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Going With the Flow: Hogtown Creek Floodplain & Green Acre Park

Green Acre Park is an important stop along the creek’s journey and another example of how a community exists side by side with the natural resources that sustain it. For the residents that live near the park, and for the city of Gainesville as a whole, the protection and preservation of Hogtown Creek is vital to ensuring that future generations will have clean drinking water for years to come.

Going with the Flow: Exploring Loblolly Woods Nature Park

...more pollutants seep into the water as it travels further into the city, and Loblolly Park is a perfect example. Oil from cars, discarded trash, and animal waste from the roads, businesses, and apartments surrounding the park are swept up in the surface runoff. The runoff flows into the creek and contaminates the water.

Northumbrian Water told to publish raw sewage discharge data it tried to hide

Appeal tribunal orders firm to share details on hundreds of thousands of tonnes of outflows into North Sea A water company that tried to keep secret details of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of raw sewage discharges into the sea has been ordered by an appeal tribunal to release the data in the public interest.Northumbrian Water has repeatedly refused to release details about the scale of raw sewage discharges into the North Sea from an outflow at its pumping station in Whitburn, after a campaigner asked under freedom of information and environmental information regulations. Continue reading...

A water company that tried to keep secret details of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of raw sewage discharges into the sea has been ordered by an appeal tribunal to release the data in the public interest.Northumbrian Water has repeatedly refused to release details about the scale of raw sewage discharges into the North Sea from an outflow at its pumping station in Whitburn, after a campaigner asked under freedom of information and environmental information regulations.Campaigners say the pollution has been going on for years, but the Environment Agency, Northumbrian Water and the government all dispute their findings.In 2012 the European court of justice ruled the sewage discharges at Whitburn put the UK in breach of its legal obligations to treat wastewater and gave the government five years to remedy the situation.Steve Lavelle, the vice-chair of the neighbourhood forum in Whitburn, south Tyneside, has been investigating the scale of raw sewage discharges in an attempt to show the pollution is continuing many years after the ECJ ruling.Lavelle said: “We need this information to show this pollution is still going on. We want the data to feed into our neighbourhood plan so that we can provide the details about the capacity of sewage treatment in the area when any future development is proposed.“At the moment they do not have the infrastructure in place to deal with the volume of sewage.”The Environment Agency permit for the plant states raw sewage discharges must only take place during intense rainfall or snowmelt.But data unearthed by Lavelle over many years has exposed what he says is sewage dumping outside periods of intense rainfall.In 2019 when the north-east of England received slightly above average rainfall of 750mm of rain, more than 760,000 tonnes of untreated sewage was discharged from Whitburn Steel pumping station directly into the North Sea, Environment Agency data obtained by Lavelle shows.In 2020, when rainfall was 610mm, within the annual average range, the long sea outfall discharged more than 460,000 tonnes of untreated sewage into the Northumbria Coast special protection area.A year later when rainfall was 660mm, the water company discharged a record high of 821,088 tonnes into the sea.Campaigners say the pollution has been going on for years but Northumbrian Water has disputed the findings. Photograph: Timon Schneider/AlamyLavelle said these discharges contributed to the pollution in the North Sea at Marsden, where there is a beach designated as bathing water, and the pollution to the beaches and rock pools at Whitburn.To retrieve 2022 data, he asked the water company via environmental information regulations and FoI to provide a detailed description of all of the sewage discharge records, the times of discharges and the volumes of sewage discharges.The regulator Ofwat and the Environment Agency are investigating more than 2,000 treatment works across the water network for suspected illegal sewage dumping.The investigations, which are likely to report this year, could impose significant fines or lead to the prosecution of some companies.Citing the investigations as a reason, Northumbrian Water refused to release the 2022 data to Lavelle, saying to do so “would adversely affect the course of justice, the ability of a person to receive a fair trial or the ability of a public authority to conduct an inquiry of a criminal or disciplinary nature”.When Lavelle asked for an internal review, Northumbrian Water argued that to release the sewage data could cause adverse public opinion to influence the regulators as they carried out their investigation.The Information Commissioner’s Office, asked to examine Lavelle’s request, supported the water company and said it was in the public interest for the company to keep the information secret.But after an appeal to the first tier tribunal, the panel found in favour of Lavelle and told the water company it was not satisfied that releasing the information would affect the course of justice.The tribunal found it was in the public interest to release the information, and the water company had not adequately considered the need for transparency in its refusal to provide the information.“It has been like pulling teeth,” said Lavelle. “They are more intent on closing down my requests for information than being transparent and providing the information which is in the public interest.”Northumbrian Water said in a statement: “We are committed to protecting and enhancing coasts, rivers and watercourses in all areas of our operation and have proactively published a number of industry-leading pledges to generate further improvements.“We have a strong track record when it comes to the environment and have retained the excellent or good rating from the Environment Agency in each of the last three years. We note the tribunal court’s decision regarding the Whitburn pumping station and are considering our next steps.”The ruling came as seven water companies published near-real-time maps of their sewage discharges from combined sewer overflows, which was required under the Enviornment Act. Those companies are Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water), Yorkshire Water, Severn Trent, Northumbrian Water, Anglian Water, Wessex Water and United Utilities.

