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Maine’s Dam Agency Does What It Can to Keep the Aging Infrastructure Safe

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Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Nearly a decade after a company abandoned the paper mill that once shaped Bucksport’s economy, its successor is in the process of abandoning three dams that shape the surrounding watershed.On Thursday night, scores of people who rely on the dam’s reservoirs for drinking water and waterfront property value packed into the former mill’s campus, seizing their only opportunity to confront representatives of the dams’ owner, AIM Development USA.One by one, attendees peppered company officials with questions about what would happen to the homes huddled around the dams’ reservoirs and those located downstream, what structural condition the dams are in and what risks will remain when they’re abandoned.“If the worst-case scenario… is that you release the water because we have no other option, do we have a (projection) of what will happen?” asked a resident on Toddy Pond whose family has lived there since the 1930s. “Should I get scuba gear for my house, or should I get sun-tanning lotion, because it will be a desert?”For officials from Bucksport, Orland, Surry and the local water utility, Thursday marked the first time meeting with AIM in-person since the company announced its intention to abandon the dams this summer. They demanded clarity on how AIM would honor its obligation, as stated in property deeds, to maintain a reservoir that serves as Bucksport’s drinking water supply and cools a gas-fired power plant. If no entity or state agency claims the dams, state law allows AIM to open their flood gates and release water from the reservoirs in a minimally impactful way, leaving mudflats and the structures behind. “Our town has sought information from the petitioners,” said Bucksport town manager Susan Lessard, yet “rather than receive information, we have experienced a process characterized by chaos and confusion.” Representatives from AIM met them with silence, promising to answer the questions online in the next few weeks. As Maine’s dams age and maintenance costs mount, the outcome of the debate could provide a playbook for others to follow. Thirteen years after a Monitor investigation revealed that Maine was behind on inspecting the state’s most hazardous dams, Maine’s dam safety program, like dozens of others across the country, remains understaffed and underfunded, even in the face of a changing climate and more intense storms. Although the state agency tasked with ensuring the safety of more than 500 dams is now up-to-date with inspections, the program has yet to institute modern protocols.The office lacks digitized records of emergency procedures that residents should follow if a local dam fails, as well as digital inundation maps outlining flooding threats. Last year the program had to bring an engineer out of retirement to inspect the hundreds of dams under the state’s jurisdiction because applications for the permanent lead engineer were scant, despite reclassifying the position numerous times to higher pay scales. The office only recently hired an assistant engineer to assist with inspections. “Maine’s dam infrastructure is aging, and the Dam Safety Program is currently understaffed, facing significant challenges with implementing dam risk reduction,” wrote the authors of Maine’s 2023 State Hazard Mitigation Plan.Several of the dams overseen by the program are both “high” risk — meaning people could die if they fail – and in “unsatisfactory” condition — the worst possible grade. The dam safety program rarely follows up on its repair recommendations, according to a 2023 report, and does not take enforcement actions when dam owners disobey, meaning the program does not compel private dam owners to maintain even the most dilapidated, dangerous dams.As Maine dams reach the end of their useful lives and maintenance bills mount, some dam owners are abdicating upkeep responsibilities or forfeiting ownership of their dams altogether — leaving communities like Bucksport and Orland at risk of inheriting these costly burdens.At an average age of more than 100, the 672 regulated dams on Maine rivers, streams, lakes and ponds are far from paragons of modern infrastructure. Of the 590 Maine dams tracked in a federal dam database, 62 are considered to be in poor condition and have some sort of safety deficiency, while 15 are deemed unsatisfactory and require more immediate maintenance. Ten of the fifteen unsatisfactory dams are also labeled high hazard, meaning that dams from Boothbay Harbor to Fort Fairfield with immediate safety defects could put the lives of downstream residents at risk if they fail. Nine poor condition dams, meanwhile, have the same high hazard rating but are on average more than two decades older than the unsatisfactory dams.It’s up to the state dam safety program to guide owners’ dams into compliance, but regulators say that can be difficult because they lack capacity for enforcement.Maine’s agency has two engineers to oversee the state-regulated dams, which include 15 of the 39 high hazard dams. The federal agency tasked with overseeing large hydropower dams, meanwhile, has five engineers to inspect the 34 high hazard dams under its purview.The behemoth frozen potato purveyor McCain Foods owns a high hazard, poor condition dam that forms Christina Reservoir near Fort Fairfield and another high hazard, unsatisfactory condition dam at Lake Josephine just a mile away.The town of Fort Fairfield owns a pair of high hazard, unsatisfactory condition dams at Bryant Pond and upstream on Libby Brook that are intended to reduce flood risk, but are developing risks of their own. (The town disputed the dam safety program’s assessment, saying their risks are lower and the dams are regularly maintained).Outside of this cluster in Fort Fairfield, Maine’s 75 high hazard dams and 85 significant hazard dams (which may not harm human life if they fail, but will cause economic and environmental damage) are scattered across the state.It’s up to the Maine dam safety program’s lead inspector and assistant to assess 160 high and significant hazard dams once every six years and the remaining 363 dams under state jurisdiction once every 12 years, all while maintaining emergency plans.The program has been able to do just that, according to a 2023 assessment conducted by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. All Maine dams have been inspected within their deadlines and have corresponding emergency plans; this means Maine has one of the highest compliance rates in the country.The authors of the assessment commended Maine dam safety employees for their hard work to “keep the program’s head above water” but painted a grim picture of the program’s ability to enforce safety standards.“Identifying deficiencies through periodic inspection is crucial, but ultimately does nothing for public safety if dams are not repaired and completed in an acceptable manner,” the authors wrote.Low funding and chronic understaffing have long plagued Maine’s dam safety program, symptoms of its sole reliance on federal grants for the program’s operating costs. The program does not receive any direct appropriations from the state legislature and does not collect any fees. In 2021, it received a meager $67,241 through its primary federal grant — at least $200,000 less than it needed, according to an internal report, and the program had to borrow from funds elsewhere.Though the dam safety program has the authority under state law to enforce compliance, none of that funding has gone to enforcement or compliance measures. The program lacks written policies describing what enforcement would even look like.Its scant budget has also made it nearly impossible to hire a permanent lead dam inspector, according to Steven Mallory, the head of the dam safety program and the director of operations and response for the Maine Emergency Management Agency.One year ago, Mallory, who is not an engineer, was facing a perilous situation after the lead dam inspector left for another job and no viable candidates applied to replace him. The program was narrowly rescued when retired inspector Tony Fletcher agreed to return on an interim basis.Mallory has increased the pay scale of the job several times since then but has had only two candidates apply over the three years, likely because engineers can find far more lucrative positions elsewhere.With these constraints, the dam safety program is constantly playing catch-up, failing to take more proactive steps to enforce safety standards, guide dam owners through necessary upkeep or removal and modernize risk mapping and dam databases, according to the assessment. Recent flooding and near misses with dam failure elsewhere in the United States have shown how costly such shortfalls can be. Emergency officials sounded this alarm to a state commission on infrastructure and climate change resilience last week.“We’ve seen in other states this year issues where dams have failed and flooded communities,” said Darren Woods, director of Aroostook County’s Emergency Management Agency. “We certainly don’t want to see that happen here in Maine.”Hazard classifications and condition assessments don’t necessarily paint the full picture of a dam’s corresponding risk, according to Mallory.The structures may be designed to withstand a 500-year flood and perform well when one hits, but the floodwaters still have to go somewhere. In the case of the town-owned dam in the heart of Dover-Foxcroft, that somewhere is into a crucial state thruway and the basement of a nearby apartment complex. Last December, when the Piscataquis River swelled behind the dam’s wall, it caused water damage and complicated access to the southern part of the state.“Most of our dams are in really good shape where they can handle excess water. However, with all the flooding and the rain, it just exasperates that problem,” Mallory told The Maine Monitor. “It’s just too much water and it’s gotta go somewhere.”Human-caused climate change has increased both the frequency and severity of floods in Maine, spurred by intense downpours concentrated in shorter and shorter periods.A study published last month in the scientific journal Nature found that it’s these rapid downpours — like the one that ripped through central and western Maine in December 2023 — preceded by multiple days of precipitation that caused most dam failures between 2000 and 2021. Its authors concluded that current engineering standards for dam flood resilience assume conservative climate conditions, and they called for officials to revisit these standards and consider more severe weather patterns.Like most other state dam agencies, Maine’s program follows model state dam regulations distributed by the ASDSO and federal government. Those standards have not yet incorporated climate change’s effects into their guidance, according to Mallory, though an ASDSO official said the organization has been advocating that state dam programs adopt updated models for extreme precipitation.Back in Maine, meanwhile, regulations already consider worst-case flooding scenarios for state-regulated dams.Mallory got a taste of what could be in store for Maine dams in the early morning hours of December 19, 2023, when a catastrophic combination of rain and snowmelt engorged the Kennebec River.Mallory’s fears lay downstream, where a pair of high hazard dams are nestled on the Cobbosseecontee Stream right before it meets the Kennebec River in the heart of downtown Gardiner. Both dams are in adequate condition, but Mallory was concerned nonetheless. He rushed to visit the dams, and was relieved to find them effectively passing the torrent of floodwater. Despite the fears that nagged him that day, Mallory said he is confident in Maine’s dams. Yet he can’t discount the increasing impact climate change will have on their infrastructure.While climate change may not be incorporated into the way Maine inspects dams and helps draft emergency plans, the state is preparing Maine dams for climate change in other ways.Maine’s 2023 State Hazard Mitigation Plan, for example, calls for tapping into a federal grant program for rehabilitating and removing high hazard dams. The mitigation plan’s local risk reduction recommendations show a variety of maintenance needs for municipally-owned, high hazard dams that have been deferred due to a lack of funds, like a $200,000 project to fortify a dam in Durham that has been patched but “needs to be strengthened and repaired to prevent failure.”In July 2023, nearby Vermont experienced firsthand the disastrous outcomes that deferred dam maintenance can lead to. After record downpours flooded valleys up the state’s mountainous spine, five dams failed and more than 50 were damaged or overtopped by floodwater, according to Ben Green, head of the Vermont dam safety program.The dams that failed were all in poor condition and municipally or privately owned, but luckily, Green said, were fairly small, earthen embankments and didn’t result in any downstream damage. That was due in part to the intense flooding that had already wrecked the dams’ watersheds, meaning even the two significant hazard dams that failed did not cause any separate, discernible damage. “So that was fortunate, I guess,” Green said.There were close calls elsewhere. On July 11, 2023, murky brown floodwater in the Wrightsville Reservoir scaled the side of a state-owned dam right outside of Montpelier, coming within one foot of overtopping its spillway and bursting down into the already flood-ravaged state capital.Green said his office stationed personnel at the state-owned dams all night for the first few days after the flood, closely monitoring the dams for any signs of impending failure. Though failures of such magnitude have been rare in Maine, the state has its fair share of hazardous dams and in 2005 saw a state-owned dam fail near Newcastle, releasing debris from a man-made lake that cost $300,000 to clean up.Part of the concern surrounding the abandonment of the Bucksport-area dams comes from the high hazard potential and poor condition of the dam on Silver Lake. If breached, its floodwaters could reach 70 homes and endanger hundreds of lives downstream in Bucksport, according to a 2021 inspection from Fletcher, the dam safety program engineer.Fletcher also described significant deficiencies with the dam, including a deteriorating concrete structure and leakages developing in its left and right sides. He recommended that AIM create an operation and maintenance plan to track the dam’s leakages and other issues, then report back to the dam safety program twice a year.But the dam safety program never followed up with AIM after that, according to Mallory, the dam safety program’s director. The program struggles to inspect all the hazardous dams it is obligated to and couldn’t spare sending an engineer to follow-up on a dam that had already been inspected before its deadline, Mallory told The Monitor Friday after attending AIM’s public hearing.“There’s a lot of steps that we could do if I had another engineer,” Mallory said. “I would have sent an engineer down there to reinspect those dams. I don’t have that. I just don’t have those assets. I have Tony, and we’re trying.”After going four years without tapping into the federal grant that funds the design process for rehabilitating or removing high hazard dams, Maine secured a $2.5 million award this fall. Outside experts and the program’s assistant dam inspector have also been working to update inundation maps with GIS and digitize dam emergency action plans, according to Mallory. And even without the digitization of the emergency plans, Mallory is confident in MEMA’s ability to adequately warn communities through alerts similar to those issued by the National Weather Service for flash floods. Compared to what the state’s hazard mitigation plan and the ASDSO report call for, however, these modest gains are only a sliver of what Maine needs to modernize its dam safety program and foster resilience to climate change. One internal estimate from MEMA recommended a $900,000 annual budget for the dam program, enough funding for two engineers, two assistant engineers and administrative staff.States in similar situations have managed to overcome the same obstacles, however. When Green started at Vermont’s dam safety program in 2017, he was one of two engineers responsible for inspecting hundreds of dams and operating the 13 state-owned dams. The dam safety program’s legal authority was so weak that Green couldn’t even set foot on a private dam owner’s land without their permission, let alone inspect dams and compel owners to make necessary repairs.Then, in 2018, the Vermont legislature granted the program rulemaking authority, allowing dam regulators to bring their program up to date with federal standards and take enforcement action when dam owners fail to maintain their dams. Vermont’s updates were gradual and limited to policy at first, but as time went on the program added a few more staff members through grant funding, then the July 2023 floods fast-tracked the program.“Within a few years we were able to pull together the two additional staff, which made everything seem possible,” Green said. “The flood kept us moving uphill.” Green now has plans for the program to expand to almost a dozen staff members and is leading a massive inventory effort to record the location, condition and owners of the dams that have been able to skirt regulation, then compel the owners to make required improvements.“Dams are forgotten infrastructure, and I think that’s obviously changing with all the highlights that dams have had in the last years,” Green said. “It’s something that we in the dam safety community can’t let people forget.”Back in Maine, Mallory sees the abandonment of the Bucksport dams as an example of the dire straits that his dam safety program is in and a call for action to turn it around.After the hearing, Mallory lingered behind and chatted with state legislators, explaining how part of these complications might have been avoided if Maine adopted the changes recommended in the peer review. With adequate staff, funding and policies, the program could have mandated compliance from AIM and ensured the dams’ safety before they were abandoned.“I think this is a guinea pig,” Mallory said. “This is the first abandonment ever. I’m hoping that with the attention on this, the legislators will (consider the recommendations) that we submitted and that will help future problems.”This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Nearly a decade after a company abandoned the Maine paper mill that once shaped Bucksport’s economy, its successor is in the process of abandoning three dams that shape the surrounding watershed

