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Water Resources Planning [4 ed.]
 9781442253995, 1442253991

Table of contents :
Brief Contents
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Introduction: The Watery Planet
2. The Planning Process
3. Hydrologic Fundamentals
4. Water Use and Supply
5. Water Law
6. Federal Agencies, Legislation, and Intergovernmental Cooperation
7. State and Intergovernmental Agencies and Programs
8. Water Quality
9. Economic Analysis
10. Floodplain Management
11. Stormwater Planning and Management
12. Models in Water Resources Planning
13. Other Planning Issues
14. Future Directions
Appendix A. Federal Information Sources
Appendix B. Conversion Table
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors

Citation preview

WATER RESOURCES PLANNING Fundamentals for an Integrated Framework Fourth Edition

Andrew A. Dzurik Florida State University Tara Shenoy Kulkarni Norwich University Bonnie Kranzer Boland Johns Hopkins University

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Executive Editor: Susan McEachern Editorial Assistant: Katelyn Turner Senior Marketing Manager: Kim Lyons Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text. Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. First edition 1990. Second edition 1996. Third edition 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dzurik, Andrew Albert, 1940– author. | Kulkarni, Tara S., 1977– author. | Boland, Bonnie Kranzer, 1952– author. Title: Water resources planning : fundamentals for an integrated framework / Andrew A. Dzurik, Tara Shenoy Kulkarni, Bonnie Kranzer Boland. Description: Fourth edition. | Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030018 (print) | LCCN 2018035926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442254008 (electronic) | ISBN 9781442253995 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Water resources development—Planning. | Water resources development— United States—Planning. | Water—Law and legislation. | Water—Law and legislation— United States. Classification: LCC HD1691 (ebook) | LCC HD1691 .D96 2018 (print) | DDC 333.91/170973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030018

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Brief Contents

List of Figures and Tables

xvii

Preface xxi Acknowledgments xxiii Abbreviations xxv  1  Introduction: The Watery Planet

1

 2  The Planning Process

24

 3  Hydrologic Fundamentals

64

 4  Water Use and Supply

88

 5  Water Law

131

 6  Federal Agencies, Legislation, and Intergovernmental Cooperation

147

 7  State and Intergovernmental Agencies and Programs

172

 8  Water Quality

194

 9  Economic Analysis

232

10  Floodplain Management

270

11  Stormwater Planning and Management

305

12  Models in Water Resources Planning

328

— iii —

iv

Brief Contents

13  Other Planning Issues

361

14  Future Directions

386

Appendix A. Federal Information Sources

403

Appendix B: Conversion Table

411

Glossary 413 Bibliography 429 Index 459 About the Authors

477

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

xvii

Preface xxi Acknowledgments xxiii Abbreviations xxv   1 Introduction: The Watery Planet

1

Troubled Waters 2 Calming Seas 5 Navigating the Path 7 Watermarks 9 Historical Perspectives on Water Resources Development 9 Evolution of Water Resources Planning 11 1800 to 1900: Emergence of Water Resources Planning 12 1901 to 1933: Multipurpose Projects 12 1934 to 1943: Economic Considerations 14 1944 to 1969: Multiobjective Focus 15 1970 to 1980: Environmental Era 16 1981 to 2018: Devolution and Environmental Protection 18 Diving In: Scope of the Book 18 Study Questions 20 Notes 21

—v—

Contents

vi

  2 The Planning Process

24

Introduction 24 Key Terms 25 Scope of Planning 26 Levels of Planning 26 The Water Resources Planning Process 27 Planning Steps 29 Problem Identification 29 Data Collection and Analysis 29 Goals and Objectives 32 Problem Diagnosis 34 Formulation of Alternatives 34 Analysis of Alternatives 34 Evaluation and Recommendations 35 Implementation 37 Surveillance and Monitoring 37 The Rational Planning Model 38 Incorporation of Planning in Federal Activity 38 The Benefit-Cost Approach 38 Problems with the Rational Planning Model 39 Technical Adjustments 40 Incrementalism 40 Optimization 40 Multiple-Objective Approach 41 Social and Political Adjustments 41 Advocacy Planning 41 Citizen Participation 42 Radical Planning 42 Trends in Planning 43 Risk Assessment 43 Alternative Dispute Resolution 44 Adaptive Management 46 Collaborative Governance 48 Integrated Water Resources Management 50 Savannah River Basin 52 McKenzie River Basin 54 Benefits of IWRM 55 Barriers to IWRM 56 Obstacles to Planning 57 Benefits of Planning 58 Study Questions 59 Notes 60

Contents



  3 Hydrologic Fundamentals

vii

64

Introduction 64 Key Terms 65 The Hydrologic Cycle and Water Budget 67 Hydrologic Cycle 67 Precipitation 68 Infiltration 69 Evaporation and Transpiration 69 Surface Runoff 70 Groundwater Flow 70 Water Budget 71 Groundwater Systems 73 Occurrence 73 Porosity 75 Permeability 76 Optimal Yield 78 Groundwater Quality 79 Surface Water 79 Occurrence 80 Watersheds 81 Surface Water Quality 83 Groundwater/Surface Interactions 84 Conclusion 84 Study Questions 85 Notes 85   4 Water Use and Supply

88

Introduction 88 Key Terms 89 Water Use 91 Water Use by Category 94 Thermoelectric Power Use 94 Irrigation Use 95 Public Supply Use 98 Industrial Use 100 Mining, Aquaculture, and Livestock Uses 100 Water Supply 101 Alternative Sources (or Supply) 105 Desalination 106 Reclaimed Water 106 Planning for Future Water Use 107

Contents

viii

Forecasting Methodologies 107 Demand Forecasting 107 Time Extrapolation 108 Single-Coefficient Methods 108 Multiple-Coefficient Methods 109 Probabilistic Analysis 111 IWR-MAIN 111 Understanding Municipal Water Use 111 Explaining Municipal Water Use 112 State of the Art 115 Conclusion 115 Water Conservation 116 Supply Forecasting 117 Reservoirs 118 Mass Diagram Analysis 119 Sequent-Peak Method 121 Optimization Models 121 The Water “Supply” Problem 122 Conclusion 124 Study Questions 125 Notes 126   5 Water Law

131

Introduction 131 Key Terms 132 Riparian Rights 132 Prior Appropriation 133 Summary of Riparian and Prior Appropriation Rights 136 Groundwater Law 136 Federal Reserved Water Rights 138 National Parks, Forests, Monuments, and Military Installations 139 Native American Water Rights 140 Recent Issues 142 State Surface Water Law 142 General Stream Adjudication 142 Reallocation of Water Supplies 142 Water Banking 143 Water Rights in Groundwater and Off-Reservation Water Marketing 144 Study Questions 144 Notes 145



Contents

ix

  6 Federal Agencies, Legislation, and Intergovernmental Cooperation 147 Introduction 147 Key Terms 147 Organizational Structure 149 Federal Legislation 151 Water Resources Development Legislation 151 Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 151 Reclamation Act of 1902 151 Federal Water Power Act of 1920 152 National Flood Insurance Program 153 Water Resources Development Acts 153 Environmental Legislation 155 Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 156 Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 156 Clean Water Act of 1977 156 CWA Section 404: Dredge and Fill Permits 157 CWA Section 401: National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System 157 Water Quality Act of 1987 158 Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 159 National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 161 Endangered Species Act of 1973 161 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 162 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation,   and Liability Act of 1980 163 Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 163 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 164 Intergovernmental Activities 164 Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin 164 Chesapeake Bay 166 Study Questions 168 Notes 169 7

State and Intergovernmental Agencies and Programs

172

Introduction 172 Local Agencies 173 State Agencies 173 California 174 Colorado 175 Texas 177

Contents

x

Wisconsin 178 Pennsylvania 179 Florida 180 Intergovernmental Water Projects and Programs 185 Everglades National Park 185 Chesapeake Bay Restoration 186 CALFED Bay-Delta Program/Delta Stewardship Council 188 Conclusion 190 Study Questions 191 Notes 192   8 Water Quality

194

Introduction 194 Key Terms 195 The Hydrologic Cycle and Water Quality 195 Nature’s Effects on Water Quality 197 Chemical Characteristics and Measures 198 Physical Characteristics and Measures 199 Example 1. Physical and Chemical Water Quality Characteristics: Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis 201 Biological Characteristics and Measures 204 Groundwater Quality 205 Example 2. Groundwater Contamination: Industrial Waste Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) Contamination in New York and Vermont 208 Saltwater Intrusion 209 Domestic Pollution 209 Industrial Pollution 210 Agricultural Pollution 210 Quality Control 211 Emerging Contaminants and Water Quality 211 1. Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) 213 2. Nanomaterials 213 Impacts of Land Use on Water Quality 214 Open Space and Agriculture 215 Example 3. Land-Water Interaction: Hydraulic Fracturing 217 Urban Land Use Development 218 Industrial Use 219 Land-Water Interfaces 220 Water Quality Planning: The Legislative Take 221 Wastewater Planning 224 Conclusion 227

Contents



Study Questions Notes   9 Economic Analysis

xi

227 228 232

Introduction 232 Key Terms 233 Who Owns the Water? 234 Principles of Public Investment Analysis 236 Demand, Supply, and Production Functions 236 Equity versus Efficiency 238 Comparisons of Value and Time 239 Benefit-Cost Analysis 241 Discounting Techniques 243 Cash Flow 244 Compound-Interest Factors 246 Hypothetical Example 249 1. Costs 249 2. Benefits 250 Present-Worth (or Present-Value) Method 251 Rate-of-Return Method 252 Benefit-Cost Ratio Method 253 Identifying Benefits and Costs 253 Limitations and Cautions 254 Annual-Cost Method 255 Cost Allocation and Cost Sharing 255 Allocation Rules 256 Cost Sharing 257 Study Questions 259 Notes 260 Appendix 9-A 262 10 Floodplain Management

270

Introduction 270 Key Terms 270 Flooding and Floodplains 271 Floodplains 272 Streamflow Analysis 273 Runoff 273 Frequency 277 How Floods Matter 279 Recent Floods 280

xii

Contents

Floods and Floodplains: History, Policies, and Legislation 282 Early History 282 Flooding-Related Policy and Legislation 283 The National Flood Insurance Program 287 Twenty-First Century Issues and Reforms 289 Flood Resilience 291 Flood Damage Reduction Measures 292 Modifying Human Susceptibility to Flood Damage and Disruption 292 Land Use Controls 293 Modifying Flooding 296 Modifying the Impact of Flooding on Individuals and Communities 297 Flood Insurance 298 Conclusion 299 Study Questions 300 Notes 300 11 Stormwater Planning and Management

305

Introduction 305 Key Terms 306 What Is in Stormwater Discharges? 307 Legal/Regulatory Framework 309 Phase I NPDES Permit 309 Phase II NPDES Permit 310 Managing Municipal Stormwater Pollution 311 Stormwater Management Programs and Plans 312 Example: Portland, Oregon, Stormwater Management Program (SWMP) 313 Stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs) 316 Best Management Practices (BMPs) 316 Structural BMPs/Green Infrastructure 318 Infiltration Systems 319 Pervious Pavement 319 Infiltration Trenches and Wells 319 Detention Systems 320 Retention Systems 320 Constructed Wetlands 321 Filtration Systems 322 Bioretention 322 Nonstructural BMPs 324 Education, Recycling, and Source Controls 324 Maintenance Practices 324

Contents



xiii

Conclusion 325 Study Questions 325 Notes 326 12 Models in Water Resources Planning

328

Introduction 328 Key Terms 330 Model Types 331 Simulation Models 333 Optimization Models 335 Model Structure 335 Linear and Nonlinear Models 336 Search Techniques 338 Statistical Techniques 339 Regression Models 340 Decision Support Systems/Collaborative Decision-Making Models 341 Model Selection 344 A Note on Data 345 Applications 346 Water Quality Models 347 Groundwater Models 347 Stormwater and Watershed Models 349 Optimization Models 350 DSS/Collaborative Decision-Making Models 350 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Water Models 352 GIS Examples 352 Conclusion 354 Study Questions 356 Notes 357 13 Other Planning Issues

361

Key Terms 361 Fish and Wildlife 362 Wetlands 365 Navigation 371 Harbors and Ports 372 Waterways 372 Recreation 375 Hydroelectric Power 379 Environmental Impacts 380 Study Questions 383 Notes 384

Contents

xiv

14 Future Directions Reflections Key Terms Storm Clouds (Future Challenges) Global Scale Climate Change Water Security The Water-Energy-Food Nexus Water Pricing, Privatization, and Globalization National Scale (United States) Infrastructure Legacy Data Challenges Conserving and Protecting Water Resources Cybersecurity Sunny Skies Setting Sail: The Water Resources Planner Study Questions Notes Appendix A: Federal Information Sources

386 386 387 388 388 388 389 390 392 393 393 393 394 395 395 398 399 399 403

Introduction 403 Federal Involvement in Water Management 404 Data Collection and Forecasting 404 Water Management Agreements 404 Water Storage and Conveyance Facilities (Dams, Reservoirs, and Water Distribution Systems) 404 Water Rights (Holding Rights to Lands They Manage or as Trustees for Tribal Water Rights) 404 Environmental Protection (Implementing Laws Such as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, or the Safe Drinking Water Act) 405 Water Quantity–Related Data 405 Streamflow and Groundwater Data 405 Precipitation Data 406 Water Use Trend Data and Other Water Resource Data 406 USACE Institute for Water Resources 406 NOAA–Digital Coast Partnership 407 Water Quality–Related Data 407 EPA CWA–Related Data Sources 407 EPA’s Water Research/Data Portal 408 EPA SDWA–Related Data Sources 408 USGS Water Quality Information 408 Note 409



Appendix B: Conversion Table

Contents

xv

411

Glossary 413 Bibliography 429 Index 459 About the Authors

477

List of Figures and Tables

Figures 1.1 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate-Related Disasters in the United States

3

2.1 IWRM: Interrelationships between Environmental, Socioeconomic, and Governance Systems as Related to Water Resources

51

3.1 Global Water Resources Distribution

65

3.2 The Hydrologic Cycle

67

3.3 Hypothetical Water Budget

71

3.4 From Precipitation to Groundwater

74

3.5 General Occurrence of the Principal Aquifer Types in the United States

75

3.6a and 3.6b Chesapeake Bay Watershed and Bay Segments

82

4.1 US Population and Total Freshwater Withdrawals by Source, 1950–2010

92

4.2 Withdrawal Trends in the United States by Water Use Category, 1950–2010

94

4.3 Relative Usage of Irrigation Water Withdrawals by Various States in 2012

96

— xvii —

xviii

List of Figures and Tables

4.4  Irrigated Acres and Applied Water Use in 17 Western States, 1984–2013 97 4.5  Extent of State Shortages Likely for the Next Decade under Average Water Conditions

102

4.6  Levels of Water Demand Analysis

110

4.7  Inputs and Outputs of the IWR-MAIN Forecasting Model

112

4.8  Reservoir Storage Zones

118

4.9   Mass Diagram Using Cumulative Inflow

119

4.10  Mass Diagram Using Cumulative Net Inflow

120

4.11  Specific Sectors of Water Resources Planning and Management

123

7.1  Florida Water Management Districts

183

7.2  Legal Framework for Florida Water Planning

183

8.1  Effects of the Hydrologic Cycle on Water Quality

196

8.2  Typical Routes of Groundwater Contamination

206

8.3  Groundwater Movement in an Agricultural System

207

8.4  Migration of Saline Water Caused by Lowering Stream Water Levels 209 8.5  The Hydrologic System Controlling Groundwater Contamination

212

9.1  Demand and Supply Curves

237

9.2  Hypothetical Cash Flow Diagram

245

9.3  Selected Compound Interest Factors

247

10.1 Typical Hyetograph

274

10.2 Inflow and Outflow Hydrographs

275

10.3 Unit Hydrograph

276

10.4 Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Costs in the United States (1980–2017) (CPI Adjusted)

282

10.5 Elements of Flood Damage Prevention

285

11.1 Connections between Stormwater, Wastewater, and Drinking Water 306 11.2 Water Cycle Changes Associated with Urbanization

308

11.3 Detention Basin Cross-Section

320



List of Figures and Tables

xix

11.4 Typical Cross-Section of a Retention Pond System

321

11.5 Constructed Wetland System

322

11.6 Delaware Sand Filter

323

12.1 IWRM: Interrelationships between Environmental, Socioeconomic, and Governance Systems as Related to Water Resources

342

12.2 Common Components of Many Decision Support Systems

343

12.3 Data-Decision Tree

346

14.1 Cumulative Number of Discontinued Stream Gages with Thirty-Plus Years of Data, 1900–2012

394

Tables   3.1 Some Beneficial Attributes of Groundwater

73

  4.1 Trends in Use of Alternative Sources by States, 2003 and 2013

105

  4.2 Water Use Sectors and Explanatory Variables

113

  4.3 Calculation of Storage Capacity by the Sequent Peak Procedure

121

  7.1 States with Assessments, 2003 and 2013

191

  8.1 BOD of Wastes from Selected Industries

216

  8.2 Summary of Assessed Waters in the United States

223

  8.3 Typical Outline for Comprehensive Planning Report

225

  8.4 Role of Land Use Planning and Control in Water Quality Management

227

  9.1 Hypothetical Cash Flow Analysis for a Flood Control and Water Supply Project

245

  9.2 USACE Cost Shares for Construction and O&M

258

10.1 Typical Values of the Rational Runoff Coefficient

274

12.1 Major Research Centers for Water Resources Modeling

329

12.2 Selected Systems Analysis Techniques

333

Preface

W

ater continues to be an extremely important issue both in the United States and in the entire world as climate change and increasing populations make new claims on a resource that has remained relatively fixed for ages. The subject has drawn considerable attention and expertise from a number of professions, including engineering, law, economics, geography, geology, regional planning, and biology. Water resources planning cuts across several fields as it focuses on future needs for and conditions of this essential item. This book deals with water resources planning and management by addressing the resource itself, the legal and administrative bases for and the economic and forecasting factors in planning, the planning process and the role of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), and then the various functional aspects of water resources, particularly water quantity and quality and including floodplain management and stormwater. It also touches on a number of other functional areas such as fish, wildlife and wetlands, recreation, navigation, and hydropower. It provides an overview of quantitative models and computer applications in water resources planning and management and looks at future directions in the field. Finally, the book closes with overall observations and conclusions, and it surveys future directions: What issues loom or will emerge that will further challenge the field, both nationally and globally? The book is intended for use as a text in advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate level courses in water resources planning and management. The breadth of the field suggests that different readers will find some chapters of greater interest than others and some chapters more difficult than others. Because of the field’s diversity, it is difficult to establish any single set of — xxi —

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Preface

background knowledge as being suitable or necessary for a course using this text. A moderate level of math and science, a reasonable level of intellectual maturity, and a firm interest in the topic should be sufficient for doing well. Beyond this level one might expect to develop particular areas of special interest in much greater detail. With the exception of the first and last chapters, each chapter in this book covers a specialized area in the water resources field and could provide the basis for additional courses. Using this book as a course text should be just the starting point for studying water resources planning and management. Supplemental course material should be provided and investigated in the way of case studies, special projects, water resource plans, current national and international water policy issues, and so on. Students and instructors are encouraged to look beyond the limitations of this book and pursue special topics in greater detail. The addition of numerous website addresses to this edition of Water Resources Planning will provide a good starting point for further examination of topics and issues of particular interest. In addition, there is a wealth of literature in the various areas covered here: books, journals, newsletters, reports, and popular periodicals, among other sources. One can also find many internet entries, conferences, movies, and special television productions on various aspects of water resources. It is a lively and constantly changing field that provides opportunities for interesting and challenging study and debate. Water is the story of our planet; it supports all life as we know it both today and into the future. Think of it as a scarce, valuable, and essential resource upon which all life depends. From the use of it in our daily routines to the misuse of it all over the globe, we as a species can do better. This book focuses on how water resources planning can both lessen and help resolve water problems in order to better address and sustain the complicated and interconnected social, economic, and environmental needs of all of our planet’s inhabitants.

Acknowledgments

W

e owe thanks and gratitude to a number of people over the years who have helped in the preparation of this book and who commented on portions of the book in its various draft forms and several editions. We also thank the many students who have been in our courses dealing with water, for their interest, questions, and comments on the many aspects of water resources. The editorial staff of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers were a joy to work with in the give-and-take process inherent in getting our book writing and rewriting started and finished. It may have been a few years, but they were always cooperative in dealing with both the normal and the unexpected delays and changes along the way. Susan McEachern, editorial director, gave frequent words of understanding and encouragement to all of us. Her able assistant, Katelyn Turner, always helpful and pleasant in assisting us, was responsible for preparing the manuscript for production. We owe a debt of gratitude to Susan and Katelyn. We would like to acknowledge the assistance of Bonnie Kranzer Boland’s husband, Dr. John J. Boland, who reviewed several of the book’s chapters, including chapter 9, “Economic Analysis,” where he provided perspectives on the new PR&G and assisted in revising some mathematical equations. Bonnie is also grateful for his insights regarding forecasting methodologies in chapter 4, “Water Use and Supply,” particularly for his input to the water conservation section as well as his personal contribution of the section entitled, “Understanding Municipal Water Use.” Finally, she wishes to thank John for his patience, understanding, encouragement, and counsel throughout the book’s production. Tara S. Kulkarni would also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Norwich University Faculty Development program, and — xxiii —

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Acknowledgments

by the Office of Research at Norwich University for research grants to complete portions of the book. In addition, a Research Apprentice (RA) grant from the university allowed her student, Elizabeth Ells, to work as an RA on this project and contribute to various chapters in the book. Tara is especially grateful to Dr. Dzurik for the opportunity to be on this team, and for the constant support and encouragement from her husband, Aniket, and daughter, Diya, as well as her extended family and colleagues, without whom this effort would have been exponentially more challenging. Lastly, Andrew A. Dzurik thanks his wife, Diane, for her ongoing moral support, and for her patience and encouragement to start and continue working on this fourth edition. Thanks also to friends and family who occasionally asked how the book was coming along. Without Diane’s occasional nudging, not nagging, and the ongoing efforts of my colleagues, Tara and Bonnie, this project would be far from finished. Many thanks to all.

Abbreviations

ADR AMI AMR APA ASR AWQMP AWWA BEA BLS BOD BTEX CAD CADRe CAFO CEAM CEQ CERCLA CFR COD CPP CSO CSS CWA DDT

alternative dispute resolution advanced metering infrastructure automatic meter reading American Planning Association Aquifer Storage and Recovery Areawide Water Quality Management Plan American Water Works Association Bureau of Economic Analysis Bureau of Labor Statistics biochemical oxygen demand benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene computer aided design computer aided dispute resolution Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations Center for Exposure Assessment Modeling Council on Environmental Quality Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act Code of Federal Regulations chemical oxygen demand Continuing Planning Process combined sewer overflows combined sewer systems Clean Water Act dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane — xxv —

xxvi

DEP DHS DNR DO DOI DPR DSS EIS EPA EQ ESA ESA EU EWEB FDEP FEMA FERC FIFRA FIRA FIRM FONSI FPC FWPA GAO GI GIS GPO GPS GSI HBN HEC IA IEM IGWMC IM IPCC IRBM IWA IWR IWRM LA LDC LID

Abbreviations

Department of Environmental Protection (Pennsylvania) Department of Homeland Security Department of Natural Resources (Wisconsin) dissolved oxygen (US) Department of Interior direct potable reuse decision support system environmental impact statement (US) Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Quality (plan or objective) Economics and Statistics Administration Endangered Species Act European Union Eugene Water and Electric Board Florida Department of Environmental Protection Federal Emergency Management Agency Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act Flood Insurance Reform Act flood insurance rate map finding of no significant impact Federal Power Commission Federal Water Power Act Government Accountability Office Green Infrastructure geographic information systems Government Printing Office global positioning systems green stormwater infrastructure Hydrologic Benchmark Network Hydrologic Engineering Center integrated assessment integrated environmental management International Ground Water Modeling Center integrated modeling Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change integrated river basin management International Water Association Institute for Water Resources integrated water resources management load allocations Legacy Data Center low impact development



MAIN MCDA MS4 NASA NASQAN NED NEPA NFIP NFIRA NGWA NIST NOAA NPB NPDES NPL NPS NRB NRC NRCS NRPB NSWP NWIS O&M OECD OFS OTA OWC P&G P&S PCB PFC PFOA PFOS P.L. POTW PPCPs PR&G RCRA SARA SCADA SCM SCRB SDWA

Abbreviations

xxvii

Municipal and Industrial (name of a computerized model) multicriteria decision analysis municipal separate storm sewer systems National Aeronautics and Space Administration National Stream Quality Accounting Network national economic development (plan or objective) National Environmental Policy Act National Flood Insurance Program National Flood Insurance Reform Act National Groundwater Association National Institute of Standards and Technology National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Planning Board National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System National Priorities List nonpoint pollutant source National Resources Board National Resources Committee Natural Resources Conservation Service National Resources Planning Board National Stormwater Program National Water Information System operation and maintenance Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office of Federal Sustainability Office of Technology Assessment organic wastewater contaminants Principles and Guidelines Principles and Standards polychlorinated biphenyls perfluorinated compound perfluorooctanoic acid perfluoroctane sulfonate public law publicly owned treatment works pharmaceuticals and personal care products Principles, Requirements, and Guidelines Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act supervisory control and data acquisition stormwater control measures separable costs-remaining benefits Safe Drinking Water Act

xxviii

SFWMD SPAC SRF SSS STA STELLA STORET STP SWM SWMP TMDL TSS TVA TWDB UN US USACE USDA USFWS USGS WATSTORE WE&RF WEAP WLA WMD WQX WRC WRDA WRF

Abbreviations

South Florida Water Management District Stormwater Policy Advisory Committee state revolving fund separate sanitary sewer stormwater treatment areas Systems Thinking, Experiential Learning Laboratory with Animation Storage and Retrieval database sewage treatment plant Stanford Watershed Model stormwater management program Total Maximum Daily Load (program) total suspended solids Tennessee Valley Authority Texas Water Development Board United Nations United States US Army Corps of Engineers US Department of Agriculture US Fish and Wildlife Service US Geological Survey Water Data Storage and Retrieval System Water Environment and Reuse Foundation Water Evaluation and Planning (software) waste load allocations water management district Water Quality Data Water Resources Council Water Resources Development Act Water Research Foundation

1 Introduction The Watery Planet

A

s Loren Eiseley wrote in The Immense Journey, “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”1 Our earth was described as a “pale blue dot” by Carl Sagan2 in a book by the same name; he was inspired by a photo taken by Voyager 1 as it departed our planetary system to explore the outer parts of the solar system in 1990. As Voyager 1 took one last look back before venturing onward, as the earth glistened in the sunlight, the inspirational words of Carl Sagan were born. In part, he stated, Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.3

Water indeed is the story of our planet. Wrapped beneath the stratosphere and nestled within the troposphere, our biosphere lives, breathes, and cannot exist without water. Compared to other planets of our solar system, the uniqueness of our living environment is striking. As Strahler and Strahler report, ours is the only known planet that has its favorable temperature ranges, the great oceans, and a comparatively dense, oxygen-rich atmosphere. Hence, “there is —1—

2

Chapter 1

really no other place for Man to live but on planet Earth.”4 This is a textbook about water resources planning. But it is more than that. It is a textbook that recognizes the paramount importance of water on this planet to sustain all living things, both present and future. From that vantage, the book hopes to steer the reader through a myriad of water-related issues whose problems and outlooks are lessened or resolved through the lens of planning. Troubled Waters Television news and newspaper headlines are increasingly documenting the disasters caused by extreme climate events in recent years. Massive storms, extreme droughts, major floods, and changing water levels in the past few years have reinforced the known vulnerability of water-related activities and the needs of humans as well as the natural system. The year 2017 was the third warmest year (global average) recorded in the 138-year climate record of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), following 2016 and 2015, the warmest and second warmest on record, respectively.5 Between 2012 and 2016 the drought in the western United States hit California hard, leading that state to be in a state of emergency from 2014 to 2017. In January 2017, the National Drought Mitigation Center6 reported that California experienced a 19 percent increase in water levels in major reservoirs due to a series of winter storms. Areas under extreme drought fell from 41 percent to 2 percent over the same month, while at the same time, nearly half of the state was still experiencing moderate to severe drought conditions. In February 2017, as the storms continued, Northern California experienced widespread flooding. Counties and cities downstream from the Oroville Dam spillway issued an evacuation order for 188,000 residents over concerns about the possible failure of portions of those structures.7 In 2017 alone, the United States experienced sixteen distinct billion-dollar disaster events, tying 2011 for the highest annual number. These events included Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, making 2017 the most expensive hurricane season in US history8 (see figure 1.1). Apart from the high frequency of these events, the cumulative cost exceeded $300 billion, a new US annual record. This total far exceeded that of 2005, the year of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Hurricane Harvey in late August 2017 is considered the worst tropical cyclone event in US history. Its strength and duration set a new US rainfall record of 153.87 centimeters (cm) (60.58 inches [in]), well beyond the previous record rainfall of 127 cm (50 in) set by Hurricane Hiki in Hawaii in 1952.9 Other kinds of atypical weather patterns have been observed. In 2015, New York and other northeastern US locales saw temperatures in the 70s in late



Introduction: The Watery Planet

3

FIGURE 1.1 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate-Related Disasters in the United States. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). (2018). U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Retrieved from https://www.ncdc.noaa .gov/billions/.

December,10 while record rain and floods were occurring in the Mississippi River basin and massive, unseasonable tornadoes ripped through Texas and other southern states.11 Globally, news reports stated that the South African city of Cape Town was set to run out of water by July 2018 and listed various measures that the government was forced to implement to push this inevitable deadline as far as it possibly could. The news also reported that several cities in India; Mexico City, Mexico; Melbourne, Australia; and Jakarta, Indonesia, were some of the other major international cities facing a similar crisis.12 Among recent record storms and flooding were those that occurred in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, in 2017; Europe, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, in 2016; India and northern Chile, in 2015; southeastern Europe; Alberta, Canada; and New York, in 2014; and northern India, southwestern China, Alberta, and Europe, in 2013.13 The list is not allinclusive. One can search precipitation data and find numerous drought and flood record extremes in different places throughout the world. The snapshots above are just illustrations of the range, variability, intensity, and spatial diversity of water-related crises that exist now or have recently existed. In short, places in the world are experiencing a wide array of water-related extremes, and these extremes highlight the variable nature of the hydrologic and climatological cycles, both local and global. The variability can be experienced

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in short to long duration over small to large regions. Given current trends, these situations will undoubtedly continue to occur and worsen. One of the main drivers of this water management challenge is global population, which continues to rise and brings with it increased competition and demand for available water supplies and land use changes. These changes threaten the short- and long-term water supplies and are usually accompanied by detrimental impacts to water quality and the natural systems. According to the United Nations (UN), global water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase over the last century. There is no global shortage of water, but an increasing number of regions are experiencing water scarcity. The UN reports that there is enough freshwater on the planet for seven billion people, but the water’s distribution is uneven and too much of it is wasted, polluted, and unsustainably managed.14 Added to this challenge are issues of governance, economic scarcity, environmental justice, and legacy water infrastructure whose care and maintenance has been neglected or never initiated due to a lack of financing. Although many of the issues mentioned above are monitored or measured at the global or national level, it is often at the regional or local level where the specific impacts occur. The planet is not running out of water, but competition exists for obtaining the cheapest, easiest, and cleanest sources. Simply stated, our planet has enough water, but in places it is either too abundant, too scarce, of unacceptable quality, or too expensive to obtain. These quandaries are not static; the dynamic nature of our changing climate and the hydrologic cycle coupled with land use changes and increased water demand ensures that these problems will persist spatially, temporally, and variably. This variability and change is expected to continue, because our human species has managed to not just use and change the resources on the planet but also now affect the planetary systems upon which our planet’s life systems depend, entering what many authors have labeled the Anthropocene. The British Geological Survey explains the term by stating, “Human driven biological, chemical, and physical changes to the Earth’s system are so great, rapid and distinct that they may characterize an entirely new [geologic] epoch—the Anthropocene.”15 A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)16 explains how increased surface temperatures on earth are causing two water-related issues: (1) sea level rise and increased frequency, intensity, and volatility and (2) divergent geographic exposures to extreme weather patterns. In 2018, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reported for the first time that some of the extremes of 2016 (record global heat, extreme heat over portions of Asia, and unusually warm waters in the Bering Sea) could not have “naturally” been possible without human-caused greenhouse gases.17 Furthermore, additional research states that it is likely that human-induced climate change played a significant role in the record rainfall event of Hurricane Harvey.18 These changing



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conditions contribute to a new nonstationarity in understanding and forecasting water supply and demand, and this adds a deeper complexity to water resources planning and management. Unfortunately, historically observed data and trends may prove inadequate to meaningfully plan for climate variability and extremes, further exacerbating complexity in calculations of risk and adversity. The impact of water resources use and management is both a natural as well as human-made phenomenon. Cosgrove and Loucks spell out the situation as they state, “Our planet no longer functions in the way it once did. Earth is currently confronted with a relatively new situation, the ability of humans to transform the atmosphere, degrade the biosphere, and alter the lithosphere and hydrosphere. The challenges of our current decade—resource constraints, financial instability, religious conflict, inequalities within and between countries, environmental degradation—all suggest that business-as-usual cannot continue.”19 This is an interesting, challenging, and important period for water resources planning and management as we try to deal with these ever-growing and changing events. Calming Seas Water is essential for human life, for flora and fauna, for agricultural and industrial production, and for water-based recreation and transportation. It is central to many national and international concerns, including health and safety, energy, food production, environmental quality, and regional economic development. Water is so much a part of our lives that it is often taken for granted, even though it is unequally distributed in time and space, thereby causing problems of “too much” or “not enough.” Issues of water quality and contamination of surface water and groundwater are also important. Although water is a vital resource and an essential requirement for individuals and societies, it can also be a deadly foe. Major floods frequently bring death and destruction throughout the world, and polluted waters often have serious health ramifications that render such water unfit for most human uses. In view of the many competing demands for water, its uneven spatial and temporal distribution, and the potential hazards from pollution and flooding, water resources planning is a significant activity in modern society. Water can no longer be treated as a free good; rather, it must be regarded as a resource to be carefully managed in order to maximize benefits and minimize negative effects. Planning is the first step in dealing with water resource issues, whether responding to immediate needs or anticipating those of some future time. Long-range comprehensive planning must be emphasized rather than the more narrowly focused project planning that has been so much a part of past water resources management.

