Welcome to Northern California River Watch!
I find some hope for the future of our planet in the emergence of millions of unconnected environmental and social movements. The leaderless Anarchy of this mass phenomenon and its macro scale means that its cells will not be centrally controlled or turned aside by profit motives. It seems to be a genuine grass roots response to the global threat which our planet faces. —Paul Hawken
10 water laws of the West
Meds wind up in tap water despite
drug disposal regulations
Christina Jewett, California Watch
July, 2010
The federal government has a patchwork of laws attempting to deal with the problem of pharmaceutical drugs showing up in city tap water across the nation.
Senator Herb Kohl, D-Wis., highlighted the issue during a congressional hearing in Washington, D.C.
"We need to provide Americans with better information about what to do with their leftover medications. Contradicting guidelines put forth by the Drug Enforcement Administration, Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service need to be reconciled," Kohl said in a statement. "Americans deserve a safe and effective way to get drugs away from their homes and keep them out of our drinking water."
California has its own set of rules, in addition to federal guidelines, but they have not resulted in water that's free of unwanted pharmaceuticals.
An Associated Press investigation published last year probed the issue of meds in the water, finding that pharmaceuticals flow through the taps in the homes of 41 million people living in 24 metropolitan areas.
Among them are Los Angeles, Long Beach and Riverside County, where water tested positive for traces of anti-anxiety and anti-convulsant medications. The probe also turned up a female sex hormone in San Francisco water.
The journalists also found nine medications in watersheds near Los Angeles, Long Beach and Riverside. While the drugs found in those areas were not identified, testers found traces of Prozac, a blood pressure medication and an antibiotic, among others, in an area defined as Southern California.
The issue is not widely discussed or disclosed to consumers, AP reporters found: When water providers find pharmaceuticals in drinking water, they rarely tell the public. When researchers make the same discoveries, they usually don't identify the cities involved. There are plenty of reasons offered for the secrecy: concerns about national security, fears of panic, a feeling that the public will not understand - even confidentiality agreements. 'That's a really sensitive subject,' said Elaine Archibald, executive director of California Urban Water Agencies, an 11-member organization composed of the largest water providers in California. She said many customers 'don't know how to interpret the information. They hear something has been detected in source water and drinking water, and that's cause for alarm - just because it's there.'
A Southern California coalition of government agencies compiled a "No Drugs Down the Drain" website on the issue, breaking down the health impacts of tainted water. The major concerns to date regarding the presence of medications in surface water bodies have been increased bacterial resistance to antibiotics and interference with growth and reproduction in aquatic organisms such as fish and frogs. Aquatic organisms are sensitive to low levels of exposure and are particularly vulnerable when exposure occurs during developmentally sensitive times such as before birth and during juvenile stages of growth. Effects of exposure can include a gender-ratio imbalance (e.g., more females than males within a given population), intersex conditions (the presence of both male and female reproductive organs within an individual organism), poor egg hatching success, decreased fertility and growth and altered behavior (e.g., lethargy and disorientation).
California has regulations in addition to federal rules. The Department of Toxic Substances Control defines some drugs as "medical waste" and watches how large medical providers, such as hospitals and clinics, dispose of them. Still, the agency does not regulate smaller medical providers or individuals. The agency is taking a closer look at the issue, though, convening a stakeholder meeting July 20 on "model programs" dealing with home-generated medical waste. For now, The Associated Press published a guide on how to get rid of unwanted medications and the DTSC lists disposal sites in Northern and Southern California.
by Hugh Holub on Aug. 16, 2010
[Note: I am a water attorney. Years ago I was asked to give a speech summarizing Western water law to a group of non-lawyers. This was the result....]
Introduction: It does not take a law degree to understand water law and policy in the western United States. Ten basic legal and historical principles govern the rights to and uses of water in the West. By understanding these ten Water Laws of the West anyone can then understand the current issues of water and its relationship to the future of the West.
I. The Law of Gravity: The First Water Law of the West is the Law of Gravity. Water runs down hill. The initial uses of water in the West involved the use of gravity to tap rivers and divert their flows into canals for delivery to farms and mines. This is also known as Newton’s Law.
II. The Law of Los Angeles: The Second Water Law of the West is the original law of Los Angeles. This L.A. Law states that “water runs uphill to money“. The development of energy technologies to lift water against the pull of gravity is the basis for modern Western civilization. Los Angeles pioneered the effort to defy gravity with money in the early 1900's with its Owens Valley Aqueduct. Southern California is now served with a network of pipelines and canals such as the Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River Aqueduct. Phoenix, Tucson, San Francisco and Denver also utilize massive pumping and diversion systems to transport water from great distances in defiance of gravity to serve their growing urban populations.
