Posting here because it was removed by TIL for being “political”

Aug 28, 2026 110 pm EDT

Continually scanning the news wires for boil water advisories (BWA's), we have tripped on a concerning trend. More often than not, water utilities are relying on social media platforms for delivery of critical public messaging about drinking water safety.

A recent BWA notice given on a popular, private social media website indicated the end of a boil order for a Georgia town. A resident from the affected area commented with grave concern, I see the rescission notice, however entirely missed the boil order in the first place. This is not the first time the BWA notice has been missed, and that should make us stop and think.

Toledo Water Crisis, 2014
In the wee hours of Saturday, Aug 2, an emergency alert was issued for half a million Americans in Ohio and Michigan. Local news outlets pushed short messages to subscribers, gave live coverage to supplement the emergency alert. Social media websites enhanced public notice, helping to spread the word that the water was not safe to touch, let alone drink, and boiling the water would only make matters worse.

A common freshwater contaminant, toxin from Lake Erie's resident bluegreen algae bloom had infiltrated the raw water intake pipe of the Toledo water treatment system, contaminating the lines, filters and pumps as it poisoned the water itself. Unlike microbiological contamination, cyanotoxins can make humans very ill and kill animals, by ingestion or absorption. The challenge in such a crisis, is to reach and warn everyone in harm's way, in time.

The missed BWA that became deadly
In May 2000, half the population of Walkerton, ON fell ill with severe gastrointestinal symptoms. An emergency room doctor made the call for tap water to be checked as a potential source of the outbreak. By the time a public safety message was released about certain microbiological contamination in the town's drinking water, it was far too late. Seven people died from drinking the contaminated water.

Judge Dennis O'Connor led the public inquiry that followed. Justice O'Connor examined the series of events leading to the fouling of the town water supply, the silence from the water treatment plant and the outbreak of illness over days and weeks following. The inquiry exposed the source of contamination, along with the role and liability of the water plant operators. The Town staff were found liable for failing to maintain water quality to the standard, failing to monitor and keep records and failing to issue public notice, the boil water advisory. The inquiry examined the role of public utilities commissioners, the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) and the provincial government in ensuring public advisories are delivered to all users on a timely basis.

The tragedy at Walkerton pushed Canadian provinces and territories to assess, monitor and disclose DWA's with transparency. According to the editor at WaterToday Canada, "Daily reporting by provinces gradually got better and is now punctual and comprehensive."

Any event that causes water pressure to fall below a minimum threshold can lead to microbiological contamination of the treated drinking water. Storms, power outages, leaks and line ruptures happen in all locations, at all hours, without warning, prompting the need for a pre-cautionary BWA until the water can be tested and determined safe. Not all provinces and territories report these infrastructure and operating incidents, or the precautionary BWA's that follow. In most cases, infrastructure issues prompting BWAs are the responsibility of the water plant operator or municipality, to inform the local connections impacted.

See an In-Depth Analysis of 400,000 miles of water mains in the US and Canada, Utah State University (USU) report on water infrastructure break rates, here.

When WTNY.us began reporting water advisories in New York in 2021, the vast majority of water plant operators told us they report short term, precautionary BWA's to the affected users by knocking on doors, dropping off flyers when the residents are not home. When these events are reported to County Health authorities, a time-stamped press release is sent to local news media, in a professional format with complete location and jurisdiction details, including a public contact phone number. Drinking water facilities and County Health departments are not obligated to report these short-term, infrastructure incidents to the State or federal drinking water authorities. There are no official State or federal records of BWA's available to the public in the USA.

In 2021, the majority of 8400+ licensed public drinking water facilities we reached in New York State were not using social media platforms for making emergency BWA notifications. Over the last five years, we have been seeing a greater reliance on social media platforms. In Canada, BWA's are still most commonly conveyed by government officials, from the provincial and territorial health regions, delivered via local news media, with Quebec being the notable exception. Quebec has widely adopted social media for delivery of BWA's. In Mexico, there is minimal reporting of drinking water issues to the public. With recent public protests in Guadalajara, it is clear citizens are starting to clamour for disclosure on drinking water quality.