Nearly a decade after a company abandoned the paper mill that once shaped Bucksport’s economy, its successor is in the process of abandoning three dams that shape the surrounding watershed.

On Thursday night, scores of people who rely on the dam’s reservoirs for drinking water and waterfront property value packed into the former mill’s campus, seizing their only opportunity to confront representatives of the dams’ owner, AIM Development USA.

One by one, attendees peppered company officials with questions about what would happen to the homes huddled around the dams’ reservoirs and those located downstream, what structural condition the dams are in and what risks will remain when they’re abandoned.

“If the worst-case scenario… is that you release the water because we have no other option, do we have a (projection) of what will happen?” asked a resident on Toddy Pond whose family has lived there since the 1930s. “Should I get scuba gear for my house, or should I get sun-tanning lotion, because it will be a desert?”

For officials from Bucksport, Orland, Surry and the local water utility, Thursday marked the first time meeting with AIM in-person since the company announced its intention to abandon the dams this summer. They demanded clarity on how AIM would honor its obligation, as stated in property deeds, to maintain a reservoir that serves as Bucksport’s drinking water supply and cools a gas-fired power plant. If no entity or state agency claims the dams, state law allows AIM to open their flood gates and release water from the reservoirs in a minimally impactful way, leaving mudflats and the structures behind.

“Our town has sought information from the petitioners,” said Bucksport town manager Susan Lessard, yet “rather than receive information, we have experienced a process characterized by chaos and confusion.”

Representatives from AIM met them with silence, promising to answer the questions online in the next few weeks.

As Maine’s dams age and maintenance costs mount, the outcome of the debate could provide a playbook for others to follow.

Thirteen years after a Monitor investigation revealed that Maine was behind on inspecting the state’s most hazardous dams, Maine’s dam safety program, like dozens of others across the country, remains understaffed and underfunded, even in the face of a changing climate and more intense storms.

Although the state agency tasked with ensuring the safety of more than 500 dams is now up-to-date with inspections, the program has yet to institute modern protocols.

The office lacks digitized records of emergency procedures that residents should follow if a local dam fails, as well as digital inundation maps outlining flooding threats.

Last year the program had to bring an engineer out of retirement to inspect the hundreds of dams under the state’s jurisdiction because applications for the permanent lead engineer were scant, despite reclassifying the position numerous times to higher pay scales. The office only recently hired an assistant engineer to assist with inspections.

“Maine’s dam infrastructure is aging, and the Dam Safety Program is currently understaffed, facing significant challenges with implementing dam risk reduction,” wrote the authors of Maine’s 2023 State Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Several of the dams overseen by the program are both “high” risk — meaning people could die if they fail – and in “unsatisfactory” condition — the worst possible grade. The dam safety program rarely follows up on its repair recommendations, according to a 2023 report, and does not take enforcement actions when dam owners disobey, meaning the program does not compel private dam owners to maintain even the most dilapidated, dangerous dams.

