Environmental Intersection by George Lindemann

Posted on Mon, May. 14, 2012

Miami-Dade’s leaky pipes: More than 47 million gallons of waste spilled in past two years

By CHARLES RABIN AND CURTIS MORGAN
crabin@MiamiHerald.com

MARICE COHN BAND / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

The central district Wastewater Treatment Plant, on Key Biscayne, Monday.

Miami-Dade County’s antiquated sewer system has ruptured at least 65 times over the past two years, spewing more than 47 million gallons of untreated human waste into waterways and streets from rural South Miami-Dade to the ritzy condos of Brickell Avenue to the Broward County border.

The breaks and blowouts — topping out at nine in a single stinky month last October — were documented in nine warning letters that state environmental regulators sent to the county’s Water and Sewer Department between June 2010 and April.

The letters, warning that the county could be on the hook for “damages and restoration’’ and civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day, were the catalyst for ongoing negotiations with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Justice and Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The talks are expected to end with a legal settlement committing the county to a multibillion-dollar plumbing repair plan — and probable customer rate hikes.

The letters lay out more dirty details of “unauthorized discharges’’ not included in a 78-page draft consent decree released last week that declares the county in violation of federal water quality laws, in large part because some of the foul spills drained into canals and Biscayne Bay.

Many of the leaks from the county’s 7,500 miles of lines were relatively minor, posing minimal traffic disruptions and public health concerns. But at least eight topped 100,000 gallons. Six more released more than 1 million gallons of raw sewage from rusted valves or cracked concrete-and-steel pipes that county engineers acknowledge had long out-lived their intended life span.

The worst problem by far, according to the DEP letters, is the county’s aging Central District Wastewater Plant on Virginia Key, which is designed to discharge partially treated sewage out a pipe more than a mile off shore. State records show that between October and December 2011 four separate failures sent a total of more than 19 million gallons spilling from the plant.

The largest at Virginia Key, on Oct. 9, spilled 17 million gallons of raw sewage.

Doug Yoder, the Water and Sewer Department’s deputy director, blamed it on a broken pin holding a filter screen used to divert “chunks of stuff” from the liquid flow. Once the pin failed, the thick solids built up, triggering a massive back-up that forced workers to shut down that plant and divert incoming sewage to another site, causing even more of an overflow.

The public never heard about that failure, Yoder said, because “nothing actually left the plant site. The overflow went into the storm drains, then back to the plant.”

But three weeks later, on Oct. 31, another million gallons of partially-treated sewage spilled out a relief valve into surrounding bay waters, forcing Miami-Dade to issue no-swimming advisories. That was triggered by a power outage that shut down a pump as operators shifted from a generator to the power grid.

Yoder conceded operators have a difficult task at Virginia Key, the oldest and most decaying of the county’s three plants. It handles some 25 million gallons of raw sewage a day from Surfside, Bal Harbour and Miami Beach. The county has mulled replacing it, which would cost $500 million — money Yoder said the department doesn’t have. He also acknowledged the department has resisted pouring a lot of repair money into a plant it hopes to replace.

“We want to avoid spending a lot to keep it running if we’re going to take it out of service,” he said.

The federal enforcement action isn’t the county’s first. In 1996, Miami-Dade paid a $2 million fine — at the time the largest ever for a U.S. Clean Water Act violation — and agreed to expand the capacity of a system that was constantly pouring raw sewage into the Miami River and Biscayne Bay.

Since then, the department estimates it has spent some $2 billion on upgrades but hasn’t come close to covering needed fixes for a system in which many pipelines are approach a half-century in age or even older.

Blanca Mesa, an activist with the Sierra Club who has raised concerns about the county’s plans to replace only one segment of an aging and fragile sewer pipe under Government Cut, said the failures point to a long history of ignoring problems and putting off proper maintenance. She said today’s problems echo failures detailed in a 1991 grand jury report documenting sewage spills into the Miami River.

“Somebody has to understand we have to set the right priorities in this county, and we haven’t been doing that for a very long time,’’ she said.

Miami-Dade Commission Chairman Joe Martinez agrees the county has to find a way to pay for the repair work. One option might be to issue bonds, Martinez said, but he would insist that property tax bills don’t rise for residents as a result. Martinez said it’s possible that any increase in bond debt would be offset by a decrease in the property tax rate, if home values rise this year, as he expects.