III. The Law of Supply Creating Demand: The Third Water Law of the West, also invented by Los Angeles, is that “if you don’t have the water, you won’t need it.” This is sometimes stated as “he who brings the water brings the people”. Both are attributed to William Mulholland, a pioneer director of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP). Los Angeles and other Western cities operate on the premise that in order to assure growth of their cities, water supplies for the future must be developed well in advance of that growth. This is in contrast to the general approach in Western cities of developing freeways and other public infrastructure long after the growth has actually happened.
IV. The Law of I Got It First: The Fourth Water Law of the West, embodied in the West’s surface water laws, is the doctrine of “prior appropriation” translated into “first in time is first in right”. First in time for most water uses in the West were farms and mines. Instead of “first in time is first in right”, we have seen the evolution of “we’ve got more votes than you in the state legislature” to decide who gets water.
V. The Law of Beneficial Use: The Fifth Water law of the West is that to have a right to water it must be “beneficially” or “reasonably” used on that appurtenant land. This is only understood in the context that water left flowing in a river maintaining the survival of fish in that river and vegetation growing along side that river was not originally defined as a “beneficial” use in Western water law, whereas drowning gophers or growing rice in deserts were deemed “beneficial” uses. In recent years, environmentalists have succeeded in gaining recognition of “instream” beneficial uses of water and a new category of water rights is beginning to emerge to preserve flows in rivers. However this process is emerging only after most rivers and streams in the West have been dammed and dried up by diversions of the flows to the previously established beneficial uses. To fully appreciate why this happened, it must be remembered that the fish in these streams only recently were able to obtain the services of water lawyers via various environmental and conservation organizations.
VI. The Law of Worthless Land: The Sixth Water Law of the West is that without a water right or access to water, land is worthless. There is not enough water available to use all available land for all the potential beneficial uses. Thus lands with water rights or access to water have value for use, whereas land without water rights is known as the desert, with zero value except when being subjected to state and local property taxation. It is also a historic fact that farmers, ranchers and miners figured all this out about a hundred years before the average city council or environmental group, thus most Western water laws are heavily weighted in favor of using water for farming, ranching and mining. This law is also known as the “appurtenancy” rule meaning the rights to the use of water are tied to specific parcels of land, which are usually owned by farmers, ranchers or miners.
VII. The Law of Expropriation: The Seventh Water Law of the West focuses on how water (and other natural resources) are obtained for Western civilization. This Law depends on finding some fairly impoverished and unsophisticated water right holder (usually Indians, farmers, or rural communities) on the other side of the mountain a city can steal water rights from. Los Angeles pioneered this approach by buying up the Owens Valley on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada for water rights nearly 100 years ago. What we are now experiencing is not so much a water shortage, but a shortage of people on the other sides of the mountains who are willing to let their water resources be stolen from them by cities. “We didn’t run out of water,” said a city official, “we ran out of dummies we could steal water from”.
VIII. The Law of the Price is Right: The Eighth Water Law of the West is that there is no water shortage if the price is right. It is widely believed in city halls that the farmers will sell their water rights if the price is high enough so the farmers can go raise martinis in La Jolla instead of cotton in the Salt River Valley of Arizona, or the Imperial Valley in California. Thus when someone asks “is there enough water for Los Angeles or Phoenix or Tucson to grow?” the answer is probably yes–if you don’t care about how much the water will cost.
IX. The Law of Water Monopoly: The Ninth Water Law of the West is that water management in an arid environment almost always results in the creation of a water monopoly. Thus (along with the discovery of fire and religion) the first steps towards civilization included the construction of irrigation ditches and the immediate creation of some sort of bureaucracy to run the system. Not surprisingly where irrigation water monopoly civilizations rose, they lasted for thousands of years. The Westlands Irrigation District in the Central Valley of California and the Salt River Project in Arizona are merely the modern counterparts of one of humankind’s most ancient of institutions–the water monopoly. Many western urban areas figured out the value of water monopoly and created enormously powerful regional agencies such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District in Arizona, to do essentially the same thing–building vast networks of canals to bring water to their constituents.
X. The Law of Vanishing Civilizations: The Tenth (or Last) Water Law of the West should be called the Hohokam Law of Water and Gravity. Under this law, if there is no rain, there is no water to flow down hill. What went up–the buildings and the civilization–may crumble to dust if Mother Nature decides to hold a long drought. Lying beneath the streets of Phoenix and downtown Tucson are the ruins of ancient Hohokam Indian cities that vanished prior to 1400 AD. Phoenix is the second city to be built on the same site in reliance on the erratic flows of the Salt River. When there are curtailments of water deliveries to Los Angeles due to drought many Southern Californians had been heard to ask “what do you mean this used to be a desert?”
Conclusion: The principles that govern Western water law and policy have a long and somewhat distinguished history. It should also be noted that similar arid environment ditch-dependent civilizations ultimately collapsed under extreme environmental stresses, internal political conflict, and invasion by barbarian hordes. This is worth contemplating during a drought with various water interests fighting over who will get water in times of future shortages while the streets of Santa Monica or Scottsdale or Tucson are filled with RVs with New Jersey license plates.