Water and Environmental - Richard A. Rula School of Civil & Environmental Engineering - Bagley College of Engineering - Page 3
R.I.P. California (1850-2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse
Last week when NASA announced that California is on its death bed and has only 12 months of water left, the news hit like a punch to the gut. “Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the…
Can We Reverse-Engineer the Environment?
The Sanitary and Ship Canal was heralded as a triumph of that heroic age of American civil engineering in which technological progress and industrial might promised to deliver us from nature’s tyranny. If we could reverse the course of rivers, what couldn’t we bend to our will? In 1955, the American Society of Civil Engineers named…
As Infrastructure Crumbles, Trillions of Gallons of Water Lost
Imagine Manhattan under almost 300 feet of water. Not water from a hurricane or a tsunami, but purified drinking water — 2.1 trillion gallons of it. That’s the amount of water that researchers estimate is lost each year in this country because of aging and leaky pipes, broken water mains and faulty meters. Fixing that…
Will water woes leave Americans thirsty?
On August 2, 2014, residents of Toledo, Ohio, woke up to a startling warning from the city: “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER.” A few samples from the city’s water-treatment plant contained worrisome levels of a toxic chemical. Algae in Lake Erie, where Toledo gets its water, made this toxin. Drinking water with this chemical —…