“We’re going to have to wait until the tax rolls come out,” he said. “We definitely need to fix the infrastructure, but we must gain people’s confidence that [the money] will be used for that.”

Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he is waiting to learn how much money the county would need to spend before committing to a financing plan. First he would look to reduce water department costs, he said, then possibly enter some type of private-public partnership.

“The last thing we want to do is put any kind of burden on the public,” he said.

Past political decisions have compounded the sewer department’s problems, by cutting into reserve funds that could have helped finance the system upgrades.

Historically, county leaders tapped water department funds for other departments struggling to make ends meet. Though that practice stopped in 2007, last year the Water and Sewer Department still “loaned’’ $25 million to the county’s general fund to help balance the books. Payback is scheduled to begin in 2014, at $5 million a year.

Right now, the department has three reserve accounts. One is required to maintain a 60-day reserve, or $55.7 million. Another is expected to have about $30 million by the end of this budget year in September. A third is empty.

Another type of reserve account intended for unexpected repairs maintains between $50 million and $60 million each year — a fraction of the repair bill that county engineers estimate could run into the billions.

Adding to the problem, county commissioners and mayors have repeatedly resisted raising what rank as some of the lowest water and sewer fees in the state — though they did boost it 4.7 percent last year. The average homeowner pays about $135 quarterly, according to the county.

Miami-Dade certainly isn’t alone in struggling to mend its leaky and aging sewage system. Most major cities in the United States have similar problems. The EPA estimates there are 240,000 water and sewer main breaks across the country each year, and puts the price tag at hundreds of billions of dollars.

In Broward County, for instance, state regulators say sewer failures have sometimes drawn scrutiny but not a similar sweeping state-federal enforcement case. Waste there is handled by 28 different utilities with much smaller and generally newer systems. Miami-Dade’s system is the largest, and among the oldest, in the state with huge pipelines carrying large volumes over long distances.

Alan Garcia, director of Broward’s wastewater and water services, said less than 3 percent of the county’s 7 million feet of pipes is older than 50 years. About 40 percent of the county’s breaks are construction related, he said.

“We do an aggressive job of monitoring our pipes,’’ he said.

Jennifer Diaz, a Florida DEP spokeswoman, said Miami-Dade hasn’t tried to cover up its problems, acknowledging in an April 2011 “self assessment’’ sent to the EPA that numerous breaks were putting the county in violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act.

The DEP opened its own enforcement case against Miami-Dade in 2009. But the following year, after consulting with the EPA and Miami-Dade, all the parties agreed to draw up a joint state-federal consent decree that acknowledges “improper’’ management and maintenance practices.

In a written statement, Diaz said the spills “are mitigated by Miami-Dade to the greatest extent possible.’’

Still, the potential failure of some key pipelines could have disastrous consequences. Earlier this year a consultant warned that the sewer main running under Government Cut to Virginia Key was so brittle it could rupture at any time. It was constructed from pipe made by a now-defunct company named Interpace, whose notoriously defective products have been linked to a number of major failures.

Though county engineers maintain the pipeline remains safe for daily use, department director John Renfrow acknowledged an unexpected failure would be “catastrophic,” spewing tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay.

His warning echoes one issued exactly two decades ago about potential sewer line breaks by a Miami-Dade grand jury appalled by environmental and other conditions in the Miami River.

“The Miami River and Biscayne Bay would experience the worst environmental catastrophes in modern history,’’ the 1991 report warned. “The detrimental impact of a spill of this type and the cleanup and mitigation costs are incalculable. If we are seriously concerned about the bay, we must address this known environmental hazard now.’’

Miami Herald staff writer Carli Teproff contributed to this report.

Peace may finally be at hand in the decades-long Everglades dirty-water war.

Eight months after Gov. Rick Scott flew to Washington to extend a political olive branch and personally pitch Florida’s latest plan for stopping the flow of polluted farm, ranch and yard runoff into the Everglades, state and federal negotiators are on the verge of an accord expected to be hailed by both sides as a major milestone.

A settlement crafted with the goal of resolving two protracted and paralyzing federal lawsuits — one goes back almost a quarter century, the other eight years — could be soon finalized, possibly within the month, according to officials on both sides of the confidential negotiations.

The agreement would commit Florida to a significantly expanded slate of Everglades restoration projects pegged at an estimated $890 million. Still, that’s a considerably smaller price tag than a $1.5 billion plan drawn up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that a Miami federal judge has threatened to impose.