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Consideration must be given in comprehensive water resources planning to a number of objectives, such as economic development, social well-being, equity and environmental justice, environmental quality, recreation, flood protection, adequacy of supplies, and political acceptability of plans. Many water resource experts maintain that most water problems are not primarily due to physical constraints or technical inabilities but to a lack of consensus on objectives or on methods of achieving those that have been set. Conflict frequently arises between developmental interests, environmental organizations, and other parties regarding which questions should be asked and what objectives should be pursued. Which of the many possible variations of water resource systems and policies should be implemented? What should be done about the direct and indirect present and future effects of climate change on water resources? The planning process is an important factor in attempting to achieve appropriate uses of water in the face of competing and often conflicting demands and with due consideration of many alternative schemes. Water resources planning covers a broad spectrum, as indicated earlier. One can deal with specific aspects of water resources, such as water supply or pollution control, or be concerned with comprehensive planning and management of water resources over a broad area, but not necessarily all aspects of a region’s water resources can be addressed simultaneously. We have evolved, however, to broader consideration of socioeconomic and environmental impacts and the interrelations among the many facets of water resources, even when dealing with some specific aspect(s). One of the more notable hallmarks of this evolution has been the acceptance and use of the concept of One Water or integrated water resources management (IWRM). Through integrating the socioeconomic, environmental, and governance systems of a study area, the concepts involve a planning process that promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising sustainability of vital ecosystems. As described further in chapter 2, the concept utilizes a systems-thinking approach that, when applied to urban areas, considers the water cycle as a single integrated system in which water flows are recognized as potential resources; the interconnectedness of water supply, groundwater, stormwater, and wastewater is optimized; and the combined impact of water use on flooding, water quality, wetlands, watercourses, estuaries, and coastal waters is recognized. The advent of tearing down old silo thinking and replacing it with planning through the framework of IWRM has reaped many benefits. Communication has been fostered across disciplines, science and understanding of the interrelationships between the natural systems and human uses and disruptions has matured, new planning tools and models are being explored and furthered, and the decision-making process itself is being enhanced, made more transparent and



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accountable. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is one of the nation’s most experienced water resources planning organizations. In 2017, the USACE expanded its planning processes to more fully include risk management, which allows for solving problems and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This risk-informed planning process also includes its SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, risk-informed, timely) planning initiative as well as current methods to improve efficiency of the planning process, such as its 3×3×3 rule (a planning study shall not exceed $3 million, 3 years, and 3 concurrent levels of review).20 Greater flexibility is being explored in finding new sources for water-short areas as alternative sources are being pursued (such as wastewater reuse, use of stormwater runoff, or desalination); meanwhile, demand management measures have slowed, and in some places reversed, water withdrawal trends. Rarely are water resource problems seen as unidimensional. The awareness of the interrelationships between the many components of water resources planning presents us with great opportunities for collaborative decision making and improved solutions and outcomes. For example, in Cambodia, 45 projects in 150 rural communities included the construction of 54 solar pumps, 102 pump wells, 5 irrigation ponds, and improved community ponds, which provided for access to water but also agricultural pursuits and overall economic stability in the region.21 Specific issues and challenges in water resources planning change over time and can differ by location, depending on corresponding needs. For example, water supply has been a crucial issue in Southern California for years, but water scarcity is now becoming an increasing concern in other parts of the United States and the world, as supplies are stressed by extensive agricultural irrigation, urban growth, and droughts. These topics are addressed in other chapters throughout this book. In the United States, water quality has received considerable attention nationally as increasing pollution of the nation’s rivers and lakes became evident. It continues to be a chronic problem and one that garners increasing attention. In the early years of the nation and continuing to the present, navigation has been viewed as essential to national economic development. In all these cases and more, planning has helped to clarify needs, identify alternatives, assess impacts, and select appropriate courses of action. Navigating the Path The USACE defines planning as a problem-solving activity, or a process that attempts to control future consequences through present actions. Planning thus becomes an iterative process for determining appropriate future actions through a sequence of choices.22 A planner is one who recognizes that the planning process exists to serve the public interest. In so doing the planner is in a unique position to lead, advocate, and shape community change.

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A planner, like many other professionals, must understand and abide by a code of ethics and standards for professional conduct. These include but are not limited to providing timely, adequate, clear, and accurate information on planning issues to all affected persons and to governmental decision-makers; having special concern for the long-range consequences of present actions and the interrelatedness of decisions; and giving people the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the development of plans and programs that may affect them. Participation should be broad enough to include those who lack formal organization or influence.23 As described by Cesanek et al., water resources “planning initiatives are beginning to reflect the need to address increasingly severe and unpredictable water management issues and they are taking on increasingly complex challenges. Progress is being made at the local level . . . as well as at the regional and national scales.”24 The role of the planner will vary depending on the scale and complexity of the problem at hand. A single planner may successfully resolve local water supply issues, or it may take the involvement of several teams of project-related individuals to bring a plan to fruition. The USACE often utilizes several teams of individuals with interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary expertise, typically reporting in a vertical fashion toward a final plan selection and approval.25 Decision making with respect to water resources involves a diverse set of people and issues. In providing municipal water supplies, for example, the level of control and involvement can include all levels of government as well as the private sector. The federal government has set standards for drinking water quality that must be met by municipal supplies. The states enforce these standards and may set even higher standards if they wish. Local governments often provide the water supply system through a local utility. Even within given levels of government, different departments may be involved. State and county health departments, for example, typically have a strong role in water supply issues, especially regarding water quality standards. At the same time, other departments may be involved with the source of the water, and still others with the construction and operation of the treatment and distribution system. Thus, to meet the community’s water needs, a city may design, finance, and build a water treatment plant as well as a distribution system in conjunction with state and federal programs, policies, and standards. In some cases, a private utility may buy water from a larger system, such as a large city, and provide it as a utility to a small development. In short, planning and decision making are required at all levels of government as well as in the private sector. Among the primary principles or objectives invoked at the federal level are health, safety, and welfare. Thus, a planning activity related to the above example would be to establish the need for national drinking water standards, obtain relevant information on health effects, determine risks and benefits of certain levels of water quality, and then establish appropriate national standards. An



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implementation program may include education, financial incentives and penalties, and assistance to state and local governments. Political, legal, and institutional considerations provide another set of important criteria for decision making. At the state level, for example, public attitudes may require higher drinking water standards than those set by the federal government. The decision for such standards in this case may be a response to political pressure rather than health considerations or other criteria. These standards then become part of the legal and institutional structure for drinking water programs. Economic considerations play an important role in water resources planning and decision making. One simple question involves the issue of affordability: Are funds available for a particular project? If funds are available, then there is the question of efficiency and maximization of benefits over costs. Again, using the above example, provision of water by a local government or private utility would be tied to costs and expected returns. Alternatives may be considered with different levels of service and different costs. Another important criterion for water-related decision making is the environmental impact of a proposed project. Potential impacts could lead to selection of one alternative over another or even to cancellation of a particular project. Perhaps one of the primary considerations for decision making is technical feasibility. Regardless of what problems are identified or which goals are established, a plan must be technically feasible before it can be considered with respect to economic and environmental issues. There are numerous other criteria for water resources planning and decision making, but those discussed above are among some of the more significant. They provide much of the explicit and implicit framework for the following chapters. Watermarks Historical Perspectives on Water Resources Development Historically, water has been treated as an inexhaustible natural resource, with little concern for costs, pollution, development of further resource supply, purification, or transport of water. In colonial America, water for residential use came from wells or other freshwater sources located nearby, with little concern for quality or adequacy of the supply. Agricultural use of water was minimal; during this period, much prime land existed that needed little if any irrigation. The irrigation that did exist was primitive—basically the diversion of small streams of water from creeks or rivers bordering the farmer’s property. Similarly, industrial use was often associated with nearby streams or lakes, and water was viewed as a free good necessary for industrial activity.

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With the population relatively small and concentrated in water-abundant areas, little need existed for conservation or careful water management. The minimal concern was due to the fact that many residents derived their water from their own wells. In effect, there was no water market, because households represented both the producer and consumer of the product. Furthermore, pollution was minimal, so there was not much need to worry about the quality of streams and lakes. Even as the need for water in cities grew, there was little recognition of water as a commodity or a market good. Augmented by the fact that water is a necessity for life, human or otherwise, it easily fit under the category of a “public good.” Municipalities and private water companies both produced and distributed water. Water was usually seen as an inexhaustible resource and priced accordingly. In time, those waterworks that were privately owned came to be regulated by government in order to ensure that the product would be continuously supplied as a necessary public good. As the US population expanded westward, the pioneers encountered arid and semiarid areas. Often, agricultural activity was impossible or greatly reduced in areas where water was not readily available. By the 1870s, irrigation by means of large ditches became increasingly prevalent in the West. Water still had a very low market price, but it began to be recognized as a resource that did have costs, however minimal (the costs of development of the resource base and transportation, for example).26 Today, the availability of water is generally taken for granted, especially in water-rich states. Whether for domestic, commercial, industrial, agricultural, or other purposes, it often seems that water can be found in endless supply. It is available in large quantities and in a variety of forms although not distributed uniformly over time and geographic space. Water managers often say that there is no shortage of water but only difficulty in getting the available water to where it is needed at low cost and with minimal negative impacts. Modern society has found a variety of solutions to make water more widely available at low cost. Municipalities have spent millions of dollars in developing water supply and distribution systems to satisfy the needs of domestic, commercial, and industrial users. With increases in the population and with continued urbanization, however, the demand for water has begun to place financial burdens on suppliers and consumers. The level of concern for water quality has followed a similar and consistent pattern. With low population density and plentiful water, streams and lakes remained relatively clean. But with urbanization and industrialization, surface waters started to become the receptacles for urban and industrial wastes. Continued development was accompanied by increased waste discharges and more pollution from surface runoff. As agriculture developed, the use of fertilizers and pesticides increased, and more pollutants were washed off the land into surface waters.



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A similar historical trend could be traced for other water resource issues. Flooding and flood damage, for example, increased as more and more people moved into floodplains and as natural channel flows became modified. Navigation grew substantially as the nation grew and population expanded westward. Water-based recreation became more troublesome as an increasing demand for recreational opportunities faced a limited supply. Essentially, regardless of which part of the world we are considering, all of these water issues boil down to a matter of growing populations, land use changes, and developing economies, leading to a continually increasing demand by and competition among users for a relatively fixed resource. With an abundance of generally high-quality water, there was minimal need for planning and management. We have reached a stage, however, where water must be treated as a scarce and valuable resource. In order to obtain optimal use of water resources, sound planning and management are essential. Evolution of Water Resources Planning Water resources planning has been practiced in one form or another since antiquity. One aspect of river basin planning can be traced back more than nine thousand years to development along the Indus, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. Irrigation for agriculture has been recorded for Jericho in 7,000 BCE.27 Recorded history covering several thousand years documents various forms of water management and engineered water systems in Egypt, Iraq, and China. The recorded histories portray a relatively sound system of planning and engineering based on the scientific principles of hydrology and hydraulics.28 Work by the Chinese in the seventh century CE included a sophisticated system of engineering structures for irrigation using both groundwater and surface water. Associated with this was a highly organized system of administration for maintenance of these structures and for the development of an optimal land use pattern.29 It is safe to assume that many of these ancient, large-scale water projects came about with the use of massive, involuntary manpower. As authoritarian sociopolitical systems declined, however, the corresponding water systems slowly degenerated.30 A detailed history of US water resources planning and development was prepared by Warren Viessman Jr. several years ago in association with the USACE and the Institute for Water Resources (IWR).31 It, along with an older USACE document,32 is an excellent source of historical information in understanding the course of water resources planning in the United States over much of the nation’s history. The following chapter subsections attempt to summarize the historical highlights provided by Viessman, although they are far from complete in covering all the details of the chronology he provided. The subsections adopt Viessman’s format, which identified five primary historical eras.

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The main objective of Viessman’s article was to present information on historical trends from 1800 to the first decade of the twenty-first century, including legislation, analytical requirements, and the inclusion of water quality management, ecosystems restoration, contemporary water resources planning at all levels, and recommendations for future actions. 1800 to 1900: Emergence of Water Resources Planning Water resources development in the United States in the early 1800s focused on private actions to obtain water power from rivers and to utilize the water for the transport of goods and people in the northeastern states. Dams and relatively large industries were built along larger rivers to use the water power available. Also financed and built by private interests were canals, including the Erie Canal, started in 1817, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, started in 1828. These canals helped the new and growing nation by providing a large network for economically transporting products among towns and businesses located along hundreds of miles of smaller canals and rivers. Together with private interests, public involvement in US water resources planning and development dates back to the nation’s effort to develop canals. In 1808, Secretary of the Treasury A. Gallatin submitted his Report on Roads, Canals, Harbors and Rivers to the US Senate. The report recommended a comprehensive plan to improve transportation between various parts of the country by a system that included four canals, canalization of four rivers in the East, and other transportation improvements. The report identified problems with jurisdiction and financing, and the plan was set aside because of the issue of federal involvement. The case of Gibbons v. Ogden33 led the Supreme Court to find in 1824 that federal participation in local improvements for navigation was justified under the commerce clause of the US Constitution. Subsequent to the ruling, Congress approved the first appropriation for work in navigable waters in 1824. The appropriation amounted to $75,000 for improving navigation over sandbars in the Ohio River and for removing snags in the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Waterway projects were studied on an individual basis from 1826 to 1875 and authorized individually in the Rivers and Harbors Act.34 The federal government’s interest in river and canal improvements resulted in the creation of the USACE in 1802 as the first major water construction agency in the United States and one of many in the federal government with major technical capabilities. In 1824, the US Congress established the responsibilities of the USACE to include planning. 1901 to 1933: Multipurpose Projects In the early twentieth century, functions were expanded to include construction of flood control works and development of water power. The Bureau of



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Reclamation was formed in 1902 and allowed to undertake irrigation projects. While single-purpose projects continued to be authorized, the idea of multipurpose water resources planning arose to promote more efficient use of resources by serving more than one purpose when planning a project. Also in 1902, the USACE National Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors was created to review reports on proposed projects and to evaluate them with the aim of eliminating economically questionable projects before making recommendations to the Chief of Engineers. Similarly, in the same year, the Secretary of the Interior was charged by the Reclamation Act with reviewing proposed irrigation projects together with their costs and practicability. Reports by the National Conservation Commission in 1909 and the National Waterways Commission in 1912 provided the basis for additional federal actions such as navigation improvements, waterpower development, and flood control. Also in this era, other federal water resources planning agencies were formed, and some existing agencies had their authorities expanded. The first Flood Control Act was passed in 1917, giving the USACE responsibility for planning and building flood control works and for performing watershed surveys when planning flood control projects. During the 1920s, the US Bureau of Reclamation was given multipurpose planning functions when the 1920 Kincaid Act directed the Secretary of the Interior to investigate California’s Imperial Valley and determine the potential for diverting water from the lower Colorado River for irrigation. This resulted in the recommendation that the federal government undertake all future development regarding the Colorado River. The Boulder Canyon Project Act in 1928 gave authority to study multipurpose projects in six other states in the Colorado River basin in order to prepare a comprehensive plan to develop and control the Colorado River and its tributaries. Further federal action in that decade included the Water Power Act of 1920, giving the Federal Power Commission authority to do surveys of waterpower potential and development across the entire country. Furthermore, Congress in 1925 directed the USACE and the Power Commission to work together to prepare a list with cost estimates of where power development might be practicable on navigable streams. Potential surveys were listed in 1926 and authorized by Congress in the 1927 Rivers and Harbors Act. In effect, the actions allowed the USACE to make general plans for all the country’s river basins except the Colorado River basin, which was assigned to the US Bureau of Reclamation. After a number of major floods on the Mississippi River in 1928, Congress approved a broad program for flood control on the Mississippi, with the federal government absorbing the entire cost. The Flood Control Act of 1928 covered only levees and diversion floodways except for one section calling for study of the impact of reservoirs on lowering floods. Such studies showed that the USACE thought reservoirs could reduce flood heights and should be recommended.

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1934 to 1943: Economic Considerations The Flood Control Act of 1936 formalized the economic evaluation of water projects. Previous federal water projects and other public works projects were seen as a means of stimulating the national economy by providing jobs around the country. In order to overcome the appearance of pork barrel politics, all water projects were coordinated with any plans for comprehensive river basin development. Keep in mind that the Great Depression was in full force during this era, thus accounting for a good portion of the federal government’s actions to stimulate the national economy and to provide work and income for millions of unemployed Americans. Additional institutions were begun during this time period, the most notable being the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) started in 1933. This unique organization was empowered to undertake all federal functions related to the development and management of land and water resources within the Tennessee River basin covering parts of seven states. Included was the authority to plan, construct, and operate dam and reservoir projects for navigation, flood control, and hydroelectric power. The TVA has become a massive organization and remains so today.35 Four additional national resource planning organizations emerged in this era, and several emergency planning agencies appeared that played roles in developing and managing the nation’s waters. For example, the National Planning Board (NPB), created in 1933, had an important role coordinating the President’s Committee on Water Flow. The NPB report included ten river basins, many of which were later authorized for development. A year later, the NPB was reorganized as the National Resources Board (NRB), in which it recommended studies of water projects for consideration by Congress. The NRB had a short life and reappeared in 1935 as the National Resources Committee (NRC). The new committee’s biggest achievement was a national study of drainage basins and problems, including recommendations for state and federal actions, with the study done in cooperation with state planning boards. The year 1939 saw the reconstitution of the NRC as the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), authorized to undertake research and analyze problems involved with water and other resources, and report its plans and programs to the president and Congress. It also was assigned joint responsibility with the US Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) to review studies and plans of the construction agencies and for all construction agency reports submitted to Congress. Two additional water-related federal agencies created in this time frame were the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, which were responsible for the financial support of state and local planning efforts and of public works projects built by federal, state, and local agencies.



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The 1930s era created a milestone in water resources planning and evaluation, with the formalized use of economic evaluation of water projects. General use of benefit-cost analysis to investigate the worth of a project may have been foreshadowed by the Flood Control Act of 1936, which stated that the federal government could improve or participate in the improvement of navigable waters or tributaries for flood control if “the benefits to whomsoever they may accrue are in excess of the estimated costs.” Other water planning agencies later adopted the benefit-cost method for other purposes, even though they were not necessarily consistent in defining terms or methods of analysis. In 1940, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) evolved within the Department of Interior after spending decades under the Department of Agriculture. Because the USFWS’s goal is to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants, and their habitats, the agency has often been in conflict with the USACE and other construction-related agencies. 1944 to 1969: Multiobjective Focus The period after 1943 saw the focus in water resources planning and management begin to shift from obtaining multiple purposes, such as flood control and navigation, toward achieving multiple objectives, such as environmental protection and economic development. Emphasis on economic assessment of water projects increased, and various commissions were formed for assessing water issues the nation faced and then recommending actions to solve them. The various agencies were consistent in their recommendation that river basin planning should be done comprehensively, not as single-purpose projects. In the 1940s and 1950s the federal construction agencies expanded their programs substantially, even without much public interest, but by the late 1950s some water resource issues started to gain broad national interest, especially protection and improvement of the environment. With the abolition of the NRPB in 1943, federal water resources planning became fragmented and narrow in scope. New water resources programs were essentially the work of congressional committees and their supporters. Agencies such as the USACE focused on the wishes of local communities seeking flood protection, the Bureau of Reclamation focused on stimulating economic development in the West with more irrigation, and the Soil Conservation Service focused on watershed conservation to protect the nation’s soils and water. After World War II the USACE continued to be the primary water resources construction agency, having more than 50 percent of federal water authorizations and funding going to its programs. With benefit-cost analysis having been in place for more than a decade, great challenges still existed in establishing a defensible discount rate to allow long-term benefits and costs to be stated in comparable terms.

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To help provide guidance to federal water agencies, a series of increasingly sophisticated documents were prepared. Proposed Practices for Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects (known as the “Green Book”) was published in 1950 and revised in 1958; in 1952, the Bureau of the Budget released Circular A-47, which set standards for evaluating water resources projects and cost sharing provisions. A new set of guidelines, Policies, Standards and Procedures in the Formulation, Evaluation and Review of Plans for Use and Development of Water and Related Land Resources, also known as Senate Document 97, was released in 1962. Circular A-47 was subsequently rescinded by President Kennedy, giving preference to Senate Document 97. During the same period that analytical guidelines were being improved, efforts were being made to increase coordination of planning efforts across federal agencies. In 1969, a decade after it was established, the Senate Select Committee on Water Resources made five broad recommendations: 1. The federal government, in cooperation with the states, should prepare comprehensive water development and management plans for all major river basins in the United States. 2. The federal government should encourage the states to more actively participate in planning and implementing water resources development and management activities. 3. Periodic assessment of water supply and demand relations should be made for each water resource region of the nation. 4. A federal program should be established to coordinate scientific research on water. 5. A scientific program should be established to encourage efficiency in water development and its use. The Water Resources Planning Act of 1965 was an outgrowth of this work. The Act was designed to encourage conservation, development, and use of the nation’s water and related land resources on a comprehensive and coordinated basis. It established the Water Resources Council; it provided for River Basin Commissions; and it authorized financial aid to states for comprehensive water resources planning. 1970 to 1980: Environmental Era In the 1970s, emphasis moved from water resources development to water quality protection and management resulting from the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, the Water Pollution Control Act amendments of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, and



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amendments in 1977 to what became known as the Clean Water Act. Congress pushed the Nixon administration for more action on water pollution control and environmental policy, but his efforts were limited by budget constraints caused by the Vietnam War. NEPA became law in 1970, with President Nixon praising the act and naming the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) as a great asset for informing him on important environmental issues. The administration quickly put the NEPA provisions into effect, and the president issued an executive order instructing federal agencies to report on possible inconsistencies between their authorities and those codified in NEPA. By April 1970, the CEQ issued interim guidelines for preparing environmental impact statements as identified by NEPA. In December 1970, the president followed his environmental interests by creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new independent regulatory agency. The EPA assumed environmental management functions of a number of existing agencies and brought together all of the federal pollution control programs related to air, water, solid wastes, pesticides, and radiation. This appeared to be the most effective way of reorganizing the numerous agencies into a single, interrelated organization. In doing so, however, the newly formed EPA made the separation of water quality from other federal water programs even more pronounced. Following the NEPA adoption, a new guide was drafted by the Water Resources Council and adopted in 1973 that incorporated environmental quality objectives: Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources, popularly called “Principles and Standards” or “P&S.” It required two equal national objectives to be evaluated in making water resources decisions: (1) national economic development (NED), and (2) environmental quality (EQ). Later in 1983, that guidance was revised further to reflect only one objective: NED. Those revisions were manifest in the Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies, or “Principles and Guidelines” or “P&G.” An additional law related to water quality was enacted in 1980: the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which became known as the “Superfund Act,” a federal law designed to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants. Its direct and significant effect on water quality has included improvement and protection of groundwater from the leaching of toxic and other pollutants from operational and defunct landfills and other disposal sites on land. In the two terms of the Reagan administration, 16 of the 799 Superfund sites were cleaned up, and only $40 million of $700 million in recoverable funds from responsible parties were collected. Reagan’s policies were described as “laissezfaire.” In 1994, the Clinton administration proposed a new Superfund reform bill, which some environmentalists and industry lobbyists saw as an improvement, but the bill did not get bipartisan support. The newly elected Republican

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Congress made numerous unsuccessful efforts to significantly weaken the law. The Clinton administration then adopted some industry-favored reforms as policy and blocked most major changes. Even though by 1995 nearly $4 billion in fees were in the Superfund, Congress did not reauthorize further collection, and by 2003 the Superfund was empty. 1981 to 2018: Devolution and Environmental Protection Since 1980, the EPA’s Superfund program has helped protect human health and the environment by managing the cleanup of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites and responding to local and nationally significant environmental emergencies. However, the tide of support for various types of effort slowed considerably in the late 1970s and continued on into the following decades. The Superfund program was highly successful in cleaning contaminated sites and improving groundwater quality below such sites. In the early years of the Superfund legislation, about 70 percent of Superfund cleanup activities historically were paid for by parties responsible for the cleanup of contamination. Until the mid-1990s, most of the funding came from a tax on the petroleum and chemical industries, but since 2001, most of the funding for cleanups of hazardous waste sites have come from taxpayers. Despite the name, the program has suffered from underfunding, and Superfund cleanups have decreased to a mere eight completed in 2014. Several other major changes have taken place since Viessman’s reporting of the nation’s water resources development history. Some of the evolution of the water resources planning, both historic and leading up to the current age, may be seen in the USACE’s increased role in ecosystem restoration planning. Spurred on by the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 1990, the USACE gained a specific environmental protection mission that represented an expansion of that agency’s traditional activities. Such authority, along with another WRDA in 2000, helped set the funding for the Everglades Restoration Initiative, an ongoing partnership with the state of Florida and the South Florida Water Management District. Other major roles have been the activities and funding of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with regard to the many floods and hurricanes prevalent well into the twenty-first century. In 2013, changes to the P&G occurred when the CEQ published new guidelines for its replacement with a new “Principles, Requirements and Guidelines” or “PR&G” (discussed further in chapter 9). Diving In: Scope of the Book This book is about planning as it applies to water resources. Although water projects have been constructed for thousands of years, water resources planning



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in a modern context has existed for only about seventy-five years. The nation has shifted from large-scale water resources development to greater emphasis on water quality and environmental protection. Much of that change is reflected in this book, mainly from a US context. Some international examples relevant to specific topical discussions are scattered throughout the book. The following chapters focus on the central elements of water resources planning and the methodologies used in the planning process. Essential to water resources planning is a sound understanding of a number of key principles. The planning process is addressed in chapter 2. Although the planning process in its generic sense can apply to many diverse functions, the chapter concentrates on the planning process as it applies to water resources and its applicability to providing a sound approach for decision making. It traces the important steps of the planning process, from problem identification and goal setting to decision making and implementation, and raises questions about the rational planning model. It also looks at recent planning approaches, such as alternative dispute resolution and IWRM as they apply to water resources and their applicability in providing a sound approach for decision making. Chapters 3 and 4 cover basic aspects of water resources. Chapter 3 provides a summary and overview of principles of hydrology. Hydrology is the study of the occurrence and distribution of the earth’s natural waters, including both surface water and groundwater. Chapter 4 covers water use and water supply, issues that are central to water resources planning. Included are patterns of water use and methods of planning for water supply, including a review of water forecasting methodologies. Alternative sources such a desalination, water reuse, and conservation are also discussed. The subsequent three chapters look at water laws and legislation that provide the basis of current water rules and regulations for surface water and groundwater. Chapter 5 covers the fundamental aspects of water law that provide the legal framework pertaining to water resources. Included are major concepts in water law plus key court cases and significant state approaches in the United States. The sixth chapter deals with federal water agencies and legislation that is significant to the nation’s water resources. Chapter 7 focuses on state and intergovernmental agencies at all levels that deal, often cooperatively, with water resources to resolve water issues. The eighth chapter deals with water quality, causes of pollution, and remedial and preventive actions for improving water quality. Water quality is one of the central aspects of water resources planning and management. Chapter 9 provides an understanding of economic analysis that is essential to water resources planning. After a review of key economic principles, the application of benefitcost analysis is presented as the primary tool of applied economic analysis. Related economic issues of cost allocation and cost sharing are also discussed.

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The next three chapters examine more of the significant planning problems in water resources. Chapter 10 addresses floodplain management, including methods for calculating flood hazards, means for reducing potential damage, and a review of recent historic flood events, and chapter 11 concentrates on management of stormwater runoff with respect to both water quantity and quality. Chapter 12 presents a survey and review of the various types of models available for water resources planning. The chapter focuses on three types of mathematical models—optimization, simulation, and statistical models—and delves into collaborative decision-making models as well as decision-support models. The material provides a summary of the advantages as well as the limitations of models in water resources planning. Lists of hydrologic models are provided by functional classification for the reader who may wish to pursue further details. The final two chapters touch on a variety of important issues relevant to water resources planning. Chapter 13 summarizes a number of important water resources planning topics that are not covered in earlier chapters, including wetland issues and environmental impact assessment as well as navigation and recreation. The final chapter 14 takes a look at future trends in water resources planning and discusses prospects for achieving a satisfactory level of accomplishment regarding the management and use of this planet’s precious water resources. Study Questions 1. There are many criteria and purposes for water resources planning and decision making. Discuss some of the bases that may be used with an emphasis on economic factors, political factors, environmental factors, or engineering factors. 2. Trace the history of water resources and development in your locale. What are some of the major historical events related to water resources use and management? 3. What major water resources projects exist in your region? Can you link each project to any economic or political factors? What has been the impact of the project on the region? What do you see for the future? 4. Trace the history of water resources development in another nation. Identify major events that have altered water resources there. 5. Identify what you think are your community’s primary current water concerns. What are the nation’s and the world’s most significant water resources conflicts and issues today? 6. What do you see for the future of water resources in your state?



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7. Considering the extreme weather events in the United States and globally, do you think about water resources any differently now than you did maybe ten years ago? If so, why? If not, why not? 8. As diversity usually adds strength, explain how using a variety of different water resources and a wider variety of water professionals can help us make better decisions—or won’t it? 9. If the period 1981–2018 is considered the “Devolution and Environmental Protection” era, thinking ahead, what do you think would be the next era, from the present to the year 2050? Why? Notes 1.  Eiseley, L. (1957). The Immense Journey, p. 15. New York: Vintage Books. 2.  Sagan, C. (1994). Pale Blue Dot. New York: Random House. 3.  Sagan, C. (1994). Pale Blue Dot, p. 9. New York: Random House. 4.  Strahler, A. N., and A. H. Strahler. (1973). Environmental Geoscience: Interaction between Natural Systems and Man, p. 37. Santa Barbara, CA: Hamilton Publishing Co. 5.  NOAA. (2018). 2017 Was 3rd Warmest Year on Record for the Globe. NOAA. Retrieved from http://www.noaa.gov/news/noaa-2017-was-3rd-warmest-year-on-record-for -globe. Also see NASA. (2017). NASA, NOAA Data Show 2016 Warmest Year on Record Globally. NASA. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show -2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally 6.  National Drought Mitigation Center. (2017, Jan.). Drought Information Services for Agriculture across the United States. University of Nebraska NDMC Project Archive. Retrieved from http://drought.unl.edu/MonitoringTools/USDroughtMonitor.aspx 7.  Thomas, T. (2017). News for Immediate Release: Concern at Oroville Spillway Triggers Evacuation Orders. California Department of Water Resources. Retrieved from https:// www.water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/News-Releases/Files/2017-News -Releases/021217-News-Release-pm_release_oroville_evacuation.pdf 8. Drye, W. (2017). 2017 Hurricane Season Was the Most Expensive in US History. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/2017 -hurricane-season-most-expensive-us-history-spd/ 9.  Blake, E. S., and D. A. Zelinsky. (2018, May). Hurricane Harvey: 17 August–1 September 2017. National Hurricane Center Tropical Cyclone Report. NOAA, National Weather Service. Retrieved from https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL092017_Harvey.pdf 10.  NBC News New York. (2015). December Shatters Warm-Weather Records in Balmy Northeast. NBC News New York. Retrieved from http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/ national-international/Winter-December-Warm-Weather-Record-Temperatures-Northeast -Region-363943941.html 11.  USGS. (2016). 2015/2016 Winter Floods. USGS Flood Information. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/floods/events/2016/winter/ 12.  Welch. C. (2018). Why Cape Town Is Running Out of Water, and Who’s Next. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/cape-town -running-out-of-water-drought-taps-shutoff-other-cities/

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13. NOAA. (2016). State of the Climate: Global Climate Report—Annual 2015. NCEI. Retrieved from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201513 14. UN. (2014). International Decade for Action: Water for Life, 2005–2015. UN. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml 15.  British Geological Survey. (2018). The Anthropocene. Retrieved from http://www.bgs .ac.uk/anthropocene/ 16. IPCC. (2015). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by the Core Writing Team, R. K. Pachauri, and L. A. Meyer. Geneva: IPCC. 17.  Herring, S. C., N. Christidis, A. Hoell, J. P. Kossin, C. J. Schreck III, and P. A. Stott, Eds. (2018, Jan.). Explaining Extreme Events of 2016 from a Climate Perspective. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 99(1), S1–S157. 18.  Risser, M. D., and M. F. Wehner. (2017). Attributable Human-Induced Changes in the Likelihood and Magnitude of the Observed Extreme Precipitation during Hurricane Harvey. Geophysical Research Letters, 44, 12,457–12,464; G. J. van Oldenborgh et al. (2017). Attribution of Extreme Rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, August 2017. Environmental Research Letters, 12(12); Irfan, U., and B. Resnick. (2018). Megadisasters Devastated America in 2017 and They’re Only Going to Get Worse. Vox Media. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/energy -and-environment/2017/12/28/16795490/natural-disasters-2017-hurricanes-wildfires-heat -climate-change-cost-deaths; and Fountain, H. (2017). Scientists Link Hurricane Harvey’s Record Rainfall to Climate Change. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes .com/2017/12/13/climate/hurricane-harvey-climate-change.html 19.  Cosgrove, W. J., and D. P. Loucks. (2015). Water Management: Current and Future Challenges and Research Directions. p. 4823 Water Resources Research, 51, 4823–4839. 20.  USACE. (2017). Planning Manual Part II: Risk-Informed Planning. IWR 2017-R-03. Prepared by Charlie Yoe. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR; USACE. (2015, Sept.). USACE SMART Planning Feasibility Studies. Planning Community Toolbox. Retrieved from https://planning.erdc .dren.mil/toolbox/library/smart/SmartFeasibility_Guide_highres.pdf 21.  UNDP. (2018). In Cambodia, Piped Water Offers Villagers a Fresh Start. UNDP. Retrieved from http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ourwork/ourstories/in-cam bodia--piped-water-offers-villagers-a-fresh-start.html 22.  USACE. (1996). Planning Manual. IWR Report 96-R-21. 23.  APA. (2018). Ethical Principles in Planning. APA. Retrieved from https://staging.plan ning.org/ethics/ethicalprinciples/ 24.  Cesanek, W., V. Elmer, and J. Graeff. (2017). Planners and Water, p. 67. PAS Report 588. Chicago: American Planning Association. 25. USACE, Planning Manual Part II: Risk-Informed Planning. 26.  Holmes. B. H. (1972, June). A History of Federal Waters Resources Programs and Policies, 1800–1960. Misc. Pub. No. 1233. Washington, DC: US Dept. of Agriculture. 27.  Hirsch, A. M. (1959). Water Legislation in the Middle East. American Journal of Comparative Law, 8, p. 168. 28. Worthington, E. B. (1972). The Nile Catchment Area—Technological Change and Aquatic Biology. In The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development, edited by M. T. Farvar and J. P. Milton. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 29.  Jones, F. O. (1954). Tukiangyien: China’s Ancient Irrigation System. Geographic Review, 44, 543–559.



