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If you live in D.C., you may have to boil your water. DC Water is advising tens of thousands of residents and businesses in a major portion of the city not to drink or cook with tap water without boiling it because of a contamination risk. A problem with the water system Thursday night made it "possible for contaminants to enter the water," DC Water said in a statement early Friday. Officials say there is no information indicating that any water was contaminated; the "boil water advisory" is a precaution. DC Water says it is safe to bathe or shower,...

Local residents in Venezuela staged further protests on Monday as the failed socialist country now appears to be running out of clean water. Multiple groups of demonstrators blocked highways around the capital of Caracas to protest the lack of clean water supplies. On the Avenida Baralt in central Caracas, protesters complained that they had not received water for two days and, as a result, were forced to use stagnant water, exposing them to infectious diseases. “At 7:05 am we are in Santa Teresa area of Glorieta protesting for water. #CaracasWantsWater,” wrote local councilor Jesús Armas on Twitter. “The residents of...

Florida has made a legally sufficient showing as to the possibility of fashioning an effective remedial decree equitably apportioning the water from an interstate river basin.

For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out of the tap. But for billions it’s not that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water even in the dry air of the desert. *snip* It’s essentially a powder made of tiny crystals in which water molecules get caught as the temperature decreases. Then, when the temperature increases again, the water is released into the air again.

Halsey Taylor is one of the leading manufacturers of drinking fountains today. Company founder Halsey W. Taylor invented the non-squirting drinking fountain. In 1896, Taylor's father died from typhoid fever. This illness is principally spread through contaminated drinking water. Several years later, while working as a plant superintendent for the Packard Motor Car Company, Taylor realized numerous workers were becoming sick with dysentery. He believed contaminated drinking water was the chief reason for the spreading illness. Taylor determined to develop a drinking fountain that was sanitary and would not contribute to the spreading of various illnesses. By 1912, he had...

Cape Town, South Africa, July 9 “Day Zero.” That’s when water taps throughout the city are expected to go dry before Israel declared statehood in 1948, its leaders focused on water security as closely as they did military preparedness. Israel is in the fifth year of drought, today citizens can reliably count on abundant water. Cape Town another story. reservoirs began receding more than two years ago. This problem turned into a crisis because of subsidy-distorted water pricing, inefficient irrigation, and a lack of desalination facilities and a long-term plan. In 2016 officials from Israel’s Foreign Ministry recognized the problem...

Every few months, there’s a new trend that promises life-changing health benefits — a spice, or a juice, or another mundane consumable, often with an Indian or East Asian name thrown in to make it seem ancient and exotic. We see these things, laugh, and move on with our lives. We live and let live. “Raw water” is the newest such trend. Customers are paying for the privilege of drinking water that is unfiltered, untreated, and unsterilized — and apparently they want it so badly that it is often out of stock. Numerous brands have emerged to cater to this...

Scientists at the University of Copenhagen compared dementia rates to the natural quantities of lithium in water for more than 800,000 people in Denmark, from areas occupied by nearly half of the population. They found that in places where lithium was highest, the dementia rate fell by 17 per cent compared to those with the lowest levels. Although researchers warn that the link could be due to other environmental factors, they say that it is worth investigating whether adding lithium to tap water could be a cheap way of protecting large numbers of people from dementia. Lithium is a metallic...

As of April 1, when it was last measured by NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, the snowpack in the Sierra’s Tuolumne River Basin came in at 1.2 million acre-feet, according to the latest data. To put the amount in perspective, the figure is enough to fill the 92,000-seat Rose Bowl in Pasadena almost 1,600 times. “The 2017 California snowpack is close to the largest on the record, which consists of decades’ worth of snow measurements made at ground level,” according to a NASA news release. The snowpack, which is made up of layers of snow that accumulate in the winter and...

I have heard that the emergency spillway is eroding through cutback. This will be an evolutionary erosive failure. It will take some time for the cut back. Hopefully the erosion will be stopped at bedrock, However, I fear that if the erosion of the emergency spillway, on the canted bedrock of the abutment communicates with the hydraulics of the principal spillway, this may result in a V notch failure. This would be the most serious type of failure.