As Maine dams reach the end of their useful lives and maintenance bills mount, some dam owners are abdicating upkeep responsibilities or forfeiting ownership of their dams altogether — leaving communities like Bucksport and Orland at risk of inheriting these costly burdens.

At an average age of more than 100, the 672 regulated dams on Maine rivers, streams, lakes and ponds are far from paragons of modern infrastructure.

Of the 590 Maine dams tracked in a federal dam database, 62 are considered to be in poor condition and have some sort of safety deficiency, while 15 are deemed unsatisfactory and require more immediate maintenance.

Ten of the fifteen unsatisfactory dams are also labeled high hazard, meaning that dams from Boothbay Harbor to Fort Fairfield with immediate safety defects could put the lives of downstream residents at risk if they fail.

Nine poor condition dams, meanwhile, have the same high hazard rating but are on average more than two decades older than the unsatisfactory dams.

It’s up to the state dam safety program to guide owners’ dams into compliance, but regulators say that can be difficult because they lack capacity for enforcement.

Maine’s agency has two engineers to oversee the state-regulated dams, which include 15 of the 39 high hazard dams. The federal agency tasked with overseeing large hydropower dams, meanwhile, has five engineers to inspect the 34 high hazard dams under its purview.

The behemoth frozen potato purveyor McCain Foods owns a high hazard, poor condition dam that forms Christina Reservoir near Fort Fairfield and another high hazard, unsatisfactory condition dam at Lake Josephine just a mile away.

The town of Fort Fairfield owns a pair of high hazard, unsatisfactory condition dams at Bryant Pond and upstream on Libby Brook that are intended to reduce flood risk, but are developing risks of their own. (The town disputed the dam safety program’s assessment, saying their risks are lower and the dams are regularly maintained).

Outside of this cluster in Fort Fairfield, Maine’s 75 high hazard dams and 85 significant hazard dams (which may not harm human life if they fail, but will cause economic and environmental damage) are scattered across the state.

It’s up to the Maine dam safety program’s lead inspector and assistant to assess 160 high and significant hazard dams once every six years and the remaining 363 dams under state jurisdiction once every 12 years, all while maintaining emergency plans.

The program has been able to do just that, according to a 2023 assessment conducted by the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. All Maine dams have been inspected within their deadlines and have corresponding emergency plans; this means Maine has one of the highest compliance rates in the country.

The authors of the assessment commended Maine dam safety employees for their hard work to “keep the program’s head above water” but painted a grim picture of the program’s ability to enforce safety standards.

“Identifying deficiencies through periodic inspection is crucial, but ultimately does nothing for public safety if dams are not repaired and completed in an acceptable manner,” the authors wrote.

Low funding and chronic understaffing have long plagued Maine’s dam safety program, symptoms of its sole reliance on federal grants for the program’s operating costs.

The program does not receive any direct appropriations from the state legislature and does not collect any fees. In 2021, it received a meager $67,241 through its primary federal grant — at least $200,000 less than it needed, according to an internal report, and the program had to borrow from funds elsewhere.

Though the dam safety program has the authority under state law to enforce compliance, none of that funding has gone to enforcement or compliance measures. The program lacks written policies describing what enforcement would even look like.

Its scant budget has also made it nearly impossible to hire a permanent lead dam inspector, according to Steven Mallory, the head of the dam safety program and the director of operations and response for the Maine Emergency Management Agency.

One year ago, Mallory, who is not an engineer, was facing a perilous situation after the lead dam inspector left for another job and no viable candidates applied to replace him. The program was narrowly rescued when retired inspector Tony Fletcher agreed to return on an interim basis.

Mallory has increased the pay scale of the job several times since then but has had only two candidates apply over the three years, likely because engineers can find far more lucrative positions elsewhere.

With these constraints, the dam safety program is constantly playing catch-up, failing to take more proactive steps to enforce safety standards, guide dam owners through necessary upkeep or removal and modernize risk mapping and dam databases, according to the assessment.

Recent flooding and near misses with dam failure elsewhere in the United States have shown how costly such shortfalls can be.

Emergency officials sounded this alarm to a state commission on infrastructure and climate change resilience last week.

“We’ve seen in other states this year issues where dams have failed and flooded communities,” said Darren Woods, director of Aroostook County’s Emergency Management Agency. “We certainly don’t want to see that happen here in Maine.”

Hazard classifications and condition assessments don’t necessarily paint the full picture of a dam’s corresponding risk, according to Mallory.

The structures may be designed to withstand a 500-year flood and perform well when one hits, but the floodwaters still have to go somewhere.

In the case of the town-owned dam in the heart of Dover-Foxcroft, that somewhere is into a crucial state thruway and the basement of a nearby apartment complex. Last December, when the Piscataquis River swelled behind the dam’s wall, it caused water damage and complicated access to the southern part of the state.

“Most of our dams are in really good shape where they can handle excess water. However, with all the flooding and the rain, it just exasperates that problem,” Mallory told The Maine Monitor. “It’s just too much water and it’s gotta go somewhere.”

Human-caused climate change has increased both the frequency and severity of floods in Maine, spurred by intense downpours concentrated in shorter and shorter periods.

A study published last month in the scientific journal Nature found that it’s these rapid downpours — like the one that ripped through central and western Maine in December 2023 — preceded by multiple days of precipitation that caused most dam failures between 2000 and 2021.

Its authors concluded that current engineering standards for dam flood resilience assume conservative climate conditions, and they called for officials to revisit these standards and consider more severe weather patterns.

Like most other state dam agencies, Maine’s program follows model state dam regulations distributed by the ASDSO and federal government. Those standards have not yet incorporated climate change’s effects into their guidance, according to Mallory, though an ASDSO official said the organization has been advocating that state dam programs adopt updated models for extreme precipitation.

Back in Maine, meanwhile, regulations already consider worst-case flooding scenarios for state-regulated dams.

Mallory got a taste of what could be in store for Maine dams in the early morning hours of December 19, 2023, when a catastrophic combination of rain and snowmelt engorged the Kennebec River.

Mallory’s fears lay downstream, where a pair of high hazard dams are nestled on the Cobbosseecontee Stream right before it meets the Kennebec River in the heart of downtown Gardiner.

Both dams are in adequate condition, but Mallory was concerned nonetheless. He rushed to visit the dams, and was relieved to find them effectively passing the torrent of floodwater.

Despite the fears that nagged him that day, Mallory said he is confident in Maine’s dams. Yet he can’t discount the increasing impact climate change will have on their infrastructure.

While climate change may not be incorporated into the way Maine inspects dams and helps draft emergency plans, the state is preparing Maine dams for climate change in other ways.

Maine’s 2023 State Hazard Mitigation Plan, for example, calls for tapping into a federal grant program for rehabilitating and removing high hazard dams. The mitigation plan’s local risk reduction recommendations show a variety of maintenance needs for municipally-owned, high hazard dams that have been deferred due to a lack of funds, like a $200,000 project to fortify a dam in Durham that has been patched but “needs to be strengthened and repaired to prevent failure.”

In July 2023, nearby Vermont experienced firsthand the disastrous outcomes that deferred dam maintenance can lead to. After record downpours flooded valleys up the state’s mountainous spine, five dams failed and more than 50 were damaged or overtopped by floodwater, according to Ben Green, head of the Vermont dam safety program.

The dams that failed were all in poor condition and municipally or privately owned, but luckily, Green said, were fairly small, earthen embankments and didn’t result in any downstream damage. That was due in part to the intense flooding that had already wrecked the dams’ watersheds, meaning even the two significant hazard dams that failed did not cause any separate, discernible damage.

“So that was fortunate, I guess,” Green said.

There were close calls elsewhere. On July 11, 2023, murky brown floodwater in the Wrightsville Reservoir scaled the side of a state-owned dam right outside of Montpelier, coming within one foot of overtopping its spillway and bursting down into the already flood-ravaged state capital.

Green said his office stationed personnel at the state-owned dams all night for the first few days after the flood, closely monitoring the dams for any signs of impending failure.

Though failures of such magnitude have been rare in Maine, the state has its fair share of hazardous dams and in 2005 saw a state-owned dam fail near Newcastle, releasing debris from a man-made lake that cost $300,000 to clean up.

Part of the concern surrounding the abandonment of the Bucksport-area dams comes from the high hazard potential and poor condition of the dam on Silver Lake. If breached, its floodwaters could reach 70 homes and endanger hundreds of lives downstream in Bucksport, according to a 2021 inspection from Fletcher, the dam safety program engineer.

Fletcher also described significant deficiencies with the dam, including a deteriorating concrete structure and leakages developing in its left and right sides. He recommended that AIM create an operation and maintenance plan to track the dam’s leakages and other issues, then report back to the dam safety program twice a year.

But the dam safety program never followed up with AIM after that, according to Mallory, the dam safety program’s director. The program struggles to inspect all the hazardous dams it is obligated to and couldn’t spare sending an engineer to follow-up on a dam that had already been inspected before its deadline, Mallory told The Monitor Friday after attending AIM’s public hearing.