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30.  Saha, S. K. (1981). Introduction. In River Basin Planning: Theory and Practice, edited by S. K. Saha and C. J. Barrow. New York: Wiley. 31.  Viessman, W., Jr. (2009). A History of the United States Water Resources Planning and Development. In The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making, edited by C. S. Russell and D. D. Baumann. IWR Maass-White Series. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 32.  USACE. (1981). Engineer Pamphlet 1165 2-1. Digest of Water Resources Policies. 33.  Gibbons v. Ogden. (1824). 22 US (9 Wheat.) 1. 34. Holmes, A History of Federal Waters Resources Programs and Policies, 1800–1960. 35.  TVA. (2017). TVA. Retrieved from https://www.tva.gov/

2 The Planning Process

Introduction

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he principal focus of this chapter is on water resources planning but with an acknowledgment that there are a number of other significant types of public planning activities outside the water resources field that are important to understanding water resources planning. In addition, there are many water resource activities and professions that, although not part of the planning function in what they do, are still important to recognize as essential in dealing with water resources overall. The broad public planning framework may be categorized by the scope of planning and by the level of government at which it occurs. An understanding of the structural framework provided by the scope and level of planning allows us to consider the planning process itself. In simple terms, the planning process is a logical and orderly way to think about the future. Management is based on the assumption that today’s decisions have future consequences; thus, planning should be an important component of management. This chapter looks at the context for planning, components of the planning process, problems with planning, trends in planning, benefits of planning, and obstacles to planning. The significance of water resources planning is demonstrated over and over again throughout the world as nations continually try to deal with growing demands and effects on their water resources from changing populations, land use changes, sociopolitical concerns related to water, issues emerging from the effects of climate change on water, demands for improved water quality as well as water supplies, and many other aspects dealing with the world’s water. A 2014 — 24 —

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World Bank report,1 includes a statement that highlights major global, waterbased issues and suggests the importance of water resources planning for the long term and on the global scale: The world will not be able to meet the great development challenges of the 21st century—access to safe drinking water and sanitation for all, livable cities, food security, energy security, jobs through economic growth, and healthy ecosystems— without improving how countries manage their water resources. Population and economic growth, along with increased climate variability, will further exacerbate current water stress. As one of the key external financiers in water resources management, the World Bank is actively working to address these challenges through cross-sectoral approaches that encompass infrastructure development, institutional strengthening, and a particular focus on the poor.

It should be reasonable to conclude that dealing with this huge array of the planet’s water concerns requires an informed and well-considered approach. This is where the field of planning plays an important and necessary role in addressing the many water resource concerns. Recognition of the increasing importance of the planning function also can be seen in a number of recent publications such as Planners and Water (2017),2 Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practices (2007),3 The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making (2009),4 A Twenty-First Century US Water Policy (2012),5 and Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West (2016).6 Added to these and a number of similar recent publications is the vast and growing number of articles, reports, publications, and other productions added freely to the internet over the decades on water resources and related topics. Key Terms This section provides an overview of key terms important for gaining familiarity, in particular, with federal legislation related to water resources planning. The knowledge gained by water resources planners in understanding these terms and concepts will help them recognize the importance of legislation and regulations for dealing with the management of water resources and the environment. The terms used in this chapter are particularly important to water resources planners but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in planning are the following: Plan A detailed formulation of a program of action. Planning The goal of planning is to maximize the health, safety, and economic well-being of residents in ways that reflect the unique needs, desires, and

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culture of those who live and work within the community. It is a structured approach to problem solving. Scoping An early and open process for determining the scope of issues to be addressed and for identifying the significant issues related to a proposed action. It is required by the Principles and Guidelines (P&G) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Integrated water resources management (IWRM) A process promoting coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising sustainability of vital ecosystems. Also referred to as “One Water.” Scope of Planning Planning may be considered in two general ways: comprehensive planning and single-purpose, or “functional,” planning. Neither is inherently superior to the other, for each serves different management needs. Comprehensive planning is done to develop the general coordination of diverse activities, to set overall direction and identify priorities among those activities, and to provide a basis for managing conflicts among them. Comprehensive planning is usually done at a general level in government and is directed to the entire jurisdiction. Thus, it is usually initiated by the central administration and requires central administrative authority for its execution; moreover, legislative sanction is often needed to legitimize this activity. Functional planning, in contrast, is usually confined to one major topic or resource of primary interest, such as water resources, transportation, or land use planning. This approach is often used to simplify and expedite priority areas of planning. Functional planning is limited in scope, can achieve more detailed investigation of problems, and often uses more technical approaches than comprehensive planning. Single-purpose or functional planning, however, is not narrow in scope. Multistate river basin planning is an example of functional water resources planning that covers a very broad scope. A final observation about functional planning is that often it is the only type of planning that is politically acceptable over time. Levels of Planning Comprehensive planning occurs at all three levels of government—federal, state, and local—as do numerous functional planning activities. There are also international planning activities and organizations that may involve several nations with a single focus, especially regarding water resources. The Great Lakes Commission, for example, is an interstate compact agency with mem-



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bers from eight Great Lakes states and associate members from two Canadian provinces: Ontario and Quebec. Its primary purpose is for the member states and provinces to have a unified voice on promoting comprehensive use, development, and conservation of the water resources in the Great Lakes Basin. Similarly, the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine was created by countries bordering the Rhine River (Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Germany, and the Netherlands) as a common forum for addressing issues related to management of the waterway. Continuing around the world, one finds a number of multinational agencies and organizations dealing with water resources planning at all levels of government. On a broader scale, the European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive, for example, establishes a legal structure for protecting and managing surface waters in the EU that cover the territory of more than one EU member state. Although all government levels are involved in water resources planning, specific components of local concern are important. Among the more significant local concerns for water resources planning are capital improvements programming, land use plans that require local mapping of floodplains and well fields, and local plans for water, sewer, solid waste, drainage, and aquifer recharge projects. The Water Resources Planning Process The United States has a relatively long history of formalized planning procedures in federal water resources planning,7 but the first major statement was a set of interagency policy guidelines known as the “Green Book,” prepared in 1950 and updated in 1962 by the president’s Water Resources Council, as noted in chapter 1. The NEPA of 1969 led to significant changes, including recognition of environmental values in the Water Resources Council’s “Principles and Standards” (P&S), which were adopted by presidential order in 1973, revised in 1979, and replaced by the “Principles and Guidelines” (P&G) in 1983.8 The P&G note that “the Federal objective of water and related land resources project planning is to contribute to national economic development consistent with protecting the Nation’s environment, pursuant to national environmental statutes, applicable executive orders, and other Federal planning requirements.” The P&S and P&G have provided US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and Institute for Water Resources (IWR) the guidance to develop and help apply consistent, replicable methods for estimating the economic, social, and environmental impacts of major water management decisions. Since their introduction, the IWR has developed supplementary guidance manuals based on decades of experience.9 Changes to the P&G occurred again in 2013 and yet again in 2014 when the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) published new guidelines that

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became known as “Principles, Requirements, and Guidelines” (PR&G; discussed further below, in planning steps and chapter 9). The USACE has also developed numerous planning guidelines and manuals aimed at complying with federal law and regulations related to water resources planning, with the most recent planning manual issued in 2017.10 Planning for water quality has been influenced strongly by Section 208 of the federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. Publications on the Section 208 planning process were prepared by the EPA to guide federal, state, and local planning activities under this program.11 Since that time, the EPA has produced numerous planning documents on various aspects of water resources, as will be referred to in several chapters in this book. A number of other federal guidelines for water resources planning have also had influences at all levels of government. The Natural Resources Conservation Service (www.nrcs.usda.gov), formerly the Soil Conservation Service, under the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has major responsibility for water conservation and flood protection in rural areas. In the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management (www.blm.gov) does planning and management for areas of public lands that involve land use and water resources projects, including dams and reservoirs. In recent years, organizations such as the American Planning Association (APA) have taken a clear stand on the role of water resources planning within the general field of planning. In 2014, the APA created a Water Task Force to assess the connections between water resources management and land use planning. The task force emphasized that “planners should not consider water management to be a specialized issue within the planning field, but rather it should be part of a planner’s basic working knowledge and day-to-day practice.”12 That effort was followed by the adoption of a policy guide in 2016 and a 2017 document that describes an integrated approach to water resources planning, provides foundational concepts commonplace in the water resources arena, lays out water issues and challenges for planners, and presents best practices, case studies, and practical information for the planning professional.13 The planning process as applied to water resources is comparable to other types of planning. It is a logical series of steps, beginning with identification of needs, proceeding to recommendations for action, and culminating in implementation and monitoring. The planning process has the following components: (1) problem identification; (2) data collection and analysis; (3) development of goals and objectives; (4) clarification and diagnosis of the problem or issues; (5) identification of alternative solutions; (6) analysis of alternatives; (7) evaluation and recommendation of actions; (8) development of an implementation program; and (9) surveillance and monitoring. Components 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are at the heart of the process and are commonly known as the “rational planning model.” All nine components of the planning process are described in the

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following subsections, with emphasis placed on their application to the water resources planning process. As mentioned above, the USACE generally utilizes the same steps (they use six steps), with greater emphasis on particular attributes depending on specific situations. The USACE’s six steps are all considered iterative, meaning that the steps get revisited frequently throughout the process, usually with greater understanding, clarity, and purposefulness with each iteration. The 2017 Planning Manual Part II incorporates risk management to produce a risk-informed planning process to help make better decisions. Planning Steps Problem Identification This first step includes identification of needs and concerns with regard to the water resources of an area, whether local, regional, or national. It is often referred to as the scoping phase pertaining to planning guidelines and steps as prescribed by the USACE. Competing and conflicting interests are often involved, and these interests should be identified and clarified. Problem identification should reflect the concerns of different private and public groups and should be described in sufficient detail to allow for adequate attention in the planning process. Public involvement as well as coordination of various agencies and groups begin at this stage. Specific needs usually stem either from a problem that has already been experienced, such as flooding, or from an anticipated problem, such as inadequate water supply to meet future needs. Public concerns may also be revealed in basic local or regional issues, such as population growth and economic development or attitudes toward landownership and environmental values. Expression of these concerns should be elicited through an active program of public involvement. In some instances, water resources planning studies may be more generalized and not deal with any single problem or need. River basin studies and areawide water quality studies typically are of this type. Data Collection and Analysis Following problem identification, the study area should be defined, and existing information for the study area should be analyzed for its relevance to the problem under consideration. This analysis should include identification of relevant geophysical and biological features; social, demographic, and cultural characteristics; land use; and economic activity, such as manufacturing, commerce, and agriculture. It is also important to determine anticipated future conditions as shown by existing planning documents. These documents should be carefully reviewed and modified as needed.

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An extensive set of data is typically available on water resources in an area. The US Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a large volume of information on surface water and groundwater within its National Water Information System (NWIS). It is the nation’s primary repository of water data, including data from more than 1.5 million sites (http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis). Particularly useful is the online “National Water Information System: Web Interface,” which provides access to vast amounts of the nation’s water information through its Water Data program. A convenient way to search for water data is to go to the USGS topical directory. It is an excellent way to explore USGS science programs and activities with data, news, images, video, social media, and much more (https://www.usgs.gov/ science/science-explorer/Water). Also important are its computerized information systems: • Hydrologic Benchmark Network (HBN) • National Stream Quality Accounting Network (NASQAN) • Water Data Storage and Retrieval System (WATSTORE) • Storage and Retrieval Database (STORET) • National Water Information System (NWIS) In 1973, ten units of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were transferred to the USGS. This initiated a Land Resource Analysis program to fill the need for earth science data in land use planning and resource management, especially in nonurban areas where existing trends indicated a danger of being seriously impacted in the future. For more than fifty years, the USGS has operated two national stream water–quality networks, the Hydrologic Benchmark Network (HBN) and the National Stream Quality Accounting Network (NASQAN), data for which are accessible through the central repository, Data.gov. These networks were established to provide national and regional descriptions of stream water–quality conditions and trends, based on the monitoring of selected watersheds throughout the United States, and to better understand the effects of the natural environment and human activities on water quality. The HBN consists of sixty-three relatively small, minimally disturbed watersheds. These watersheds range in size from over 5 to 5,000 square kilometers (2 to 2,000 square miles) with a median drainage basin size of approximately 148 square kilometers (57 square miles). NASQAN, on the other hand, consists of 618 larger, more culturally influenced watersheds and provides information for following water quality conditions in major rivers and streams. Drainage basins range in size from 2.59 square kilometers to 3.1 million square kilometers (1 square mile to 1.2 million square miles), with a median drainage basin size of more than 10,000 square kilometers (about 4,000 square miles).



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The Water Data Storage and Retrieval System (WATSTORE) was created in 1971 as a central system to store and make available to the public the USGS’s water data, collected at thousands of sites in all the states and the territories of the United States since the late 1800s. Files are maintained for (1) surface water, water quality, and groundwater data, measured on a daily or continuous basis; (2) annual peak values and peaks above a base flow for streamflow stations; (3) chemical analyses for surface water and groundwater sites; (4) geologic and inventory data for groundwater sites; and (5) summary data on water use. WATSTORE maintains a file of the sites for which data are stored in the system. STORET (STOrage and RETrieval) or now, Water Quality Data (WQX) is the EPA’s largest computerized environmental data system (https://www3.epa.gov/ storet/). It is a repository for water quality, and it is used by state agencies, the EPA and other federal agencies, universities, individuals, and others. This EPA data system is a composite of two data management systems containing water quality information: the Legacy Data Center (LDC), and STORET. The LDC contains historical water quality data from the early part of the twentieth century through the end of 1998, while STORET contains data collected beginning in 1999 along with older data that has been properly documented and migrated from the LDC. Both systems contain raw biological, chemical, and physical data on surface water and groundwater collected by federal, state, and local agencies, Native American tribes, volunteer groups, academics, and others. Each sampling result in the LDC and in STORET is accompanied by information on where the sample was taken (latitude, longitude, state, county, Hydrologic Unit Code, and a brief site identification), when it was gathered, the medium sampled (e.g., water, sediment, fish tissue), and the name of the organization that sponsored the monitoring. STORET also contains information on why the data were gathered, sampling and analytical methods used, laboratory used for analysis, quality control checks used, and the personnel responsible for the data. The LDC and STORET are web-enabled, so with a standard web browser, one can browse both systems interactively or create files to be downloaded to a personal computer. Other types of data useful for planning purposes can be found at a variety of sources. For example, at the local level, local planning agencies typically gather and maintain a variety of databases relevant to the local community, and municipal water utilities have information on water use for each of their accounts. State agencies normally have current and historic data relevant to their respective functions. On a national scale, important sources of economic and population conditions are found at the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).14 Another significant source of information is the US Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), where economic and social change is chronicled, understood, and explained. Many planning studies can be based upon the economic and demographic information

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produced by the BEA and the US Census Bureau. The US Census Bureau (www .census.gov) is the collector and provider of timely, relevant, and quality data about the people and economy of the United States. It may be necessary to obtain primary data in some instances. Examples are questionnaires on water use, gauging stations to measure water flow at specific points in a stream, and samples to determine water quality in a water body. As part of the data collection process, forecasts should be made of appropriate variables to determine likely future conditions of the problem under investigation. These data may include such things as land use changes, future flooding and flood damage, water requirements to support future growth and development of a region, and water quality in selected areas. In all cases, these projections are based on certain assumptions regarding the future, such as levels of population growth, economic development, and changes in technology. Especially important is the projection of what the future conditions would be in the absence of any action regarding the problem being studied (called the “future without project condition” by the USACE). Goals and Objectives Specifying relevant planning goals and objectives and defining their relative importance is one of the most difficult tasks in water resources planning. There are many divergent interests that often generate competing and often conflicting objectives. For example, the conflict between extreme economic and environmental objectives is commonplace in water resources planning. No single plan satisfies all economic and environmental objectives, and therefore the plan formulation process must represent trade-offs among conflicting interests. Until the 1970s, economic objectives dominated water resources planning, with the benefit-cost criterion stated in the Flood Control Act of 1936 as the guiding objective: “the benefits, to whomsoever they may accrue, are in excess of the estimated costs.” In other words, the prime objective in federal water resources planning was to maximize the net aggregate monetary benefits to all parties affected by a water resources project. As a result of the 2014 guidance mentioned above, the new objectives of the PR&G state: Federal water resources investments shall reflect national priorities, encourage economic development and protect the environment by: 1. Seeking to maximize sustainable economic development 2. Seeking to avoid the unwise use of floodplains and flood-prone areas and minimizing adverse impacts and vulnerabilities in any case in which a floodplain or flood-prone area must be used 3. Protecting and restoring the functions of natural systems and mitigating any unavoidable damage to natural systems



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The revised PR&Gs apply to the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce; the EPA; the USACE; the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Given the ambiguity and complexity of the PR&G directives, it will be interesting to see how these revisions are embraced and implemented at the federal level. The CEQ no longer lists the PR&G on its website; an archived copy was obtainable at the following address: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ administration/eop/ceq/initiatives/PandG. Statements of goals and objectives indicate what the planning effort hopes to accomplish. Goals are broad and general, such as the attainment of clean water or provision of adequate water supplies. Although they are stated in general terms, goal statements relate human values to natural resources and the environment. Objectives are more specific, usually measurable statements of the plans to be developed. Often several objectives are required to attain a goal. Objectives provide the basis against which to evaluate alternatives. Planning objectives generally stem from problems and concerns associated with direct water resources outputs. The following examples are typical water resources planning objectives: • To prevent continued water degradation by waterborne wastes • To prevent or reduce flood damages • To provide water-based recreation • To provide for efficient reuse of treated wastewater • To provide for efficient development and management of water supplies To further illustrate goals and objectives, it is appropriate to consider federal laws and actions. National water resources goals are incorporated in numerous legislative acts, executive orders, and administrative laws. The Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (P.L. 92-500) summarized the national goals with regard to water quality: • That the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters be eliminated by 1985 • That wherever attainable, an interim goal of water quality, which provides for the protection and propagation of fish, shellfish, and wildlife and provides for recreation in and on the water, be achieved by July 1, 1983 These goals were not fully achieved and, in fact, the first one may be unrealistic if taken literally. The amendments did provide, however, a statement of direction and a basis for the EPA to set a number of objectives that resulted in programs for implementing the Act. It is difficult to plan for vague or unrealistic objectives. Therefore, objectives should be stated as clearly and specifically as possible in order to facilitate their achievement but should not go to the extent of specifying levels of outputs to be achieved.

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Problem Diagnosis A thorough analysis and clear understanding of the problem is needed at this point so that the alternative solutions that are developed will respond to the objectives. Clear understanding of a problem may indicate that there are numerous and widely divergent solutions. Thus, a flooding problem may be met by nonstructural solutions as well as a conservation program, or by different management of the water and related land resources, rather than by building new reservoirs. Other problems and issues may surface later to provide an additional basis for evaluation. Formulation of Alternatives The purpose of this task is to address the problems and objectives defined above. Alternative plans must be formulated to help the decision-maker see how they relate to the objectives and understand the trade-offs among them. Formulation of alternatives begins with identification of measures that will satisfy the defined needs. Public and interagency participation is important at this point to ensure that a full range of measures is considered. Whenever possible, the alternatives should range from capital-intensive structural measures to nonstructural management solutions. Structural measures tend to be relatively expensive and irreversible, whereas nonstructural approaches involve low initial costs and tend to be reversible if changes are needed. The range of alternatives should be narrow enough to focus only on those issues that are directly related to the stated objectives but broad enough to address objectives that are incompatible with other concerns in the region. If different objectives are given, alternatives should be developed to meet each objective. The 1973 P&S, for example, were required to meet objectives for a national economic development (NED) plan and an environmental quality (EQ) plan. The NED plan has economic efficiency as its primary objective, while the EQ plan focuses on preservation or restoration of the environment. Accordingly, alternatives would have to be developed for each of these objectives, among others. There is no standard for the number of alternatives to be developed. Judgment must be exercised to determine which plans are appropriate and to decide which alternatives to carry forward for more detailed study. Until new federal agencyspecific procedures are developed to address the 2014 PR&G, it is unclear which, how many, and by which means the objectives will be selected and justified. Analysis of Alternatives This stage has two major aspects: economic evaluation and impact assessment. The purpose is to provide identification and measurement of changes



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that would result from the alternative plans being considered. In all cases, it is useful to have a “no action” plan in order to compare the alternatives (“future with project condition”) with a situation of no action taking place (the “future without project condition”). Under the “no action” plan, projections are made of future conditions assuming that no plan is implemented. Economic evaluation of each alternative provides an important basis for plan comparison. Different plans may involve different projects with different economic lives. Methods of benefit-cost analysis have been developed to allow comparisons on a common basis. There is a large body of literature on this subject, especially as applied to water resources, so only a few comments are provided at this point. In its simplest form, benefit-cost analysis compares the present value of all costs with the present value of all benefits. If the benefits exceed the costs, then the plan is economically justified. The present value approach is appropriate if the economic lives of alternatives are the same. If they differ, it is more appropriate to convert each time stream of net benefits to an equivalent average annual net benefit for purposes of comparison. Benefit-cost analysis is detailed and complex, but a good understanding of this useful technique is essential to water resources planning.15 (Chapter 9 in this book covers basic economic analysis in water resources planning.) Impact assessment includes environmental, social, and economic impacts; the major concern is environmental impact, stemming from NEPA. Most water resources projects that are undertaken directly or indirectly receive at least partial federal funding. NEPA requires that all proposals for major federal actions include an environmental impact statement (EIS), and thus, most projects in water resources planning must meet EIS requirements. Even in the absence of NEPA, impact assessment of alternatives is just as important and valid as an economic evaluation. Impact assessment is essentially an analysis of the potential impacts (positive and negative) and potentially significant changes that might be brought about by an alternative. Impacts are identified by comparing the inputs, outputs, and facility requirements of an alternative to the base condition in the absence of that alternative. Although no single measure of environmental impact can be obtained that would be comparable to the benefit-cost ratio, the environmental assessment of each alternative allows a detailed comparison of potential impacts, which allows for more informed decision making. Numerous federal documents as well as published articles and books are available on impact assessment procedures.16 Evaluation and Recommendations Evaluation is the process of analyzing alternative plans and comparing their beneficial and adverse contributions for the purpose of recommending a plan. A simple approach to evaluation may follow this progression:

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1. Identify the issue and objective to which each alternative is directed. 2. Determine the positive and negative character of the alternatives, using public input as well as professional evaluation. 3. Display the results of the evaluation so that decision-makers know how each alternative relates to local, regional, state, and national issues and policies. This display should include trade-offs and choices for each alternative. Several determinations must be made to ensure that plans are adequate and unique: • Determine how well an alternative satisfies component needs, including beneficial and adverse effects on all component needs. • Compare the performance of each alternative with all others. Alternatives that differ only slightly represent an incremental variation of a unique alternative and should be treated as one alternative. • Analyze the trade-offs between economic efficiency and environmental quality.17 Specific criteria used by the USACE are useful in evaluating plans and reducing the number of alternatives: • Acceptability: Assess the workability and viability of a plan in terms of its acceptance by affected parties and its accommodation of known institutional constraints. • Effectiveness: Appraise a plan’s technical performance and contribution to planning objectives. • Efficiency: Assess the plan’s ability to meet objectives functionally and in the least costly way. • Completeness: Assess whether all necessary investments to fully attain a plan are included. • Certainty: Analyze the likelihood of the plan meeting planning objectives. • Geographic scope: Determine if the area is large enough to fully address the problem. • Benefit-cost ratio: Determine the economic effectiveness of the plan. • Reversibility: Measure the capability to restore a complete project to its original condition. • Stability: Analyze the sensitivity of the plan to potential future developments.18 The significance of each of the above tests in comparing plans is a matter of judgment and will vary with the type of plan being developed. Additionally, at this step other social effects are also to be considered, such as urban and community impacts, equity considerations, and potential impacts

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related to income, employment, population distribution, quality of life, and so forth (these relate to the NEPA and to environmental justice, which is discussed further in chapter 9). Economic evaluation and impact assessment may not be the only factors entering the decision-maker’s calculus. Benefit-cost analysis, for example, is not a complete means for evaluating the economic effects of alternatives, but it is useful as a means of quantifying dollar losses and gains to be expected with each alternative. Similarly, impact assessment may be an objective method of forecasting the likely effects of alternatives, but it will not necessarily reveal the relative importance of different values of society. Plan selection is done by those decision-makers with legal authority, based on comparisons and recommendations set forth by planners. The selection should be based on the best use of resources considering all effects, monetary and nonmonetary. Usually only one plan is selected, although the planning process may be repeated to develop new alternatives or combinations of existing alternatives. Implementation Implementation means carrying out a selected plan or set of recommendations. At this stage, the plan is adopted and put forward for design and construction or for the adoption of laws, policies, and management procedures. Although implementation is usually a difficult process, a thorough approach to the previous steps and continuous consideration of implementation in those stages will ensure that the alternatives are realistic and the selected plan is capable of being carried out. Often in water resources planning, considerable effort goes into developing plans that are never adopted. In some cases, a plan is approved and adopted but never carried out, or it is set aside for years. In the latter case, care must be taken not to implement a plan that was adopted years ago unless a thorough reevaluation is done. In like fashion, a recently adopted plan that is being implemented should be continuously reviewed in order to resolve any problems that might arise. Surveillance and Monitoring This step may be considered the “closing of the loop.” Although a water resources plan may be fully implemented, the project should be monitored to see how well it satisfies the original goals and objectives. Many water resources projects require long-term investments, so it is likely that modifications will be required as conditions change. It is common for such modifications to be needed long before the useful life of the investment is completed.

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The Rational Planning Model Incorporation of Planning in Federal Activity From 1933 to 1944, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) embodied the most significant new dimension of the planning community.19 The NRPB demonstrated that planning was a continuous process integrating social, economic, and cultural factors, not a one-time undertaking of physical design. The realization marked the transition of planning from a field dominated by architects and engineers with a primary concern for the physical problems of cities to a field emphasizing the social sciences and the development of research methods useful to planners. The Benefit-Cost Approach President Harry S. Truman on his last day in office, January 19, 1953, delivered a message to Congress that implicitly gave substantial impetus for water resources planning and management to incorporate key elements of the rational planning model. He encouraged Congress to consider a number of items with respect to water resources that have since become common practice, including: • Efficiency of expenditures • Project evaluation • User charges • Public participation • Increased state and local participation Benefit-cost analysis is a straightforward mathematical formulation of the rational planning model that focuses on the single goal of economic efficiency.20 It was rapidly learned, however, that where public policy is concerned, intangible constraints, such as social and environmental costs and benefits, also need to be considered.21 The problem, then, is putting a monetary value on the noncommensurables. Because of this problem, the effects of investments that can be measured in monetary terms are often treated implicitly as being the most important effects when, in fact, the intangible costs and benefits may actually be the most significant. Benefit-cost analysis, because of this deficiency, is more suitable for ranking or comparing courses of action designed to attain the same ends than for testing the absolute desirability of one project over another. This method is discussed more fully in chapter 9.



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Problems with the Rational Planning Model Despite the great intellectual appeal of the rational planning model, it came under increasing criticism in the 1960s and 1970s as the planning profession itself matured and confronted the realities of a more complex decision-making process in the context of a changing political environment and a shifting set of societal goals. Essentially there are three major problems that this model encounters.22 The first is the problem of knowledge and the issue of uncertainty. Most decision analysis relates to unique and nonrepetitive situations. Therefore, the prediction of consequences requires subjective probability judgments. With subjectivity, it is likely that no two people will agree on the same conclusions concerning the future. Another difficult issue within the problem of knowledge concerns the information systems that provide decision-makers with accurate and relevant data. This problem ranges from the outright falsification of data to the loss of important information through aggregation, or the transformation of data into mathematical models. Such difficulties are inherent in the process and structure of bureaucracy. Finally, a serious aspect of the problem of knowledge is the limited validity of the social models used in estimating the impact of decisions. This problem arises in part from the need to limit the number of variables and relationships evaluated. Also, modern social dynamics do not permit the future to unroll incrementally. Rather, the future unrolls disjointedly through a series of crises, breakthroughs, and transformations, which does not provide a stable framework for decision making. The second major problem confronting the theoretical framework of the rational planning model is what economists call the community welfare function. More simply, the community welfare function is defined as the calculation of trade-offs among a community’s preferences for different goals. In order to determine a community’s preferences, a process of social dialogue and consensus development must be undertaken with the community. This process leaves planners with no independent and objective basis for evaluating alternatives. The third major problem confronting the rational planning model is implementation. Within a bureaucratic system, decisions are frequently made without regard to the ability or inability to implement those decisions. It can never be assumed that once a decision is made it will be carried out with minimal friction, especially in a political environment.

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Technical Adjustments Attempts to compensate for these shortcomings have resulted in modifications and adjustments to the rational planning model. Three important technical adjustments are incrementalism, optimization, and the multiple-objective approach. Incrementalism Incremental planning is an attempt to adapt decision-making strategies to the limited cognitive capacities of decision-makers and to reduce the scope and cost of information collection. Incremental planning has six primary requirements: 1. Instead of conducting a comprehensive analysis and evaluating all alternatives, the decision-maker focuses on creating policies that vary only limitedly, or incrementally, from existing policies. 2. Only a small number of alternatives are considered. 3. For each alternative, only a limited number of the “important” consequences are evaluated. 4. Rather than a process of one comprehensive ends-means evaluation, incrementalism allows for many means-ends adjustments, to make the problem more manageable. 5. There is no one correct decision or solution; rather, the issue is handled as a series of small steps in the right direction. 6. Incremental decision making is described as remedial. It is geared toward solving present problems, not the promotion of future goals.23 Overall, incrementalism is described as “satisficing” using the decision-making criteria of “bounded” rationality.24 Even though the decision made is not the best in terms of the rational planning model, it is the best available under the circumstances and therefore is good enough. Optimization Optimization is another extension of the rational planning model.25 The process of optimization is first to build a model of a planning system in which all final objectives are expressed. The decision-maker exists within this planning system, with his or her role being to evaluate alternatives in order to reach goals that eventually achieve the final objectives of the system. The purpose of setting long-range objectives is to put the short-range goals in their proper perspective. The belief is that in so doing, it can be determined which goals are the most important. Therefore, optimization is not just optimiz-

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ing the products of planning; rather, it is optimizing the process of planning.26 Optimization is sometimes termed “super rationality” because it uses complex mathematical programming for problem solving. This method allows for the manipulation of a wide range of policy variables. The problem of predicting the outcomes of combinations of policies requires “super models” of system performance. Optimization models and their role in water resources planning are examined further in chapter 12. Multiple-Objective Approach A third reaction to the rational planning model is termed the multipleobjective approach to analysis.27 This approach is a direct response to the single-objective benefit-cost analysis. Multiple-objective analysis incorporates noncommensurables into its objective function, and it also allows for the trade-offs not accounted for in the rational model. Examples of noncommensurables include environmental goals (e.g., to reduce air pollution or increase dissolved oxygen content); public health, safety, and welfare goals (e.g., to decrease morbidity or decrease mortality); or recreational goals (e.g., to increase fishing, swimming, camping, etc.). Multiple-objective analysis considers much more than the single goal of economic efficiency; it values all the benefits and costs of a decision with regard to community goals. Social and Political Adjustments During the same period that these technical adjustments were being developed, planning also branched off in another direction. Issues of poverty, racism, powerlessness, and income redistribution commanded the attention of the planning field. Planning theories emerged that dealt with more than the traditional physical environment. These theories attempted to integrate social and political environments into planning practice. Through these theories, planning was no longer seen as concerned only with problem solving. Rather, planning was viewed as an attempt to understand the functional aspects of society and recommend future action to improve societal conditions. More simply stated, planning was viewed as part of a broad process to catalyze a social decision-making process. Advocacy Planning One example of planning that rejects the role of the planner as technician and attempts to examine social and political issues is advocacy planning.28 One effect of the advocacy movement has been to shift social policy formulation into the open. It has also challenged the traditional view of unitary public-interest

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decision making (where one decision-maker decides what the public interest is). Advocacy planning calls for developing pluralistic decision making (involving the people affected by the plan so that the best plan can be created). The role of the advocacy planner is to assist the client organization in clarifying its ideas and to translate complicated bureaucratic language to the public. The advocate’s actions make the public better informed about possible alternatives and thus force public agencies to produce superior plans. Citizen Participation The advent of citizen participation in policy formulation was also an attempt to reform the technical planning role. The major problem of early citizen participation efforts was that such programs tended to consist of citizens reacting to agency plans and programs rather than citizens proposing their concepts of appropriate goals and future action. The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations identified thirtyone different forms of citizen participation used in the United States.29 These many forms range from the traditional public hearing to citizen committees, drop-in centers, workshops, meetings, conferences, and surveys. The various forms of citizen participation are used to achieve two general goals. These are (1) to change governmental behavior so that governmental units better respond to citizens’ needs and desires and refrain from the insensitive or arbitrary exercise of power; and (2) to change citizen behavior by affording participation opportunities through which citizens can exercise and enhance their watchfulness over government. Citizen participation, although not as popular as in the 1960s and 1970s, is still an integral element at all levels of government and is highly prevalent in today’s decision-making processes. In addition to the increased use of public participation methods used today, chapter 12 describes the collaborative decision-making techniques and models that are in use. Shared vision planning and collaborative decision making are now widely used throughout the USACE as well as other public and private water resources planning applications. Radical Planning Another planning tradition is radical planning.30 The proponents of radical planning believe that education should be integral to the everyday life of local communities, with minimal intervention from the government and maximum participation of the people in defining and controlling their own environment. More specifically, radical planning promotes the idea of decentralizing government and letting the people take care of themselves. The common link among modern planning theories is the role of planning. Modern planning is intended to evoke active social learning and social education.