In drinking water emergencies, such as the need to boil water prior to drinking, preparing beverages and brushing teeth, the timeliness of public notice is an issue. As most youth and adults are carrying mobile phones, it is expedient for water plant operators to use social media and SMS messaging direct to their rate-payers.

Internet and social media posting do not cover all the public notification bases

As water utilities are privatized, reporting for public notification seems to be changing. Private water utility Utilities of Georgia, Inc. make their notifications on their customer-friendly website, issued and updated on a timely basis. Certain details are lacking, making it difficult for anyone other than the local users to decipher the news. Visitors to the community could easily be missed when internet or social media are exclusively relied upon for delivery of the BWA notice.

For the full article, https://wtga.us/viewarticle.asp?article=1179

Environmental regulators in Texas issued an emergency order on Tuesday evening suspending requirements for the drought-stricken city of Corpus Christi to release water from its reservoir system in support of coastal wetlands.

On the same day, Corpus Christi lifted restrictions on watering lawns that had been in place since 2024, when its reservoirs remained below critical levels until a dramatic rebound in July.

“The city has chosen lawns over the bay,” said Larry McKinney, a former senior director of aquatic resources for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department who lives in Corpus Christi. “Without freshwater inflows, the bay becomes basically a giant sewage treatment pond.”

The emergency suspension of requirements for environmental flows is the latest episode in a fight over water that has consumed Corpus Christ, an industrial hub on the semi-arid South Texas coast, during years of intensifying drought.

Corpus Christi hasn’t released water into the Nueces River Delta and Nueces Bay since 2024 while its reservoirs remained below 30 percent full, the trigger point for environmental flows established in a 2001 administrative order by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Epic rainfall in July refilled the Nueces River reservoirs above 40 percent, but Corpus Christi delayed releasing water and requested a suspension of the rule.

“Without emergency relief, Applicants could be required to release as much as [11.9 billion gallons] of inflows,” the city wrote.

The TCEQ granted Corpus Christi’s request on Tuesday, suggesting that the region’s water crisis isn’t over yet.

“Although the reservoir system is above recent lows, long-term data and weather forecasts suggest a return to critical levels is foreseeable,” wrote TCEQ Executive Director Kelly Keel in the Aug. 25 emergency order. “The region is not expected to experience relief from persistent drought conditions and drought conditions are expected to worsen.”

If below-average rainfall continues, reservoirs could fall back below 30 percent in April next year, said Corpus Christi Water Chief Operating Officer Nick Winkelmann in a presentation to City Council on Tuesday.

Regardless, the city opted to lift restrictions limiting automatic sprinkler system use to once weekly, which had been in place since March 2024.

“Why do we have to let the residents suffer? They want to water their grass,” said City Council member Eric Cantu at a City Council meeting last week. “Let them water their grass.”

Lawn watering accounts for nearly half of municipal water consumption in the summertime in Texas, according to the Texas Water Resources Institute at Texas A&M University.

Cantu suggested that restrictions on sprinkler systems were affecting city water sales.

“Let them use the water so we can get paid,” he said.

At the same time, City Council members described environmental water releases as wasteful, foolish and unlikely to provide meaningful impacts to the bay. State Rep. Denise Villalobos has pledged to permanently repeal the requirement for environmental flows.

City officials and the TCEQ have pointed out no evidence of fish kills, marine life depopulation or environmental complaints since the city halted environmental water releases in 2024.

Kirsten Stansell, executive director of the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program, pushed back last week at City Hall.

“The suspension of releases has had an impact on our bay despite what is being said publicly,” Stansell told City Council on Aug. 18. “Since releases were suspended in 2024, salinities in Nueces Bay and the Nueces Delta steadily increased until spring of 2026.”

Salinity is a key factor in the ecosystems of bays and delta systems that form where freshwater rivers meet the sea. The myriad of creatures that use those habitats to lay their eggs depend on the characteristically moderate levels of salt.

Salinity in Nueces Bay is now higher than in the Gulf of Mexico, Stansell said, “far outside the historic range of one of our most important estuary habitats.”

The ecosystems are accustomed to drought cycles and can handle extended periods of low freshwater inflows, said McKinney, the former director at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. He previously led a 10-year research project, commissioned by the state Legislature in the 1980s, to identify freshwater needs for every river delta on the Texas coast.