“There’s a lot of steps that we could do if I had another engineer,” Mallory said. “I would have sent an engineer down there to reinspect those dams. I don’t have that. I just don’t have those assets. I have Tony, and we’re trying.”

After going four years without tapping into the federal grant that funds the design process for rehabilitating or removing high hazard dams, Maine secured a $2.5 million award this fall. Outside experts and the program’s assistant dam inspector have also been working to update inundation maps with GIS and digitize dam emergency action plans, according to Mallory.

And even without the digitization of the emergency plans, Mallory is confident in MEMA’s ability to adequately warn communities through alerts similar to those issued by the National Weather Service for flash floods.

Compared to what the state’s hazard mitigation plan and the ASDSO report call for, however, these modest gains are only a sliver of what Maine needs to modernize its dam safety program and foster resilience to climate change. One internal estimate from MEMA recommended a $900,000 annual budget for the dam program, enough funding for two engineers, two assistant engineers and administrative staff.

States in similar situations have managed to overcome the same obstacles, however. When Green started at Vermont’s dam safety program in 2017, he was one of two engineers responsible for inspecting hundreds of dams and operating the 13 state-owned dams.

The dam safety program’s legal authority was so weak that Green couldn’t even set foot on a private dam owner’s land without their permission, let alone inspect dams and compel owners to make necessary repairs.

Then, in 2018, the Vermont legislature granted the program rulemaking authority, allowing dam regulators to bring their program up to date with federal standards and take enforcement action when dam owners fail to maintain their dams.

Vermont’s updates were gradual and limited to policy at first, but as time went on the program added a few more staff members through grant funding, then the July 2023 floods fast-tracked the program.

“Within a few years we were able to pull together the two additional staff, which made everything seem possible,” Green said. “The flood kept us moving uphill.”

Green now has plans for the program to expand to almost a dozen staff members and is leading a massive inventory effort to record the location, condition and owners of the dams that have been able to skirt regulation, then compel the owners to make required improvements.

“Dams are forgotten infrastructure, and I think that’s obviously changing with all the highlights that dams have had in the last years,” Green said. “It’s something that we in the dam safety community can’t let people forget.”

Back in Maine, Mallory sees the abandonment of the Bucksport dams as an example of the dire straits that his dam safety program is in and a call for action to turn it around.

After the hearing, Mallory lingered behind and chatted with state legislators, explaining how part of these complications might have been avoided if Maine adopted the changes recommended in the peer review. With adequate staff, funding and policies, the program could have mandated compliance from AIM and ensured the dams’ safety before they were abandoned.

“I think this is a guinea pig,” Mallory said. “This is the first abandonment ever. I’m hoping that with the attention on this, the legislators will (consider the recommendations) that we submitted and that will help future problems.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Drought Is Causing Saltwater to Creep up the Delaware River. Here's What's Being Done About It

Drought and sea level rise are causing salty oceanwater to creep into the Delaware River, threatening a source of drinking water for Philadelphia and millions of other people

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Salty oceanwater is creeping up the Delaware River, the source for much of the drinking water for Philadelphia and millions of others, brought on by drought conditions and sea level rise, and prompting officials to tap reservoirs to push the unpotable tide back downstream.Officials say drinking water isn't imminently at risk yet, but they're monitoring the effects of the drought on the river and studying options for the future in case further droughts sap the area.A closer look at the crawling salt front:The salt front or salt line is where saltwater from the ocean and freshwater meet in the river. That boundary is typically somewhere around Wilmington, Delaware, but the recent drought in the Northeast has pushed it about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north, around Philadelphia International Airport.The farther the line moves upstream, the closer it gets to drinking water intakes, which officials have worked for decades to avoid. The Delaware River provides drinking water for some 14 million people, including most of Philadelphia but also New Jersey and New York. Still, the line is south of those intakes and below the level it traveled in the 1960s during record drought conditions. Desalination of saltwater, which people cannot safely drink, is costly, energy intensive and can create new issues like where to dispose of the highly concentrated salt brine pulled from the water. It's also not a feasible option, officials say. “There are alternative sources, but we don't want to be trucking in bottled water for people,” said Amy Shallcross, the water resource operations manager at the Delaware River Basin Commission. “We get nervous when it starts to get up near Philadelphia. It’s only 18 miles right now from the drinking water intakes. And sometimes it can shoot upstream really quickly.” What are officials doing about the encroaching salt? Officials control the salt line by releasing water from two reservoirs, which pushes the front downriver. The commission monitors the flow at Trenton, which is the furthest upstream point affected by the tide. The flow officials target is roughly equivalent to the amount of water in two Olympic-sized swimming pools flowing by per minute. If the rate dips below that, then more water is released. When was the last time saltwater moved this far upriver? The salt front last reached roughly where it is now in 2016 during another drought, officials said. Does this phenomenon happen elsewhere in the country? The Delaware River basin isn't alone in fending off intruding saltwater, which is exacerbated by rising sea levels and dredged riverbeds to aid navigation, Shallcross said. The Mississippi River similarly saw what officials call a “salt wedge” in 2023 resulting in heightening underwater levees and bringing in drinking water. What caused the saltwater to move upstream? A rainless start to fall brought on a drought in parts of the Northeast, including the Delaware's basin. The reduced rainwater has diminished the river's flow and allowed the denser saltwater to creep upstream. Has the recent rain helped? Yes, but it's not enough. The river needs about an inch of rain a week for a time to move the line back to its normal location, Shallcross said. How are officials planning for the future? The Basin Commission, which is a federally created agency run by Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, that manages the river's resources, is studying the impact of climate change on water resources and considering other options including additional storage, Shallcross said. Water managers are starting to consider more serious conservation measures as well. “I would say the East is not water-rich, we’re water adequate, and we need to recognize that,” she said.Peterson contributed to this report from Denver.The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Climate

Energy

How Magnet Fishers Catch Underwater Garbage, Guns and Sometimes Treasure

With the help of a powerful rare-earth alloy, magnet fishers pull garbage out of polluted waterways