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Trends in Planning The conflicts and struggles among different approaches to planning have resulted in far more emphasis on the process of planning than on the plan itself.31 This experience has been found primarily at the local planning level since the early 1960s, but the lessons have also carried over to other levels of government. These lessons should not be ignored by water resources planners and managers interested and involved in the planning process at any level of government. Many states, for example, attempted to institute traditional approaches to planning at the state level in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although these approaches were conceived properly in terms of the rational planning model, it was commonly assumed that state plans could be effectively devised if they were comprehensive, included means for determining goals and objectives, and addressed all relevant areas of interest by inclusion of various “functional planning” elements. Such efforts at state-level planning reached their pinnacle in attempts to relate comprehensive state plans to the plan-implementation environment in state government, as opposed to the more straightforward decision-making environment in local government. The more complex state-level organizational environment, however, led to the relative failure of “comprehensive” state planning models in the 1970s. The comprehensive state planning model has been replaced by more focused executive planning and policy orientation in most states. This trend in planning recognizes the limitations of our ability to be truly comprehensive, especially in fast-changing policy and decision-making environments. Long-range planning now relies more on incremental learning and feedback mechanisms as a means of coping with complexity and change. Gradual movement toward common goals and more fundamental system change are both possible strategies within this planning approach. Inflexible planning control systems are replaced by more adaptive interactions among planning policies, decisions, evaluation, and adjustment of organizational focus in an evolutionary manner. Strategic planning concepts generated by the private sector are representative of this planning style. Among the more recent trends in water resources planning, several seem to be gaining in significance: risk assessment, alternative dispute resolution, adaptive management, collaborative governance, and integrated water resources management. The following sections give an overview of each of these approaches. Risk Assessment Risk assessment is commonly used in evaluating potentially dangerous projects such as nuclear power plants, offshore oil wells, and hazardous-waste handling facilities. It is simply the process of adding risk probabilities to the multiple-objective analysis to estimate the possibility of serious accidents and

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damages. The resulting analysis provides more meaningful information for decision making.32 The 2017 Planning Manual Part II of the USACE incorporates risk management to produce a risk-informed planning process to help make better decisions. Alternative Dispute Resolution One of the trends in planning and in other fields in situations where participating parties do not agree is the development and use of mediation, or alternative dispute resolution (ADR)—that is, an alternative to litigation, the traditional method of dispute resolution. It is currently being used in an increasing number of water resources, environmental, and land use disputes as a means of achieving an acceptable outcome. Arriving at a negotiated compromise eliminates both the costs and time loss incurred in litigation. Another advantage of mediation is that the decision is a compromise satisfying all parties involved as opposed to the win-lose situation of a court decision. At the heart of this approach is the effort to obtain conflict resolution through mediation of a neutral party. There is a basic dichotomy between the potential dispute resolution objective of “truth” and the notion of “justice,” according to Thibaut and Walker.33 Truth is the objective in conflicts where the resolution according to an objective measure is to the common advantage of all interested parties. When an outcome will maximize the interest of one party at the expense of the other, however, no solution will be viewed as “correct” by all parties. Justice becomes the central issue when the goal is apportionment of outcomes or distribution of finite benefits. The field of water resources planning has conflict and disagreement without any single “correct” solution as a normal condition. If we all lived by an infinite water pool of ideal quality that was under our complete control, conflicts would be minimal, but this is not reality. Water resources interests have different attitudes regarding ways to achieve certain ends, uses of water, and other areas where they disagree over this fixed commodity. The range of disputes extends from complete agreement to fully intractable conflict. Conflict resolution procedures are appropriate for the stages in between, and the extent of disagreement affects the process and intensity of the process that is applied. Of particular interest under ADR is the effort to avoid litigation and enter into a process of negotiation, mediation, and joint resolution of disagreements. Normal litigation can be characterized as an adversarial process in which a decision is reached by a third party, such as a judge, and imposed whether it is acceptable to all parties or not. ADR, on the other hand, seeks to achieve mutually acceptable decisions without a third party making the decision. If a third party is involved, it is in the role of a facilitator or mediator who is a neutral party used to bring about resolution of the conflict between the other parties. The emphasis in ADR is on voluntary agreement, mutual interests, and interdependence. ADR

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uses processes to encourage communication, trust, and improved relationships between the interested parties.34 The dispute resolution process can be divided into three phases, and within each of these phases are a number of tasks: Conflict Assessment • Clarify major issues • Identify individuals and organizations with a stake in the outcome • Identify individuals and organizations who can block implementation • Identify underlying interests of the major stakeholders • Obtain major stakeholders and decision-makers’ acceptance of a process to resolve identified conflicts Negotiation and Joint Fact-Finding • Initiate the dispute resolution process • Agree on objectives of the process • Clarify differences among parties • Clarify interests of the stakeholders • Document existing conditions associated with the identified problems • Conduct joint fact-finding/data collection as necessary • Generate alternatives to meet each party’s interests • Establish evaluation criteria • Evaluate alternatives based on criteria established • Select options which maximize benefits to each party and meet process objectives Implementation • Identify tasks necessary to implement agreements • Identify all those who will conduct specific tasks • Establish a timeframe for conducting and completing tasks • Establish an advisory group (or similar mechanism) to oversee activities • Meet after a predesignated period of time to evaluate agreements35 Adequate preparation prior to entering dispute resolution procedures is essential, as is the systematic development of an implementation plan. In fact, all of the above phases and their components are important to the successful conclusion of dispute resolution processes. Among the benefits of ADR processes is that they allow parties to make the settlement decisions rather than turning those decisions over to others. ADR gives the opportunity to avoid the extensive time, expense, and uncertainty of

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a court or administrative decision. At the same time, however, ADR is not intended to completely replace litigation. Adaptive Management Adaptive management refers to the concept of applying experimentation to the design and implementation of natural resource and environmental policies. An adaptive policy is one that is designed from the outset to test clearly formulated hypotheses about the behavior of an ecosystem being changed by human use.36 If policies succeed, hypotheses are affirmed; if policies fail, an adaptive design encourages learning so that future decisions can proceed from a better base of understanding. The approach attempts to set up a process that allows scientific information to be integrated into resource management decisions. Adaptive management is highly advantageous when policy makers face uncertainty, as is generally the rule in ecosystem-level or watershed-level management decisions. The experimentation mentality fostered by adaptive management encourages the steady accumulation of reliable knowledge into the management framework. Adaptive management recognizes that environmental quality is not achieved by eliminating change but by providing resiliency in the face of surprise. Disadvantages associated with this approach include political fallout from highly visible failures and increased short-term costs of information gathering. The adaptive approach acknowledges that there is a series of myths associated with current environmental management and assessment programs. Management-oriented myths include the following: • The central goal for design is to produce policies and developments that result in stable social, economic, and environmental behavior. • Development programs are fixed sets of actions that will not involve extensive modification, revision, or additional investment after the development occurs. • Policies should be designed on the basis of economic and social goals with environmental concerns added subsequently as constraints during the review process. • Environmental concerns can be dealt with appropriately only by changing institutional constraints.37 Adaptive environmental management recognizes that such paradigms are attempts to simplify complex situations in which much of the data and understanding necessary to make decisions is unavailable or unknown. Adaptive assessment recognizes that ecological systems respond to actions based on the following four properties:



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1. The parts of an ecological system are connected to each other in a selective way that has implications for measurement of impacts and management of the resources. 2. Events are not uniform in either time or space. 3. Sharp shifts in behavior are natural for many ecosystems. 4. Variability, not constancy, is a feature of ecological systems that contributes to their persistence and to resiliency. Consequently, management should be oriented around these concepts. Therefore, adaptive management (1) is ecosystemic, rather than jurisdictional, (2) focuses management on populations or ecosystems rather than individual organisms or projects, and (3) operates on a time scale consistent with natural systems rather than business cycles or political terms or budget cycles.38 It recognizes that environmental quality is not achieved by eliminating change but, instead, by providing resiliency in the face of surprise. In the Columbia River basin, the concept of adaptive management has been applied as an explicit strategy since 1984. Experimentation as a management strategy has proven to be consistent with the actions called for by the Northwest Power Act, namely, protecting, mitigating, and enhancing fish and wildlife resources of the Columbia River as affected by hydropower development.39 The use of adaptive management stemmed from two primary causes: (1) an environmental crisis (decline of Columbia River salmon) and (2) a legislative response (creation of the Northwest Power Planning Council). Other important contributing factors were the need to bring together disparate governmental and nongovernmental entities to form a regional plan, and the fact that scientific uncertainties were an impediment to developing a program. The use of adaptive management at the ecosystem level on the Columbia differs from its traditional usage, which is connected with harvest management strategies, and from typical usage in that multiple political jurisdictions and a wide array of economic interests are involved. The use of adaptive management in the Columbia basin has had mixed results. Regulators are becoming accustomed to treating management as a learning process, formation of a regional vision has been enhanced, there has been an increased appreciation of the complexities of many components of the system, and there has been a political commitment to stress scientific methods in resolving disputes. On the other hand, it is difficult to identify scientific questions that have been addressed in the basin through a process that could be called adaptive management. Virtually all critical questions that faced the council upon its adoption of the management concept in 1984 still remain, and the establishment of basin-wide research and monitoring has been difficult. Difficulties in establishing adaptive management should not be surprising, since many of its basic premises run counter to normal modes of doing business.

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The idea that an agency should take dramatic steps to learn can be problematic in a high-stakes, real-world setting. That high value is placed on learning ignores the fact that in some instances, ignorance has value. As long as questions are unanswered, parties are free to take a political position and “good” science is that which “answers” our questions. In short, adaptive management does not allow managers to escape unscientific pressures.40 Collaborative Governance A theme receiving increasing attention in planning is collaborative governance in water resources planning and management. As an example, difficult water resource challenges faced in the Sacramento, California, region in the late 1980s failed to be resolved by traditional methods. This led to realization by city and county personnel several years later that a different approach was needed. The new approach to be tried was to initiate a collaborative policy dialog among those involved in the situation. Innes and Booher41 describe how emergent collaborative approaches to a number of existing planning and policy practices can work, drawing upon their years of experience and familiarity with many successful as well as failed attempts at collaborative policy making throughout the world. Their work shows how many types of knowledge are needed for understanding problems in collaborative planning processes. Some of the successful processes they identify include methods whereby experts, laypersons, and people with unique local knowledge joined to create an understanding of the challenges to be faced and the possible options to deal with their problems. The Sacramento experience with collaborative planning is linked to the California Federal (CALFED) program—now the Delta Stewardship Council “Delta Plan”—and its success with collaborative efforts in the same region. The section on the Delta Plan in chapter 7 provides some details of the time and effort involved in getting numerous local entities to modify their approaches toward management in order to have much greater success. Another demonstration of successful collaborative planning is the Philadelphia Water Department’s “Green City, Clean Waters” plan, as amended through negotiations started in 2009 with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. This program represents the City of Philadelphia’s commitment toward meeting its regulatory obligations and helping to revitalize the city. The combined sewer overflow/long-term control plan update submitted in 2009 explains how the vision and commitment to its implementation came from its history, built on extensive watershed analysis and planning, and how it was continually informed by local and national policy trends.42 By evaluating various alternative implementation approaches, the city concluded that a green stormwater infrastructure-based approach would provide



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the greatest return in environmental, economic, and social benefits in the most efficient time period. Philadelphia’s Program for Combined Sewer Overflow Control, “Green City, Clean Waters,” utilized a strong citizen participation component in its collaborative efforts to achieve success with the plan. The city’s philosophy of a land-water-infrastructure approach was made real in "Green City, Clean Waters." Green stormwater infrastructure includes a range of soilwater-plant systems that intercept stormwater, infiltrate a portion of it into the ground, evaporate a portion of it into the air, and in some cases release a portion of it slowly back into the sewer system. A third example of collaborative planning is shown by New Orleans’s focus on multiple levels of government when the city needed to reduce flooding and clean the water after disastrous damage by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The storm caused substantial damage, but its aftermath was catastrophic. Levee breaches caused massive flooding that caused more than $100 billion in damage and substantial loss of lives. New Orleans had a huge and complex water problem, particularly in terms of flooding and stormwater planning. Similar to the Philadelphia effort, leaders in New Orleans looked to a collaborative approach. The Greater New Orleans Foundation, founded in 2003, was enlisted to help bring many agencies and other interested parties together to develop a post-Katrina program.43 The Greater New Orleans Foundation is part of a large, interconnected region and serves thirteen surrounding parishes. Using people, ideas, and resources (including funding from several major donors), the Foundation played a major role in the region’s recovery by coordinating donor efforts and gaining support for the Unified New Orleans Plan following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, that devastated the region. The Foundation’s efforts made the release of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid possible. The region was also severely impacted following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, causing the largest oil spill in the nation’s history. The Greater New Orleans Foundation responded within days by opening the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund, designated for projects that restored and strengthened the communities and environments affected by the disaster. Donations from around the world were channeled into millions of dollars in grant assistance over the next three years. Recognizing that 44 percent of the region’s residents live in oil-threatened coastal parishes, one of the Foundation’s top priorities was to address the short-term and long-term needs of these residents and of the region’s environment. The examples above have shown that collaborative governance is important to the success of water resources planning efforts where multiple layers of organizations and governmental agencies are involved in obtaining solutions to complex water problems.

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Integrated Water Resources Management IWRM is a specific application of the more general notion of integrated environmental management, which seeks to deal holistically with the natural environment. Integrated environmental management (IEM) can be considered as that set of proactive or preventive measures that “maintain the environment in good condition for a variety of long-range sustainable uses.”44 In other words, IEM may be viewed as the coordinated control, direction, or influence of human activities in a specific environmental system to “achieve and balance the broadest possible range of short- and long-term objectives.” In current terminology, IEM might be interchanged with the concept of sustainable development, which also seeks a balance between environmental protection and long-term, sustained human activity. It evolved largely from experience showing that single-medium or single-source management was not successful in meeting short- or long-term goals. Over the past decades, the body of literature and the use of IWRM has grown substantially, and it has become a driving force in water resources planning.45,46 IWRM is no longer a “new” approach to water resources planning, but one that is receiving increased attention as a modified form of older planning approaches, with several variations. A list of elements for integrated management would show many similarities to the “rational planning model” approach to water resources management. A 156-page report by the APA in 2017, Planners and Water,47 is an indicator of the strong and growing interest among water resources planners for an integrated approach to managing water resources. It was noted that past planners interacted with water utilities that managed water supplies, wastewater, and stormwater outside the normal planning process. Work on water issues by planners was done as part of reviewing development projects or environmental impacts. Planners were not typically involved in planning the location, growth, or management of water systems. A main focus of the report was on One Water, another, simpler name for IWRM. There is no specific consensus among water professionals on a particular definition for IWRM or its implementation.48 Definitions of One Water were developed by two water resource research foundations. The Water Research Foundation (WRF) offered a One Water definition as “an integrated planning and implementation approach to managing finite water resources for long-term resilience and reliability, meeting both community and ecosystem needs.”49 The Water Environment and Reuse Foundation (WE&RF) offered the following: “The One Water approach considers the urban water cycle as a single integrated system, in which all urban water flows are recognized as potential resources, and the interconnectedness of water supply, groundwater, stormwater and wastewater is optimized, and their combined impact on flooding, water quality, wetlands, watercourses, estuaries and coastal waters is recognized.”50 A complementary approach is given in the International



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FIGURE 2.1 IWRM: Interrelationships between Environmental, Socioeconomic, and Governance Systems as Related to Water Resources.

Water Association’s (IWA’s) principles for “Water Wise Cities” (n.d.), reflected in the notion that all city dwellers should be able to have access to safe drinking water and sanitation services. The IWRM has taken hold of the water resources planning and management field, and its manifestations can be found in all aspects of current planning both in the United States and abroad. Terms such as One Water; total water management; holistic water management; comprehensive water policy planning; systems or watershed, basin, or problem shed approaches; conjunctive water use; silo busting; and many more are employed to convey the interrelationships between the human uses of water and the governance, socioeconomic, and environmental systems in which they lie (see figure 2.1). Integrated water resources management has a number of dimensions, with several possible meanings and perspectives that are identified in terms of river basin planning:

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• Water resources have various physical aspects (e.g., surface or ground; quantity, quality). • Water is a system, but it is also a component that interacts with other systems (e.g., interaction between land and water; interaction between river and estuary). • IWRM can consider interrelationships between water and social and economic development (e.g., role of water in hydropower, industrial production, urban growth). • IWRM can consider the river not only in terms of the water itself but also the biological resources that rely upon it in its natural state (e.g., fish and wildlife, benthic organisms, plants). • IWRM can incorporate a river in its full extent, from headwaters to the estuary, and in consideration of the entire range of potential uses over its length. • IWRM can view the resource and its uses from a long-term perspective as well as from a short-term, immediate view.51 Taken as a whole, these dimensions suggest that IWRM looks comprehensively at water and the related resources of a water resource system (e.g., river basin) in efforts to manage the system for broad, long-term objectives. The scope of IWRM offers further insight into what it is. At the strategic level, it requires thinking comprehensively in order to maintain the widest possible perspective, while at the operational level, a more focused approach is needed. Although an integrated approach considers a mix of variables and their interrelationships, attention is directed toward a smaller number of variables that are believed to account for a substantial portion of the management problems. A comprehensive perspective is valuable for the initial review of a problem, but it should be followed by an integrated approach that is more selective and focused. The Savannah River basin in the southeastern United States and the McKenzie River basin in the northwestern United States provide two different examples of the appeal of IWRM as applied to river basin management. Savannah River Basin The Savannah River basin provides a situation where integrated management has been investigated closely. The river forms the border between Georgia and South Carolina, with its headwaters in both states. A working group of twelve water management experts agreed that application of the principles of IEM would be highly beneficial for a system as complex as the Savannah River basin. Not only are the many aspects of land use, water withdrawals, waste discharges, water quality flow rates, and environmental protection regulated by various state and federal agencies but the objectives to be attained by these controls often conflicted. It was envisioned that a more integrated management system would have the necessary databases and mechanisms for conflict



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resolution, to balance protection and development functions more effectively than was presently possible.52 IEM was thought to be “particularly beneficial in meshing management activities of the sovereign entities—the federal and state governments—that today are separated functionally and by regulations in controlling one body of water, indistinguishable by state allegiance or federal primacy.”53 Clearly there are parallels between the Savannah and many other river basins that have numerous and often conflicting demands as well as multiple affected jurisdictions. The working group for the Savannah recommended a stepwise approach for developing IEM in the river basin: 1. Identification of objectives 2. Examination of alternative approaches for attaining each objective 3. Consideration of mutualities or conflicts among objectives, emphasizing public involvement 4. Development of a plan based on balancing multiple objectives and negotiated compromises 5. Implementation of a plan by Georgia, South Carolina, and the federal government The working group stressed that all parties with significant interest in the future of the basin need to be represented: elected officials and administrators for the states and their local subdivisions, federal officials, impacted populations and industries, and public interest groups. They also stated that the following issues must be addressed and incorporated into the management system: 1. Reasonable allocation of water supply and the assimilative capacity of the river and tributaries among Georgia, South Carolina, and federal needs 2. Establishment of water quality regulatory standards that the three entities find acceptable 3. Specified indicators for minimum acceptable levels for water quality, habitat, recharge, and so forth 4. Consistent approach to wildlife/fisheries regulations and habitat maintenance 5. Optimized water availabilities for in-stream and off-stream use, including habitat considerations, by controlling flows and reservoir impoundment levels 6. Land use management and controls The main component of the integrated management plan was to be a set of combined and interrelated objectives and quantitative evaluation of the benefits and costs compared to the alternatives that were rejected. An important outcome of this effort was the identification of questionable assumptions and predictive uncertainties that would have to be resolved by specific studies or measurements.

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Equally important were recommendations on the structure of the system for managing the program and guidelines for operation. Precedents existed for a wide range of options. Such alternatives included assignment of lead responsibilities to various existing federal and state agencies, designation of an advisory group to guide cooperation of various agencies, assurance of consistent responses by the various agencies through an interstate compact, or the establishment of a basin authority either working through existing entities or with full management powers and staffing. The group realized the inherent difficulties for the various federal and state agencies to surrender major responsibilities for controlling the river and its shores. McKenzie River Basin The McKenzie River basin is a good example of integrated river basin management (IRBM), but on a smaller scale than the Savannah River. The McKenzie River lies only in the state of Oregon, flowing from the crest of the Cascade Mountains westward to join the Willamette River. Its headwaters lie in three wilderness areas, while the confluence with the Willamette is near the EugeneSpringfield metropolitan area. The river provides many benefits: drinking water for more than two hundred thousand people, excellent fisheries, hydropower, recreation, open space, wildlife habitat, and rich soils. With the broad array of interests, many conflicting demands have been placed on the river’s resources, and a program was needed to coordinate existing plans and regulations for more effective management of the basin. The focus of the McKenzie program was to actively approach problems and conflicts in the basin, using citizen participation, and to develop a workable model for natural resource protection. During 1991–1992, the Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB) and Lane County met with a number of affected state agencies to coordinate the early phases of the study and to gain additional support for it. Lane County and EWEB began the study by allocating funding to identify options for the first year in a scoping report. The scoping report identifies the McKenzie River as an outstanding natural resource that supplies many benefits and values, and recognizes the many competing demands on the resources of the watershed that need to be balanced: • domestic water supply • recreation • hydropower • wildlife and fisheries habitat • public access

• private property rights • agriculture • forestry • scenic values • sand and gravel

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The scoping report goes on to state that the “most effective way to address the multitude of issues is to establish an integrated, comprehensive watershed management program that includes governmental and citizen participation.” The goals and objectives of the program are especially noteworthy in spelling out what might be accomplished through an IRBM program: 1. Create a problem-solving and decision-making framework to deal with issues that cross jurisdictional boundaries within the basin. 2. Establish objectives and set a direction for basin use by balancing the demands on the resource. 3. Integrate existing and future plans dealing with the McKenzie watershed. 4. Provide relief to landowners frustrated by having to deal with several layers of government on water issues. 5. Proactively deal with the issues, before the resource, the major domestic water supply for the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area, is degraded. 6. Compile more complete information for decision making so that significant issues in the watershed can be acted upon comprehensively. 7. Develop a basin-wide land and natural resource database to provide better technical and research information to all jurisdictions. 8. Develop a process to coordinate jurisdictions and to optimize and protect the competing values they represent. 9. Foster stewardship of the resource. Benefits of IWRM As implied by the Savannah River and McKenzie River examples, the benefits of IWRM are many, especially in terms of rational and broad-based management of the resources of a region. Among the benefits identified by Cairns are: 1. Long-term protection of the resource 2. Enhanced potential for nondeleterious, multiple use 3. Reduced expenditure of energy and money on conflicts over competing uses, and the possibility of redirecting these energies and funds to environmental management 4. More rapid and effective rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems to a more usable condition (more ecosystem services provided) 5. Cost effectiveness54 Benefits of IWRM must be considered in terms of the difficulties inherent in managing water resources comprehensively. It has long been recognized that the institutional problems associated with managing natural resources are, without

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question, invariably more aggravating and intractable than the technical and scientific problems. There are many existing institutions charged with some fragment of resource use or management, but they typically fail to integrate system management responsibilities. Barriers to IWRM There is general acceptance of IWRM, but implementation has not been consistent because of obstacles and because there are no obvious ideal models to choose from and follow. In addition, certain political and economic conditions may lead to differing attitudes toward integrated management. Integrated management was affected adversely as the nation moved toward privatization and free markets in the 1980s. Mechanisms to coordinate, provide research, and plan were either dismantled or eviscerated by the Reagan administration.55 Consistent with this action, it was not surprising that integrated river basin management in the United States was the exception, not the rule. During the 1980s, the trend in the United States moved steadily away from an integrated approach as various coordinating mechanisms were systematically eliminated. It wasn’t until the 1990s that integrated water resource management rebounded and swiftly ensconced itself in the water resources planning profession. Some of the more salient barriers to implementing IEM or IWRM, particularly related to river basin studies, were the following: • Integrated management takes time, and time means money; agencies do not fund necessary time for this activity. • Turf battles run rampant in organizations. • Many are unwilling to compromise. • Required changes in lifestyle are strongly resisted by some, not only by individuals but also by institutions and corporations. • Society is oriented toward growth rather than maintenance. • The political process is oriented toward polarizing issues rather than integrated management. • Institutions of higher learning do not train people to think in an integrative manner. • Short-term profits are enticing and they can distract or divert resources from longer term gains. • A cynical attitude such as “what has posterity done for me” poses an obstacle toward a collaborative decision making process. • Reluctance to changing ways of doing things is commonplace.



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Obstacles to Planning Common obstacles to planning often involve problems of how officials perceive the planning process. Such perceptions constitute an important issue that should be addressed. Typical attitudes are reflected in statements and questions about the relevance of planning. Reasons behind these questions range from real problems based on a bad experience to lack of understanding of planning, resistance to change by most organizations, jealousy among technically oriented professionals who feel threatened by challenges to their knowledge, or the belief that the future is totally impossible to predict, much less plan for. Some decisionmakers and managers believe that coping is easier than planning; they also fear that planning leads to too much control and eliminates flexibility—therefore it should be resisted. These perceptions can be largely dispelled by providing a better understanding of the planning process, by using planning methods that take advantage of “incremental learning” and other dynamic planning approaches, by specifically involving both decision-makers and technical staff in the early stages of planning through to implementation, by emphasizing collaborative and partnership styles of planning involvement, and by providing a clear, unequivocal top management commitment to the planning process. Top management support still may leave other obstacles to planning. Most planning settings involve many different agencies with different legal mandates and possibly conflicting public constituencies; this is often the case in water resources planning and decision making. Such conflicts exist whether planning is being done or not; as a result, actually implementing even the best of plans is often a difficult task. A major obstacle to planning in an organization is the close association between the planning process and the organization itself. When organizations undergo major changes (as they sometimes do), many ongoing activities are disrupted—particularly long-term, goal-oriented activities like planning. Moreover, the pressures that usually accompany major agency reorganizations—such as increasing or decreasing staff, adjusting to new program responsibilities, redirecting agency priorities and resources, and accommodating political mandates—present major obstacles to a continuing planning process. It can be argued that planning is most needed during these periods of change. Any planning that takes place in such an environment is likely to be much more immediate in focus until some type of organizational stability returns. A common obstacle to planning lies in typical conflicts among agencies that reflect power struggles, competing constituencies, and different agency missions and goals. Struggles where planning becomes a control issue are going to be dominated by the larger issues of power and authority.

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Finally, it is important to note that planning is difficult to execute in a regulatory environment. One commonly cited reason for this difficulty is that the day-to-day pressure of regulatory decisions is simply a foreign environment for long-range planning.56 This pressure forces a regulatory agency into a more reactive posture, from both the standpoint of its workload and the changing situations and issues to which it must respond on short notice. Regulated interests prefer a certain degree of administrative flexibility in regulatory agencies so that they can negotiate and arrange the best deal possible, unconstrained by plans that don’t always fit their situation. A further difficulty results when new regulatory programs are mandated within prescribed deadlines, because agencies lack the time to set goals, collect data, and establish policies to support the regulatory process. These reasons, among others, highlight the fact that planning programs face special obstacles in a regulatory agency environment, and those obstacles must be anticipated and understood in advance.57 Benefits of Planning Planning approaches and applications in the public sector are now numerous and widespread. They reflect an increasing acceptance of planning techniques in all levels of government.58 This trend is especially the case in water resources planning and management. In broad terms, numerous benefits can be attributed to planning, although they all must be tempered with caveats on how well planning is carried out, under what constraints, and in which specific institutional environments. A major purpose and benefit of planning is to help make better decisions. The planning process can happen in various ways, such as bringing information together in a comprehensive manner, evaluating alternative solutions, and estimating the future consequences of the alternatives.59 Planning also helps to give direction and organization to a series of decisions by giving them a future orientation. By deciding on the desired directions in advance through a goalsetting process, planning gives a future orientation to short-term, routine decisions, and it attempts to give a degree of predictability and rationality to those decisions. When short-term operating policies are established to provide more specific direction to daily decisions, a bridge or linkage is set up between the short-range concerns of most decision-makers and the long-range context and consequences of their decisions. One of the major hazards of planning is that predicting the future is far from being a precise and accurate process. Early approaches to planning give testimony to this fact. Contemporary planning practice, however, works to reduce risk and uncertainty about the future through a variety of forecasting methods that become part of an evolving and dynamic planning process. Analysis of current decisions provides important information that is useful in changing



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assumptions, updating forecasts, and thereby gaining more exact estimates of likely outcomes. As demonstrated earlier in the discussion of steps in the planning process, this interactive learning, feedback, and revision process is inherent to planning and helps to build credibility over time. Another benefit often attributed to planning is its coordinative value. Coordination within an organization and with outside influences is a basic requirement in most planning activities because the goal-directed approach means constantly considering the relative contribution of all activities toward achieving common goals.60 Conflicts and inconsistencies do arise, but these must be addressed in order to work toward an organization’s goals, or else the goals must be altered to reflect the situation. Anticipation and resolution of conflict rather than blind movement toward goal-oriented results require consistent coordination among those involved. The planning process often provides benefits merely by exposing the normative values involved in these coordination and conflict-resolution processes, especially in the public sector, because public planning goals supposedly reflect the public interest. When these goals are supported through the political process, as through official plan adoption, they can be used to evaluate private rights and responsibilities in various public decision situations. The benefits obtained from good planning include improved quality of routine decisions, better understanding of problems and issues, better direction and more consistent policy decisions with respect to long-term goals, more focus on priority issues, consensus building, and more rationality in public decision making. Finally, it is essential to note that planning has numerous obstacles as well as benefits. Thus, planning as a tool or process should not be oversold as a magic answer, because this expectation will not be fulfilled. Study Questions 1. Compare and contrast single-purpose water resources planning with multiple-purpose planning. Give two different examples of each. 2. Review the history of water resources planning in your region and in your state. Is it coordinated with other types of planning, such as transportation or economic development? 3. What are the goals and objectives identified in the plans for your region and state? How were they established? Are they realistic? What do you see as the major obstacles to planning and to plan implementation in your community? 4. Using the USACE’s list of criteria for evaluating plans, select a water resources project under consideration in your state and determine whether it satisfies all criteria.

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 5. What is the primary agency for water resources planning in your region or state? To what extent is the public involved in the planning process? What about special interest groups?  6. Is your state legislature active in water resources planning legislation? Why or why not?  7. Identify and review two important pieces of water resources legislation passed in your state over the past ten years. To what extent have they been brought about or affected by federal activity?  8. Prepare an outline of a plan for an important water resources issue facing your community now or in the foreseeable future. Be sure to include the steps in the planning process that are important to this particular issue.  9. Which agencies and individuals are primarily responsible for decision making with respect to water quality in your community? 10. What is IWRM? What are its components and why is the framework so useful in planning? Notes 1.  Huffman, E. (2014). Water Resources Management: Sector Results Profile. World Bank. Retrieved from http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2013/04/15/water-resources-manage ment-results-profile 2.  Cesanek, W., V. Elmer, and J. Graeff. (2017). Planners and Water. PAS Report 588. Chicago: American Planning Association. 3. AWWA. (2007). Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practice, M50. 2nd ed. AWWA. Retrieved from http://www.awwa.org/Portals/0/files/publications/documents/ M50LookInside.pdf 4.  Russell, C. S., and D. D. Baumann, Eds. (2009). The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 5.  Christian-Smith, J., et al. (2012). A Twenty-First Century U.S. Water Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. 6.  Fleck, J. (2016). Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West. Washington, DC: Island Press. 7.  Schwarz, H. E. (1979). Water Resources Planning—Its Recent Evolution. ASCE, Journal of the Water Resources Planning and Management Division, 105(1), 27–38. 8.  US Water Resources Council. (1973). Principles, Standards and Procedures for Water and Related Land Resources Planning. Washington, DC: GPO; US Water Resources Council. (1983). Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies. Washington, DC: GPO. 9.  Institute of Water Resources. (2018). IWR Library. USACE. Retrieved from http:// www.iwr.usace.army.mil/Library/IWR-Library/ 10.  USACE. (2017). Planning Manual Part II: Risk-Informed Planning. IWR Report 2017R-03. Prepared by Charles Yoe. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR; USACE. (1997). Planning Primer. IWR Report 97-R-15. Prepared by Kenneth Orth and Charles Yoe. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR;



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and USACE. (1976). Manual for Water Resources Planners. Fort Belvoir, VA: Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors. 11.  EPA. (1974). Guidelines for Preparation of Water Quality Management Plans. Washington, DC: GPO; EPA. (1974). Water Quality Management Planning for Urban Runoff. Washington, DC: GPO; EPA. (1975). Guidelines for Areawide Waste Treatment Management Planning. Washington, DC: GPO. 12.  APA. (2016). Water Working Group, Water Task Force. APA. Retrieved from https:// www.planning.org/nationalcenters/green/watergroup/ 13.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 14.  US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). BLS. Retrieved from https:// www.bls.gov/; and US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis. (n.d.). BEA. Retrieved from https://www.bea.gov/ 15.  McAllister, D. M. (1981). Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis. In Evaluation in Environmental Planning. Boston: MIT Press. 16.  See, for example, Ortolano, L. (1984). Environmental Planning and Decision Making. New York: Wiley; Rau, J. G., and D. C. Wooten, Eds. (1980). Environmental Impact Analysis Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill; Jain, R., et al. (1993). Environmental Assessment. New York: McGraw-Hill. 17. USACE. (1976). Manual for Water Resources Planners. Fort Belvoir, VA: Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors. 18. USACE, Manual for Water Resources Planners. 19.  Friedman, J., and B. M. Hudson. (1974). Knowledge and Action: A Guide to Planning Theory. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 40(1), 2–16. 20.  McAllister, Theory of Cost-Benefit Analysis. 21.  Funigiello, P. J. (1972). City Planning in World War Two: The Experience of the National Resources Planning Board. Social Science Quarterly, 53(1), 91–104. 22.  Funigiello, City Planning in World War Two. 23. Lindblom, C. E. (1959). The Science of Muddling Through. Public Administration Review, 19 (2), 79–88. 24.  Simon, H. A. (1949). A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations. In Administrative Behavior. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. 25.  Costello, L. S. (1973). Establishing Goals and Objectives for Urban Water Resources Management. Reston, VA: CH2M Hill, Inc. 26.  Churchman, C. W. (1983). The Systems Approach. 2nd ed. New York: Dell. 27.  Holling, C. S., and M. A. Goldberg. (1980). Ecology and Planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 45(4). 28. Davidoff, P. (1965). Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 31(4). 29.  Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. (1980). Citizen Participation in the Federal System. Washington, DC: GPO. 30.  Hudson, B. M., et al. (1979). Comparison of Current Planning Theories: Counterparts and Contradictions. Journal of the American Planning Association, 45 (4), 387–98. 31.  Krueckeburg, D. A. (1983). The Culture of Planning. In Introduction to Planning History in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, Center for Urban Policy Research. 32.  Dzurik, A. A., and R. Feldhaus. (1986). The Evolution of Planning Theory and Practice: Engineering Implications. ASCE, Journal of Urban Planning and Development, 112(3).

