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Plumbing the planet: The 5 biggest projects taking on the world’s water supply

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on February 5, 2009 at 8:02 am

From Popular Mechanics:

The dire statistics are well-known, but deserve repeating: One in six people in the world live without regular access to clean water, according to the United Nations, and one in three lacks access to decent sanitation. Even countries with good water supplies—like the U.S.—will experience trouble sustaining them in the near future, as panelists discussed at the water roundtable PM hosted last fall.

The United States has its share of ambitious water infrastructure—that’s how cities such as Los Angeles exploded from the desert—but it doesn’t solve the problem of vanishing supplies. The snowpack in the California mountains is down to 61 percent of a normal year, authorities there say. U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu recently expressed his concerns for the long-term consequences. “I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,” Chu told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going,” either.

At the same time, urban areas like New York and Tokyo are grappling with the problem of too much water all at once. A projected consequence of global warming, besides drought, is the accelerated cycle of what used to be 100-year storms. Around the world, countries are trying to combat these problems with ever-more-clever engineering: bigger and badder treatment plants, pipelines, tunnels and reservoirs. Here are five projects hoping to be big and bad enough.

Click here to read the rest of this article from Popular Mechanics, which profiles the Ashkelon desalination plant in Israel, the North-South Transfer project in China, the G-Cans Tunnel System in Japan, the Marina Reservoir project in Singapore, and Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System.

February 5, 2009 · Filed Under Infrastructure, International Water Issues

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