Magnet fisher James Kane cradles a shiny, four-pound magnetic disk: a stainless-steel shell housing an alloy of iron, neodymium and boron. He hucks it into a lake in a public park in New York City, then tugs it slowly toward shore with a sturdy synthetic rope. As the powerful magnet bump bump bumps along the bottom, it kicks up a line of bubbles—and then suddenly there’s a heavy drag, as if the lake bed has turned to taffy. The magnet is stuck to something. Filmed by his partner Barbi Agostini, Kane hoists their dripping catch: a thick iron rod called a sash weight, a counterbalance used to open heavy windows a century ago.Over the next few hours on this October afternoon, Kane and Agostini also pull in a 20-year-old flip phone, a signpost, fishing hooks and lures, pliers, bottle caps, batteries and an iPhone 6. They give the smartphone to a girl who’s nearby with her friends, fishing for bluegills. “If it works, I’m going to be so happy!” she says. Then she sniffs the phone and wrinkles her nose. “It smells.”To magnet fish is to plumb unseen depths for sunken treasure, but it also means getting acquainted with the stinky, the scummy and the bizarre. Agostini’s magnet once clanked onto the lid of a mason jar, inside which floated a dead tarantula in purple liquid. A particularly exciting catch can bring headlines—or the police. The American zeal for guns has sown firearms below the waterline, and magnet fishers harvest them with regularity. Agostini and Kane have found pistols, shotgun parts, Revolutionary War–era grapeshot and modern ammo clips. The two magnet fishers call the police whenever they find a gun, and they do so often enough that some officers recognize them. Last year Kane pulled an inert hand grenade out of New York City’s East River, summoning the police department’s bomb squad to a posh waterfront block in Queens. But the pair’s most notable catch—and probably the most famous thing ever found by U.S. magnet fishers, which Kane says has earned them a mention in an upcoming volume of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!—was a safe containing stacks of waterlogged cash, pulled from a river this past May.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.The $100 bills were so degraded that Agostini and Kane don’t yet know precisely how much they found, but based on the stacks’ thickness, they estimate the total was $50,000 to $80,000. As soon as they could do so after the catch, they took a Megabus to Washington, D.C., to hand deliver the money to the Mutilated Currency Division at the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing. There it will be counted and eventually paid out to the pair, though processing might take a few years—Kane says they’re in line behind people who had bills blackened by last year’s deadly wildfires in Hawaii.Agostini and Kane, both age 40, didn’t get into this pastime expecting to get rich; mostly they wanted something to do outside during the COVID pandemic. Magnet fishing, alongside baking sourdough bread and solving jigsaw puzzles, took off in the early months of 2020. “Magnet fishing was so COVID-friendly. You were forced to distance yourself” even if you bumped into a fellow hobbyist outdoors, says Pittsburgh-based archeologist Ben Demchak, who sells specialized magnets through his company, Kratos Magnetics. Magnet fishers, he explains, need to give each other a wide berth in the field; their powerful lures tend toward mutual attraction.Non-working revolvers found by James Kane and Barbi Agostini atop an old safe.James Kane and Barbi AgostiniSocial media algorithms boosted the hobby, too. Reddit has a magnet fishing forum with nearly 220,000 members. On YouTube, channels such as Kane and Agostini’s Let’s Get Magnetic emphasize the thrills, editing out hours of dragging and dipping for the moment a precious or peculiar item is yanked out of dark water. But magnet fishers say that what has lasting appeal, and makes up the bulk of their time, is taking trash out of the environment. “It’s a good thing to do. You’re cleaning up the water. It’s an amazing feeling,” says Colt Busch, a magnet fisher in Maine, who recently discovered an antique Coca-Cola bottle, intact but empty, embedded in a clump of metal scraps.Magnet fishers don’t always get a warm reception. Walking near the lakeside after their latest catch, Kane and Agostini are approached by a member of a nonprofit group that partners with the city to help maintain the park. She tells them magnet fishing isn’t permitted here. She adds that she hasn’t called the police—at least, not this time.Neodymium’s Mighty PullNo one would be able to fish with neodymium magnets at all if it weren’t for metallurgist John Croat and engineer Masato Sagawa. In the early 1980s Croat, then at the General Motors Research Laboratories, and Sagawa, then at the Sumitomo Special Metals Corporation, were both searching for alternatives to cobalt and samarium magnets, which are powerful but expensive. Independently and almost simultaneously, Sagawa and Croat identified the same intermetallic compound, which is a substance with a fixed ratio of elements: in this case, two atoms of the rare earth element neodymium to 14 iron atoms to one boron atom. “That didn’t exist yet,” Croat says. “The discovery of that intermetallic compound is the invention.” You can’t trip over a rock with the chemical composition Nd2Fe14B. Such magnets must be created artificially, through sintering or bonding. In what Croat describes as a “shock,” each happened to announce their discovery at the same conference in Pittsburgh in November 1983. Then they changed the world.Neodymium magnets weren’t simply more affordable. They were strong enough to enable miniaturized computer hard drives and tinier, mightier electric motors. Wind turbine cores have neodymium magnets to efficiently turn kinetic energy into electricity. They are also key components of headphones and speakers, and they remain the most popular rare-earth magnets sold commercially. “I don’t think they will ever come up with a better magnet,” Croat says.Neodymium magnets, despite their name, are mostly iron. Such magnets contain regions “where all the electrons are lined up like soldiers on parade, all facing in the same direction,” says Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London. In neodymium magnets and other permanent magnets—which don’t require electric currents or other external help to stay magnetic—multiple layers of these aligned electrons stack up. The result can be imagined as a pattern like three-dimensional wallpaper. Sella likens the structure to a series of unending nightmares. “Every time you move a certain distance, oh, my God, you’re back where you started,” he says. The neodymium, even in a relatively tiny amount, helps pin the iron atoms in place in this repetitive crystalline lattice.“Magnetism is really a reflection at a macroscopic scale of the quantum phenomenon called spin,” Sella says. This property is often described in terms of an atom’s nucleus or its particles spinning about an axis. But that’s a fairly crude mental picture, he says. The reality is that spin “represents something about the fundamental nature of the particle.”As a quantum phenomenon, magnetism might seem ethereal. But it can quickly become much less so when handling actual neodymium magnets: Agostini says she once found herself stuck to a subway seat, held fast by a magnet in her backpack. If two neodymium magnets get too close, they can slam together, crushing a wayward finger in a painful metallic sandwich. When two of them accidentally bump each other, Kane strains to separate them, like he’s breaking apart the world’s most frustrating KitKat bar.Stores like Demchak’s sell neodymium magnets according to their shape and pull force, measured in the thousands of pounds. A “360,” for instance, is a solid magnet housed in a metal cylinder. To comply with the regulations for shipping these objects by air, Demchak nests them in boxes of foam to buffer the magnetic fields. Shipping magnets in the U.S. by ground doesn’t have such restrictions, he says, although he now packs those parcels carefully, too. He learned his lesson after selling his first 360—which never made it to the customer. It probably got stuck somewhere in a mail processing plant, he says. Or maybe it’s still out there, clamped to the belly of a delivery truck.Deep Cleaning?Once the Bureau of Engraving and Printing sends them the funds from the mutilated cash, Agostini and Kane say they want to use the money toward a down payment to move out of New York City. Agostini would like to buy a place with enough space to raise chickens, dogs and goats. She loves animals, she says, and considers magnet fishing to be an extension of this because it helps clear pollution from their habitat.“If you really talk to magnet fishers, you can tell they have a sense of pride about it—they’re cleaning up the waterways,” Demchak says. For example, he notes that magnet fishers recently helped pull hundreds of electric scooters out of a river that runs through the campus at Michigan State University. Busch says he has caught more than 140 bicycles since he began magnet fishing. And there’s plenty more trash to collect. “As much as I clean up the water,” Busch says, “I feel like there’s three times as much junk left to pull up.”If there have been comprehensive scientific reports on the environmental impact of magnet fishing, they aren’t in any mainstream databases. Only a handful of studies even reference the hobby, such as a 2024 analysis in the journal Hydrobiologia of Hungarian magnet fishers’ social media posts that evaluated how much discarded fishing gear had been recovered since 2016. Photographs and videos posted online showed that magnet fishers pulled in more than 2,000 pieces of gear, including rods, reels, hooks and other items, from Hungary’s waterways.It’s helpful when magnet fishers remove sharp bits of metal, which can be physical hazards to swimmers and wildlife, points out Timothy Hoellein, an aquatic ecologist at Loyola University Chicago, who studies trash in freshwater environments. Electronic devices and batteries also contain heavy metals, such as cadmium and mercury, plus other chemicals that are potentially toxic to “microorganisms, or invertebrates, or fish or people,” he says. Dull iron is not a particular danger to anything, though, he says; soils already contain natural iron and rust.Various objects found by magnet fishers including jewelry, coins and an old beer can.James Kane and Barbi AgostiniBut lake beds can host things worse than rust. Toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, can stick to charged particles in sediments. Fine silts and clays also retain pollutants such as microplastics and particles from nuclear fallout, as well as nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorous, which can harm ecosystems if concentrations are too high. Releasing these trapped materials presents a possible downside to magnet fishing. “Any practice that could disturb the sediment at the bottom of a lake, especially an urban or periurban lake, has the potential to resuspend this sediment—and any associated pollutant—back into the water column,” says Phil Owens, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. Whether magnet fishing has a “net positive or net negative effect on lakes and ponds” could depend on the individual body of water, its surroundings and the intensity of magnet fishing activity. Hoellein hypothesizes that such disturbances are minor relative to magnet fishing’s potential benefits. “There could be some sediments with industrial chemicals or other pollutants that are released back into the water through magnet fishing, but I don’t know if it would be that different than a major storm coming through” and agitating a lake floor, he says.Plus, magnet fishing dredges up an additional perk: it gets people outdoors, where they can enjoy often-overlooked waterways. A few urban bodies of water are shunned for a good reason, though—the Environmental Protection Agency says New York City’s sludgy Gowanus Canal is one of the most contaminated water bodies in the U.S. (Kane would love to magnet fish there but says he hasn’t because the canal water is “very bad for your health if you get it in your facial area.”) But many other aquatic areas in cities are unfairly dismissed as too dangerous or unpleasant to be around, Hoellein says. Or they’re treated as junkyards. That’s a counterproductive attitude, he says, “especially in places where we also drink from that same water.” He welcomes anyone who wants to contribute, in their own style and with the time they have, to fixing the problem of environmental trash. “For some people, that’s magnet fishing,” Hoellein adds.Know before You ThrowAt the shore, the magnet fishers and the nonprofit staffer reach a détente; the discussion turns to a mutual appreciation for local history. Later, privately, Kane insists he has played by the book: he has a fishing license and a metal-detecting license, and this lake is in a public park.Magnet fishing is permitted in publicly accessible places in the U.S. But it might also be subject to local rules and regulations. Although magnet fishing is not specifically mentioned by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation in its publicly listed regulations, “using magnets to retrieve sunken metal objects can have negative impacts on local wildlife and is against [Parks] rules in any bodies of water under Parks jurisdiction,” wrote a spokesperson for the department in an e-mail to Scientific American. The spokesperson added that the applicable rule is Section 1-04(b)(1)(iii), which prohibits disturbing vegetation.Demchak’s rule of thumb is that “if you could fish with a fishing pole, for the most part, you can magnet fish.” Certain historic sites, however, can be off-limits to magnet fishers. In fact, fearing the destruction of delicate submerged artifacts, South Carolina has outlawed magnet fishing under the state’s Underwater Antiquities Act. It’s the only U.S. state to have made the hobby illegal in public areas.If you ever decide to toss a magnet into a lake (where legal), Kane and Agostini offer a few pointers: Be up-to-date on your tetanus shots. Bring a first aid kit for scrapes and pokes and a large bucket for the garbage you will inevitably find. Dispose of that junk properly or sell it to a scrapyard. Wear thick, protective gloves and clothes you don’t mind getting muddy. And look out for the click—the haptic sensation that travels up a rope when a magnet has stuck to something hard and hollow, such as a safe. It’ll probably be trash, but then again, you won’t know until you pull it out of the water. “We still get excited,” Agostini says, “because it’s a mystery every time.”