Why no one won this year’s water wars

California's wet winter exposed enduring conflicts between fish and farms.

SACRAMENTO, California — California is having a really good water year. But all the rain and snow is doing almost nothing to lubricate the state’s perpetual conflicts between fish and farms.Neither farmers, cities nor environmentalists feel like they’re getting enough water from the State Water Project and the federally run Central Valley Project, a semi-coordinated labyrinth of reservoirs, canals and pumping stations that together irrigates nearly 4 million acres.Farmers and cities are arguing that the storms mean they should get more than the 40 percent of their contractual deliveries that they’ve been promised so far (they get about 63 percent on average). They’d have more of an argument if endangered fish weren’t also getting massacred at the pumps: The water projects have already exceeded their take limit for the season for steelhead trout, meaning they’re violating the Endangered Species Act.Everyone is frustrated with Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden’s administrations, which operate the systems, as well as with themselves:“That water is not recoverable,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents the 27 water agencies that get supplies from the State Water Project, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Santa Clara Valley Water District. “We should all be in timeout right now.”With so many cooks in the kitchen, there’s a variety of culprits. Westlands Water District, which gets its water from the CVP, is blaming the Biden administration, which runs the project through the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service.Westlands General Manager Allison Febbo said she thinks the high steelhead losses could have been due to the fish returning in above-average numbers, rather than to pumping decisions. She’s calling for a hearing in the Republican-led House into how the CVP applied the Endangered Species Act this year.“We are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “The actions being taken have real world consequences in our district, and we don’t see those actions particularly substantiated.”Jon Rosenfield, science director of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper, is pointing at Newsom’s Department of Water Resources, which he argues loosened protections for fish during the last drought.“This is a direct result of the Newsom administration waiving its water quality rules, which it already acknowledges are inadequate, for three years in a row,” he said. He also said the state ran its pumps too early, when there were a lot of fish present.Newsom administration officials are penitent and vowing to change, but are also making the argument for more investment.DWR Director Karla Nemeth called the low allocations “unusual” and traced them in part to more real-time efforts by the state to protect endangered fish after a severe die-off roughly two decades ago prompted lawsuits.She outlined a series of “fixes,” including increasing genetic testing of fish to better figure out which ones absolutely need to be protected and building the Delta Conveyance Project, a controversial tunnel to reroute deliveries underneath the overplumbed Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.“This year was kind of a poster child for infrastructure that’s not really up to the challenge of the next century, and more work that needs to be done,” she said in an interview.(Reclamation didn’t respond to a request for comment, while NMFS said “We limit impacts on threatened and endangered species based on all of the best available science to protect them and provide opportunities for their recovery.”)The fight will continue playing out in several venues: State and federal agencies are currently renegotiating the underlying fish-science documents that guide management decisions, which are still governed by Trump-era rules.And last week, they kicked off the monthlong process to plan summer releases from Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in the state, which will crystallize the conflict as well as anything: Water managers will try to find a balance between releasing water for farms when they need it in the summer and maintaining cool-enough water reserves to send down rivers to protect endangered salmon eggs in the fall.On one point, everyone agrees: California’s water system is broken, whether it’s a wet, a dry or average year.“I don’t think that we are well-positioned for the type of adaptive management and real-time response that’s going to be needed in order to maximize our resources for the environment and for people and farms,” Pierre said. “This year really highlighted that.”Like this content? Consider signing up for POLITICO’s California Climate newsletter.

U.S. Plan to Protect Oceans Has a Problem, Some Say: Too Much Fishing

An effort to protect 30 percent of land and waters would count some commercial fishing zones as conserved areas.

New details of the Biden administration’s signature conservation effort, made public this month amid a burst of other environmental announcements, have alarmed some scientists who study marine protected areas because the plan would count certain commercial fishing zones as conserved.The decision could have ripple effects around the world as nations work toward fulfilling a broader global commitment to safeguard 30 percent of the entire planet’s land, inland waters and seas. That effort has been hailed as historic, but the critical question of what, exactly, counts as conserved is still being decided.This early answer from the Biden administration is worrying, researchers say, because high-impact commercial fishing is incompatible with the goals of the efforts.“Saying that these areas that are touted to be for biodiversity conservation should also do double duty for fishing as well, especially highly impactful gears that are for large-scale commercial take, there’s just a cognitive dissonance there,” said Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, a marine biologist at Oregon State University who led a group of scientists that in 2021 published a guide for evaluating marine protected areas.The debate is unfolding amid a global biodiversity crisis that is speeding extinctions and eroding ecosystems, according to a landmark intergovernmental assessment. As the natural world degrades, its ability to give humans essentials like food and clean water also diminishes. The primary driver of biodiversity declines in the ocean, the assessment found, is overfishing. Climate change is an additional and ever-worsening threat.Fish are an important source of nutrition for billions of people around the world. Research shows that effectively conserving key areas is an key tool to keep stocks healthy while also protecting other ocean life.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.