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33.  Thibaut J. W., and L. Walker. (1978). A Theory of Procedure. California Law Review, 66(3), 541–566. 34.  Goldberg, S., F. Sander, and N. Rogers. (1992). Dispute Resolution: A Negotiation Mediation and Other Processes. Boston: Little, Brown. 35.  Viessman, W. A., Jr., and E. T. Smerdon, Eds. (1990). Managing Water-Related Conflicts. New York: American Society of Civil Engineers. 36.  Lee, K. N. (1993). Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment. Washington, DC: Island Press. 37.  Holling, C. S., Ed. (1978). Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. New York: Wiley-Interscience. 38. Lee, Compass and Gyroscope. 39.  McConnaha, W. E., and P. J. Paquet. (1995). Adaptive Strategies for the Management of Ecosystems: The Columbia River Experience. Portland, OR: Northwest Power Planning Council. 40.  Volkman, J. R., and W. E. McConnaha. (1993). Through a Glass Darkly: Columbia River Basin Salmon, the Endangered Species Act, and Adaptive Management. Environmental Law, 23, 1249–1272. 41.  Innes, J., and D. Booher. (2018). Planning with Complexity: An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy. 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 42.  Philadelphia Water Department. (2018). Green City, Clean Waters. Retrieved from http://www.phillywatersheds.org/ltcpu/ 43. Greater New Orleans Foundation. (2012). Our Mission. About Us. Retrieved from https://www.gnof.org/about-us/ 44.  Cairns, J., Jr. (1991). The Need for Integrated Environmental Systems Management. In Integrated Environmental Management, edited by J. Cairns Jr. and T. V. Crawford. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers. 45.  Examples are Heathcote, I. W. (1998). Integrated Watershed Management: Principles and Practices. New York: Wiley; and Lai, R. ed. (1999). Integrated Watershed Management in the Global Ecosystem. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. More recently, A group of twenty British authors contributed to Holden, J., Ed. (2015). Integrated Water Resources Planning. New York: Routledge. 46.  Mitchell, B. (1990). Integrated Water Management. New York: Belhaven Press. 47.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 48.  Bateman, B., and R. Rancier. (2012). Case Studies in Integrated Water Resource Management: From Local Stewardship to National Vision. Middleburg, VA: American Water Resources Association Policy Committee. Retrieved from https://www.awra.org/committees/ AWRA-Case-Studies-IWRM.pdf 49.  Paulson, C., W. Broley, and L. Stephens. (2017). Blueprint for One Water. Water Research Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.waterrf.org/resources/webcasts/Lists/Public Webcasts/Attachments/74/Webcast013017_FINAL.pdf 50.  Mukheibir, P., C. Howe, and D. Gallet. (May 2014). What’s Getting in the Way of a “One Water” Approach to Water Services Planning and Management? Water, Technical Papers. Retrieved from http://aquadoc.typepad.com/files/one_water_awwa.pdf 51. Mitchell, Integrated Water Management. 52.  Zielinski, P., et al. (1991). Management of the Savannah River. In Integrated Environmental Management, edited by J. Cairns Jr. and T. V. Crawford. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers.



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53.  Zielinski, P., et al., Management of the Savannah River. 54.  Cairns, The Need for Integrated Environmental Systems Management. 55. Mitchell, Integrated Water Management. 56.  May, J. W., and S. Snaman. (1986). A Critique of Water Resources Planning in Florida. Vol. 4 of A Report to Five Water Management Districts. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University. 57.  Charbeneau, R. I., Ed. (1984). Regional and State Water Resources Planning and Management. Bethesda, MD: American Water Resources Association. 58.  May and Snaman, A Critique of Water Resources Planning in Florida. 59.  Davis, R. K. (1968). The Range of Choice in Water Management. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future. 60. Charbeneau, Regional and State Water Resources Planning and Management.

3 Hydrologic Fundamentals

Introduction

W

ater covers about two-thirds of the earth’s surface, but surprisingly little is readily available for human use. On a global scale, the saline oceans are the biggest component of the earth’s water system, containing more than 97 percent of the total amount of water. Of the remaining, other saline water makes up 0.9 percent and freshwater 2.5 percent. The further breakdown of the components of freshwater and their percentages, available from the US Geological Survey (USGS) website, are shown in figure 3.1.1 Thus, we note that of the 2.5 percent freshwater, more than 65 percent is trapped in glaciers and ice caps, and approximately 30 percent is in the subsurface in the form of groundwater. The remaining, limited available amount is distributed very unevenly on and under the earth’s surface and over time. These factors, combined with the many open-ended subcycles of the global hydrologic cycle, account for many of the water resources problems facing water resources planners and managers. This chapter presents basic information on hydrology, focusing on that which is particularly relevant to water resources planning. The first section introduces key terms used in this chapter, followed by a section that deals with the hydrologic cycle and the water budget. The remaining portion of the chapter concentrates on surface and groundwater hydrology, and the interactions between them. Although it is important for the water resources planner to understand basic hydrologic principles, this chapter only skims the surface

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FIGURE 3.1 Global Water Resources Distribution. Source: United States Geological Survey (USGS). (2016). The World’s Water. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html

of this important topic. More information can be found in books that are directed toward hydrologists and engineers.2 Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resources planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms on hydrologic fundamentals are the following: Freshwater Water that contains less than 1,000 milligrams per liter (mg/L) of dissolved solids; generally, more than 500 mg/L of dissolved solids is undesirable for drinking and many industrial uses.3 Saline water Water that contains significant amounts of dissolved solids compared to freshwater (less than 1,000 parts per million solids [ppm]); slightly

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saline water has 1,000–3,000 ppm solids, moderately saline water has 3,000– 10,000 ppm solids, and highly saline water has 10,000–35,000 ppm solids. Groundwater is generally defined as water that flows or seeps downward and saturates soil or rock, supplying springs and wells, and as water stored underground in rock crevices and in the pores of geologic materials that make up the earth’s crust.4 If one subtracts water stored in polar ice and glaciers, saline lakes, and inaccessible groundwater, one can easily see that there is relatively very little freshwater available. In fact, very little (less than 1 percent) of the earth’s freshwater is readily available for human use: roughly 0.3 percent.5 Surface water All water on the surface of the ground, including water in natural and artificial boundaries as well as diffused water. Included is water that flows in streams and rivers and in natural lakes, in wetlands, in oceans, and in reservoirs constructed by humans. Evapotranspiration  The combined processes of evaporation and transpiration. It can be defined as the sum of water used by vegetation plus water lost by evaporation. Aquifers are defined as geologic formations of sediments and rocks that store and transmit significant amounts of water. An unconfined aquifer has water in direct vertical contact with the atmosphere, whereas a confined aquifer is bounded on top and bottom by relatively impermeable layers and may be under pressure (artesian). Watersheds The land area that drains water to a particular stream, river, or lake. It is a land feature that can be identified by tracing a line along the highest elevations between two areas on a map, often a ridge. Large watersheds, like the Mississippi River basin, contain thousands of smaller watersheds.6 Porosity The fraction of void space in a given amount of soil material. Permeability The ability of a porous medium to transmit water. Safe yield The amount of naturally occurring groundwater that can be withdrawn from an aquifer on a sustained basis, economically and legally, without impairing the native groundwater quality or creating an undesirable effect, such as environmental damage.7 Optimal yield The optimal plan for the use of a groundwater supply. Such a plan maximizes economic objectives of groundwater development subject to physical, chemical, legal, and other constraints. Runoff Generally defined as water moving over the surface of the ground, consisting of precipitation (rainfall or snowfall) minus infiltration and evapotranspiration. Water budget Also called a water balance model, a summation of inputs, outputs, and net changes to a particular water resource system over a fixed period.

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The Hydrologic Cycle and Water Budget Hydrologic Cycle The hydrologic cycle is a summary of flows in the natural water system; it involves a constant transfer of water from land and sea to the atmosphere and back again (figure 3.2). A number of websites provide details on the hydrologic cycle, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).8 Precipitation (rain, snow, hail) falls to the earth and may follow several paths. Some evaporates before reaching the ground; a large portion infiltrates into the earth, becoming groundwater; and the remainder becomes surface water as it enters into surface or depression storage or falls on surface water bodies. As excess precipitation accumulates, water overflows and moves across the earth’s surface. This runoff ultimately reaches streams, lakes, and other surface water bodies, from which a considerable amount of water returns to the atmosphere via evaporation. The water that infiltrates into the ground enters the soil zone, where it may be taken up by the soil and plants and eventually given up by evapotranspiration. A portion may evaporate from the soil surface or pass into the saturation zone and into aquifers. In order to do effective water resources planning, a thorough knowledge of all the components of the hydrologic cycle is essential. Many water resources

FIGURE 3.2 The Hydrologic Cycle.

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planning issues require using the hydrologic cycle to understand the flows of water into, through, and out of a basin or watershed. Although we frequently deal with surface water and groundwater independently, the hydrologic cycle shows that they are both integral and interrelated parts of the complete water system. Breaking the cycle down into components or concentrating on specific watersheds and regions is done for convenience, but care must be taken to recognize the interrelations of the entire water system. The hydrologic cycle can be summarized in terms of six variables: P I E T R G

= Precipitation = Infiltration = Evaporation = Transpiration = Surface runoff =  Groundwater flow

Of importance to water resources planning is the fact that as water is transferred among hydrologic cycle components, its quality is changed. For example, as water percolates into the ground, it gathers some of the contaminants through which it passes; rainwater collects impurities from the atmosphere; and runoff gathers impurities from the land surface. These and other aspects of water quality are discussed in detail in chapter 8. It is also important to note that as water is transferred among the components of the hydrologic cycle, changes in quantity occur among the various components. Not all the water that falls as precipitation is ultimately available as a water resource for humans. These variabilities affect the available supply and demand of water resources, impacting availability and use, as discussed in chapter 4. The hydrologic cycle can be expressed in a simple equation for any component: inflow − outflow = change in storage. More specifically, hydrologic cycle components can be arranged into a hydrologic budget as follows: ∆S = (P) – (R) – (E) – (T) – (G) Here ∆S, the change in storage, is equal to the net sum of precipitation (P), surface runoff (R), evaporation (E), transpiration (T), and groundwater flow (G). Each component of the hydrologic cycle is important to water resources planning and is explained in more detail below. Precipitation The major forms of precipitation are rain and snow. The distribution of precipitation is highly variable in both geographic space and time. Areas with

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high annual precipitation can experience droughts, just as areas that normally receive small inputs of precipitation may experience flooding from either rain or snowmelt. The ability to forecast conditions of either flood or drought is very important in water resources planning. The impacts upon agriculture are obvious with either too much or too little rain. Also, long-term changes in the amount of rainfall an area receives may open new areas for agricultural development or restrict the continued use of established agricultural areas. If long-term decreases in rainfall occur in an established agricultural area, additional water resources could include irrigation with groundwater supplies or construction of irrigation lines or canals to take advantage of surface waters. Precipitation is also important in reservoir management. Too little rain or runoff from snowmelt will result in lower reservoir levels, subsequently affecting power production and municipal water supplies. Too much precipitation will cause reservoirs to overflow, resulting in downstream flooding. In some areas deficient in precipitation, cloud seeding has been used in an attempt to augment natural precipitation. Increased precipitation from cloud seeding might benefit many areas of water use, including agriculture, power generation, urban water supply, forest fire control, and recreation. However, questions often arise on the impacts of the process on human health and the environment, and on the impacts on the precipitation levels in other communities. Some states in the United States, including California,9 Texas,10 and Utah,11 have used cloud seeding. Infiltration Infiltration occurs when precipitation seeps into the ground through pervious soil. Rates of infiltration are highly variable depending on the soil characteristics. If the precipitation rate is higher than the infiltration rate, overland flow of excess water will occur. Data on infiltration for local areas can be obtained from US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) soil surveys done for most counties in the United States.12 Evaporation and Transpiration Evaporation and transpiration can have significant effects on the amount of water that is available for human use. Transpiration is the process where plant roots draw in soil moisture by means of osmotic pressure and pump it out to the atmosphere through their leaves. Evapotranspiration is the term used for the loss of water from the soil through the combination of evaporation and transpiration. Evapotranspiration has a major impact on the amount of precipitation that remains available for use as a water resource. Of the 75 centimeters (cm) (or

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29.5 inches [in]) of average rainfall in the United States each year, 55 cm (21.6 in) are returned to the atmosphere by the process of evapotranspiration. As with the other components of the hydrologic cycle, the rate of evapotranspiration is highly variable. Agricultural irrigation is an important area for the study of evapotranspiration. Different crops have different evapotranspiration rates. These different evapotranspiration rates become significant when determining the amount of irrigation a crop is to receive. The USGS maintains datasets on evapotranspiration rates for the United States. For example, the 2000–2013 dataset may be found using the USGS ScienceBase Catalog.13 One area where the effects of evaporation alone can be readily seen is in reservoir management. For example, if additional storage is planned for a western US reservoir by adding to the height of a dam, evaporative effects must be considered to determine if there will be any net increase in storage. Transpiration can become important if there are significant quantities of aquatic macrophytes present in the water body. Another example of the effects of evaporation is the loss of water from the open aqueducts that transport water in Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada. Surface Runoff Precipitation that does not return to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration or infiltrate into the ground either is stored on the surface or drains as surface runoff. Surface runoff quantities are extremely important in watershed and reservoir management. The larger the watershed, the more potential runoff and/ or storage that can be realized in the reservoir for a given amount of rain. The quality of surface runoff into a reservoir that serves as a municipal water supply is also important and accounts for the restricted access many watershed areas have. In addition, surface runoff from agricultural, suburban, or urban land use also pose potential detrimental water quality and excess water quality (such as flooding) threats. Groundwater Flow According to the National Groundwater Association (NGWA), approximately 40 percent of the US population relies on groundwater as its primary water source.14 Some states rely heavily on groundwater; it represents more than one-half the total withdrawal in seven states.15 In Florida, 90 percent of the 2010 population was served by a public supply system, 88 percent of which was supplied by groundwater as the drinking water source.16 Public water supply was the largest use of groundwater, followed by agricultural irrigation, in Florida in 2010. Groundwater flow is also an important component of streamflow and wet-

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lands and may serve as the only source of water to these systems during periods of low precipitation. Water Budget An important step in understanding a region’s water resources is to examine the region’s water—or hydrologic—budget or balance. A water budget is a simple but important analytical tool for measuring the flow and net balance of water over time within a region. It is an accounting of inflows, outflows, and net storage of water in a particular hydrologic system or defined geographic region. Figure 3.3 shows a hypothetical water budget with the inflows and outflows. The difference between inflows and outflows is the change in storage from year to year. Some years will have gains while others will remain the same or show a loss. Some regions of the country may show a continual decline over many years, particularly in areas where a surface water body, such as a lake, or the groundwater is being heavily overdrawn. A review of a series of annual water budgets in such places will provide insight into forthcoming challenges that would need to be addressed.

P Ts

Es

R1 R2 R3 Rg

I FIGURE 3.3 Hypothetical Water Budget. Key: P = precipitation; R1, R2, = runoff into the watershed; R3 = runoff out of the watershed; Rg = groundwater that appears as surface water; Es = evaporation; Ts = transpiration; and I = interflow.

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Components of the budget can be defined using the previous notation for the hydrologic cycle. If we isolate surface water and include groundwater that appears as surface water (Rg), such as natural springs, the water budget for a specific region can be defined as: ∆Ss = P + R1 + R2 – R3 + Rg – Es – Ts – I In other words, the change in surface water storage (∆Ss) for a region over the time of concern is the net sum of precipitation (P), runoff into (R1, R2) and out of (R3) the region, groundwater that emerges as surface water (Rg), evaporation (Es) and transpiration (Ts) out of the surface system, and interflow (I) between surface and groundwater. Units of measurement for this equation are in volume per unit of time. Similarly, the water budget for groundwater flow in the region can be defined as: ∆Sg = I + G1 – G2 – Rg – Eg – Tg Change in groundwater storage (∆Sg) is the net sum of interflow (I), groundwater flow into (G1) and out of (G2) the region, groundwater that emerges as surface water (Rg), evaporation (Eg), and transpiration (Tg) of the groundwater system. Essentially the water budget serves a purpose similar to a checkbook or bank statement; it gives a record of deposits, withdrawals, and net balance. It is important to note several observations regarding the hydrologic cycle and the water budget. Rainfall exhibits an uneven distribution during any one year as well as from year to year. Use of “average” rainfall data can be misleading from a water management perspective because of an upward skew of averages from relatively infrequent but particularly heavy events. Thus, the use of “average” data in preparing a water budget will not necessarily match actual hydrologic data for any particular period of time. Evapotranspiration typically accounts for a major share of the water budget. This combined measure of evaporation and transpiration indicates the extent to which precipitation is needed merely to break even. Certainly, a tropical climate will have a much greater evapotranspiration rate than a temperate area. Groundwater is important in many areas as the major source of water, because the volume of water beneath the ground is often many times that of surface water. It is important to have a reliable measure of groundwater supply in a region exhibiting high withdrawal rates and to determine whether the groundwater level has been declining over time. Surface water is similarly important in many regions. The volume of water stored over time should be measured as well as the capacity of surface waters and channels to carry and store water under excessive runoff conditions.



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Depending upon climatic conditions and various elements of the hydrologic cycle described above, storage of water may be extremely significant to a region. Storage—surface and subsurface, natural, and human-made—is the buffering system that absorbs excess inflows during wet seasons and gradually releases water during dry seasons. Surface storage may occur naturally in lakes, rivers, and wetlands, whereas subsurface storage occurs in soil moisture, shallow water table aquifers, and deep aquifers. Groundwater Systems Because groundwater is the source of drinking water for approximately half the population of the United States, it deserves particular attention as a major component of the hydrologic cycle.17 Groundwater is often the least expensive and sometimes may be the only available source of freshwater in a particular area. In the United States, irrigation is the biggest user of groundwater, withdrawing about 65 percent of the total, while domestic use and industry accounts for much of the remainder. Although some groundwater flows to the surface under natural conditions, most groundwater is obtained through pumping. Some of the beneficial aspects of groundwater are identified in table 3.1. TABLE 3.1 Some Beneficial Attributes of Groundwater   1. Nationally, a major source of supply: with ubiquitous distribution, it is commonly available at place of use.   2.  It is a reliable source, with small natural fluctuations in storage.   3.  Present utilization is small compared to total supply potentially available.   4.  Quality and temperature are reliably uniform.   5.  Biologic quality is usually good, generally free from turbidity and pollution.   6.  It is relatively immune to contamination and destructive hazards of warfare.   7. Evaporation losses are minimal, except where groundwater occurs at shallow depths in semiarid and arid areas.   8.  There are manifold uses of groundwater reservoirs in addition to water supply.   9. Cost of development, except for detailed hydrogeologic investigation, is relatively low, requiring small initial capital investment. 10.  Development has comparatively little impact on surface environment. Source: US Water Resources Council. (1983). Essentials of Ground-Water Hydrology Pertinent to Water Resources Planning. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Occurrence Groundwater begins as infiltration from precipitation on the ground, and from streams, lakes, and reservoirs. Water flows downward through the zone of

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aeration by gravity. This percolation leaves a film of water known as soil moisture on the soil grains. The water then enters the zone of saturation. Just above this zone, continuous films of water are held in pores by capillary action. The amount of water in this capillary fringe depends on climatic and soil conditions and depth of the aerated zone. The water table is the level at which free water would stand in a well extending to the saturated zone. Water below this depth that saturates soil or rock structure is known as groundwater. It moves horizontally and under control of the hydraulic gradient, flowing downgrade with little vertical mixing. Figure 3.4 shows the genesis of groundwater via the movement of precipitation through the subsurface layers. Aquifers are permeable geologic strata that hold and convey groundwater. Figure 3.5 depicts the extensive depth and breadth of aquifers that underlie the United States. Most aquifers are large enough to be considered storage reservoirs. Whether aquifers are considered unconfined depends on the confining upper layer. The upper boundary of an unconfined aquifer is the water table, whereas a confined aquifer (also known as an artesian or pressure aquifer) exists where groundwa-

FIGURE 3.4 From Precipitation to Groundwater. Source: United States Geological Survey (USGS). (2016). Infiltration—The Water Cycle. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/edu/watercycleinfiltration.html



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FIGURE 3.5 General Occurrence of the Principal Aquifer Types in the United States. Source: Heath, Ralph C. (1984). Ground-Water Regions of the United States, p. 11. USGS Water-Supply Paper 2242. Washington, DC: GPO.

ter is confined by relatively impermeable strata. Water in an artesian well rises to the piezometric level (i.e., the level to which it would rise in an unconfined tube). Porosity The space between the geologic material, which determines how much water the material can hold, is called pore space or void space. Porosity is a way to

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determine how many pore spaces exist in the strata and is often expressed as the fraction of void space in a given amount of soil material. Highly porous materials such as sand are able to hold and transmit large amounts of water, especially if the pores are interconnected. Permeability The ability of a porous medium to transmit water is known as permeability. It may range from a dense rock with negligible flow to granular layers in a valley wall that drain groundwater rapidly enough to create small waterfalls. Darcy’s law, the basic principle defining the flow of groundwater, is written as: v=Ki where: v = discharge velocity (Q/A) K = coefficient of permeability i = hydraulic gradient (h/L) The coefficient K, often referred to simply as hydraulic conductivity, is primarily a characteristic of porous media.18 Darcy’s law is valid for laminar flow (i.e., where the velocity is slow enough to allow each water particle to follow a definite path without interference from other moving particles). This condition describes most natural groundwater movement. Turbulent flow results when particles follow irregular paths and crisscross at random. The above equation representing Darcy’s law is a simple form that must be expanded substantially to account for real-world applications. More detailed and sophisticated forms of Darcy’s law are beyond the scope of this text but may be pursued in depth in any groundwater hydrology book. It is important to know, however, that Darcy’s law provides the underlying theory for groundwater flow and is relevant to such concerns as groundwater drawdown, rate of flow from a well, and speed of movement through an aquifer. The following discussion considers some of the more salient factors in groundwater flow. Before pumping begins, equilibrium prevails in most undeveloped aquifers; that is, over time, recharge to the system equals discharge, and no net change in groundwater storage occurs. This input-output concept is similar to the inputs to and outputs from a surface reservoir. The value of a groundwater reservoir as a water source depends largely upon two inherent characteristics: the ability to store and the ability to transmit water. Due to discontinuities in geology and hydrology, recharge areas for aquifers may not correspond spatially with the



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footprint of the physical aquifer. For example, the Floridan aquifer underlies all of Florida and portions of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. If one looks at just one component of that aquifer system, the Upper Floridan aquifer, generally only 55 percent of the state of Florida contributes to its recharge, with most of the highest recharge areas (15 percent of the state) located in central and west central Florida and portions of the Panhandle. High recharge areas for the Upper Floridan also exist in southern Georgia.19 Groundwater system behavior is based on the application of the principle of continuity as it pertains to groundwater. Discharge by wells is thus a new discharge superimposed over a previously stable system, and it must be balanced by an increase in recharge of the aquifer or by a decrease in the old natural discharge, by a loss of storage in the aquifer, or by a combination of these.20 This basic principle applies the conservation of mass to groundwater hydrology. In short, the amount of water entering a groundwater system equals the amount leaving the system plus net changes in the amount of water stored in the groundwater system. This fundamental, classical principle is often overlooked and violated when the yield of a groundwater reservoir is assessed or when aquifer use plans are made. In most groundwater systems, replenishment and discharge are not uniform over time and space, the hydrogeology is not homogeneous, and pumping stresses are unevenly distributed. Such conditions make the solutions to groundwater problems complex and heavily dependent upon professional judgment and experience as well as upon the application of scientific principles. Long-term sustained yield is the rate of withdrawal, which is equal to the sum of changes in recharge and discharge that result from withdrawals and lowering of water levels by pumping. Rates of withdrawal that exceed the rates of recharge or discharge over a prolonged period of time are considered groundwater “mining.” Declining water levels resulting from sustained withdrawals may continue over a long period of time. Even without declines, some water must be taken from storage initially to create hydraulic gradients toward pumping wells; thus, some water must be taken from storage in order to use groundwater. Time delays in pumping effects show that balanced conditions of flow do not ordinarily exist. For example, water levels may lower substantially, and some wells go dry long before the groundwater system reaches a new equilibrium between replenishment and natural and imposed discharge rates. The best-known example of nonequilibrium is from the High Plains aquifer, also known as the Ogallala aquifer. The aquifer spans more than one hundred million acres and lies under parts of eight states: Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. The average thickness of deposits in this area is about three hundred feet, consisting of silt, sand, and gravel. The resultant aquifer of moderate permeability rests on

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relatively impermeable rock and constitutes the only significant groundwater source in the region. The southern portions of the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer, which slope gently from west to east, are cut off from external water sources upstream and downstream by escarpments. Groundwater replenishment, then, depends on sparse precipitation, and total recharge is very small compared to vast irrigation withdrawals. This pronounced lowering of the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer’s water table by increased pumping is especially prominent in the heavily developed, central portion of the aquifer, where withdrawals by pumping have increased substantially since the 1950s, mainly for irrigation (about 95 percent of the withdrawals). Little additional natural recharge can be put into the system because the aquifer’s water table lies at least fifty feet beneath the surface in most of the area and there is little surface runoff in the region. At the same time, natural discharge has remained relatively unchanged. The hydraulic gradient toward the eastern escarpment is virtually unchanged by the drawdown toward the center. Even if the pumping could salvage all discharge, it would be only a small percentage of the present large withdrawal rate. Virtually all water is being “mined” from the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer, and equilibrium is not being established. Just from 2002–2015, within the Republican River basin of the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer, there was an area-weighted average water level decline of 1.37 meters (4.5 feet).21 Similar depletion of aquifers is happening throughout the world as irrigation exceeds the limits of groundwater supplies. Optimal Yield Prevention against groundwater mining has historically been an important consideration in groundwater resources planning and management. The term safe yield was introduced in 1915 and defined as the amount of water that could be pumped “regularly and permanently without dangerous depletion of the storage ‘reserve.’” The term and its definition saw a lot of changes during the 1900s, with Fetter noting a composite definition, based on the ideas of several authors: “Safe yield is the amount of naturally occurring groundwater that can be withdrawn from an aquifer on a sustained basis, economically and legally, without impairing the native groundwater quality or creating an undesirable effect such as environmental damage.”22 Still, a number of authorities noted that the “safe yield” term did not adequately account for the surface-groundwater interrelationships and precluded the development of the storage functions of an aquifer, and proposed abandoning it. Optimal yield was then introduced to replace safe yield and mining yield. It can be defined as the optimal plan for the use of a groundwater supply. Such a plan maximizes economic objectives of groundwater development subject to physical, chemical, legal, and other constraints. Optimal yield is a function of the particular time and state of the entire aquifer



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system; it is not a simple specification of allowable pumping rates, as is the usual case with most safe yield and mining concepts. For a given groundwater use, optimal yield does not necessarily imply sustained yield. Large withdrawals in excess of equilibrium constraints may be optimal under this concept. Groundwater Quality Greater attention is now being devoted to groundwater quality as we more fully understand the interrelation of surface and subsurface systems. Much of the concern with hazardous wastes, for example, is tied directly to the threat of damaging groundwater supplies. Contaminated surface water may be restored to health in a few years or even less, whereas parts of a groundwater system may be made useless for centuries by indiscriminate introduction of hazardous substances and contaminants. Chemical, physical, and biological characteristics of groundwater are important considerations in water resources planning, for they determine the usefulness of the water. Maintenance of groundwater quality is one of the major requirements of managing and maintaining groundwater. Standard methods for analysis of most organic and inorganic components of groundwater are well developed, but the geochemistry and chemical hydrology of groundwater systems, involving determination of the source and fate of chemical components and prediction of the chemical impacts of development, are less advanced. Chemical data on rocks and water provide important clues to geologic and groundwater history and aid understanding of groundwater flow systems. For example, sewage and industrial wastes that are deliberately or unintentionally introduced to a groundwater environment may generate complex chemical and physical reactions. Saltwater intrusion into aquifers, temperature changes resulting from injection of water or wastes, and natural treatment of wastes in groundwater are just a few of the conditions associated with groundwater use. requiring water quality and geochemical investigation. Water quality, including that of groundwater sources, is covered in more detail in chapter 8. Surface Water To balance the hydrologic fundamentals required of water resources planners, understanding the presence, importance, use, and quality of surface waters is essential. When one thinks of water, it is often, if not always, those waters that can be seen on the face of the earth. Surface waters—previously defined as water found on the earth’s surface, such as rivers, lakes, streams, reservoirs, or wetlands, estuaries, or oceans—have been used by humankind well before the dawn of civilization. Whether used for irrigation, water supply, transportation,

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power, waste disposal, a source of fish and wildlife, recreation, political or natural boundaries, or aesthetic, cultural, or spiritual purposes, surface water is as indelibly linked to humans as it is an essential component of the earth’s natural hydrologic cycle. And it was the widely recognized deterioration in the quality of surface water that gave rise to the environmental movement in the United States, resulting in the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (1970) and the Clean Water Act (1972). According to the USGS in 2010, of the total waters withdrawn in the United States, 78 percent was surface water. Of those withdrawals, 16 percent was saline. Of total freshwater withdrawals, surface water comprised 75 percent, with the majority of it going to thermoelectric uses (50.4 percent) (much of which is returned to the source), irrigation (29 percent), and public supply and industrial, respectively. The USGS notes that if thermoelectric use is ignored, then irrigation use accounts for 58 percent of the nation’s surface water withdrawals.23 Occurrence In the United States and in most parts of the world, the term surface water is usually synonymous with freshwater. For water resources planners, the great majority of water issues pertain to freshwater, with some applications for brackish water (a mix of fresh and saline water) and saline water, particularly when it comes to utilization of desalination methods. The USGS cites a salinity range of freshwater, less than one thousand parts per million (ppm); slightly saline water, from one thousand ppm to three thousand ppm; moderately saline water, from three thousand ppm to ten thousand ppm; and highly saline water, from ten thousand ppm to thirty-five thousand ppm. Water that exceeds five hundred mg/L of dissolved solids is considered undesirable for drinking and many industrial uses.24 Surface waters can also be classified by their hydrologic form. The forms range from large saline oceans to small intermittent or ephemeral freshwater streams and everything in between. Lakes are generally large depressions on the earth’s surface that store water over long periods of time. Many lakes were created during the Ice Age and can be found throughout the world. Source water for lakes includes precipitation, snowmelt, groundwater seepage, rivers and streams, or combinations of these. Russia’s Lake Baikal is the world’s largest and deepest freshwater lake, containing almost 20 percent of the world’s surface freshwater. In the United States, Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest lake, followed by Lake Tahoe (California/ Nevada). Lake outflows consist of rivers and streams whose flows and characteristics change as the lakes mature. Additionally, evaporation and groundwater recharge can serve as outflows from lakes. Most lakes by definition are destined to “die,” as they will naturally fill up with soil and debris over extended periods.25 Reservoirs are essentially artificial lakes that exhibit analogous characteristics.



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Rivers and streams differ from lakes in that their main characteristic is their water flow rather than storage. Rivers are defined as natural streams of water of considerable volume, larger than brooks or creeks, while streams are bodies of flowing water whose natural water courses contain water at least part of the year. The two most lengthy rivers in the world are the Nile and the Amazon. The Missouri River is the longest river in the United States, while the Mississippi is the river with the greatest volume in the United States. In addition to surface runoff, rivers and streams receive their waters from the same sources as lakes. Rivers gain their input and size through a series of tributaries defined as a set of smaller rivers or streams that flow into a larger river or stream. Usually, a number of smaller tributaries merge to form a river. Streams are described in the context of water flowing in a natural channel as distinct from a canal.26 Many rivers and streams are perennial (continuous flow), although many indeed exhibit less duration in flow and can be characterized as ephemeral (flow is not continuous). Rivers are measured by their flow rate and are measured by river or stream gauges. The USGS provides up-to-date information for surface water through its National Water Information System Web Interface.27 Discharge is the amount of water that is moving downstream over a given time period. For additional detail on streamflow analysis, the reader should consult chapter 10. Wetlands are areas of shallow standing waters that contain hydric plants. They represent the interface between terrestrial and aquatic systems. These marshy areas are found along lakes, rivers, streams, reservoirs, estuaries, and swamps. The borders of such areas with the uplands are referred to as “riparian” (explored more in chapter 5). The characteristics and importance of wetlands in water resources planning are discussed in greater depth in chapter 13. Watersheds In describing surface water hydrology, the watershed provides a fundamental unit of analysis. A watershed is the land area that drains water to a particular stream, river, or lake. It is a land feature that can be identified by tracing a line along the highest elevations between two areas on a map, often a ridge. Large watersheds like the Mississippi River basin contain thousands of smaller watersheds. Smaller watersheds can nestle within larger watersheds, working up in scale until the outfall reaches an ocean or sea. Figures 3.6a and 3.6b display the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed, which extends through six states, some of the major watersheds, and the ninety-two smaller bay segments nestled within the whole.28 The watershed concept is particularly useful because it links the hydrology back to the land that influences it. These links can be clearly seen through use of a water budget.29 The water budget exercise described above can be applied to a watershed, utilizing the inflows and outflows for that specific basin.

FIGURES 3.6a and 3.6b Chesapeake Bay Watershed and Bay Segments. Sources: 3.6a: US Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2011). Chesapeake Bay: Restoration Effort Needs Common Federal and State Goals and Assessment Approach, p. 6. Report to Congressional Committees. GAO-11-802; 3.6b: EPA. (2010, Dec. 29). Chesapeake Bay TMDL Executive Summary, p. ES-4, FIGURE ES-1: A nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment TMDL has been developed for each of the 92 Chesapeake Bay segment watersheds.



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Physical attributes of watersheds determine the quantity and quality of water that will flow into them and be stored or flow out of them. Attributes such as land use, geology, climate, slope, and vegetation all affect the ultimate fate of the water as it enters and/or leaves the watershed. Water destined as runoff through and out of the watershed will pick up soils, sediments, rocks, and contaminants as it works its way downstream via streambanks, rivers, or floodplains, where these loads may be deposited. Streams and rivers provide this sediment transport, which plays a major role in current and future downstream stream and river channel characteristics and configuration. The concept of watershed is not just a hydrologic construct, but in the planning arena, it is also a planning approach used to address many interrelated issues. Traditionally utilized as a planning construct for identifying and rectifying water quality and biological integrity of geographic areas, the approach is now heralded as an example of a systems approach: Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), or the “One Water” concept. This drive for a more holistic means of analyzing, solving, and managing in a truly interdisciplinary manner is the hallmark of the effort by the American Planning Association (APA) to improve water resources policy and practice in the United States. It states, “One Water is a water management paradigm based upon the idea that all water within a watershed is hydrologically interconnected and is most effectively and sustainably managed using an integrated approach.”30 The One Water concept is described as a simpler term for the IWRM terminology prevalent in the water literature. Numerous guidelines for IWRM abound, particularly from the EPA and the American Water Works Association (AWWA).31 See chapter 2 for more details and examples of IWRM and the One Water concept. Surface Water Quality Ambient surface waters in their natural state reflect the chemical, biological, and physical characteristics of their natural settings. But because surface water literally sits on the surface of the earth, its vulnerability to contamination from human-induced sources is obvious. Surface waters are the first to encounter a plethora of land use–related pollutants, which are air-carried or are carried downstream as surface water or which eventually percolate into the groundwater, or all three. The United States has been aggressive in trying to stem the intensity and extent of surface water pollution through various mechanisms both mandatory and regulatory. The EPA and states are heavily engaged in these restoration efforts. Those regulations and programs are described in chapters 6 and 7, respectively. For additional information on water quality, the reader is encouraged to read chapter 8 for further descriptions of water/land use interrelationships that jeopardize the quality of the nation’s waters.