Water

Animals

Energy

Unstoppable invasion: How did mussels sneak into California, despite decades of state shipping rules?

Most ships discharging ballast water into California waters are inspected, but state officials have tested the water of only 16 ships. Experts say invaders like mussels are inevitable under current rules and enforcement.

In summary Most ships discharging ballast water into California waters are inspected, but state officials have tested the water of only 16 ships. Experts say invaders like mussels are inevitable under current rules and enforcement. After the recent discovery of a destructive mussel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, some experts say California officials have failed to effectively enforce laws designed to protect waterways from invaders carried in ships’ ballast water. A state law enacted 20 years ago has required California officials to inspect 25% of incoming ships and sample their ballast water before it’s discharged into waterways. But the tests didn’t begin until two years ago — after standards for conducting them were finally set — and testing remains rare. State officials have sampled the ballast water of only 16 vessels out of the roughly 3,000 likely to have emptied their tanks nearshore. Experts say stronger regulations are needed, as well as better enforcement. “It’s not really a surprise that another invasive species showed up in the Delta,” said Karrigan Börk, a law professor and the interim director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. “It’s likely to continue happening.” Native to eastern Asia, the mussels — detected near the Port of Stockton, in a small San Joaquin Valley reservoir and several other Delta locations — were the first to be detected in North America. If the mollusc evades eradication efforts, it could spread over vast areas of California and beyond, crowd out native species and clog parts of the massive projects that export Delta water to cities and farms. Invasive golden mussels, shown at a California Department of Water Resources lab, might crowd out native species in waterways and clog parts of the state’s massive water projects. Photo by Xavier Mascareñas, California Department of Water Resources Ted Lempert, a former Bay Area Assemblymember who authored a 1999 state law aimed at preventing ships from bringing invasive species into California, said state officials “apparently took their eyes off the ball.” “We were trying to get ahead of the game, so I’m really frustrated that after all these years some of the events we were trying to prevent have come to pass,” he said. But the prospect of an invasive species colonizing a new region frequented by ships “is a numbers game” that can happen even under the most rigorous regulations and enforcement, said Greg Ruiz, a marine ecologist with the Marine Invasions Research Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. “This is not a failure in the system,” he said. Ballast water is stored in tanks to stabilize vessels at sea. Often taken on at the port of departure and released at the port of arrival, it is a global vector of invasive species, including pathogens that cause human diseases. “We were trying to get ahead of the game, so I’m really frustrated that after all these years some of the events we were trying to prevent have come to pass.”Ted Lempert, former Bay Area Assemblymember To address the threat to ecosystems and water supplies, the State Lands Commission, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard enforce a suite of overlapping regulations. The goal of these state and federal rules is to reduce as much as possible the number of living organisms in discharged ballast water. Vessel operators can achieve this by exposing their ballast water to ultraviolet light, filtering it and treating it with chlorine, which is then removed before discharge. ‘Highest standards in the world.’ But are they enforced? About 1,500 ships a year entering California waters release ballast water, according to Chris Scianni, environmental program manager of the State Lands Commission’s Marine Invasive Species Program. To check for compliance, officials board and inspect nearly all of them, plus another thousand vessels prioritized for inspection for other reasons, Scianni said. During these inspections, officers review ballast water logbooks and reporting forms, interview crew members, inspect water treatment equipment, and occasionally take water samples for testing. “We’re the only entity in the world that’s doing this right now,” Scianni said. A 2003 state law declares that the State Lands Commission “shall take samples of ballast water, sediment, and biofouling from at least 25% of vessels” subject to invasive species regulations. But commission officials told CalMatters they interpret it to mean that 25% of ships must be inspected, with no specific requirements for sampling. Sampling for some ships began in 2023, after the commission enacted standards for how the tests are conducted. It’s a considerable endeavor: A cubic meter of water — which weighs a metric ton — must be collected from a ship. It can take an hour to draw, and it must be done while the vessel is actively discharging. Hours more may pass before results are ready. Federal officials have their own ballast oversight program. It leans on a system of self-reporting by vessel operators — which critics consider a weak tool for ensuring compliance. An EPA spokesperson said the agency “can assess compliance with (the rules) either through a desk audit or an on-site inspection.” Many experts told CalMatters that the state and federal limits on how many organisms are allowed in discharged water are adequate but that enforcement is lacking. “We had the highest (ballast water management) standards in the world, but they were never actually enforced because the state couldn’t come up with a set of technologies to implement them,” said Ben Eichenberg, a staff attorney with the group SF Baykeeper. Ted Grosholz, a professor emeritus with the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute said “the standards are very exacting…The problem we have is compliance. How many ships coming in with ballast water can we really sample and verify? Enforcement officials can’t watch everyone.” “The standards are very exacting…The problem we have is compliance. How many ships coming in with ballast water can we really sample and verify? Enforcement officials can’t watch everyone.”Ted Grosholz, UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute Smithsonian’s Ruiz said state records show that all documented ballast discharges at the Port of Stockton since 2008 have followed state regulations. Ships that discharge, however, occasionally remain uninspected as they enter a port. And some vessel operators may cheat, filling their ballast tanks with clean ocean water to pass off a faulty water treatment system as functional. Moreover, even treated ballast water can contain high levels of zooplankton. Ruiz, who has studied California’s data on ship arrival and locations of the mussels, said it’s probable the golden mussel entered the Delta at least a year ago and even possible that it’s been there for a decade or more, adding that “it could even have happened in the pre-treatment (of ballast water) era.” Somehow, the creature slipped through the cracks and made itself a new home in what has been called one of the most invaded estuaries on the planet. It’s an outcome that Lempert as an assemblymember tried to prevent a quarter-century ago, when he authored the Ballast Water Management for Control of Non-indigenous Species Act. The law required incoming vessels to either retain their ballast water, drain it while simultaneously refilling with new water hundreds of miles out at sea, or use an “environmentally sound” treatment system. It tasked the California State Lands Commission with monitoring vessels for compliance. California has since enacted a complex system of regulations: In 2003, the Marine Invasive Species Act expanded the scope of Lempert’s legislation. Three years later, the Legislature required the commission to set limits on organism concentrations in ballast water; these “standards of performance” were implemented in 2022. While the standards allow minute levels of organisms in the water, the goal is “zero detectable living organisms” by 2040. Several federal laws also aim to protect U.S. waters from creatures like the golden mussel. Penalties for breaking ballast management rules have been modest. At the state level, violations have resulted in 24 fines in the past six years, totaling just over $1 million. Federal fines are rare, with just nine penalties issued amounting to about $714,000 in the EPA’s Pacific Southwest region since 2013. Commission officials said “the frequency of noncompliant discharges … has dropped dramatically since our enforcement regulations (with penalties) were adopted in 2017.” Can ballast water be sterilized? California officials say achieving the law’s goal of zero organisms in ballast water discharged into waterways is infeasible. It would require a network of treatment plants at coastal ports, costing $1.45 billion over 30 years. The shipping industry would face another $2.17 billion in costs for installing systems capable of transferring ballast water to the floating treatment plants. But Eichenberg said some ships already use commercially available systems that consistently, and by a wide margin, outperform industry standards. He said the state’s failure to require that vessels use the most advanced treatment systems available — technology capable of nearly sterilizing ballast water — has culminated in the golden mussel’s arrival. “Something like this was bound to happen eventually,” he said. State and federal performance standards — modeled after international standards — limit the concentration of living zooplankton-sized organisms, like mussel larvae, in ballast water before discharge to 10 per cubic meter. For smaller organisms, allowances are higher. But even in ballast water that has undergone treatment in approved systems, zooplankton concentrations can be off-the-charts for reasons not always clear, according to Hugh MacIsaac, an aquatic invasive species researcher at the University of Windsor in Ontario, who has studied the spread of the golden mussel in South America and central China. Golden mussels, measured at a state lab, have been found in several Delta locations. Photo by Xavier Mascareñas, California Department of Water Resources Treating ballast water doesn’t necessarily work. A study in Shanghai found up to 23,000 zooplankton-sized organisms per cubic meter in the ballast water of half of ships sampled, MacIsaac said. Ruiz, at the Smithsonian research center, said the study’s sample size of 17 ships is too small to be representative and that such high concentrations are abnormal in the United States. “We sample vessels here, and that’s not what we see coming into the U.S.,” he said. Ship operators have shifted radically in the past 20 years “from no management to a nearly complete use of open-ocean exchange to, now, an almost complete transition to ballast treatment technology,” Ruiz said. Attention turns to federal rules The federal government, not state agencies, will soon become the key player in ballast management. That’s because new EPA rules, which are likely at least 18 months away from full implementation, will preempt state regulations.The new rules — which state officials will help enforce — will keep the existing standards for organism concentrations, but prevent states from implementing their own rules that exceed federal standards. For example, California’s goal of zero detectable organisms in ballast discharge will be nixed. Nicole Dobrosky, the State Lands Commission’s chief of environmental science, planning and management, said states can petition the federal government for changes to the rules. Shippers welcome the shift to national rules that align with international standards, said Jacqueline Moore, Long Beach-based vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association. “An international industry by nature, the maritime community always appreciates consistent standards across the board, and across the ocean in this case,” Moore said. “It’s much easier for everyone.” “We have the technical ability to efficiently remove or kill organisms that are trapped in a tank of water. For half a century federal law has required EPA to …protect the environment and public health — yet EPA still refuses to do so.”Environmental groups in a letter to Biden But the change of regulatory oversight concerns Marcie Keever, the oceans and vessels program director with Friends of the Earth. She said that to date the State Lands Commission has been the more active enforcer. Preempting state laws with federal standards that she says are too weak “will essentially give the shipping industry a free pass to pollute…These shipping companies are self-reporting pollution instances, and no one is doing anything about it except for the state.” In 1973, the EPA exempted ballast water from the Clean Water Act. Eventually forced by court rulings to comply with the act, the agency released its newest standards in October for limiting organism concentrations in ballast water. Keever said the EPA is not setting the bar as high as it should. “We’re still basically at the same place we were at 20 years ago,” Keever said. “The EPA has never set what we see as the best available technology for ballast water discharges.” More than 150 environmental groups made similar claims in a 2022 letter to President Joe Biden, arguing that the technology exists now to almost entirely sterilize ballast water. “[W]e have the technical ability to efficiently remove or kill organisms that are trapped in a tank of water,” they wrote. “For half a century federal law has required EPA to use that ability to protect the environment and public health — yet EPA still refuses to do so.” The EPA disagrees with the criticism. Joshua Alexander, press officer with the agency’s Region 9 San Francisco office, told CalMatters that “the EPA concluded that these standards (in the new rules) are the most stringent ones that the available ballast water test data can support.” Can anything stop the mussel invasion? October’s discovery of the golden mussel in California is being treated urgently by state and federal officials. The creatures have wreaked havoc on water supply and hydroelectric facilities in South America, and they are spreading rapidly through central China. In the Great Lakes, invasive zebra mussels cause $300 to $500 million in damages annually to power plants and other water infrastructure — the types of impacts officials in California hope to avoid. Tanya Veldhuizen, the Department of Water Resources’ special projects section manager, said officials are considering the use of chemicals to remove the creatures from pumps, intakes and pipelines of the massive State Water Project, which transports water to farms and cities. Several scientists told CalMatters that with most nonnative species, eradication is only possible early in the game — meaning management officials often have one shot at success. Biologist Andrew Chang, who works at the Smithsonian research center’s Marin County field lab, noted an old adage in invasion ecology — containing the spread of a nonnative species is like trying to put toothpaste back into a tube. “The more time that passes, the process of putting the toothpaste back in the tube gets messier and messier,” Chang said. University of Windsor’s MacIsaac thinks California may be on the cusp of an unstoppable mussel invasion. “This is an enormous problem for your state,” he said. More about water ‘Immediate threat’: Mussel invades California’s Delta, first time in North America October 31, 2024November 5, 2024 Prop. 4 passes: Californians approve $10 billion for water, wildfire, climate projects November 5, 2024November 6, 2024

