues, or grow the economy to create more revenues.  The key is receipts will probably track with the economy, so as it improves, the deficits will reduce.  If the economy improves, that improves the outlook for construction, water sales, sewer sales, and local revenues.  That means maybe we can spend more on infrastructure locally.  Maybe we can look at adaptations to bigger issue like sea level rise or changing precipitation patterns to secure sustainable water supplies.  Most are regional issues, so help beyond the local level will be requir3d.  Washington?

Of course what would be great to get to a budget where we actually pay off some of that debt, something that has not occurred in the US since 1960.  If you are a local utility, local government, business or individual you need a debt repayment plan.  Perhaps next time we see potential surpluses, the solution will be debt repayment, not tax cuts……