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Groundwater/Surface Interactions Although groundwater and surface water are usually viewed as separate, independent entities, it is rarely that simple. In 1998, a USGS circular by Winter et al. stated that water managers should consider the implications of this interface and should understand that the two sources are intimately related and that they should be managed as a single source. The topic was furthered by the publication of another USGS circular in 201232 and emphasized by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2014.33 Because groundwater can move vertically, laterally, or downward, it has the potential for sustaining lakes, rivers, streams, wetlands, and other surface water bodies in a myriad of different geographic, geologic, and climatological conditions. Groundwater that sustains such water bodies is considered base flow. When wells are placed into the groundwater without proper analysis, their impacts create drawdown of the aquifers and a lowering of the base flow for the affected surface water feature(s). This in turn reduces the quantity (and potentially the quality) of water that is relied upon for surface water features, jeopardizing the ecological, economic, or social aspects routinely performed by the surface water feature(s). Effects can be short- or long-term. Another interface occurs when surface water, which would normally percolate and recharge groundwater, is altered either by changes in land cover, which could either consume the water before it can percolate (such as crops or other land use), or by accelerating the runoff by making the land surface more impervious, such as paving it over with concrete. These types of interactions are just a few of what should be considered, along with other chemical, physical, and biological processes that these interfaces can present. The water resources need to be considered when making land use decisions, as these decisions can have long-ranging implications for current and future water supplies and for all aspects of water quality. Additional information linking land use and water quality can be found in chapter 8. Conclusion We have traced the essential elements of the flow of water over, on, and under the surface of the earth. Although the freshwater available is only a very small fraction of the earth’s total water, it is extremely important in water resources planning and management. The hydrologic cycle helps to show that the waters of the earth are interconnected and that they move in a continuous cycle. It also suggests the ways in which water is affected by land resources. The water budget is an accounting device introduced to show that all water can be traced as inflows, outflows, and net changes in storage. The sections on groundwater and surface water were provided to help the reader understand the genesis and importance of these two water sources both



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nationally and globally. The total water system is vast, complicated, interconnected, and in places interchangeable. Understanding the complexities of these two water sources helps a water resources planner understand the fundamentals that lay the groundwork for planning. The concept of the watershed, or One Water, is a focal point for marshalling efforts to integrate planning on a wide range of water issues such as water supply, water quality, environmental concerns, and others. Advances in alternative sources (described in chapter 4) such as desalination, conservation, water reuse, using water of lesser quality, and other applications are trends that will further expand the water sources currently available as well as those in the future. Study Questions  1. Which portion of the earth’s total supply of water is of greatest concern to water resources planning? Why?  2. If precipitation were nonexistent for an extended period of time, what would happen to the storage of water in the hydrologic budget? What would be the effect on the other variables? Explain.  3. What are the effects of infiltration and permeability on groundwater?  4. Construct a water budget for your region, using data available from the USGS, the US Weather Bureau, or other available resources.  5. Explain how the water budget might be used to help solve a long-term water supply problem for a growing region within a large watershed.  6. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using groundwater as a source for municipal water supplies.  7. What is the long-term outlook for using groundwater for agricultural irrigation in different regions of the nation?  8. Describe the current groundwater in your current location.  9. What might be the surface water effects from intensive groundwater withdrawals? 10. Why is it important to understand how surface and groundwater interact? Provide three examples of such interactions. Notes 1.  USGS. (2016). The World’s Water. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https:// water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html 2.  See Dunne, T., and L. Leopold. (1990). Water in Environmental Planning. San Francisco: Freeman; Wanielista, M., R. Kersten, and R. Eaglin. (1997). Hydrology: Water Quantity and Quality Control. New York: Wiley; Viessman, Jr., W., and G. L. Lewis. (1997). Introduction to Hydrology. 4th ed. New York: Addison Wesley; Todd, D. K. (1999). Groundwater Hydrology. New York: Wiley; Mimikou, M. A., E. A. Baltas, and V. A. Tsihrintzis. (2016). Hydrology and Water Resource Systems Analysis. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

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3.  USGS. (2017). Water Science Glossary of Terms. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/edu/dictionary.html 4.  USGS. (2017). Water Science Glossary of Terms. 5.  Dzurik, A. A. (2003). Water Resources Planning. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 6.  USGS, Water Science Glossary of Terms. 7.  Fetter, C. W. (2001). Paradox of Safe Yield, p. 447. In Applied Hydrogeology. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 8.  NOAA. (2015). Water Cycle. NOAA. Retrieved from http://www.noaa.gov/resource -collections/water-cycle 9.  Hunter, S. M. (2007, March). Optimizing Cloud Seeding for Water and Energy in California. A PIER Final Project Report for the California Energy Commission, CEC-5002007-008. Retrieved from http://www.energy.ca.gov/2007publications/CEC-500-2007-008/ CEC-500-2007-008.PDF 10.  Texas Department of Licensing and Regulations. (2016). Harvesting the Texas Skies in 2016: A Summary of Rain Enhancing (Cloud Seeding) Operations in Texas. TDLR. Retrieved from https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/weather/summary.htm 11.  Utah Division of Water Resources. (2016). Cloud Seeding. Utah Division of Water Resources. Retrieved from https://water.utah.gov/Cloudseeding/CurrentProjects/defaultcur rent.html 12.  USDA, NRCS. (2017). Welcome to Web Soil Survey (WSS). Web Soil Survey. Retrieved from https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm 13. USGS. (2017). Annual Average Evapotranspiration Rates across the CONUS, 2000–2013. ScienceBase-Catalog. Retrieved from https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/ item/55d3730fe4b0518e35468e1e 14.  NGWA. (2016). Groundwater Use in the United States of America. NGWA. Retrieved from http://www.ngwa.org/Fundamentals/Documents/usa-groundwater-use-fact-sheet.pdf 15.  Maupin, M., J. F. Kenny, S. S. Hutson, J. K. Lovelace, N. L. Barber, and K. S. Linsey. (2014). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. Circular No. 1405. US Department of the Interior; USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/pdf/circ1405.pdf 16.  Maupin et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. 17.  Alley, W. M., T. E. Reilley, and O. L. Franke. (2013). Sustainability of Groundwater Resources. USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/circ1186/ 18.  Hammer, M. J., and K. A. MacKichan. (1981). Hydrology and Quality of Water Resources. New York: Wiley. 19.  Fernald, E. A., and E. D. Purdum, Eds. (1998). Water Resources Atlas of Florida. Tallahassee: Florida State University, Institute of Science and Public Affairs. 20.  Theis, C. V. (1940). Source of Water Derived from Wells: Essential Factors Controlling the Response of an Aquifer to Development. Civil Engineering, 10(5), 277–280. 21.  McGuire, V. L. (2017, Mar.). Water-level changes in the High Plains Aquifer, Republican River Basin in Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, 2002 to 2015. US Geological Survey. Retrieved from https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sim3373 22.  Fetter, Paradox of Safe Yield, p. 447. 23.  USGS. (2017). Surface Water Use in the United States, 2010. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/edu/wusw.html 24.  USGS, Water Science Glossary of Terms.



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25. Encyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Surface Water: Rivers, Streams and Lakes. Encyclopedia .com. Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/news-wires-white-papers -and-books/surface-water-rivers-streams-and-lakes 26.  USGS, Water Science Glossary of Terms. 27.  USGS. (n.d.). National Water Information System: Web Interface. USGS Water Resources. Retrieved from https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt 28.  US Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2011). Chesapeake Bay: Restoration Effort Needs Common Federal and State Goals and Assessment Approach, p. 6. GAO-11-802. USGAO. Retrieved from http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11802.pdf; EPA. (2010). Chesapeake Bay TMDL Executive Summary, p. ES-4. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/pro duction/files/2014-12/documents/bay_tmdl_executive_summary_final_12.29.10_final_1.pdf 29.  Anisfeld, S. C. (2010). Water Resources. Washington, DC: Island Press. 30.  Cesanek, W., V. Elmer, and J. Graeff. (2017). Planners and Water, p. 21. PAS Report 588. Chicago: American Planning Association. 31.  AWWA (2007). Water Resources Planning, Manual of Water Supply Practices, M50, chapter 13, Integrated Resource Planning, pp. 315–340. 2nd ed. Denver: AWWA; Bateman, Brenda, and Racquel Rancier. (2012, Nov.). Case Studies in IWRM: From Local Stewardship to National Vision. Middleburg, VA: American Water Resources Association Policy Committee. Retrieved from https://www.awra.org/committees/AWRA-Case-Studies-IWRM.pdf; Heathcote, Isobel W. (2009). Integrated Watershed Management: Principles and Practice. 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; Maxwell, Steve (2012, Jan.). Four Critical Trends in the Future of Water. Journal-American Water Works Association, 104(1), 20–24; National Research Council. (1999). New Strategies for America’s Watersheds. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17226/6020; Palmer, Richard N., and Kathryn V. Lundberg. (2007). Integrated Water Resource Planning. Illinois State Water Survey. Retrieved from https://www.isws.illinois.edu/iswsdocs/wsp/IWRP_Palmer_Lund berg.pdf; USACE. (2014, Jan.). Building Strong Collaborative Relationships for a Sustainable Water Resources Future: Understanding Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). Washington, DC: USACE. Retrieved from http://www.state.nj.us/drbc/library/documents/ USACE_IWRMrptJan2014.pdf; EPA (website). (2018). Healthy Watersheds Protection. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/hwp; EPA (website). (2018, forthcoming fall 2018). How’s My Waterway? [previously, Surf Your Watershed]. Information available at http://cfpub.epa .gov/surf/locate/index.cfm; EPA. (2008). Handbook for Developing Watershed Plans to Restore and Protect Our Waters. EPA 841-B-08-002. Washington, DC: EPA; EPA (website). (2018). Online Training in Watershed Management. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/watershed academy/online-training-watershed-management; EPA. (2018). Introduction to Watershed Planning. Watershed Academy Web. Retrieved from https://cfpub.epa.gov/watertrain/pdf/ modules/Introduction_to_Watershed_Planning.pdf; USGS (website). (2016). Science in Your Watershed. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/wsc/management.html; US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (website). (2018). WaterSMART: Cooperative Watershed Program. Retrieved from https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/cwmp/index.html 32.  Winter, T. C., J. W. Harvey, O. L. Franke, and W. M. Alley. (1998). Ground Water and Surface Water A Single Resource. USGS Circular 1139; Barlow, P. M., and S. A. Leake. (2012). Streamflow Depletion by Wells—Understanding and Managing the Effects of Groundwater Pumping on Streamflow. USGS Circular 1376. 33.  US Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning. GAO-14-430.

4 Water Use and Supply

Introduction

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s noted in chapter 1, water is essential for human life, for flora and fauna, for agricultural and industrial production, and for water-based recreation and transportation. It is central to many national concerns, including energy, food production, environmental quality, and regional economic development. Water is so much a part of our lives that it is often taken for granted even though it is unequally distributed in time and space, thereby causing problems of “too much” or “not enough.” In the United States, there are many mechanisms and instruments that provide detailed information and comprehensive data on water demand, availability, and use of water resources, and they serve as excellent tools in the planning process. In fact, even as the environmental policy was evolving in the United States, the first preliminary look by the US Water Resources Council in 1968, as well as the second more comprehensive assessment in 1978, focused primarily on the availability of water resources for human uses. Today, the overall goal of water resources planning involves the consideration of alternatives for meeting future needs and implementing the “best” plan(s). In some cases, water supply can expand, demand can be curtailed, additional alternative sources can be deployed, or any combinations of these can be undertaken. The scope of the need has also expanded to include not just human needs, but the needs of the environment as well. This chapter focuses on the important issues in water use and supply by looking at the uses and requirements for water (demand), as well as available — 88 —



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resources (supply). Water pollution and quality-related issues are addressed in chapters 8 and 11. This chapter deals with the topics of water use and water supply, and forecasting methodologies to reconcile the two. For a planning professional, it is useful to have access to data that provide information on how water resources are used across user categories and whether available water supplies (sources) are enough to meet the current or future demands of these users. Therefore, the first section of this chapter examines US water use data compiled by the US Geological Survey (USGS), followed by a water supply section that describes availability and the distribution of available water supplies and the mechanisms available to balance demand and supply in the United States. Lastly, the chapter describes the water demand forecasting methodologies and planning approaches needed for meeting future demands of users, given the limited supply of clean, inexpensive, and accessible water. Key Terms This section consists of descriptions of key terms important for contextualizing water use and supply for the planning professional. It is important to water resources planners that they not only understand these terms and concepts but that they are cognizant that the lack of specific terminology can lead to confusion, misinterpretation, and frustration. Below are a number of terms used in this chapter that are not likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. In describing water use and supply topics, the first six common terms listed below are used frequently and, unfortunately, often interchangeably. Water use Water that is used for a specific purpose, such as for domestic use, irrigation, or industrial processing. It pertains to human interaction with and influence on the hydrologic cycle, and includes elements such as water withdrawal from surface and groundwater sources, water delivery to homes and businesses, consumptive use of water, water released from wastewater treatment plants, water returned to the environment, and instream uses, such as using water to produce hydroelectric power. Per capita water use The average amount of water used “per person” during a specified time period, generally per day. Per capita use = total yearly water withdrawn/population/365 days. Water demand Usually defined in an economic context, water demand is the water use as a function of the price of water. The term is often used interchangeably with “water use,” without the consideration of price. In this book, the term water demand will not necessarily include a price aspect unless so specified in the text.

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Price elasticity (of demand) The sensitivity of the quantity of water demanded to changes in price. It is usually depicted as a negative relationship: as a ratio of percent decrease in quantity demanded/percent increase in price. Water withdrawal The process and/or amount of water taken from a surface, groundwater, or other source and conveyed it to a place for a particular type of use. Water consumption The portion of water withdrawn that is evaporated, transpired by plants, incorporated into products or crops, lost in conveyance, consumed by humans or livestock, or otherwise removed from the immediate water environment. It is consumed only in the sense that it is removed from a particular subsystem for a period of time. It is also referred to as consumed water or, even more commonly, consumptive use. Consumptive use See “Water consumption,” above. Conveyance loss Water that is lost in transit from a conveyance (pipe, channel, conduit, ditch) through leakage or evaporation and that is generally not readily available for further use. Offstream use Water withdrawn from a surface, groundwater, or other source and used in a different place. Withdrawal and consumptive use apply only to offstream uses. Instream use Water used without removing it from its source. Example of instream uses would be navigation, recreation, or power plant cooling. Discussions of water use typically concentrate on offstream uses. In 1998, the USGS last published estimates of 1995 instream and offstream uses.1 Those statistics depict instream uses approximately eight times greater than offstream uses. Water stress When annual water supplies drop below 1,700 m3 per person.2 Water scarcity Scarcity in availability due to physical shortage, or scarcity in access due to the failure of institutions to ensure a regular supply, or due to a lack of adequate infrastructure.3 When annual water supplies drop below one thousand cubic meters per person, the population faces water scarcity; and below five hundred cubic meters, it faces “absolute scarcity.”4 Economic water scarcity The lack of investment in water infrastructure or insufficient human capacity to satisfy the demand for water in areas where the population cannot afford to use an adequate source of water.5 Groundwater mining Withdrawals that exceed replacement, which usually results in lowered aquifer water levels. Alternative sources (or alternative water supply) Water that has been reclaimed after one or more public supply, municipal, industrial, commercial, or agricultural uses; or as a supply of stormwater, or brackish or saltwater, that has been treated in accordance with applicable rules and standards sufficient to supply the intended use.6 It can also include sources from lesser quality water, water transfers, water marketing, aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), or waters derived from water conservation measures.



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Desalination The removal of salts from saline or brackish water to provide freshwater. Water Use The water budget or water balance model described in chapter 3 is useful in understanding water supply and various forms of consumption as well as the safe-yield concept. The water budget for a specified water system, whether groundwater, surface water, or the complete water system within a geographic area, is a summation of inputs and outputs to the system. The net result is the change in storage. Some years will show losses while other years may remain constant or show a net gain. The water budget concept is particularly useful in regions that show a continual loss, especially in areas where groundwater use is heavy. Reviewing a number of annual water budgets in such an area will indicate the extent of groundwater depletion. Essentially, the water budget, similar to a checkbook or bank statement, provides a record of deposits, withdrawals, and net balance. The USGS is the primary agency in the United States for studying, synthesizing, and reporting on the quality and quantity of water, including water for environmental and ecosystem needs. The USGS’s National Water Use Science Project compiles and disseminates the nation’s water use data in cooperation with local, state, and federal environmental agencies. The USGS has compiled estimates of water withdrawals and uses in the United States every five years since 1950.7 At each of these five-year intervals, state and hydrologic region-level data are compiled in a national water use data system and published as a national circular. The USGS 2014 circular8 presents water use data for the year 2010 (USGS 2010 Estimate), and several of these data were presented in chapter 3. Data included in the following sections on US water use and population are from the USGS 2010 Estimate. The 2015 Estimate, published in late summer 2018, is available on the USGS website. For the United States overall, the USGS 2010 Estimate reports a total water withdrawal of 1,343.83 billion liters per day (bld) or 355 billion gallons per day (bgd), 86 percent of which was freshwater and 14 percent was saline. This total water withdrawal figure is the lowest reported since before 1970. Of this total freshwater use, fresh surface water comprised 75 percent and groundwater 25 percent. Total freshwater withdrawal trends are shown in figure 4.1. Although the USGS has not calculated freshwater consumptive use since 1995, that last estimate was approximately 405 bld (107 bgd), a figure roughly similar to the previous two decades.9 That figure would represent almost onequarter of the total offstream withdrawals for that year (1,521 bld or 402 bgd).

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FIGURE 4.1 US Population and Total Freshwater Withdrawals by Source, 1950–2010. Source: Maupin, M., J. F. Kenny, S. S. Hutson, J. K. Lovelace, N. L. Barber, and K. S. Linsey. (2014). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010, p. 46. Circular No. 1405. US Department of the Interior, USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/.

In that report, the USGS notes that consumptive use of freshwater in the eastern United States is about 12 percent of those freshwater withdrawals (and 20 percent of the total US freshwater withdrawals), while the consumptive use of freshwater withdrawals in the western United States constitutes 47 percent of those withdrawals. The high consumptive use in the West was attributable to the 90 percent of the water use withdrawals for irrigation (located in the West), with California accounting for the largest consumptive use. Recent trends may have altered consumptive use estimates. Additional discussion related to consumptive use is described below under irrigation use. Total 2010 saline withdrawals were comprised of surface water (93 percent) and groundwater (7 percent). The source of most saline water used was seawater or brackish coastal waters, and it was primarily used for thermoelectric power usage (97 percent). In 2010, saline groundwater use increased (the highest increase yet reported for a five-year increment), while saline surface water use declined, continuing a declining trend begun in 1970. Most of the saline groundwater use in 2010 was for mining purposes. As depicted in figure 4.1, 2010 witnessed a 13 percent decrease in total withdrawals from 2005 figures, with much of the decrease accounted for by reductions in thermoelectric power, irrigation, public supply, and industrial uses. Fresh surface water withdrawals dropped by 15 percent compared to 2005 levels, and fresh groundwater withdrawals were 4 percent less than in 2005.



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As a matter of fact, in 2010, only mining and aquaculture increased their usage from 2005 levels. Meanwhile the population in the United States rose 4 percent between 2005 and 2010 (12.3 million) bringing the 2010 total US population to 313 million. Population (decadal) growth rates have varied in the United States, with stronger growth rates exhibited between 1950 and 1960 (19 percent increase), steady growth between 1960 and 1990, increased rates between 1990 and 2000 (13.2 percent), and a 9.7 percent rate between 2000 and 2010. The USGS 2010 Estimate reports that over the 2000–2010-decade, population growth was much faster in the southern and western states (14.3 and 13.8 percent, respectively) compared to midwestern and northeastern states (3.9 and 3.2 percent, respectively). The general assumption that water demand increases as population increases is not borne out by the above statistics. Overall per capita water use has been declining, with the USGS 2010 Estimate stating that the national average public supply/domestic delivery per capita use declined from approximately 400 liters per day (lpd; 106 gallons per day [gpd]) in 1985 to 337 lpd (89 gpd) in 2010.10 It is up to the water resources planner to be able to identify and communicate the nuances of these trends and to ascertain the particular aspects regarding each community that lead to water withdrawals, large or small, increase or decrease over differing time horizons. Finally, in examining overall water withdrawals in the United States in 2010, more than 50 percent of the total withdrawals were accounted for by twelve states. California accounted for approximately 11 percent, followed by Texas, Idaho, and Florida. Forty-five percent of the total water withdrawals in 2010 were for thermoelectric power generation, making it the largest use category, followed by water withdrawals for irrigation (33 percent) and public supply (12 percent); see figure 4.2. Thermoelectric power generation, irrigation, and public supply make up 90 percent of the total withdrawals.11 California was the state with the largest withdrawals of surface water, with 76 percent of it being used for irrigation purposes. In 2010, more surface water than groundwater was withdrawn for all uses except for domestic, livestock, and mining purposes. Irrigation also accounted for 65 percent of the nation’s fresh groundwater withdrawals mainly in the states of California, Arkansas, Texas, and Nebraska. Other water use categories include industrial, domestic self-supply, livestock and aquaculture, and mining uses. Details on these user categories are described below. A more detailed breakdown is available at the USGS website.12 A thorough understanding of these user categories is important as physical/environmental, economic, or social conditions may change the water withdrawal conditions ranging from the community level up to the national level. A summary of water withdrawal trends in the major user categories follows.

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FIGURE 4.2 Withdrawal Trends in the United States by Water Use Category, 1950–2010. Source: Maupin, M., J. F. Kenny, S. S. Hutson, J. K. Lovelace, N. L. Barber, and K. S. Linsey. (2014). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010, p. 46. Circular No. 1405. US Department of the Interior, USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/.

Water Use by Category Thermoelectric Power Use Thermoelectric power generation is the largest user category of water withdrawals in the United States. In 2010, 609.45 bld (161 bgd) were withdrawn, representing 45 percent of the grand total, or 38 percent of the freshwater total withdrawals. Surface water was the major source for this category (greater than 99 percent), with 73 percent of it from freshwater. After a peak in the 1980s, there has been a slight decline over the years, with the most striking decline between 2005 and 2010: a decline of 20 percent, the lowest level since before 1970. The USGS 2010 Estimate describes several factors that led to this decline, including recirculation systems using less water than once-through cooling systems, environmental quality concerns, use of natural gas and more water-efficient cooling technology, and the closing of once-through plants or upgrades to intakes and cooling systems (particularly in California). The US Department of Energy’s Innovations for Existing Plants program is developing technologies to reduce water use at plants without negatively impacting plant operations.13 Some examples of these changes include providing alternative sources of cooling water, changing the cycles of concentration (increasing for wet recirculation systems) and decreasing for wet cooling tower blowdown requirements, and reducing cooling tower evaporative losses via coal drying.

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Irrigation Use In 2010, irrigation use comprised 33 percent of the total water withdrawn in the United States, the second largest user of water in the country after thermoelectric power. Irrigation use is defined as water that is applied by an irrigation system to assist crop and pasture growth or to maintain vegetation on recreational lands such as parks and golf courses.14 Irrigation includes water that is applied for pre-irrigation, frost protection, chemical application, weed control, field preparation, crop cooling, harvesting, dust suppression, leaching of salts from the root zone, and conveyance losses. Irrigation water can be self-supplied or supplied by irrigation companies or districts. Irrigation use in 2010 totaled 435 bld (115 bgd), the lowest levels since before 1965. Like many of the other categories shown in figure 4.2, irrigation water use has been declining since 1980, with surface water providing the majority of the water from 1985 (66 percent) to 2010 (57 percent); and groundwater (albeit increasing) providing the remainder. As mentioned above, much of this groundwater use was from California, Arkansas, Texas, and Nebraska. This increase in groundwater use represents three times more groundwater use than in public water supply, the next largest user of groundwater in the United States.15 Along with the increased use of groundwater for irrigation over time, there has been a serious depletion of some regional aquifers, discussed later in this chapter. California, the state with the largest surface water withdrawals, used 76 percent of that surface water for irrigation purposes. In fact, California used more than 87 bld (23 bgd) of freshwater for irrigation in 2010, far exceeding the second- and third-ranked states of Idaho and Florida, which used 53 bld (14 bgd) and 34 bld (9 bgd), respectively. Declines in overall irrigation water use are attributed to increasing water efficiency in irrigation technology, with an increase in microirrigation systems usage showing significant increases between 2005 and 2010. Irrigation acreage has increased since 2005; however, the numbers of acres using sprinkler and micro-irrigation systems continue to increase and accounted for 58 percent of total irrigated lands in 2010. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that irrigation accounts for 97 percent of total agricultural water use, with the remainder going to rural domestic use and livestock production. In 2012, irrigated farm acreage amounted to 22.6 million hectares (55.5 million acres) in the United States, a decline from 2007 by almost half a million hectares (about one and one-quarter million acres). While states like Nebraska increased irrigated hectares, California and Florida saw the highest decreases in irrigated land.16 This “decrease” in irrigated acreage reported by the USDA appears to conflict with the trend, described in the previous paragraph, from the USGS 2010 Estimate, which stated an increase in irrigated acreage between 2005 and 2010. A teaching moment here: different agencies use different terms when defining user classes, and they differ in how

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FIGURE 4.3 Relative Usage of Irrigation Water Withdrawals by Various States in 2012. Source: United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). (2017). How Important Is Irrigation to US Agriculture? USDA Economic Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-manage ment/irrigation-water-use/#crops.

they collect and analyze their data. Note that the definition of irrigation use by the USGS includes several uses not typically considered “agricultural,” such as golf courses, use on recreation lands, parks, and so forth. The USDA most likely gathers its data from agricultural-related sources only. Without standardization of terms and data collection methods, comparisons between different data from different sources and different time spans must be reviewed and understood. Figure 4.3 shows the 2012 relative usage of irrigation water withdrawals by various states. Irrigation is a major aspect of agriculture, as crop irrigation was developed concurrently with settlement of the arid West, which had plenty of sun but, in most areas, inadequate precipitation to raise a variety of crops. In contrast, irrigation in the humid East is used mainly to supplement natural precipitation, to increase the number of plantings each year or the yields of crops, and to reduce risk of crop failure during drought periods. Florida, a major agricultural producer, has one of the highest rainfall rates in the nation, but it also has a high rate of irrigation for crops (Florida experiences a high evapotranspiration rate). Irrigation withdrawals have been affected by the reduction in the use of gravity irrigation water use (such as flood irrigation) versus pressure irrigation water use, as shown in figure 4.4. One of the key attributes of irrigation water use is its consumptive use component. Agriculture accounts for 80 to 90 percent of US consumptive water



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FIGURE 4.4 Irrigated Acres and Applied Water Use in 17 Western States, 1984–2013. Source: United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). (2017). How Important Is Irrigation to US Agriculture? USDA Economic Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-manage ment/irrigation-water-use/#crops.

use.17 In general, irrigation use tends to have higher consumptive use fractions than other uses, because crop production relies on the transpiration of plants to thrive and survive. Hence consumptive use is a key factor in crop production.18 The USGS’s discussion regarding consumptive use for irrigation in 1995 consisted of an estimate of 61 percent consumptive use, and 19 percent conveyance loss, with a return flow of only 20 percent of the withdrawals.19 Combined, these losses represented almost one-quarter of the total offstream uses in 1995. Given that irrigation trends have trended downward since 1980, this proportion of losses (consumptive use + conveyance loss) to overall water withdrawals would have decreased over time but would still represent a significant figure. An internet search of the term consumptive use finds numerous studies and site-specific and/or statewide estimates of consumptive use. The potential savings that could be harnessed by minimizing irrigation consumptive use are a frequent source of water conservation/efficiency investigations. However, extensive and intensive water use for irrigation will continue to consume water at an elevated rate compared to other water uses, due to crop types, evaporative losses, water content of “finished” agricultural products, transpiration, geological, topographical, and climatological conditions as well as irrigation

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(in)efficiencies. Continued research in agricultural engineering and land use management is needed to better articulate, plan for, and manage the consumptive use of water from irrigation uses. Undoubtedly, irrigation will remain the leading consumptive user of the nation’s water supply. Competition for the use of the available groundwater and surface water supply is expected to be heavy, as agriculture, population, and industry continue to expand, particularly in arid regions such as the US Southwest. It is also important to remember that the definition of irrigation also includes uses such as self-supplied parks and golf courses. Water withdrawals for, and consumptive use regarding, these purposes will continue to grow and must also be considered when planning for future water resources management. Public Supply Use The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines a public water supply system as a system that provides water for human consumption through pipes or other constructed conveyances to at least fifteen service connections or serves an average of at least twenty-five people for at least sixty days a year.20 The USGS defines public supply use—as a water use category—as water withdrawn by public governments and agencies, such as a county water department, and by private companies and then delivered to users. Public suppliers provide water for domestic, commercial, thermoelectric power, industrial, and public water users. Thermoelectric, industrial, large commercial uses, and some public uses are often self-supplied and are usually not serviced by a public supply system, though in specific instances they can be. Information on public supply is usually available from state health agencies and state permitting offices. It is also available from the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Information System.21 Data on population served and withdrawals are generally accurate because state, local agencies, and/or water utilities maintain nearly complete information. Delivery data from public suppliers to various users are harder to obtain, and the data varies greatly in its accuracy and specificity. Public supply use is the third largest user category of water in the United States, following thermoelectric and irrigation water uses. Approximately 86 percent of the 2010 population (269 million) relies on the public water supply. In fact, the states with the greatest populations—California, Texas, New York, and Florida—accounted for a total of 35 percent of all public supply water withdrawals. In 2010, 159 bld (42 bgd) of water withdrawals were for public water supply, representing 14 percent of total 2010 withdrawals. The source of those total withdrawals came from surface water (63 percent) and groundwater (37 percent). Areas in the United States such as Puerto Rico joined with thirty-six states that relied heavily on surface water, while Hawaii, Florida, Idaho, Missis-



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sippi, Nebraska, and Iowa relied more heavily on groundwater. In some cases, brackish water has been used as a public water supply source. For example, the US Virgin Islands and the states of Florida, Massachusetts, and Texas withdrew a total of 89 bld (23.5 mgd) of saline surface water in 2010. During the same time, a combined 1,199 million liters per day (mld) (317 million gallons per day [mgd]) of saline groundwater were withdrawn for public supply in Florida, California, Texas, Virginia, and Utah. Public supply is most often associated with residential or domestic water use and those uses usually represent the largest component of public supply withdrawals. Domestic use is defined by the USGS as water used for household purposes, such as drinking; food preparation; bathing; washing clothes, dishes, and dogs; flushing toilets; and watering lawns and gardens. In 2010, domestic water deliveries comprised 57 percent of the public supply withdrawals. Keep in mind that public supply also may serve public uses such as pools, firefighting, water and wastewater treatment, and so forth. Leaks, maintenance, and system losses also include unaccounted-for amounts. The 2010 withdrawals in public supply were 5 percent less than the 2005 totals, declining from 167.7 bld (44.3 bgd) to 159 bld (42 bgd). This is the first time since the 1950s that public supply withdrawals experienced a decline. This also occurred despite continued population growth in the United States. In 2010, per capita use of public supply water is reported to average 336.9 lpd (89 gpd), a decline from 397.45 lpd (105 gpd) in 1985. As municipalities wrestle with competing demands for water and greater stress on existing sources, conservation— defined as a beneficial reduction in water use,22 a greater focus on efficiency, and drought responses provide some explanation for this decline in public supply use over this time period. Residential water conservation methods can contribute significantly to overall municipal water conservation. Certain economic measures, such as water pricing policies, can be utilized to reduce the demand for water. Related to this factor is the need for metering water use. Water use restrictions (e.g., fines for illegal water use during times of drought, restrictions on outside water use, etc.) can be effective in reducing water use during emergency shortages or peak demand periods. Further information regarding the role of water conservation is presented in the demand forecasting section of this chapter. Related to domestic use is the self-supplied domestic (separate) water use category. In 2010, 44.5 million people in the United States were characterized as domestic self-supplied, constituting 14 percent of the population accounting for 13.6 bld (3.6 bgd) or 1 percent of all total withdrawals. The states of Maine and Alaska and the US Virgin Islands topped the list of entities with a large percentage of self-supplied population within their total population, while the self-supplied populations were largest in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan.

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Industrial Use Industrial water use is used for purposes such as processing, washing, and cooling in manufacturing plants. Some of the major water-using industries are steel, chemical and allied products, paper and allied products, and petroleum refining. Many states have permit programs that require reporting of industrial withdrawals and return flows that provide a fairly reliable source of data. Information on deliveries from public suppliers to industrial users can be estimated by a number of methods if the data are not available from the public suppliers. In 2010, approximately 60.18 bld (15.9 bgd) of water withdrawals were for industrial use. This accounted for 4 percent of the total withdrawals, with freshwater accounting for 93 percent of industrial water withdrawals (of which Indiana and Louisiana accounted for 33 percent) and 98 percent of industrial groundwater withdrawals, 14 percent of which was used by California alone. Texas used 65 percent of the saline surface water industrial withdrawals, mostly from areas along the Gulf Coast. Overall, Indiana, Louisiana, and Texas accounted for 35 percent of the total industrial withdrawals. Total 2010 withdrawals were 12 percent lower than the 2005 industrial withdrawal numbers. In fact, total industrial withdrawals decreased by 38 percent between 1985 and 2010, the years when mining and aquaculture withdrawals were separated from other commercial industrial uses. Declines in industrial water withdrawals may be attributed to improved process efficiency, environmental regulation, availability of water resources, and a greater emphasis on reuse and recycling within the industrial facilities. This has been corroborated by the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Task Committee on Water Conservation, which indicated that the federal water quality regulations regarding wastewater discharges have been the primary impetus for reduction of industrial demand.23 This reduction in demand for water withdrawals has also been brought about mainly through water reuse, recycling of internal wastewater, and water use reduction measures. The reuse and recirculation of wastewater is restricted by the economic feasibility of reuse (i.e., whether it is cheaper to recycle or seek an alternative water source or supplier) and the quality required for industrial processes. Overall, the outlook for reuse and conservation of industrial water supply appears undiminished. Mining, Aquaculture, and Livestock Uses Two final categories to be mentioned are that of aquaculture and mining, since these two categories alone showed increases from 2005—2010. Aquaculture is defined as water use associated with the farming of organisms that live in water (such as finfish and shellfish) and offstream water use associated with



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fish hatcheries. Aquaculture and mining combined comprise 4 percent of total 2010 water withdrawals, with aquaculture representing 3 of the 4 percent. Most of the water withdrawn for mining was saline groundwater while, conversely, the majority of water used for aquaculture was from surface water sources occurring at facilities that provide flowthrough, returning the water directly back to its source. Finally, livestock (self-supplied) utilized approximately 1 percent of the total 2010 withdrawals, exhibiting usage similar to the previous decade. Water Supply In the late 1970s, the US Water Resources Council’s Second National Assessment of the Nation’s Water Resources provided a summary of water supply conditions for the nation.24 According to that report, more than 151.46 trillion lpd (40 trillion gpd) pass over the coterminous United States as water vapor, and about 10 percent of this total precipitates as rain, snow, sleet, or hail at an average equivalent amount of 76.2 cm (30 in) per year. Barely one-third of what remains after evapotranspiration occurs can be actively used. There has been no completed assessment of the nation’s water resources since that date.25 In the absence of a national assessment, one measure of supply adequacy is the presence or absence of shortage. Figure 4.5 summarizes the projected status of freshwater demands for the decade 2013–2023 in the United States as reported by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO)26 after surveying state water managers. Of note is the prevalence of expected regional and local shortages in the majority of the states (forty out of fifty states). In addition, a 2016 USDA report27 concludes that • In the absence of adaptation, future renewable water sources will be insufficient to avoid a substantial increase in the likelihood of annual water shortages in many areas of the United States. On average, the number of basins likely to experience shortages is projected to increase about fourfold by 2060. • Future groundwater mining at levels similar to those of the past few decades is by far the most effective adaptation, providing roughly a 20 to 50 percent reduction in the number of basins expecting shortages. Groundwater mining becomes increasingly costly, however, and is not sustainable in the long run. • A wide range of other adaptations, from reductions in irrigated area to additions in reservoir capacity to added flexibility in managing trans-basin diversions, have a relatively modest effect on the number of basins projected to incur annual shortages.