Water

Chemicals

Government

Groundwater pumping is causing land to sink at record rate in San Joaquin Valley

Groundwater pumping has been causing the land to sink at a record pace in California's San Joaquin Valley. New research suggests ways of addressing the problem.

For decades, a costly problem has been worsening beneath California’s San Joaquin Valley: the land has been sinking, driven by the chronic overpumping of groundwater.As agricultural wells have drained water from aquifers, underground clay layers have compacted and the ground surface has been sinking as much as 1 foot per year in some areas.New research now shows that large portions of the San Joaquin Valley have sunk at a record pace since 2006.“Never before has it been so rapid for such a long period of time,” said Matthew Lees, the study’s lead author.The study by Stanford University researchers is the first to quantify the full extent of land subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s major farming regions, during the last two decades. The collapsing ground has damaged canals, wells and other infrastructure, requiring repairs that in some areas are now in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Under California’s groundwater law, local agencies are tasked with combating the problem as they work toward plans to limit pumping and address overdraft by 2040.Measurements from satellites have tracked changes in the ground surface during much of the last two decades, but there is a gap in the data from 2011 to 2015. The researchers used data from GPS stations to document the declines in the land during those years, which enabled them to detail subsidence for the entire period from 2006 to 2022.Much of the sinking has occurred in two large swaths of the valley, one around the community of El Nido and the other around the city of Corcoran. The research found that the declines averaged nearly an inch per year if spread across the entire San Joaquin Valley.“With these findings, we can look at the big picture of mitigating this record-breaking subsidence,” said Rosemary Knight, the study’s senior author and a professor of geophysics at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability.The study, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, also presents ideas about how the sinking could be slowed or stopped through strategic recharging of aquifers.The findings underline California’s continuing struggle with a phenomenon that has been altering the landscape since the early 1900s, when wells and pumps began to proliferate in the valley.In a famous 1977 photo, Joseph Poland, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, stood next to a telephone pole with signs reading 1925, 1955 and 1977, marking how the ground level had fallen nearly 30 feet in the area near Mendota.In a 1999 report, USGS researchers described the land subsidence in the San Joaquin Valley as “the single largest human alteration of the Earth’s surface topography.”The rates of decline slowed in the 1970s and ‘80s as newly built aqueducts brought river water to farmlands, and the sinking remained less pronounced into the early 2000s. That changed during the 2007-09 drought, which was followed by extreme droughts from 2012 to 2016 and from 2020 to 2022 — droughts that research shows have been significantly worsened by global warming.Knight and Lees said the decrease in water deliveries from canals during the droughts, combined with the prioritization of water for environmental purposes and changes in agriculture, have contributed to the sinking over the last two decades.They compared the total volume of valleywide subsidence since 2006 with measurements from 1944 to 1968 — a portion of the half-century illustrated in Poland’s photo — and found the post-2006 period has brought the same amount of sinking, but over a shorter time.“History has repeated itself,” Lees said. “We did it again, and we got there faster.”Lees, a research associate at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, worked on the study when he was a geophysics doctoral student at Stanford.The researchers said in addition to damaging aqueducts and other infrastructure, sinking land threatens to affect the route of the state’s high-speed rail, and also worsens floods hazards as the topography shifts.The problem is driven by groundwater overdraft, which occurs when the amount of water pumped out exceeds the amount of recharge. When clay layers in aquifers are drained and collapse, the loss of water-storing space is largely irreversible.According to the researchers, overdraft of the valley’s deep aquifers is causing much of the subsidence. These aquifers lie hundreds of feet underground, below shallow aquifers and clay layers, and they contain clay layers that are especially susceptible to compaction when water is extracted.Many wells have been drilled 1,000 feet deep or more to supply farms, and these wells are drawing water from aquifers where much of the subsidence is occurring. Workers drill a well on a farm near Terra Bella, Calif., in 2021. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) To slow or halt the sinking, the researchers say, it’s important to address the overdraft in the deep aquifers where clay layers are compressing. They say this could be done by reducing pumping from the aquifers or by recharging them using either natural pathways or wells that would allow for injecting water underground.“We need to stop the overdraft of compacting aquifers,” Knight and Lees wrote, suggesting that efforts be strategically “targeted to the deeper parts of the aquifer system.”Directing water to the right places to replenish these deeper spaces requires detailed information about the valley’s geologic features, including natural pathways where water can quickly travel through permeable sand, gravel and cobbles to reach aquifers. In parts of the valley, these channels can take in flows near the base of the Sierra Nevada, miles from where the land is subsiding, and funnel water to where it will help slow the sinking.California recently mapped large portions of the valley’s aquifers to reveal their webs of hydraulic connections. Using a helicopter equipped with a ground-penetrating electromagnetic imaging system, scientists have scanned up to 1,000 feet underground to map optimal areas for recharging aquifers — including channels left by ancient rivers that lie hidden beneath alluvial fans in the valley.“If we’re going to continue pumping from the lower aquifer, we need to recharge in such a way that that recharge water reaches the lower aquifer,” Knight said. “You need to stop the overdraft in the part of the aquifer that’s causing the subsidence, and that’s the deeper part.”As part of California’s efforts to curb declines in groundwater levels, one partial solution that has been promoted by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and local water agencies is managed aquifer recharge — projects to replenish groundwater that involve a range of methods, such as building infrastructure to capture runoff during wet periods and shunt water to basins where it percolates into the ground.Other methods include drilling injection wells that deliver water to aquifers or intentionally releasing floodwater on agricultural lands in areas where it can seep rapidly underground.The scientists analyzed how much water would be needed to recharge portions of aquifers that are driving the subsidence problems, and calculated it would be about 680,000 acre-feet per year on average, an amount comparable to state estimates of how much water is available for groundwater replenishment in an average year.From a practical standpoint, Lees said, it’s not feasible to dedicate all the water to addressing land subsidence.“There are a lot of other very important priorities, and there are logistical difficulties in getting that water into the compacting parts of the aquifer system,” he said. “We have to be strategic with what we do with this recharge. Where subsidence is causing the most harm, we’ve got to try and get it to those compacting aquifers.” A section of the Friant-Kern Canal that was damaged by subsidence undergoes repairs in 2022. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) Targeting places where subsidence is causing costly problems, Knight said, will mean focusing on areas, for example, where collapsing ground is going to damage an aqueduct or wells that communities rely on for drinking water, or where shifting ground is worsening flood risks.“The study has made me optimistic,” Knight said. “I think it could be addressed if you strategically target the areas where you want to stop subsidence.”The findings add to a growing body of research being used by local water officials as they develop state-mandated plans for managing groundwater.Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, adopted a decade ago, land subsidence is one of several undesirable effects that local agencies must take steps to avoid, along with “significant and unreasonable” lowering of groundwater levels and degraded water quality, among others.Another goal is preventing more household wells from drying up as water levels decline. According to state data, more than 5,000 wells have run dry in the last decade, and scientists warn that thousands more could be at risk unless stronger measures are put in place.The latest study helps inform California’s efforts to address subsidence and underscores the importance of considering the different effects pumping has in shallow aquifers and deep aquifers, said Graham Fogg, a hydrogeology emeritus professor at UC Davis who wasn’t involved in the research.More recharge of deep aquifers is needed and can be done effectively, Fogg said, but will have to be done in concert with reduced pumping.“Recharge will help solve a lot of it, probably not more than half of the problem,” Fogg said. “The other half is going to have to be pumping reductions, and that’s the painful part.”Researchers have projected that large portions of the Central Valley’s irrigated cropland will need to be permanently left dry to comply with the restrictions. Experts with the Public Policy Institute of California have estimated that by 2040, the necessary pumping cutbacks could mean fallowing more than 900,000 acres of farmland.On the positive side, valuable data to guide recharge efforts have emerged in recent years, including detailed information on the natural architecture of the aquifer system, Fogg said. During the last two decades, the record-breaking pace of subsidence has coincided with the drilling of thousands of new agricultural wells, and as parts of California have had some of the fastest-declining groundwater levels in the world.The water has been used to irrigate a wide variety of crops, including nuts, fruits, tomatoes, cotton and cattle-feed crops to supply dairies and feedlots. Growers have also planted vast orchards of almonds and pistachios.Fogg said the latest research is sobering because it shows that California is still grappling with significant undesirable effects of subsidence.“At this point, there should be no excuse for this kind of subsidence to occur in the next 10 years,” Fogg said.

