Nowadays, the United States is an urbanized country – the vast majority of us live in cities. When you have hundreds of people living in a square mile, it is much more efficient to have the county/city water department deliver water to households than to have everyone drill their own well or build their own water tank. Municipal water systems supply water for a city’s residential, commercial, parkland, schools, and fire-fighting needs. Even industries get some of their water from these public-supply systems.

So just how does your city supply water to you? A great deal of engineering goes into supplying our water needs. Cities have to have a means of storing a tremendous amount of water so it is available when we need it. Probably, somewhere near you (at a higher altitude), a river was dammed to form a reservoir. These reservoirs can be very large or they may cover just a few acres. Sometimes a well is dug to supply ground water to the storage reservoir. Closer to your home might be a water tower, which will always be built on high ground. Read more

Uranium’s Mobility May Have Been Overestimated

Uranium contamination may move much slower in groundwater than previously believed, according to scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Around the nation, sediments and groundwater are contaminated with uranium from discharges at mining and processing sites.

Knowing how uranium spreads out or diffuses in water is critical to predicting its movement and removing the contamination. But previous estimates may have significantly overestimated the radionuclide’s ability to move with the groundwater. Read more

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently released a report entitled Global Water Security that claims water supply issues around the globe will lead to economic instability, civil and international wars, and even the use of water as a weapon in the next several decades.

In typical shock-and-awe fashion, the U.S. government paints a grim picture of so-called global warming, water shortages, and other water problems as the causes of major global destabilization, which it also says may be mitigated if certain steps are taken to offset them. Read more

When looking at the location of rivers and the amount of streamflow in rivers, the key concept is the river’s “watershed”. What is a watershed? Easy, if you are standing on ground right now, just look down. You’re standing, and everyone is standing, in a watershed.

A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that falls in it and drains off of it goes into the same place. Watersheds can be as small as a footprint or large enough to encompass all the land that drains water into rivers that drain into Chesapeake Bay, where it enters the Atlantic Ocean. This map shows one set of watersheds in the continental United States; these are known as National 8-digit hydrologic units (watersheds). Read more

If you ask your grandparents what life was like when they were kids, the answer will probably be that things were simpler, slower, less automated, and that people did not move so often. But since your grandparents’ time two major things have happened: (1) the population of the United States has increased greatly, and (2) technology and scientific innovations have come to play a major role in our lives.

Pesticide use has grown because not only must our exploding population be supplied with food, but crops and food are grown for export to other countries. The United States has become the largest producer of food products in the world, partly owing to our use of modern chemicals (pesticides) to control the insects, weeds, and other organisms that attack food crops. But, as with many things in life, there’s a hidden cost to the benefit we get from pesticides. We’ve learned that pesticides can potentially harm the environment and our own health. Water plays an important role here because it is one of the main ways that pesticides are transported from the areas where they are applied to other locations, where they may cause health problems. Read more