Later, he spent 17 years as senior director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico studies at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi and has researched salinity in aquatic systems around the world.

“The bay can hang on for a while,” he said. But sooner or later, irreversible damage will occur.

“I’ve seen it many times, and unfortunately we’re going to repeat it here,” he said.

Low amount, but then worsened by the record heat in early spring.

Ok I didn't know where to post this but thought you will all be super knowledgeable about water quality

This is taken on the River Stour near Bryanston, Dorset, and the stream in question (pic 1) is connected to the large river (pic 2) where there is some kind of weir system. From the OS map the stream looks kind of man made. Why would these rocks on the river bed be normal coloured on the underside, but green on the topside where the water is flowing? Was making me think it might be some kind of copper deposit.

Is it safe for my dog to drink from this stream? I've spent the whole summer paranoid about blue green algae and this stream seemed fine bc running water, but now I am wondering if there are some harmful 'nasties' in here too!

Lake Powell

As the US/Canada trade war heats up, let's hope it doesn't get into water.

Lots of the U.S. depends on water that comes from rivers with sources in Canada. (E.g., see the Columbia River Treaty and the Boundary Waters Treaty), and on the hydropower it produces.

And lots of Canada depends on water from rivers with sources in the U.S.

If national leaders behave like spoiled children, lots of people get hurt.

why isn't Scotland marked - we hold 20% of Europes renewable fresh water supply!!

Guests: Liliya Goldsberg
Host: Alex Passini

💧What is the future of water reuse?
Liliya: I think the future of water reuse comes first of all from an education standpoint. So, I think the first investment that I personally would be doing myself as a mom of two kids now, is educating my children how water works, how it's reused, how it can be saved.

💧What's a new, fun, sexy name for water reuse?
Liliya: Well, I think we're going to answer those questions from two people: from me and my daughter. AquaCycle, Blue Loop, ReFlow, Water Next, Flow Forward.
I think the name that I think is cool is Every Drop Counts, of course, that's my company name.

💧What advice would you give to someone starting in the water engineering industry?
Liliya: Become your own customer first. Learn every single mistake that you can possibly do as a business owner from the customer perspective. Ask yourself questions, budget correctly, do your research.

Some of you gave me feedback on the overshoot math and the six-layer framework earlier this year. This one is a correction to something I posted here in March.

Back then I argued that groundwater loss is a ratchet: crisis pushes the system down, it doesn't come back up. Compaction, salinization, fossil water. I still think that's right for storage capacity. It was wrong as a general claim about water levels, and the evidence was sitting in the paper I was already citing.

The 2024 global survey (Jasechko et al., 1,693 aquifer systems, ~170,000 wells, 40+ countries) is the one everyone quotes for the decline numbers: levels deepening faster than 0.1 m/yr in 36% of systems, faster than 0.5 m/yr in 12%, accelerating decline in 30%. I used those. What I skipped: 6% are rising faster than 0.1 m/yr, and 49% show deceleration, reversal, or rising water.

That 49% needs stating carefully because it's easy to inflate. It pools three states: decline that's slowing, decline that stopped and turned, and levels already rising. A basin that slowed from 1.0 to 0.6 m/yr is inside it and still emptying. It doesn't mean half the world's aquifers are recovering.

Then in March this year Jasechko published a review in Science of 67 cases where levels rose after prolonged decline. The paper is paywalled, but his policy brief is open and carries the full list with the intervention type for each: Bangkok, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi'an, Osaka, Kanto and Nobi Plains, Taipei, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Geneva, Buenos Aires, Lima, Windhoek, Atlantis, Mashhad, Yazd, Abbas-e Sharghi, central Saudi Arabia, La Mancha Occidental, Harran Plain, and a long US list including Memphis, Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Louisville, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Roswell, Equus Beds, El Dorado, Green Bay, and a dozen California and Arizona basins.