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Record Dryness in US Northeast Should Change Water Behavior, Experts Say

The U.S. Northeast is experiencing an unusually severe and widespread drought during months that are typically the wettest

DENVER (AP) — It hasn't been a typical fall for the northeastern United States.Fires have burned in parks and forests around New York City. Towns and cities in a stretch from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to south of Philadelphia had their driest three months on record, according to the Applied Climate Information System. Some reservoirs in the region are near historic lows.Major changes need to happen to avoid critical shortages of water in the future, even if that future isn't immediate. As the climate warms, droughts will continue to intensify and communities should use this one as motivation to put in place long-term solutions, experts say. “This is the canary in the coal mine for the future,” said Tim Eustance, executive director of the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission. “People should stop watering their lawns yesterday.”Eustance wants New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to issue a drought emergency to increase people’s sense of urgency. Here are some ways to stretch water experts said could become necessary in the Northeast. Replenishing more water underground One important place water is stored is under our feet. Groundwater has dropped significantly over the years in parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and New York. Groundwater makes up about half of New Jersey's drinking water. Sprawl and concrete can make it tough for rain to replenish the water underground. “New Jersey is ‘mall-landia.’ We have these giant parking lots that could be ways to reclaim water instead of having runoff,” Eustance said.In some other parts of the country there is increasing use of permeable asphalt, concrete and pavers that allow water to percolate into the ground and back into the aquifer. It would be up to municipalities to require that, he said.A faster way to replenish the aquifer is by injecting highly treated wastewater into it, something Los Angeles has been doing for years. It is dramatically adding to the city's available water. Virginia Beach, Virginia, is also pumping highly treated water back into its aquifer, and Anne Arundel County in Maryland is trying to pass legislation that would allow the same. Paying people to conserve In some places in the western U.S., getting paid to save water has long been an option. Some cities and counties pay dollars for every square foot of lawn torn out and replaced with native landscaping. Those policies are not nearly as widespread in the Northeast, said Alan Roberson, CEO of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators. “The abundance has created a different perspective,” he said. This can make it hard to get people on board with conservation.Upgraded water meters can give customers details about their water use and help them see where they can save money when drought doesn't feel as urgent, said Beth O'Connell, chief engineer for Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Reusing water could become more common The concept is simple: capture water from the sink, clothes washer, shower and toilet, treat it to a high standard and use it again for nonpotable purposes: It can be sent back through pipes to flush toilets, cool buildings, water yards or help raise water levels in a river or aquifer. “One of the crimes I think, in America, is we use drinking water to water our lawns and flush our toilet,” Eustance said. Zach Gallagher is CEO of Natural Systems Utilities, which designs, builds and operates water recycling systems. He also is the father of three kids and lives in New Jersey, so this drought hits close to home.“I feel like I'm doing something that is going to be meaningful and leave something beyond for my children, and their children,” he said.Reuse can be a tool for both drought and flood, he explained. When a building can reuse its own wastewater and discharge it directly into a body of water, it eases stress on a city's fragile sewer system, which is a common vulnerability in old coastal cities. It also reduces demand on new water.Once open this summer, the company's redesign of the old Domino Sugar Refinery on New York’s East River will be able to treat 400,000 gallons (1.5 million liters) of wastewater a day, enough to cover a football field in nearly 15 inches (38 centimeters) of water. The cleaned water will be piped back into the new mixed-use buildings for flushing toilets, cooling and landscaping, with some of it discharged back into the river.Nonpotable reuse has a growing footprint in the eastern U.S., but scaling it to a regional level should be the next focus, O'Connell said. Planning for a future that includes extended drought can be costly. It could also require a shift in mindset from one of abundance to conservation, said Del Shannon, dam engineer and member of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He has worked on water projects around the world and said many developing countries are focused on getting reliable water for crops and drinking.“We need to treat our water and guard it as gently as those countries are."The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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The Heart Whisperer

A childhood discovery inspires a woman to push the boundaries of our compassion in this true story. The esteemed Earthlings creator, Shaun Monson, weaves together archived news clips, never seen before arrest footage, and current interviews to tell this tale that crosses countries and decades. Cameo appearances by Joaquin Phoenix and other famous animal advocates.

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The Cost of Sand

The Cost of Sand highlights the potential destruction of a crucial bio-link on the edge of the Ramsar wetlands from proposed expansion of sandmining in Bass Coast, Victoria. It features interviews with scientists and conservationists about the significance of preserving the last remnant coastal bushland in the region and the vulnerable wildlife and ecosystems it supports.

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You can count the number of female paddlers in Futaleufú, Chile on one hand... and they want to change that. After many riverside matés and floating conversations, the idea to create a kayak course for local teenage girls was hatched. Thanks to a committed group of women from around the globe, what started as a dream is now an inspirational contribution to the local community.

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Protecting the River Krupa

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Maine’s Dam Agency Does What It Can to Keep the Aging Infrastructure Safe

Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Related News

Drought Is Causing Saltwater to Creep up the Delaware River. Here's What's Being Done About It

How Magnet Fishers Catch Underwater Garbage, Guns and Sometimes Treasure

Unstoppable invasion: How did mussels sneak into California, despite decades of state shipping rules?

Groundwater pumping is causing land to sink at record rate in San Joaquin Valley

Record Dryness in US Northeast Should Change Water Behavior, Experts Say

Suggested Viewing

The Heart Whisperer

The Cost of Sand

Chicas al Agua

Protecting the River Krupa

Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

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sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

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