"Officials are anticipating a failure of the Auxiliary Spillway at Oroville Dam within the next 60 minutes (5:45 p.m.)," the California Department of Water Resources said on Facebook. The Yuba County Office of Emergency Services said on Facebook an evacuation has been for "all Yuba County on the valley floor." The city of Marysville and Yuba County have been ordered to evacuate, the Marysville Police Department tweeted.

After reading this article, I just went and drank a cup of water straight from the faucet without boiling it. I do not have a water filter.I think the city’s call to boil water was not justified. The filter at the city’s water treatment plant would stop the giardia. Also, there was only one reading of low chlorine, and it was only slightly below the normal level. No giardia has been found in the water that has gone through the city’s filter. No cases of the illness have been reported.I think the city cried wolf.If there ever is a real...

After a half-decade of drought, California has been buffeted this winter by a series of powerful rain and snowstorms that dumped countless billions of gallons of water on the state’s watersheds. Some of the deluge was captured in the form of mountain snows that will feed rivers and streams during the annual spring melt. But at lower elevations, it was rain, some retained in man-made reservoirs that had become seriously depleted, but most flowing swiftly to the Pacific Ocean. At one point last week, flows on the Sacramento River and its American River tributary were more than 130,000 cubic feet...

Authorities say Shahroon Augustine entered the Eugene Sawyer Water Purification Plant with a duffle bag, containing a passport from Pakistan. He was charged with trespassing, then vanished. “If our water supply isn’t vigorously protected, we as a society could have real trouble,” says Richard Schak, a former Chicago Police official who launched the criminal justice program at National Louis University. He has studied municipal water systems.

Feds: Al Qaeda Mata Hari Wanted To Poison Pres. Carter Federal Sources: Siddique Wanted to Use Biological Agents to Contaminate Pres. Carter's Water By RICHARD ESPOSITO and BRIAN ROSS August 13, 2008 Long before Aafia Siddique was arrested in Afghanistan last month, allegedly in possession of a list of New York targets and chem-bio weapons information, she had allegedly developed a plot, however improbable or amateurish, to kill Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush and to attack the White House. Siddique plotted to use weapons that included biological agents to contaminate former president Carter's water, according to multiple federal...

The western United States is chronically short of water and the situation can only get worse, barring some sort of major reversal of climate. I don't believe this is caused by climate change, but rather is an inevitable function of increasing population demands on a limited resource. With few exceptions, Lake Mead, designed to be a major supplier of water for southern California and Las Vegas, has been steadily dropping to the point where it may fail to produce any water in dry times of the cycle. Other reservoirs have been observed to dry up or lose over three quarters...

...the dangers are mainly for 534,000 Massachusetts residents who draw their water from private wells, the report found. Unlike public water systems, wells are not subject to state and federal testing and treatment requirements... Environmental advocates said they worry whether the department is up to the job of regulating the water supply....“The DEP really needs to beef up its ground water monitoring.”

Officials told residents of a small Colorado community not to drink or shower in tap water Thursday because one of the town’s wells may have been contaminated with THC, marijuana’s intoxicating chemical. No illnesses have been linked to the water in Hugo, a town of about 730 people some 100 miles southeast of Denver, said Lincoln County Public Health Director Susan Kelly. THC was detected in tests conducted with field kits, although other field tests were negative, sheriff’s Capt. Michael Yowell said. More definitive laboratory tests were underway, he said. …

Warning: House office water tainted with lead By Rachael Bade and Jake Sherman 06/28/16 07:37 PM EDT A House office’s water supply has been tainted by high lead levels and may be unsafe, according to a warning blasted out to congressional offices Tuesday night. In a “dear colleagues” letter, House office buildings superintendent William Weidemeyer told members and staff that the Cannon House Office Building was experiencing lead levels above normal, according to a recent water test. “This week, the AOC received results within the Cannon House Office Building that indicate lead levels in drinking water sources are slightly above...

Immorality among women is causing a river in Iran to dry up, according to a senior cleric from the Islamic Republic Seyyed Youssef Tabatabi-nejad, who leads Friday prayers in Isfahan, encouraged the country’s morality police to crack down on ‘improper veiling’ and suggested women’s immodest clothing was having an impact on the environment. In a sermon this week, he said: “My office has received photos of women next to the dry Zayandeh-rud River pictured as if they are in Europe. It is these sorts of acts that cause the river to dry up even further,” ISNA News Agency reported. “I...