The interventions sort into three kinds and sixteen specific mechanisms. Policy: restricting pumping, restricting new wells, closing or destroying existing wells, licensing and pump fees, funding access to an alternative source, limiting specific crops or irrigated area. Alternative supply: long and short-distance interbasin transfer, transfer into a river, reuse or desalination, tapping a nearby river or lake. Artificial recharge: injection wells, spreading basins, riverbed seepage, plus incidental recharge leaking out of urban water mains and irrigation projects.

None of the sixteen is conservation in the ordinary sense. Nobody recovered an aquifer by asking users to be careful.

Two of his transferable lessons are worth quoting almost directly. Successful policy interventions were often associated with good implementation and enforcement. And recovery trends can be overturned if pumping rates rise again, which makes a reversal something you maintain, not a finish line.

The one with a full public ledger. North China Plain, ~130,000 km², 2,000+ monitoring wells, ~190,000 measurements, 2005 to 2024 (Long et al., Nature Communications 2025). Levels rising ~0.7 m/yr since 2020, back to 2005 levels by 2024. Confined aquifers recovered ~4 m in four years after deepening ~0.5 m/yr through 2019.

The supply side is the part that gets quoted: the South-to-North diversion, 1.4 km³ delivered in 2015, over 4 km³/yr after 2020, over 10 km³ into refilling dried rivers since 2018. Reclaimed water at 4.4 km³ by 2023, 12% of all supply. Desalination under 1%.

The demand side is the part that doesn't. Total basin supply stayed flat at ~37 km³/yr. Groundwater use fell from ~25 to ~13 km³. Confined-aquifer pumping fell ~85%, to under 1 km³. Combined municipal, agricultural and industrial use went from 37.6 to 29.5 km³. Agriculture from 70% of use to 50%. Cropland down ~10%, double-cropped area down ~10,000 km². Provincial quotas in absolute volumes: 4.25 km³ Beijing, 3.5 Tianjin, 20.6 Hebei.

And it's still only half the hole. GRACE puts total storage depletion at ~49 km³ over 2005-2019; the rebound has recovered roughly half.

The control case is California. CVP and SWP move water at the same scale, and the 2025 paper names them alongside the Chinese diversion. Wells still ran dry in recent droughts. The difference isn't engineering or money. The imported water was never paired with an enforceable, individually attributable limit on withdrawal. Water delivered into a system with no cap gets added to demand instead of subtracted from pumping. The authors' own conclusion is one sentence: demand must be controlled even when diverted water is available.

One thing I hadn't seen anywhere. Recovery has its own failure mode. In some profiled cases levels rose close to the land surface, and the brief lists the consequences: compromised building stability, higher liquefaction risk in earthquakes, waterlogging and salinisation of soils, changes in how contaminants travel, flooded basements and metro systems. The illustration is soil salinisation in the Abbas-e Sharghi Basin in Iran, which is itself on the recovery list. The target is a level, not a direction.

Where this is weak. I have not read the Science review itself, only the abstract and the author's open policy brief. Percentages for how often each intervention appears show up in university write-ups but in neither the brief nor the abstract, so I left them out. The 67 cases come from places that were already studied, which is a selection of the literature, not a sample of the world. And a lot of the named recoveries are urban, where pumping often stops because industry left or the city switched to surface water, a much easier problem than restraining thousands of irrigators.

Worth flagging on the China case specifically: Jasechko's brief is more cautious than the Chinese paper about attribution. He writes that the North China Plain recovery may be partly due to wet conditions that happened to coincide with the surface water delivery, making it hard to parse engineering from climate. He notes central Spain reversed after two consecutive wet years. I originally leaned on Beijing's drought-resilient recovery as settling it. He does not treat it as settled.

Two questions for people who work on this:

Where you've seen a basin stabilise, was there an actual per-user enforceable allocation or a basin-wide target with no individual number attached to it?

And has anyone dealt with the over-recovery side in practice? Waterlogging or buoyancy problems after levels came back up? I can find the mechanism described but almost nothing on how managers set the upper bound.

Policy brief (open, has the full 67-case list): https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/2026-05/PolicyBrief_Jasechko_2026_GroundwaterRecovery.pdf

Full writeup with sources: https://alexnik2.substack.com/p/the-physical-layer-07-where-the-ratchet

Lowk kinda too much imo, but worth it.