Most key technical issues — such as the size of additional artificial marshes used to scrub dirty, nutrient-laced storm runoff that has poisoned vast swaths of the Everglades — have been largely sorted out. But both sides cautioned the deal could still be delayed as negotiators work through the nuts and bolts of rolling out, implementing and enforcing a complex and likely controversial agreement.

Environmental groups and sugar growers have heard increasingly encouraging reports from negotiators over the past few months, though they have not been briefed on key details. But they agree the new cleanup blueprint that emerges will stand as a landmark in the costly, contentious legal and political battles to revive the struggling, shrunken River of Grass.

“It would be huge for everyone,’’ said Gaston Cantens, a vice president for Florida Crystals, one of the region’s largest sugar growers. “For a business, whenever you can have stability and certainty, then you can make long-term plans with confidence.’’

Environmentalists are reserving judgment, with some bracing for a deal they fear will be a compromise that might fall short of providing the Glades the pristine fresh water it needs and will push cleanup deadlines, already repeatedly delayed, back by years.

David Guest, an attorney for EarthJustice who represents several environmental groups in a 24-year-old lawsuit brought by the federal government that first forced Florida to deal with Glades pollution, said he has heard enough about the framework of the deal to know he’ll find plenty to question.

But even Guest acknowledges, “It’s absolutely going to be progress, there is no doubt about that.”

The South Florida Water Management District, which oversees restoration projects for the state, responded to questions with a statement, saying the state plan was “scientifically sound, economically feasible and would bring about long-term protection for America’s Everglades.’’

“We’ve had productive dialogue with our federal partners and have made significant progress toward an agreed-upon approach. However, there are some outstanding issues that are important to Florida.” For both the Obama and Scott administrations, finalizing a major Everglades deal would represent a political win and a rare example of bipartisan cooperation. It would be particularly notable for the governor, a tea party-backed, anti-regulation Republican healthcare executive who infuriated environmentalists in his first year in office by slashing environmental programs and gutting much of the state’s grown management oversight.

With the state facing the threat that U.S. District Judge Alan Gold would impose the $1.5 billion EPA cleanup plan on the state, Scott last October flew to Washington to pitch Florida’s alternative plan, meeting with high-ranking White House officials, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

He has continued campaigning since, in meetings and letters, including a Feb. 1 letter to President Barack Obama discussing encouraging settlement talks and stressing a message repeated in a state court brief filed this month requesting more time for negotiations: that the state’s time and taxpayer’s money would be better spent on projects than “pointless, expensive and time-consuming litigation.’’

In an April 5 response to Scott, EPA administrator Jackson echoed the upbeat tone, noting “we share a common desire to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us for quick, historic progress towards clean water for the Everglades.’’

Though four federal agencies initially found the state’s plan inadequate, the state has made a number of tweaks and additions during negotiations, officials said, adding some 8,400 more acres of treatment marshes — still far less than the 42,000 additional acres the EPA had proposed. In addition, the state plan calls for expanded water storage in a string of new “flow equalization basins’’ intended to keep the marshes more effective by limiting flooding or damaging dry-downs.

To save money, land swaps are being considered and water managers also intend to convert a massive reservoir that water managers halted two years and $272 million into construction in 2008 would be turned into one of new, shallower basins.

The nearly $900 million in projects would add to the $1.8 billion the state has already spent to construct a 45,000 acres of existing marshes, with an additional 11,000 acres scheduled to come online later this year. But that massive network hasn’t been enough to meet the super-low standards needed to protect the sensitive Glades ecosystem from phosphorous, a common fertilizer ingredient that drains off farms and yards with every rainstorm. It fuels the spread of cat tails and other exotics that crowd out native plants.

Though Scott has earned praise from some environmentalists, Guest, the EarthJustice attorney, isn’t among them, arguing the governor didn’t lead so much as he was pushed by courtroom defeats and mounting pressure from two federal judges.

Gold, in a 2004 suit brought by the Miccosukee Tribe and the environmental group Friends of the Everglades, has issued a series of rulings blasting the state and federal agencies for “glacial delay’’ and repeatedly failing to enforce water-pollution standards tough enough to protect the Everglades. In 2010, he ordered the EPA to draw up a cleanup plan that water managers said they couldn’t afford.