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FIGURE 4.5 Extent of State Shortages Likely for the Next Decade under Average Water Conditions. Source: United States Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning, p. 29. GAO-14-430.

• The highest levels of risk of impaired water quality resulting from land and resource use in the coterminous United States generally are found in the eastern half of the nation. • Forests are disproportionally important as sources of water, especially in the northeastern and western United States, where they provide roughly twothirds of the annual renewable water supply. Federal lands are the source of more than 60 percent of the water supply in the US West as a whole, and the source of more than 75 percent of the water supply of some western states. Analyses of water sources and supplies such as these are important in formulating plans and policies for water use. As previously stated, although water resources may be plentiful on a national scale, variations over time and among regions cause differing concerns regarding excessive or inadequate quantities at the regional or local level.



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Currently, detailed annual hydrologic data for each state are compiled and published by the USGS under the National Water Information System (NWIS) and are readily available from USGS district offices and online. They provide such information as stage, discharge, and water quality of streams; elevation and water quality of lakes and reservoirs; water level and water quality of wells; and discharge and water quality of springs. The NWIS provides access to water resources data collected at about 1.5 million sites in the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The USGS investigates the occurrence, quantity, quality, distribution, and movement of surface and groundwater and disseminates the data to the public, state, and local governments; public and private utilities; and other federal agencies involved with managing the nation’s water resources.28 Surface water depletion from irrigation is a major concern in the western states. The Colorado River has been reduced to a mere trickle as it enters the Gulf of California, mainly because of appropriated water used for irrigation purposes in central Arizona and Southern California, although a substantial portion is used for municipal supplies as well. Another example is Pyramid Lake, the largest lake in Nevada, which is expected to see a decline of one foot of surface elevation every four years,29 primarily as a result of decreased inflow as a result of diverted water from the Truckee River for irrigation. The NWIS of the USGS does maintain well records and data management. In 2008, the USGS published a report on groundwater availability in the United States.30 It reports that of sixty-six principal aquifer systems investigated, twenty account for almost 90 percent of the groundwater withdrawals. The High Plains aquifer discussed below posed the most extreme recordings in terms of relative withdrawals. The previous national summary of groundwater level declines was in 1983 (by the USGS) and published in 1984. Further assessments were made in 2007 with subsequent publications, but the USGS, citing a 2002 report by the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, warned that the availability of groundwater levels and rates of change is “not adequate for national reporting” because a comprehensive database of all groundwater level monitoring does not exist.31 The 2008 report describes numerous aquifer systems throughout the United States that are experiencing substantial water level declines, and it provides an extensive review of aspects pertinent to groundwater availability in the country, with particular emphasis on the regional scale. The lack of a comprehensive database (and collection protocol) is a serious problem and one that requires rectifying. Inadequate data acquisition, monitoring, and management issues are a prevalent concern in water resources planning and management. The total amount of groundwater estimated to be available in the coterminous states within 762 meters (2,500 feet) of the earth’s surface is more than 123 trillion cubic meters (100 billion acre-feet, or 32.5 x 1012 gallons). According to

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USGS figures, during 1900–2008, approximately 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of groundwater was depleted, with the highest rates of almost 25 km3/yr (6mi3/yr) from 2000–2008.32 The quantity of groundwater far exceeds the available water in streams and lakes, but problems exist in some areas because of substantial groundwater mining. Especially notable is the High Plains area, which mines more than 17 trillion cubic meters (14 billion acre-feet) annually. The huge High Plains, or Ogallala, aquifer (see chapter 3), extending from northern Texas to southern South Dakota, was once thought to be inexhaustible. Development spread across the regional aquifer, starting in the central basin (Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma) in the 1940s and ’50s, and to the northern basin (Wyoming and Nebraska) in the 1950s and 1960s. Using hydrographs, a set of observation wells and mathematical modeling estimated average saturated thickness and average annual rates of depletion. In 2016, Steward and Allen predicted the peak depletion for areas overlying the Ogallala aquifer. They reported that some states have already reached the peak (2010 for Kansas, 2002 for New Mexico, 2012 for Oklahoma, and 1999 for Texas), while it is close for others (2023 for Colorado) and has yet to occur in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming.33 The previously described water use trends state that overall irrigation water use is declining. However, aggregate numbers and trends mask internal spatial and temporal variability. Although overall irrigation use has stabilized and decreased nationally, many regions of the United States are experiencing intensive growth in water use and increased demands on those local supplies, groundwater or surface water, as described above. Often these are in areas in which water availability is not adequate or is stressed, such as irrigation use in the arid southwestern United States or the Great Plains. Because of agriculture’s high withdrawal, consumptive use, and conveyance loss, the potential for water conservation in agriculture is very high. Supply augmentation on a large scale may not be feasible in many places because of the economic and environmental constraints involved in creating new reservoirs or diverting water from distant sources (although recharge of groundwater with agricultural wastewater may be practical in some areas). Conservation and reuse of the irrigation waters appear to be more appropriate solutions and would include development of more productive and/or salt-tolerant crop species; changes in use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; lining of irrigation canals or the use of pipelines to prevent seepage loss; “trickle,” “drip,” or “micro-jet” irrigation practices to reduce the quantity of water necessary for continued crop yield; and the reuse of municipal and/or agricultural wastewater for direct irrigation or for recharge of groundwater. All of these practices involve conscientious management of irrigation water, and most require either significant economic expenditures or changes in traditional methods of crop management. The long-range savings in terms of water supply and capital expenditures may be worth the effort.

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Alternative Sources (or Supply) As mentioned in the preceding chapters, the framework of integrated water resources management (IWRM) provides the water resources planning practitioner with a wide array of tools and consideration of a broad spectrum of planning and management techniques. Utilizing the framework, which recognizes the interrelationships between the socioeconomic, environmental, and governance systems, traditional physical sources such as groundwater, surface or saline water, and so forth, are now just part of a continuum of IWRM or One Water. A water source for one user may be a waste stream from another user. Water that was once thought unpotable is now potable. Surface water becomes groundwater, and it is then turned back to surface water again. Water withdrawn from one basin is now used in basins hundreds of miles away. Water thought to be too saline is now used for water supply purposes and so on. The finite boundaries of particular water-related systems can expand and contract with technical innovation, institutional arrangements, or socioeconomic conditions. By applying a systems approach to planning and managing water resources, flexibility is enhanced and assessment of risk and reliability have improved. Alternative sources were previously defined in the “Key Terms” section as water that has been reclaimed after one or more other uses, or a water supply of stormwater, brackish water, or saltwater that has been treated to supply the intended use. It can also include sources from lesser-quality water, water transfers, desalination, water marketing, ASR, or waters derived from water conservation measures. The GAO reports the frequency of some selected alternative sources utilized by different states in 2003 and in 2013, in table 4.1. TABLE 4.1 Trends in Use of Alternative Sources by States, 2003 and 2013 Number of States Developing New Water Supplies through Reclaimed Water, Recycling Stormwater, and Desalination, 2003 and 2013 Type of New Supply

Number of States in 2003

Number of States in 2013

Reuse of reclaimed water Recycling of stormwater Desalination

23 out of 47 5 out of 47 9 out of 47

36 out of 50 19 out of 49a 18 out of 50

Number of States Using Interbasin Transfers and Voluntary Transfer Markets, 2003 and 2013 Type of Action

Number of States in 2003

Number of States in 2013

Interbasin transfers Voluntary transfer markets

28 out of 47 15 out of 47

36 out of 50 21 out of 49b

a,b

In 2013, only 49 state water managers responded to this question.

Source: US Government Accountability Office. (2014, May). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning, pp. 40–41. GAO-14-430.

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This section briefly describes two of the most prevalent alternative sources in use today. Information regarding reuse of stormwater can be found in chapter 11, and water conservation is discussed later in this chapter under the forecasting methodologies section. Numerous instances and applications of all these methods can be found in the literature. Desalination Saline water is available for certain purposes in almost unlimited supply from the oceans or brackish water bodies. Conversion to freshwater, however, requires substantial expenditures and it has not always been viewed as a desirable alternative from a cost perspective, but it is quickly increasing in popularity. Changes in membrane technology have greatly leveled the cost differentials between traditional source water and desalination. One source states, “Advances in technology and equipment have resulted in a reduction of 80 percent of the energy used for water production over the last 20 years. Today, the energy needed to produce freshwater from seawater for one household per year (~2,000 kW/yr) is less than that used by the household’s refrigerator.”34 Globally, there are more than 150 countries utilizing the technology with 18,000 plants in operation providing more than 83 bld (22 bgd).35 In the United States in 2010, saline water withdrawals amounted to 170.3 bld (45 bgd) of surface water and 12.45 bld (3.29 bgd) of groundwater, used primarily for thermoelectric power generation and mining purposes. More than two thousand desalination plants are in use in the United States. Florida is in the lead with the greatest number of desalination plants, followed by California, Texas, and North Carolina. In many of these instances, the use of desalination augments integrated strategies of water management that are already utilizing reclaimed water or water conservation measures.36 Tampa Bay Water, for instance, is the only utility in the United States that uses three distinct sources of water: groundwater, surface water, and seawater combined. Originally designed to be the largest facility in the Western Hemisphere, the Tampa Bay Water desalination plant provides up to 95 mld (25 mgd) of drinking water to its customers.37 Reclaimed Water Another important alternative source is recycled water. Recycled water can be used for agricultural purposes, recharge, or surface water augmentation at various locations and at various scales. Most large-scale recycling of water is being performed in the United States from reclaimed water, as well as reuse of stormwater or gray water.38 Reclaimed water is defined as treated wastewater that is under the direct control of a treatment plant owner/operator that has been treated to a quality suitable for a beneficial use. Use of reclaimed water has

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been increasing because, in most US locations, municipal wastewater is required to be treated before it is discharged, and this treated water is generally available in high volumes and available year-round. The EPA reports that approximately 7 to 8 percent of municipal wastewater is being reclaimed of the 121.13 bld (32 bgd) of wastewater being produced.39 The use of reclaimed water can help avoid water supply and wastewater costs, can be used for environmental and recreational purposes, can improve water reliability or water quality, and can address economic, social, and equity concerns.40 Prevalent applications include irrigation use, industrial use, groundwater recharge, geothermal energy production, seawater intrusion barrier, recreational/environmental use, non-potable urban uses such as fire suppression, toilet flushing, air conditioning, and potable reuse. Although reclaimed water use is found throughout the US, 90 percent of it is practiced in the four states of California, Florida, Texas, and Arizona.41 California is aggressively implementing water reuse, and updates on those rates and applications can be found on the State Water Resources Control Board website.42 Reclaimed water use is also practiced in more than forty-seven countries globally, with most of it used for agricultural purposes (some with limited amounts of treatment).43 Planning for Future Water Use Planning for future water supplies must start with identifying uses and estimating demand for these uses. Estimating demand relationships is an important step in water resources planning and management. This section provides an overview of the major considerations in dealing with forecasting water demand and supply. Forecasting Methodologies A forecast is a conditional prediction; the statement about the future is expected to be accurate if the methods or the assumptions used to develop the prediction are correct. Use of the term forecast implies explicit assumptions as well as a method or a model.44 Forecasts are often used to justify large expenditures in water supply infrastructure, yet most water supply agencies use relatively simple methods for determining the future demands on an area’s water supply capabilities. Demand Forecasting Common approaches for projecting municipal demand focus on population size and number of households; industrial demand forecasting often relies upon

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number of employees; and agricultural demand relates to crop type and acreage. Such variables are used in simple mathematical calculations to project future demand and to develop water supply management strategies. However, other less salient factors also need to be examined in water use analysis. Water use forecasts in most cases are long-range, covering up to fifty years, and typically measure average daily use. Such long-range planning is necessary because water use projections are usually used to plan major facilities such as dams, reservoirs, and treatment plants. Short-range projections may be made for smaller facilities or selected management strategies and may deal with variations in water use by season, month, or week. Even though most agencies use simple approaches, the available forecasting techniques are varied. The following sections describe the more important techniques. They are reviewed more fully in a report by the Institute for Water Resources (IWR), US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE),45 and are also explained in more detail in various textbooks on water supply. Time Extrapolation This technique only considers past water use records and extrapolates into the future, using graphs and other mathematical methods. It assumes a continuation of past trends over time but may use a variety of functional forms, such as linear, exponential, and logarithmic. Water use and time are the only variables considered in this technique. It is not highly reliable, especially for long-term projections. Single-Coefficient Methods The most commonly used technique, this method estimates future water demand as a product of service area population and per capita water use. The per capita water use coefficient may be assumed to be constant, or it may be projected to increase (or decrease) over time. Population projections may be obtained for the service area through original work, from local sources such as local planning departments or water utilities, or from higher-level sources such as state agency projections. The per capita approach is usually applied to municipal water use. Many studies have shown population (independent or explanatory variable) to be a reliable indicator of water use (dependent variable). The method may be refined by using separate per capita coefficients for different use categories such as residential, commercial, public, or industrial. This separation of categories is called a disaggregation. It is often helpful to disaggregate (separate) forecasts so that water use can be addressed in specific use sectors, geographic areas, or seasons.



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A variation of the per capita approach is to use the number of customers in the water system within the study area. Single-coefficient methods may also be applied to industrial use. For example, water use per employee may be used with projections of employment in the industrial sector. Such employment projections are often available from local, regional, or state planning offices. Commercial forecasts may be done in terms of water use per employee or per square foot. Similarly, agricultural forecasts may be done by projecting land area in specific crops and multiplying by irrigation requirements per unit of area for each crop type. In all cases, the single-coefficient method relies entirely on projections of a key (independent/explanatory) variable and assumptions regarding future water use as a function of that variable. The method is reasonably reliable for shortrange forecasts but becomes increasingly questionable for long-term projections. Multiple-Coefficient Methods This approach defines future water use as a function of two or more variables associated with water use. Regression equations are typically developed as the statistical technique for estimating the relevant coefficients. This technique may be based on historic time series data for the study area or on cross-section data from a number of similar areas. To forecast water use, future values of the independent variables must be determined by other means. For example, average water use in a region (W) may be specified as a function of the number of employees in manufacturing (E) and number of households (H): W = a + b1E + b2 H + e The values of a, b1, and b2 are parameters estimated statistically from the dataset, while e is an “error term” to account for the unexplained variation in W. To estimate the equation using time series, historic data would be applied using regression analysis techniques. Future water use would then be determined by calculating the estimated equation with projected values of E and H for the forecast period. Water Demand Models. The term water demand is frequently used in water use projections. In economics, demand is a function of price, whereby a price increase is associated with a decrease in demand. Water use projections in the absence of price considerations are sometimes termed “water requirements” by water resource economists.46 If we consider price (P) and demand (Q) for water with other factors held constant, the price elasticity of demand (ed) can be defined as ed = –(

dQ dP )/( ) Q P

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Thus, if a doubling of price (100 percent increase) results in a demand decrease of 30 percent, the elasticity is −0.3. In economic theory, the elasticity is less for necessities than for luxuries; that is, demand for a necessary item will be less influenced by price than will demand for a luxury item. This concept is important in understanding the relative value of water and of pricing policies for water supply. Water demand models are a subcategory of the multiple-coefficient methods described above. The primary differences are that the price of water is included as an explanatory (or independent) variable and some measure of personal income is often included. One of the most significant studies of this type was by Linaweaver et al.47 Their model showed that the most important variables in residential water use were climatic factors, economic levels of consumers, irrigable lawn areas, and number of homes. Howe and Linaweaver48 demonstrated the potential effects of price on water demand by showing an average annual weighted price elasticity of −0.4 in a study of twenty-one metered areas; that is, demand would drop by 40 percent if the unit price were doubled. A study by Kindler and Bower49 showed that water demand relationships can be analyzed at four levels: national, regional, aggregated local, and individual (figure 4.6). Each

FIGURE 4.6 Levels of Water Demand Analysis. Source: Kindler, J., and B. T. Bower. (1978, Nov.) Modeling and Forecasting of Water Demands. Paper presented at the Conference on Application of Systems Analysis in Water Management, Budapest, Hungary.

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level is the aggregate of demand from the next lowest level. The primary advantage of demand models is that they contain more complete sets of explanatory variables and can reflect important policy considerations with respect to price. Substantial price increases may actually reflect changes in water supply costs as well as deliberate pricing policy. Probabilistic Analysis Models using regression analysis to explain variations in water use also include the “error term” (e) to account for unexplained variation. If the remaining variance is random and not accounted for by other variables, water use then can be identified as a stochastic process.50 Probabilistic analysis includes not only independent variables to estimate future use but also a probability distribution of that estimate. IWR-MAIN In spite of the varied list of forecasting methods described above, simple per capita projections of future water use were commonly used to plan city water supply systems until the 1960s, when alternative approaches were investigated. A study at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1960s is generally considered the turning point, for it defined and used major factors influencing residential water use. Water use forecasts in many cities today use these factors or variations of them in developing “disaggregated forecasts.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the USACE conducted research on developing disaggregated forecasting and water conservation. A primary product of this research was the USACE’s IWR Municipal and Industrial (MAIN) IWR-MAIN model, a computerized model for forecasting water use.51 In its latest versions, it was also used for estimating the effects of water conservation methods and is customized using MS Excel features by CDM Smith, which owns the IWR-MAIN Water Demand Management Suite©.52 IWR-MAIN has been used in Southern California, Las Vegas, and Phoenix as well as the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Rivers conflict between the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Inputs and outputs to the model are displayed in figure 4.7 and serve as an example of the depth and range of data that can be utilized in a disaggregate forecast method. Additional information pertaining to forecasting and demand management can be found in Baumann, Boland, and Hanemann.53 Understanding Municipal Water Use This section discusses forecasting municipal water use in two steps: explanation and prediction. It has been provided by John J. Boland.54

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FIGURE 4.7 Inputs and Outputs of the IWR-MAIN Forecasting Model.

Municipal water use is defined to consist of all water uses that are typically supplied by a public water utility and include residential use, commercial and institutional use, industrial use (to the extent that it relies on public water supply), and various public sector uses. Explaining Municipal Water Use Any careful attempt to explain municipal water use quickly encounters at least three problems: • In every community, water is used for many different purposes by many different kinds of users. This suggests a need for disaggregation, where water use is separately stated and explained for each of a number of user sectors.

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• Water use, even for a specific kind of user, is affected by a relatively large number of explanatory variables. For example, household water use may be a function of number of persons in the household, building type, household income, price of water, characteristics of water-using appliances, conservation practices, and so forth. • In most cases, the only sources of water use data are the existing customer water meters. These are read periodically (monthly, bimonthly, quarterly) by the water utility but not all at the same time. This creates problems for data interpretation. Given this complexity, it is clear that explanation of municipal water use requires disaggregation of water use into a number of user sectors and further requires some judgment as to which and how many explanatory variables are to be considered in each user sector. Table 4.2 is meant as an example of how this can be done. Specific applications may call for a different set of user sectors (e.g., single-family residential structures may be treated differently from multiple-family buildings) and a greater or smaller number of explanatory variables (e.g., if industrial use is a minor factor in total municipal water use, it may be adequately described in terms of a single variable, such as employment). TABLE 4.2 Water Use Sectors and Explanatory Variables Possible Explanatory Variables Household income Marginal price (water + sewer) Persons per household Housing type Lifestyle variables Moisture deficit Irrigable area Level of commercial activity Level of industrial activity Number of employees Recycle rate (for process water) Demand management measures Other surrogate of binary variables

Residential (Inside Uses)

Residential (Outside Uses)

Commercial & Institutional

Industrial

X X

X X

X

X

X X X X X X X X

X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

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The various types of water use data can be described as follows: Macro data • Total water use for all users in a sector • Based on billings; time period is a billing period or longer Quasi-micro data • Water use for individual users within a sector • Based on billings; time period is a billing period or longer Micro data • Water use for individual users within a sector • Requires special instrumentation; time period can be defined as needed and may be a day or less Each of these data types presents specific problems. In the case of macro data used for multisite studies (e.g., where data are collected for a number of cities), errors can be introduced as a result of inconsistent user sector definitions. This can be avoided by limiting the analysis to a single site, but doing so results in a time series analysis, which eliminates consideration of any explanatory variable that varies spatially (e.g., climate). Because the data are taken from billing records that contain meter readings obtained on a rotating basis, only rolling averages can be observed. Also, data obtained from billing records are subject to various unknown errors due to meter malfunction, incorrect readings, and data management problems. Quasi-micro data, which is taken from the billing records for specific water users, avoids some of these problems but is still limited to rolling averages and subject to various metering-related errors. Most researchers would prefer to have micro data, where special instrumentation is installed at water users’ premises so that the level of water use can be monitored in real time. This eliminates reliance on the meter reading cycle and on the potential errors associated with it. However, the kinds of instrumentation proposed in the past for this purpose have had substantial costs and have required permission from property owners (potentially biasing the sample). In recent years, many utilities have installed advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) to support automatic meter reading (AMR). Suitably equipped water meters are interrogated via radio frequency, telephony, or power transmission. The meter readings are communicated to the utility’s servers via fixed networks, mobile transceivers (e.g., drive-by trucks), or handheld devices. Where AMR

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has been implemented, a possible strategy for collecting water use data would be to interrogate the meters of selected customers at frequent intervals, collecting micro data without the need for additional instrumentation. However, the data are still subject to error due to meter misregistration (residential water meters often underregister as they age). Also, depending on the resolution of the meters themselves, the minimum time period for accurate measurement may be on the order of a few days. State of the Art There are literally hundreds of papers and published reports providing explanatory models of various aspects of municipal water use. The most common type of study utilizes macro data for a single site, sometimes for the entire community and sometimes for residential use alone. There are some studies based on quasi-micro data, usually for residential customers. There are also multisite studies of both kinds. There are a handful of single-site studies using true micro data, collected in various ways. However, there may be only a single example of a large, geographically diverse, multisite, near-micro data study. And that study is more than half a century old. The Johns Hopkins Residential Water Use Study described above was conducted from 1962 to 1965 in thirty-nine locations throughout the United States.55 Special metering equipment was installed on water mains serving groups of houses, rather than relying on individual metering. Water use for each group of houses was recorded at frequent intervals on punched paper tape over a period of thirty months. Data were also collected for numerous potential explanatory variables. The result was a set of residential water use models that were widely adopted for a variety of purposes. It has been occasionally suggested that the Johns Hopkins study should be replicated with modern instrumentation and a better idea of the relationships that should be studied. But it can be noted that the original study cost was in the range of $300,000 to $500,000 in 1965 dollars (the total includes estimated cost-sharing by local utilities). Although instrumentation and data management would be more efficient now, it is still likely that the cost of replicating the Johns Hopkins study would be on the order of millions of dollars. So far, there has been no serious attempt to fund such a study. Conclusion Although a number of advanced methods are available for forecasting municipal water use, they are not in general use. The most common approach, the per capita method, has been associated with large errors in the past. Certain

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advanced methods, such as the IWR-MAIN model, have produced substantially accurate forecasts, at least over the several decades that these methods have been in use. However, changes in lifestyles, plumbing fixtures, conservation practices, and pricing practices all present new challenges for explanation and prediction of water use. It would be possible to improve explanatory models in a way that addresses the new challenges, but this would require new water use studies. These studies would utilize sector-specific models, true micro-level water use data, micro-level data on explanatory variables, and minimal metered error. However, such studies are costly and time-consuming, and there is, to date, no apparent funding source. Water Conservation Previously, water conservation was listed as an alternative source being used in the reconciliation of water demand and water supply. Technically it is a demand management technique in that it fosters beneficial reductions in water use rather than providing a new or different source of water. In a sense, it extends the use, making more water available for particular users or for a particular location or time period. Demand management measures are the actions, policies, and programs aimed at modifying consumers’ pattern of water use. Short-term conservation measures are utilized in periods of drought, or when there are system interruptions, unexpected water quality issues, or other short-term situations. Long-range conservation measures are the typical demand management programs generally implemented at the municipal level or in the industrial, commercial, or agricultural sectors, in order to reduce usage for beneficial purposes such as postponing additional water infrastructure, improving water use efficiency, increasing reliability, lowering costs, enhancing flexibility, improving environmental resources, and so forth. Conservation measures may include behavioral changes, technological changes, ordinances, prohibitions, water use policies, or pricing. They can be administered voluntarily, by mandate, or by a combination of the two. They are utilized on a multitude of scales, from the neighborhood scale through statewide, to sometimes regional (multistate) in scope. What is most important to the water resources planner is that full consideration of water conservation, along with the tools and alternative supplies mentioned above, is integrated into the planning framework. After a review of the detailed demand forecast and a review of the existing water system sources and availability, a systematic evaluation of each water conservation measure must be integrated into the water supply plan, guided by the planning objectives. It is important to recognize possible interactions among individual water conservation measures. For example, behavioral changes and pricing policies may

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be considered separately or together, and their combined effectiveness may be less than the sum of their individual effectiveness. In planning, measures may be considered separately but also in combinations. The end result is likely to be some set of conservation measures that performs well against specified criteria, usually economic or environmental objectives. This result must be compared to the base water supply plan to ascertain that a net benefit has occurred. If not, that measure or set of measures is omitted and the next measure or set of measures is evaluated. Once the best performing set of measures is evaluated for effectiveness and other properties, it is added to the water supply plan as an integral component. The final plan, including the selected water conservation measures, must then be evaluated for feasibility, acceptability, and reliability.56 Water conservation is widely practiced all over the world, and its intensity has grown in the United States because of droughts, land use changes, population growth and development, and competition for water sources. There is no scarcity of conservation studies in the literature. Of particular note are the EPA’s guidelines for water conservation and numerous other references.57 Online water conservation software is also available for use.58 Supply Forecasting Forecasting the supply side of water use requires information on the sources available to meet projected demand and the amount that can be provided from these sources as well as the costs and environmental effects. In most places, water is available from groundwater, surface water, or both. Some locations use desalinization plants to provide water. The USACE has reallocated storage in some of its reservoirs for municipal and industrial water supply. When considering such reallocations, it may be necessary to determine the costs of “supplying” the same amount of water through water conservation. The USACE IWR prepared the Water Supply Handbook: A Handbook on Water Supply Planning and Resource Management, which is an encyclopedic resource of more than four hundred pages on the subject. It is available online either as a complete report or by chapter.59 The handbook is a reference for almost everything related to the USACE and water supply. It is intended for use by the USACE, academia, and nonfederal organizations with an interest in water supply planning and management. The focus of the handbook is: 1. To provide water supplies (municipal, industrial, agricultural, and emergency/ drought contingency) from new and existing USACE reservoir projects (chapters 2–5) 2. To manage those supplies through modeling, water conservation, forecasting, and water control systems (chapters 6–9)

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Groundwater supplies are plentiful in many places and are frequently used for municipal, industrial, and agricultural purposes. The significant information required in forecasting groundwater supplies is the depth to aquifers and the amount of water that can be withdrawn without impairing the quality or quantity of water in the aquifer (or the safe yield). In many cases, groundwater has been withdrawn to such an extent that a significant lowering of the water level and contamination by saltwater intrusion have resulted. Reservoirs Surface water provides naturally abundant supplies where lakes and rivers have sufficient capacity to meet demands. In such places, plans must be developed for providing the necessary facilities for treatment, storage, and distribution of the water. In many cases, however, reservoirs are also needed to augment natural systems in periods of low flow and to regulate the distribution of surface water flows and volumes.60 Essentially, reservoirs are for temporary storage of water over relatively long periods of dry weather and low flow. Many reservoirs, however, serve purposes other than for water supply, such as flood damage reduction, hydroelectric generation, and water-based recreational activity. Reservoirs are important sources of freshwater, with total storage capacity in the nation at about 850,203.487 bl (224,600 bg). About 35 percent of this capacity is for flood control, with the remainder available for other uses. As shown in figure 4.8, there are three major elements of reservoir storagecapacity requirements: (1) active storage for firm and secondary yields; (2) dead storage for sediment collection, hydropower production, and recreational purposes; and (3) flood storage for reduction of downstream flood damages.61 Firm yield, or safe yield, can be defined as the maximum amount of water available from a reservoir based on historical streamflow records, whereas secondary yield is any amount greater than firm yield.62 Dead storage is the amount available for purposes other than water supply.

FIGURE 4.8 Reservoir Storage Zones. Source: Loucks, D. P. (1976). Surface-Water Quality Management Models. In Systems Approach to Water Management, edited by A. K. Biswas. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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In 2016, the USACE released a report based on a survey conducted at 356 reservoir projects across the United States that are owned and operated by the USACE. The survey collected information on water management, water supply, and reservoir sedimentation. These survey data, over the years, have been useful in prioritizing and funding relevant projects. In 2013, a pilot study assessed the use of downscaled global climate model data in forecasting conditions to future streamflow and reservoir operations.63 Mass Diagram Analysis A relatively simple method for determining reservoir storage requirements is a mass diagram based on the assumption that past flows will be repeated in the future. The curve shows total cumulative inflow to a stream at the point of a proposed reservoir plotted against time. To determine required capacity, we find the maximum difference between cumulative inflows and cumulative demand. The example in figure 4.9 is based on data in table 4.3 showing cumulative monthly

FIGURE 4.9 Mass Diagram Using Cumulative Inflow.

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flow and assuming that average demand or required release per time period (Rt) is 5.0 units. The difference between total inflow and release is the quantity needed to meet demand. Demand is drawn as a sloped line and placed tangent to the cumulative inflow curve. In months where streamflow is less than demand, the demand slope is greater than the supply slope and the reservoir must make up the deficit. The maximum demand, or required capacity (Ka), needed for this particular period of analysis is ten units. The graphic approach can be done easily if demand in each time period is the same. If demand varies, the cumulative differences between inflow and demand can be plotted as in figure 4.10. The maximum vertical distance between the highest point of the cumulative difference curve and the lowest point to its right represents the required capacity. In order to determine storage capacity requirements over time, an estimate of the mean probability of unregulated streamflow makes it possible to define the probability of any particular reservoir yield. Thus, if we had a fifty-year record of streamflow and the required reservoir capacity for each of those years, a frequency analysis of the record would allow selection based on recurrence intervals. Designing for the lowest flow of record in this case would be a fifty-year recurrence interval, or a 2 percent drought.

FIGURE 4.10 Mass Diagram Using Cumulative Net Inflow.

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Sequent-Peak Method The mass diagram method is still used often, but a more manageable modification is the sequent-peak procedure.64 Storage capacity required at the beginning of period t is Kt, and Rt is the required release in period t. Inflow is represented by Qt. If we set K = 0, the procedure calls for calculating Kt for up to twice the total length of record according to the following equation: Use Kt = Rt – Qt + Kt–1 if positive Use Kt = 0 otherwise If the critical sequence of flows occurs at the end of the record, this method assumes that the record repeats. The maximum of all Kt is the storage capacity needed to provide the required release, Rt. The method is demonstrated in table 4.3 with data for fourteen periods. TABLE 4.3 Calculation of Storage Capacity by the Sequent Peak Procedure Period t 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Required Release Rt

Inflow Qt

Previous Required Capacity K{t-1}

Current Required Capacitya Kt

5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0

6 4 6 7 3 1 3 3 6 8 7 6 7 6

0 0 1 0 0 2 6 8 10 9 6 4 3 2

0 1 0 0 2 6 8 10b 9 6 4 3 2 1

Greater than or equal to zero Maximum required storage capacity = 10.

a

b

Optimization Models The mass diagram and sequent-peak methods use few variables and cannot incorporate such considerations as evaporation losses, lake-level regulations,

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or multiple-reservoir systems. Mathematical models have been developed for such purposes based on mass-balance equations that explicitly define inflows, outflows, and net storage. A notable example of modeling for water supply is the Potomac River basin model for the Washington, DC, metropolitan area (discussed more fully in chapter 12). Developed in the late 1970s after years of concern about water supply for the growing metropolitan area, the modeling approach has a number of important features, including the following: • It combines optimization and simulation models to provide operating rules for the water supply system. • It makes extensive use of the National Weather Service River Forecast System. • It uses a technique for predicting water demand and applies the technique to system design and operation. • It combines distribution analysis and hydrologic modeling for operating procedures for a complex, multiple water distribution system. • It uses risk analysis to identify the start of potential droughts.65 In one case, implementation of this systems analysis approach resulted in a predominantly nonstructural solution to a major water supply problem and, therefore, considerable savings were achieved.66 The Water “Supply” Problem The reconciliation of water supply and demand globally and in the United States is a complicated matter to address. According to the United Nations (UN), water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century; there is no global shortage of water, but an increasing number of regions are experiencing water scarcity.67 In the United States, trends and figures discussed above have shown that as population has continued to rise, overall water use has generally stabilized and shown some declines since the 1980s. Simply stated, our planet has enough water, but in places there is either too much or not enough, its quality is unacceptable, or obtaining it is too expensive. The planet is not running out of water, but competition exists for obtaining the cheapest, easiest, most reliable, and cleanest sources. Furthermore, these quandaries are not static; the dynamic nature of our changing climate and the hydrologic cycle coupled with land use changes and population increases and demands ensures that these problems will persist spatially, temporally, and variably. In the United States, of the 15.9 trillion liters (4.2 trillion gallons) that are received as precipitation on an average day, about two-thirds are evaporated from

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wet surfaces or transpired by vegetation back to the atmosphere. The remaining one-third, about 5.3 trillion liters (1.4 billion gallons) accumulates in surface or ground storage, flows to the oceans or across international boundaries, or is used for consumption by domestic, agricultural, or industrial activities. Only a fraction of this amount can be actively used.68 As noted in earlier chapters, the hydrologic cycle and periods of low rainfall and high consumption in different parts of the United States play a large role in the struggle between liberal water use and severely constrained availability. Typically, one part or another of the country seems to be in a period of precipitation deficit and corresponding water shortage while other parts may be experiencing record rainfall events and flooding. California has been the nation’s poster child for measures implemented in response to severe drought over the past several years. In February 2016, the US Drought Monitor reported that more than 38 percent of California is suffering from exceptional drought, more than 22 percent is in extreme drought, and about 20 percent is in severe drought.69 Although the worst drought in the United States occurred in 1930 in the “Dust Bowl,” the 2012 drought has been characterized as comparable in terms of its size and severity.70 The water resources planner thus has to plan for all extremes in three management areas: supply, demand, and drought. As noted in chapter 1, the IWRM framework consists of subsectors of the environmental system, the socioeconomic system, and the governance system. Using that framework and drilling down deeper into the more specific water management alternatives as discussed in this chapter, we find the interactions of the water supply, demand, and drought management strategies. Figure 4.11 displays these management sectors. Supply and demand management aim at managing the resource in the long term, while drought management is directed toward short-term issues. Supply Management

Demand Management

Drought Management

FIGURE 4.11 Specific Sectors of Water Resources Planning and Management. Source: Boland, John J. (2018, Mar.). Personal communication.