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno, who oversees the original 1988 cleanup suit by the federal government, has expressed similar frustrations and urged both sides to come up with a viable plan.

Barbara Miedema, vice president of the Belle Glade-based Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative, said she expects it will still take a while to nail down the deal. With multiple federal and state agencies, more than a half-dozen environmental groups, the Miccosukee Tribe and two federal judges involved, there are numerous legal, practical and political hurdles to clear, she said.

“We hear they are close, but we have been hearing they are close for months,’’ she said. “A lot of signs say it’s likely. I’m not betting on it.’’

BY CURTIS MORGAN

CMORGAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM

Though the previous washed-out weekend might have suggested otherwise, South Florida’s rainy season has not yet begun — at least officially.

But when it does start sometime this month, expect it to be a bit wetter than normal, forecasters and water managers said Thursday.

South Florida’s wet season, which usually begins around May 20 and runs until mid-October, typically produces about 70 percent of the regional rainfall. Those five months help keep the Everglades healthy and water supplies recharged or — if the rains don’t show — produce droughts that kill crops and lawns.

Robert Molleda, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Miami office, said a number of indicators, including the easing of the global La Niña weather pattern, point to a wetter season into June. The remaining months appear likely to be close to average.

With the region still showing lingering effects from an unusually dry fall and winter, a bit more rain would help, said Susan Sylvester, chief of water control operations for the South Florida Water Management District, which oversees the water supply for 7.7 million people from Orlando to Key West.

Above-average April rainfall, much of it delivered last weekend, helped Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties but only provided a bit of recharge for Lake Okeechobee, which serves as the region’s water barrel.

Overall, the 16-county district’s rainfall deficit since November is about 5.5 inches. Lake Okeechobee was at 11.63 feet above sea level Thursday, about two feet below its average mark for the date.

The typical wet season produces about 35 inches of rain but one tropical storm or hurricane can easily push the figure higher.

 

Bruce Ritchie, 05/02/2012 - 04:04 PM

With the workload of developing new nutrient water quality rules seemingly in the rear view mirror, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is moving forward on some other potentially controversial water quality issues.

DEP is responsible for protecting the quality of Florida’s drinking water as well as its rivers, lakes, wetlands and springs. The Federal Clean Water Act requires states to publicly review and update their water quality standards in what is called a "triennial review." 

The department has scheduled hearings for later this month in West Palm Beach, Orlando and Tallahassee to consider its "human health criteria" involving exposure to chemicals through fish consumption.

DEP was conducting a similar review in 2008 before some environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state's lack of numeric limits for nitrogen and phosphorus. That lawsuit led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set limits for nitrogen and phosphorus in Florida waterways, which prompted DEP to adopt replacement rules.

"That just became all-consuming," said Drew Bartlett, director of DEP's Division of Environmental Assessment and Restoration. "Now that we put that to rest, we can shift those resources consumed by the numeric nutrient criteria back onto this issue. We decided to pick it straight right back up."

The Legislature waived approval of those rules in February and the state sent them to the EPA for review. Environmental groups including the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club have a legal challenge pending at the Division of Administrative Hearings.

In 2009, the Clean Water Network petitioned the federal EPA to set human health criteria for fish consumption. Other environmental groups had sued in 1995, arguing that previous human health criteria were based on low fish consumption rates by Floridians.

DEP has conducted studies and determined that Floridians do eat more fish than those in other states, so proposed new human health criteria will have to reflect that, Bartlett said.

"It is going to become more stringent than it is currently on the books for all of those (pollution) parameters," he said.

Although Bartlett said DEP is moving forward as planned, Clean Water Network's Linda Young said her group has warned it will sue if DEP delays action again.

"(The federal) EPA has to make sure the criteria adopted are protective of human health when those fish are consumed," said Young, the group's director.

After the hearings from May 15-17, DEP hopes to adopt updated rules by the end of the year, Bartlett said.

The department also is proposing limits for nitrogen and phosphorus in estuaries along the Florida Panhandle. And the department will consider setting new requirements for dissolved oxygen, which affects the amount of pollution that can be discharged into waterways.

Florida's dissolved oxygen criteria were based on national criteria from studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, Bartlett said.

He said in more recent years, DEP has invested in a "huge" monitoring system in Florida to determine what dissolved oxygen conditions exist naturally in Florida. That science also will be presented at the workshops.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida is tracking the dissolved oxygen issue and has raised serious concerns with DEP, said Jennifer Hecker, the group's director of natural resource policy.

"Sometimes by changing the goal and standard you can create compliance," Hecker said. "It doesn't necessarily make anything better -- that is the concern. We want to see things truly improve. I think that is what Floridians want as well."

Young warned that industry groups are seeking to allow pollution to continue by reducing dissolved oxygen -- along with setting weak nitrogen and phosphorus limits and creating new designated uses for waterways with their own pollution limits.

Bartlett responded the science behind dissolved oxygen standard needs to be updated based on new science, just like with the nitrogen and phosphorus limits. And he said DEP will looking for feedback from the public at its upcoming workshops.

"We can't really do anything at DEP that is not truly and soundly rooted in the science," Bartlett said. "There is no other way to do it really."

Reporter Bruce Ritchie can be reached at britchie@thefloridacurrent.com.

BY CHARLES RABIN AND CURTIS MORGAN

CRABIN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
 

Almost two decades after the EPA imposed the biggest fine at the time on the county for ignoring the Clean Water Act, the feds are back and talking to Miami-Dade leaders, this time about repairing miles of faulty pipes that carry raw sewage.

In this file photo, a Miami-Dade County high-pressure vacuum truck works on the sewer system in Northwest Dade. MIAMI HERALD FILE

Miami-Dade County’s 7,500 miles of sewage lines are in such decrepit shape and rupture so frequently — sometimes spilling raw waste into waterways and Biscayne Bay — that federal environmental regulators are demanding repairs and upgrades that could cost upwards of a billion dollars.

Authorities from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice and Florida Department of Environmental Protection met Wednesday morning with leaders at County Hall to begin what figures to be a lengthy and expensive negotiation for Miami-Dade.

John Renfrow, director of Miami-Dade’s Water and Sewer Department, acknowledged the string of major ruptures that have plagued the county’s sewage system in recent years, saying the aging network is “being held together by chewing gum.” He added he has sought more money to fix the leaks for a long time.

The price tag, though still uncertain, will easily reach the hundreds of millions and could top $1 billion based on past repair projects. The massive overhaul almost certainly will mean rate hikes for hundreds of thousands of residents who have historically paid some of the lowest fees in the state.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/02/v-fullstory/2779936/feds-file-complaint...

“We would like to think there’s state and federal assistance,” said Doug Yoder, Water and Sewer deputy director for regional compliance. “But this is ultimately going to come back to rates. It will require our rates go up, either to generate cash or to pay bonds back.”

The federal complaints are sketched out in a 78-page draft consent decree claiming Miami-Dade County has violated sections of the Clean Water Act, along with terms and conditions of its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits. The report doesn’t detail specific failures, but said state and federal environmental protection agencies “have inspected Miami-Dade’s WCTS [wastewater collection treatment system] and WWTPs [wastewater treatment plants] and have discovered a number of improper management, operations, and maintenance practices.”

Miami-Dade has suffered at least three major sewer pipe breaks the past three years, and a recent internal report shows that three sections of 54-inch pipe under the bay, leading to the Virginia Key water treatment plant, are so brittle they could rupture at any time. Renfrow told The Miami Herald earlier this year that a break in that pipe, which carries 25 million gallons of raw sewage each day from Surfside, Miami Beach, and Bal Harbour, could be “catastrophic.”

He said it would mean “you’d have to close down the beaches and it would be an environmental mess.”

Aging sewer lines are not a problem unique to Miami-Dade. The EPA estimates there are 240,000 line breaks across the country each year as governments struggle to find revenue to repair sewage systems that in some cases are 100 years old. Fixing the nation’s sewer line ills could exceed $100 billion, the EPA noted.

Though the EPA wouldn’t comment directly on the complaint, the agency seems to be focusing on the Virginia Key line and several other pipe lines that have broken the past few years. The county’s system, built in the 1920s, last underwent major repairs in the 1970s.

The last time Miami-Dade was hit with a consent decree in 1996, it paid a $2 million fine, at the time the largest penalty paid to the EPA for Clean Water Act violations. Unlike the current decree, which is looking at old faulty pipes, the previous probe focused on the county’s lack of capacity to drain water overflows. In the 1990s, overflows and spills into the Miami River, Biscayne Bay and canals were mostly due to the system’s inability to handle big rainstorms.

Since then, the county has spent nearly $2 billion upgrading its system, from a $600 million overhaul of the water treatment facility in South Dade, to repairing more than 500 pump stations, to retrofitting thousands of homes with low-flush toilets. Water flow has been reduced by about 12 percent, or close to 100 million gallons a day.

Yet, the federal government maintains, Miami-Dade must spend billions more because over the past decade miles of aging pipeline crisscrossing the county are breaking with increasing frequency.

“The system is getting old,” said Bertha Goldenberg, the water and sewer department’s assistant director.

Adding to the worries, engineers have linked many of the worst breaks to defective pipe built by Interpace, a now-defunct company whose products were widely used in the 1970s. Now, some are failing decades earlier than expected. Over time, steel reinforcement wires inside the concrete pipes have corroded, broken and failed.

Recent breakdowns have occurred in Hialeah — where a 54-inch main break left a giant sinkhole — in Northwest Dade, where a 72-inch pipe burst and leaked almost 20 million gallons of sewage into a canal leading to Biscayne Bay, and in Miami Lakes, where a bus got stuck in a sinkhole after a 12-inch pipe broke. Fixing the system can be taxing, as groups of workers head out at night to one of the county’s 1,041 pump stations, then insert machines with mini cameras to run through the pipes in search of cracks or tears.

Perhaps the most infamous sewage rupture in recent memory occurred in 2000, when the line from Government Cut to Virginia Key was accidentally ruptured when contractors installing new boatlifts at Miami Beach Marina drilled through it. The resulting gusher of raw sewage cost $2.5 million to repair and the stinking slick closed surrounding waters for days.

 

By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press – 17 hours ago   

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden has taken what he says was his first airboat ride, touring a swath of the Everglades while touting the benefits of a federally funded restoration project to restore the flow of water.

Biden boated past a bridge project west of Miami that will elevate a cross-Everglades highway that long dammed water flowing through Everglades National Park. Environmentalists say the project will improve wetlands habitat for alligators, wading birds and other wildlife.

The project was approved in 2000 but construction was only expedited after years of legal challenges using stimulus money under President Barack Obama's administration, park officials say.

Biden brought his granddaughter along on the airboat tour and also was joined by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, two Florida Democrats.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Fourteen states suffering under drought. Water use in Southwest heads for day of reckoning. Water-pollution laws violated more than 500,000 times in five years. Ruptures in aging water systems cause pollutants to seep into water supplies.

 The above reporting from The Times speaks to a growing reality: the United States faces a water crisis. In making the feature documentary “Last Call at the Oasis,” I found the flow of evidence bracing in its breadth and acceleration, but the underlying dynamics are not new: we use more water than the system can naturally replenish, and we abuse the supply we have. During, say, periods of drought, we might fitfully curtail our consumption habits, but when it comes to long-term management strategies requiring long-term sacrifices, we balk. Isn’t clean and abundant water a basic right? We just need to find more water!

While we can’t “make” more water, there is one solution to water shortage problems that addresses issues of both quality and supply. Without mining an ancient aquifer, draining a natural spring or piping in the pricey harvest from a greenhouse-gas-and-brine-generating desalination plant, there is a solution to provide a valuable source of extremely pure water: reclaim it from sewage. The stuff from our showers, sinks and, yes, our toilets.  In Israel, more than 80 percent of household wastewater is recycled, providing nearly half the water for irrigation. A new pilot plant near San Diego and a national “NEWater” program in Singapore show it’s practical to turn wastewater into water that’s clean enough to drink. Yet, in most of the world, we are resistant to do so.

Why?

We think we are rational beings, but we are not. We are emotional creatures, subject to obscuring feelings like fear and disgust. No one knows more about this than Paul Rozin, the subject of this piece, who has studied disgust for decades. His work shows us the fallacy in assuming that, given the facts, people will make logical choices. While recycled water may be a smart and clean way to manage our water supply, our primitive instincts are more programmed to fear the murky water hole than to worry about climate change, new contaminants and population growth. We should think green, but we can’t help thinking brown. Until we understand the very human, irrational component to our actions — or lack thereof — we’ll still be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

The Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jessica Yu is the director of the forthcoming “Last Call at the Oasis,” a feature documentary on the water crisis for Participant Media.  Her nonfiction and scripted films include “Protagonist,” “Ping Pong Playa” and “In the Realms of the Unreal.”