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Efforts to deal with the California drought situation have employed all of these management strategies. Measures have ranged from xeriscaping and other water conservation efforts on an individual or municipality basis (for example, by February 2, 2016, Californians reduced water use by more than 25 percent for seven straight months, meeting the mandate by Governor Brown) to more technological ones, such as those outlined in the 2016 Drought Contingency Plan that partnered with multiple state and local agencies responsible for various water-related operations across the state. Infrastructure redesign involving enlarging or augmenting the water supply can be a costly venture and may overburden readily available supplies. On the other hand, underestimating or ignoring the projections for increased future withdrawals could be costly to society in other ways. Water planners must strike an appropriate balance between the alternatives; thus, the estimation of future water requirements becomes a critical factor in planning for water supply. Water planners are exploring all the temporal, spatial, technological, environmental, social, behavioral, institutional, and financial options available and assessing them in more systematic ways than ever before. The framework of the IWRM, as introduced in chapter 2, allows for and encourages these analyses. In the past, new sources of water satisfied emerging needs; dams and canals were built to store water and move it to where it was needed. But the era of big water projects has come to a close. There has been a large push against altering the natural course of waterways, and for promoting ecological engineering. Even the USACE, typically known for its role in some of the biggest water projects in the country, has embraced the “engineering with nature” concept since 2010. With these issues in mind, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories developed “Dynamic Water Budget Models” that would allow decision-makers to investigate how today’s water policy options would affect a society’s water resources decades into the future. In a January 2002 news release, Sandia officials noted that they think the model might help regions and nations with critical water shortages and conflicts as well as areas such as the southwestern United States, where sound water management policies might avert a crisis.71 This initiative and the informative efforts of the Global Water Partnership and authors such as Grigg, Loucks, van Beek, and others, are exploring and championing the need for and outcomes of the IWRM approach.72 These were discussed in chapter 2, and the model applications are examined more fully in chapter 12. Conclusion This chapter has provided an introduction to water use concepts and an overview of water sources and supplies. It covered trends in water use by major cat-



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egories and gave a summary of techniques for forecasting water demand, water supply, and determining supply requirements. Water use and supply touch on many aspects of water resources planning and engineering. As demand continues to increase for many specific uses of water, new approaches will have to be tried in order to find appropriate solutions. The nation and the world as a whole are, for the most part, beyond the old approach of simply providing more water to satisfy growing demands. As additional constraints are placed upon the traditional engineering approach, better planning and management procedures are needed to address several pertinent questions: • How can better forecasts be made? • How large should additional supplies be? • How can the efficiency of use be improved? • To what extent can demand be modified? • How can risk and greater reliability be reconciled? • How should periods of low flow or drought be accommodated? New management techniques, innovative engineering (including computerized modeling and systems analysis), greater emphasis on rational pricing policies, and increasing reliance on conservation and wise resource management are all essential to meeting future water needs. Study Questions 1. Identify and discuss the primary consumptive water uses in your area. 2. Describe the major sources and supply systems for water in your region. Is water available locally, or is it imported from other regions? 3. Assess the current use of water in your region according to the major categories of users. Which user category is most dominant? Discuss the water demand that might be expected in 25 years in your region. 4. What are the various policy options that might be available for dealing with greatly increased water demand in a region? Be sure to include both the supply and demand options. 5. Forecast the demand for water in your community or region for the years 2025 and 2050 using time extrapolation, single-coefficient, and multiplecoefficient methods. Which forecast do you think is most reliable? 6. What do you think are the primary water supply problems in your state, and what are some possible remedies? 7. What are the merits of conservation for dealing with water shortages? What are the limitations?

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8. Most countries of the world use much less water per capita than the United States. What are some possible explanations? Do you expect the United States to reduce consumption in the future or other countries to increase consumption—that is, do you anticipate a convergence in water use trends? 9. Describe a circumstance of two different cities, one of which would require a disaggregated forecast versus one that would not. What are the characteristics that would require a disaggregated forecast? Notes 1.  Solley, W. B., et al. (1998). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995. USGS Circular 1200. US Department of the Interior. Washington, DC: GPO. 2.  UN. (2012, Mar.). Water Stress versus Water Scarcity. Water for Life Decade. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml 3. UN. (n.d.). Water Scarcity. Water Facts. Retrieved from http://www.unwater.org/ water-facts/scarcity/ 4.  UN, Water Stress versus Water Scarcity. 5.  Economic Water Scarcity. Wikipedia. Accessed March 7, 2018. 6.  Swihart, T. (2011). Florida’s Water: A Fragile Resource in a Vulnerable State, p. 259. New York: RFF Press. 7.  USGS. (2018). Estimated Use of Water in the United States. Water Use in the United States. Retrieved from http://water.usgs.gov/watuse/50years.html 8.  Maupin, M., J. F. Kenny, S. S. Hutson, J. K. Lovelace, N. L. Barber, and K. S. Linsey. (2014). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. Circular No. 1405. US Department of the Interior, USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/ 9.  Solley et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995. 10.  Maupin et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. 11.  Maupin et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010. 12.  USGS. (2018). Total Water Use in the United States, 2010. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html 13.  Feeley, T. J., T. J. Skone, G. J. Stiegel, A. McNemar, M. Nemeth, B. Schimmoler, J. T. Murphy, and L. Manfredo. (2008, Jan.). Water: A Critical Resource in the Thermoelectric Power Industry. Energy, 33, 1–11. 14.  Maupin et al., Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010, p. 50. 15.  USGS. (2018). Total Water Use in the United States, 2010. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-total.html 16.  USDA. (2017). Background: How Important Is Irrigation to US Agriculture? USDA Economic Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices -management/irrigation-water-use/ 17.  USDA. (2017). Irrigation & Water Use. USDA Economic Research Service. Retrieved from https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/irrigation-water-use/ 18.  Anisfeld, S. C. (2010). Water Resources. Washington, DC: Island Press. 19.  Solley et al. (1998). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995.



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20.  EPA. (2018). Information about Public Water Systems: Drinking Water Requirements for States and Public Water Systems. EPA. Retrieved from http://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/ information-about-public-water-systems 21.  EPA. (2018). Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) Federal Reporting Services. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/safe -drinking-water-information-system-sdwis-federal-reporting 22.  Baumann, D. D., J. J. Boland, J. H. Sims, B. Kranzer, and P. H. Carver. (1979). The Role of Conservation in Water Supply Planning. IWR Contract Report 78-2. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR. 23.  American Society of Civil Engineers, Task Committee on Water Conservation. (1981, March). Perspectives on Water Conservation. Journal of the Water Resources Planning and Management Division, 107(WR1), 225–238. 24. US Water Resources Council. (1978). Second National Assessment of the Nation’s Water Resources. Washington, DC: GPO. 25. GAO. (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning. GAO-14-430. 26. GAO, Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning, p. 29. 27.  Forest Service USDA. (2016, September). Future of America’s Forests and Rangelands: Update to the Forest Service 2010 Resource Planning Act Assessment. p. 44. Gen. Tech. Rep. WO-94. Retrieved from https://www.fs.fed.us/research/publications/gtr/gtr_wo94.pdf 28.  USGS. (2018). National Water Information System: Web Interface. USGS Water Resources. Retrieved from http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/qw 29.  State of Nevada. (2013). Truckee River Chronology. State of Nevada. Division of Water Resources. Retrieved from http://water.nv.gov/mapping/chronologies/truckee/part1.cfm 30.  Reilly, T. E., K. F. Dennehy, W. M. Alley, and W. L. Cunningham. (2008). GroundWater Availability in the United States. USGS Circular 1323. Retrieved from https://pubs .er.usgs.gov/publication/cir1323 31.  Reilly et al., Ground-Water Availability in the United States, p. 17. 32. Konikow, L. F. (2013). Groundwater Depletion in the United States (1900−2008). USGS Scientific Investigations Report 2013−5079. Retrieved from http://pubs.usgs.gov/ sir/2013/5079 33.  Steward, D. R., and A. J. Allen. (2016). Peak Groundwater Depletion in the High Plains Aquifer, Projections from 1930 to 2110. Agricultural Water Management, 170, 36–48. 34. Voutchkov, Nikolay. (2016). Desalination—Past, Present and Future. International Water Association. Retrieved from http://www.iwa-network.org/desalination-past-present -future/ 35.  Schwalbe, Stephen. (2016). Desalination: Can the US Navy Help Fight the World’s Droughts? In Homeland Security. Retrieved from https://inhomelandsecurity.com/desalina tion-navy-solution-droughts/ 36. Leven, Rachel. (2013). U.S. Desalinization Industry Grows Since 2000: Seen as Essential to Meeting Supply Needs. Bloomberg BNA. Retrieved from https://www.bna.com/ us-desalination-industry-n17179876105/ 37.  Tampa Bay Water (website). Retrieved from https://www.tampabaywater.org/ 38.  National Research Council. (2012). Water Reuse: Potential for Expanding the Nation’s Water Supply through Reuse of Municipal Wastewater. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press; National Research Council. (2012). Understanding Water Reuse: Potential for Expanding the Nation’s Water Supply through Reuse of Municipal Wastewater. Washington,

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DC: National Academies Press; National Research Council. (2016). Using Graywater and Stormwater to Enhance Local Water Supplies: An Assessment of Risks, Costs, and Benefits. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 39.  EPA. (2012). Guidelines for Water Reuse. EPA/600/R-12/618. Washington, DC: EPA. Retrieved from https://nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/P100FS7K.pdf 40.  Raucher, R. (2006). An Economic Framework for Evaluating the Benefits and Costs of Water Reuse: Final Project Report and User Guidance. Alexandria, VA: WateReuse Foundation. 41. Carpenter, Guy. (2010). Reclaimed Water Trends Nationally and Internationally. Presentation to the Arizona Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Water Sustainability. Arizona Department of Water Resources. Retrieved from http://www.azwater.gov/azdwr/waterMan agement/documents/ReclaimedWaterTrends-GuyCarpenter.pdf 42. State Water Resources Control Board (website). (2018). California Environmental Protection Agency. Retrieved from https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/ grants_loans/water_recycling/munirec.shtml 43. EPA, Guidelines for Water Reuse. 44.  Boland, John J. (2018). Lecture notes. Johns Hopkins University. 45.  Boland, John J. et al. (1981). An Assessment of Municipal and Industrial Water Use Forecasting Approaches. Fort Belvoir, VA: US Army Corps of Engineers, Institute for Water Resources. 46.  Basta, D. J., and B. T. Bower. (1982). Analyzing Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future. 47.  Linaweaver, F. P., J. C. Geyer, and J. B. Wolff. (1967). A Study of Residential Water Use. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development. 48.  Howe, C. H., and F. P. Linaweaver. (1967, Mar). The Impact of Price on Residential Water Demand and Its Relation to System Design and Price Structure. Water Resources Research, 33(1), 13–32. 49.  Kindler, J., and B. T. Bower. (1978, Nov.). Modeling and Forecasting of Water Demands. Paper presented at the Conference on Application of Systems Analysis in Water Management, Budapest, Hungary. 50.  Boland et al., An Assessment of Municipal and Industrial Water Use Forecasting Approaches. 51.  Hittman Associates, Inc. (1969). Forecasting Municipal Water Requirements, vol. 1, The MAIN II System. Contract No. 14-01-0001-1977. For the Office of Water Resources Research, US Dept. of the Interior. Columbia, MD: Hittman Associates, Inc. 52. IWR-MAIN. (n.d.). CDM Smith. Retrieved from http://www.dynsystem.com/IWR -MAIN/History.html 53.  Baumann, D. D., John J. Boland, and W. Michael Hanemann, Eds. (1998). Forecasting Urban Water Use: Theory and Principles (chapter 3), Forecasting Urban Water Use: Models and Applications (chapter 4), and Demand Management Planning Methods (chapter 9). In Urban Water Demand Management and Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill. 54.  Boland, Lecture notes. 55.  Howe and Linaweaver, The Impact of Price on Residential Water Demand and Its Relation to System Design and Price Structure. 56.  Baumann, Duane D., John J. Boland, and W. Michael Hanemann, Eds. (1998). Urban Water Demand Management and Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill; Planning & Management Consultants, Ltd. (1980, Apr.). The Evaluation of Water Conservation for Municipal and Industrial Water Supply: Procedures Manual. Contract Report 80-1. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR.



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57. EPA. (2016). Best Practices to Consider When Evaluating Water Conservation and Efficiency as an Alternative for Water Supply Expansion. EPA 810-B-16-005. Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sustainable -water-infrastructure/best-practices-water-conservation-and-efficiency-alternative-water; or the EPA’s 1998 Water Conservation Plan Guidelines. WaterSense. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/watersense/water-conservation-plan-guidelines; or AWWA. (2007). Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practices, M50. 2nd ed. Denver: AWWA. Retrieved from http://www.awwa.org/Portals/0/files/publications/documents/M50LookInside.pdf; or the Pacific Institute (website), from http://pacinst.org/. 58.  Cooley, Heather, and Matthew Heberger. (2012). CE2 Model: Evaluating the Costs and Benefits of Urban Water Conservation and Efficiency Measures. Pacific Institute. Retrieved from http://pacinst.org/publication/573/; Skeens, Brian. (2013). Water Conservation Planning and Tools and Models. UNC Environmental Finance Center. Retrieved from http://dev .www.efc.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.efc.sog.unc.edu/files/Skeens_Models.pdf; Alliance for Water Efficiency. (2015). AWE Water Conservation Tracking Tool: Planning and Evaluating CostBeneficial Water Conservation Programs. UNC Environmental Finance Center. Retrieved from https://efc.sog.unc.edu/sites/www.efc.sog.unc.edu/files/4%202015-02-17-Tracking -Tool-Presentation.pdf 59.  Hillyer, T. M., and G. A. Hofbauer. (1998). Water Supply Handbook: A Handbook on Water Supply Planning and Resource Management. USACE Institute of Water Resources Revised IWR Report 96-PS-4. Alexandria, VA: USACE. Retrieved from https://www.iwr.usace .army.mil/Portals/70/docs/iwrreports/96ps4.pdf 60.  Loucks, D. P., J. R. Stedinger, and D. A. Haith. (1981). Water Resource Systems Planning and Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 61. Loucks, D. P. (1976). Surface-Water Quality Management Models. In Systems Approach to Water Management, edited by A. K. Biswas. New York: McGraw-Hill. 62.  Kindler and Bower, Modeling and Forecasting of Water Demands. 63.  USACE. (2016, May). Status and Challenges for USACE Reservoirs. Institute of Water Resources. Alexandria, VA: USACE. 64.  Thomas, H. A., and R. P. Burden. (1963). Operations Research and Water Quality Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Water Resources Group. 65.  Viessman, W., Jr., and C. Welty. (1985). Water Management Technology and Institutions. New York: Harper & Row. 66.  Viessman and Welty, Water Management Technology and Institutions. 67.  UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2014). Water Scarcity. Water for Life Decade. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml 68.  US Water Resources Council, Second National Assessment of the Nation’s Water Resources. 69.  See http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?total, for a list of impacts from various drought categories; and the NOAA Drought Monitor, at https:// www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/drought/nadm/maps 70. NOAA. (2018). Drought Termination and Amelioration. NOAA. Retrieved from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/drought/recovery/ 71.  Sandia National Laboratories. (2002, Jan. 9). Sandia Simulator Rapidly Calculates Tomorrow’s Water Resources Given Today’s Policy Choices. News release. 72. Global Water Partnership. (2018). Welcome to the GWP IWRM ToolBox! Global Water Partnership. Retrieved from https://www.gwp.org/en/learn/iwrm-toolbox/About_

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IWRM_ToolBox/; Grigg, Neil S. (2016). Integrated Water Resource Management. London: Palgrave Macmillan; Loucks, Daniel P., and Eelco van Beek. (2017). Water Resource Systems Planning and Management: An Introduction to Methods, Models, and Applications. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG.; Palmer, Richard N., and Kathryn V. Lundberg. (2007). Integrated Water Resource Planning. Illinois State Water Survey. Retrieved from http://www.isws.illinois.edu/iswsdocs/wsp/IWRP_Palmer_Lundberg.pdf; AWWA, Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practices; and the Federal Support Toolbox (website). Watertoolbox.us. Retrieved from http://watertoolbox.us/apex/f?p=689:1

5 Water Law

Introduction

W

ater law in the United States is complex and nebulous, partly because water law concepts were drawn from several different countries as the new nation originally conquered or bought the continental United States, and partly because water law is primarily composed of state laws with little, if any, federal guidance. Modern water law in the United States has remnants of the French, Spanish, Russian, Hawaiian, and English legal systems. These different bases of legal principles have resulted in several different water ownership and usage systems throughout the country. This chapter reviews many of the legal systems pertaining to water ownership and use. Some are merely derivations of a main principle, such as the reasonable use doctrine, whereas others are unique, such as the prior appropriation doctrine. Additionally, each system provides different usage rights based upon whether the water is groundwater or surface water. Further complicating this mix of ownership and usage systems are the rights provided to the federal government for federal properties, such as national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as for properties owned by Native American tribes. It is informative to look at A Twenty-First Century of U.S. Water Policy, by Gleick et al,1 published in 2012, to get an idea of the complexities of US water law and policy in America: Whereas several nations have reformed their approach to water management in the twenty-first century, . . . the United States . . . continues to use a complex legal and administrative framework, based on a wide diversity of federal laws, regulations, — 131 —

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and historical court rulings, to distribute authority over water between federal, tribal, state, and local governments. This framework has been built up over two centuries and is based on the United States constitution, federal and state legislation, judicial decisions, common law, and even international treaties.2

Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter particularly important to water resource planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in water law are the following. Riparian Relating to, living, or located on the bank of a natural watercourse (as a river) or sometimes of a lake or a tidewater. Use of water by property owners in actual contact with inland waters for natural purposes is a property right. Riparian rights A doctrine of water law under which the right to use lakes and streams rests with owners of riparian land, or land that borders on the surface water. Reasonable use Ability of upstream riparian owners to use any amount of water desired as long as usage does not interfere with reasonable needs of lower riparian owners. Correlative rights Riparian owners given a proportional share of the water based on land ownership. Prior appropriation A water rights system where the first person to divest water from a stream was designated a senior appropriator and granted a vested right to that amount of water. Later users of the unappropriated supply of water were junior appropriators with secondary rights to water. Groundwater law Landowners’ right to absolute control of water beneath their property, either underground streams or percolating water. Restatement of torts Statement that specifies what constitutes unreasonable use of water. Federal reserved water rights Water rights associated with the water necessary to fulfill the purposes of federal reservations such as national parks, forests, monuments, and military bases. Water banking System that allows transfer of water without direct negotiation between buyers and sellers. Riparian Rights The concept of riparian rights in America probably originated in English common law and is the basis of the existing water law in nearly all of the eastern



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states. Riparian rights started in the humid, water-rich eastern states where demand for water was mainly for mill operation, stock watering, and domestic use. Agricultural and industrial water needs were minor; the main concern of water regulation was the prevention of pollution, to allow downstream users an unadulterated supply of water. The basic premise of riparianism is that the right to use water is a property right. Only persons who own land in actual contact with inland waters such as streams, rivers, lakes, or bays are granted riparian rights. Swamps and overflow lands are excluded; only land inundated at the average high tide is considered to be riparian land. In addition, the owner of riparian land cannot transfer his or her riparian rights to another parcel of property because such rights are limited to the riparian property. Riparian rights focus on water use for natural purposes such as taking care of the necessities of life. Riparian owners may take streamflow for domestic use but not for large-scale irrigation or industrial uses. These owners do not have an assigned quantity of water that they may take. Upper riparian owners may not obstruct the water flow or injure the lower riparian owner. Lower riparian owners are prohibited from back-flooding an upstream owner. If these restrictions are violated, the injured riparian owners are entitled to collect damages for their losses. Riparian users can only lose their riparian rights voluntarily; there are no provisions for forfeiture of riparian rights. Riparian rights have evolved to include two derivations: (1) “reasonable use” and (2) “correlative rights.” The reasonable use rule allows upper riparian owners to take any amount of water they desire as long as this usage does not interfere with the reasonable needs of the lower riparian owners. In states using the correlative rule, riparian owners are assigned a proportional share of the water based upon land ownership. This method of water allocation has the benefit of providing riparian owners with a minimum amount of water that they can reasonably anticipate. It reinforces the concept that water users are interdependent with their neighbors. Furthermore, in times of drought, each riparian owner’s share is proportionally reduced; no one riparian owner is forced to bear the loss of more than his or her proportional share of water. Prior Appropriation The prior appropriation doctrine arose during the 1880s among the miners and new settlers in the western states. Because they were trespassing on government lands, they were unable to claim riparian rights. Furthermore, because their major water uses—mining and irrigation—were much more intensive, a different system had to be devised. A resulting system of water rights resembled the manner in which the miners’ gold claims were staked out. The first person to

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divert water from a stream or creek was granted a vested right to that amount of water. This right is superior to all rights gained by future appropriators. Thus, the “First in Time, First in Right” principle emerged.3 The prior appropriation system created two types of users: senior appropriators and junior appropriators. A senior appropriator is a user whose appropriation is prior to all others. The rights that a senior appropriator possesses are impressive. The amount of water that a senior appropriator is authorized to use is dependent upon whether the particular state uses a permit system. In states without a permit system, the senior appropriator is entitled to a fixed amount of water equal to the amount that was originally withdrawn when the use first became vested.4 Some western states have established a permit system by which the senior appropriator is entitled to the amount of water specified by the permit. In these states, this amount is derived through a mathematical formula that incorporates many of the variables that determine the amount of water needed. These variables include water quantity limitations, conditions of transmission, location of land, degree of slope, depth and character of soil, length of growing season, nature of crops, and climate. The holder of such a permit is perpetually entitled to the right to use this water allotment as long as the water is used beneficially. Appropriators entering into the unappropriated supply of water after senior appropriators have done so are known as junior appropriators. They are primarily downstream farmers who possess secondary rights to the river’s water or people who have benefited from Bureau of Reclamation projects.5 Senior appropriators who desire to withdraw more water than their vested amount are considered to be junior appropriators for that additional withdrawal. Due to the fixed amount of water that each appropriator can use, junior appropriators are not at the mercy of senior upstream appropriators. They receive their allotted water supply unless there is a reduction of total water available to all appropriators. During a drought, for example, senior appropriators continue to use their original ration of water. Once senior appropriators’ needs are fulfilled, the next-in-line appropriator may use any surplus, but if there is no surplus, the junior appropriators are just out of luck. Unlike riparianism, the prior appropriation right can be lost involuntarily. Failure to exercise the water right in a beneficial use and nonuse of the water right for a specified period of time constitute grounds for forfeiture of the appropriation.6 Because prior appropriation was created by miners and settlers, most of the beneficial uses are those that promote economic development. In many instances, this bias toward economic growth has resulted in detrimental environmental consequences. The environmental movement of the 1970s caused some western states to include conservation, recreation, and aesthetic goals as beneficial uses. The number of beneficial uses is relatively extensive, as listed by Clark.7 Those beneficial uses include domestic uses, municipal uses, irrigation uses, stock watering, general railway, power generation, mining, milling,



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manufacturing, refrigeration, fire protection, minerals recovery, groundwater recharge, log floating (CA only), fish and wildlife preservation and propagation, and aesthetics (considered beneficial only in recent years). Appropriators do not have a free hand to change how they appropriate their water allocation. Their vested rights continue only for as long as the type and place of their beneficial use and point of diversion remain the same. Several states have established administrative systems from which an appropriator must receive permission before undertaking a new use; new uses cannot adversely affect other appropriators. In some states, there is an additional requirement for changes in the place of diversion: the user must show an expectation of greater profits.8 In the early years of prior appropriation, any transfer of water rights resulted in a change in priority. The new users were treated as junior appropriators even though the water rights they gained were from a senior appropriator. With the advent of state permitting systems, this procedure has changed. Permitting systems allow for a senior appropriator to transfer his or her seniority to another appropriator. An appropriator’s rights are protected against two types of interference: (1) interference with the diversion methods to the place of use, and (2) interference with streamflow above a senior appropriator’s diversion.9 Minor inconveniences or irregularities in the streamflow do not constitute cause for judicial relief from the interferences; there must be a material or substantial reduction of the quality or quantity of the senior appropriator’s supply. If a junior appropriator takes water beyond his or her allotted amount, a senior appropriator may sue to recoup the lost value of water, labor, and crops.10 The doctrine of prior appropriation has two branches: (1) the Colorado doctrine and (2) the California doctrine. The Colorado doctrine is a pure prior appropriation rights system, whereas the California doctrine consists of both riparian and prior appropriation rights. Completely rejecting riparian rights, the Colorado doctrine allows for stream water diversions as long as the use fulfills the beneficial use provision.11 No appropriator, however, can divert more water than actually needed. One of the strongest criticisms of the Colorado doctrine is that it promotes waste; it does not provide for effective measures to encourage conservation. Pursuant to the Colorado doctrine, when an appropriator takes measures to conserve water, the surplus water reverts back to the public and is subject to appropriation. Consequently, the appropriator who conserves water is not entitled to utilize that water for other uses. Several states have attempted to address this dilemma by enacting statutes that enable the appropriator to use the conserved amount for other purposes before it can be further appropriated by other users. The California doctrine incorporates riparian rights with the vested appropriation rights gained under prior appropriation.12 Both systems are found in

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California because of its unique history wherein settlers from the East brought the riparian rights systems, and the miners created the prior appropriation system. Each state that utilizes the California doctrine varies in the degree to which it recognizes riparian rights. The California doctrine, consisting of both prior appropriation and riparian rights, creates many instances of conflict regarding which water system is applicable in a particular situation. Because riparian rights are vested with riparian land without regard for water use and prior appropriation is based upon the actual use of the water, the two doctrines seem to be irreconcilable. However, in California, the two systems have been merged into one system entitled “reasonable and beneficial use.”13 This system combines the concept of (1) the appropriator’s beneficial use of the water and (2) the riparian landowner’s reasonable use of the water. Riparian rights have been narrowed over the years due to a bias in favor of the prior appropriation system. Currently, riparian rights may be exercised only on riparian land—owners are not allowed to use riparian water on nonriparian land. Furthermore, Californian voters passed an amendment restricting all water rights to a beneficial test in an attempt to reduce waste. Summary of Riparian and Prior Appropriation Rights In summary, there are two major differences between riparian rights and prior appropriation. Under riparianism, landowners can only gain surface water rights if they are riparian owners; water rights are property rights. The riparian owners do not have an assigned amount of water to be used solely for their needs. Instead, the riparian owners must return back to the watercourse all of the water they divert. The basic premise is that the streamflow can only be used temporarily; it is not a resource to be depleted. A water user in a prior appropriation state need not have land abutting a water body. Thus, while riparian owners would lose their water rights if the course of the stream changed, an appropriator would remain unaffected. Water users gain rights based upon the priority of their beneficial use and have an exclusive right to the allotted water. Therefore, unless the state has a minimum flow rule, appropriators can lawfully divert the entire quantity of streamflow if they can use it beneficially. The water body is viewed much as a mine would be—the water is the ore to be extracted. Groundwater Law In groundwater law, groundwater is divided into two legal classifications: (1) underground streams and (2) percolating waters. Underground streams are

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waters that flow in a known and defined channel. Percolating waters, on the other hand, are all other underground waters that do not flow in a definite channel. It is important to determine which type of underground water is present, as they are sometimes regulated differently. Historically, land was developed with little or no consideration for groundwater protection. In English common law, landowners had absolute control of the groundwater beneath their property. They could dig a new well anywhere on their property even if it adversely affected a neighbor’s existing well. Their neighbor’s only recourse would be to dig a deeper well. There were three prevailing reasons, based on the existing knowledge at the time, why groundwater withdrawals were not regulated: 1. The existence, origin, and movement of such waters were so secret and concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules with respect to them would result in hopeless uncertainty. 2. The damage to such waters could not be foreseen or avoided. 3. Any other rule would prevent or interfere with normal and legitimate use of the land.14 By rejecting the English system of absolute ownership, American courts created a hybrid system which incorporated the reasonable use rule of riparianism and some principles from English common law. The new system allowed landowners to withdraw groundwater only for reasonable uses as long as the withdrawal did not harm the water supply of an adjoining landowner. Most eastern states use this hybrid rule. One problem with this system is that the courts have had difficulties determining what constitutes “reasonable.” The courts have considered several factors: the effects of the withdrawal, the quantity of water available, the nature of the use, the dependability of the supply, and climatic conditions. Not until the environmental movement of the 1970s was the interdependence and relationship between surface water and groundwater recognized by state legislatures. The availability and quality of groundwater is fast becoming a serious problem. Legislation is beginning to emphasize the conservation and regulation of groundwater supplies, as well as the acquisition of recorded and stable rights. There are five basic approaches to regulating groundwater withdrawals: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Prior appropriation as a part of a permit system Correlative rights Reasonable use Common law or absolute ownership rule permitting unlimited withdrawal Restatement of Torts Rule.15

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The system used by most states is prior appropriation as a part of a permit system. There are two types of permit systems. The first system requires a permit for all groundwater withdrawals with exceptions for domestic uses. The second system is much narrower in scope. It requires permits only for those underground waters that have been identified in legislative or judicial decisions, thus leaving much groundwater unregulated. Both permit systems have restrictions similar to those of the surface water permit systems. Approval is necessary for any change in the place or purpose of the use, and inefficient use of groundwater is sufficient cause for permit revocation. The correlative rights system works well in areas where groundwater yields have been extensively documented, because the owners are well informed about the amount of water available for their proportional use. This doctrine prohibits the waste of water and prioritizes various water uses. The reasonable use doctrine differs from the correlative rights doctrine in that the reasonable use doctrine does not have any methodology for determining the allocation of the available water. Additionally, the reasonable use doctrine does not prioritize preferences for water uses. The reasonable use doctrine prohibits the waste of water; however, an owner may pump as much water as desired as long as there is no waste. The absolute ownership doctrine reflects the English common law system of nonregulation of groundwater and is also known as the “Biggest Pump Wins” system.16 It earned this title from the concept that landowners may pump as much groundwater as they wish for any purpose, without incurring any responsibility to their neighboring landowners, and waste is not prohibited. The Restatement of Torts Rule is a formulation by legal scholars of what groundwater regulations ought to be. The Restatement is similar to the correlative rights doctrine in that it limits groundwater withdrawals that are unreasonable. Unlike the reasonable use doctrine, the Restatement specifies what constitutes an unreasonable use. The advantages of the Restatement of Torts Rule are that it does the following: • Conforms to modern hydrological principles • Combines surface water and groundwater rules • Makes groundwater diversion rights more definite and certain • Protects minimum flows in watercourses • Protects aquifers from overdrafting17 Federal Reserved Water Rights Federal reserved water rights are associated with federal reservations such as national parks, forests, monuments, and military installations. The United States



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also holds reserved water rights in trust for North American Indian tribes. Federal water rights are created when Congress establishes a federal reservation. In most cases, however, Congress does not allocate a specific amount of water for the federal reservation. Furthermore, federal reserved water rights exist outside of the state water rights system. They do not require a diversion from a water body, need not fulfill the beneficial use requirement, and are not subject to forfeiture or abandonment for nonuse. Additionally, the priority date is established when the United States creates the federal reservation. Consequently, much conflict has arisen regarding the quantification and utilization of such rights. National Parks, Forests, Monuments, and Military Installations The amount of water reserved for national parks, forests, monuments, and military installations is not unlimited. Rather, federal reservations are guaranteed only that amount of water necessary to fulfill the purpose of the federal reservation. To determine the amount of water reserved to the federal reservation, courts examine the asserted water right and the specific purposes for which the land was reserved. In other words, how much water is being sought, for what purpose, and is that purpose consistent with the reason the reservation was created? The following two US Supreme Court decisions provide good examples of that analysis. In Cappaert v. US,18 the Court was confronted with the question of whether the designation of Devil’s Hole in Nevada as a national monument reserved federal water rights and, if so, to what extent. According to the presidential proclamation that reserved it as a national monument in 1952, Devil’s Hole is “a unique subsurface remnant of the prehistoric chain of lakes which in Pleistocene times formed the Death Valley Lake System,” that contains a “peculiar race of desert fish . . . which is found nowhere else in the world.” The controversy began in 1968 when the Cappaerts started pumping groundwater from wells located two and a half miles away from Devil’s Hole. As a result of this pumping, the water level in Devil’s Hole began to drop, which threatened the ability of the Devil’s Hole pupfish to spawn, thereby threatening the species with extinction. The United States sued the Cappaerts in an attempt to prevent further groundwater pumping. The US Supreme Court held that it was the intent of Congress to reserve an amount of water that was sufficient to preserve the scientific value of Devil’s Hole and the long-term viability of the pupfish. Because the Cappaerts’ pumping interfered with the federal water rights reserved to Devil’s Hole, which were senior to the Cappaerts’ appropriation, the Court ruled in favor of the United States. In US v. New Mexico,19 the state of New Mexico instituted a stream adjudication to determine the exact rights of each user to the water from the Rio Mimbres. The United States claimed reserved water rights from the Rio Mimbres

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for use in the Gila National Forest and sought to establish a minimum instream flow in the Rio Mimbres for “aesthetic, environmental, recreational, and fish purposes.” The difficulty with the US position was that all of the water in the Rio Mimbres was already fully appropriated. Thus, the federal reserved water right would require a gallon-for-gallon reduction in the water available to the existing appropriators. Rejecting the US claims for water to meet a variety of uses, the US Supreme Court restricted the reserved water rights to the “limited” purposes for which the Gila National Forest was created—timber preservation and secure water flows. The Court held that Congress had intended to reserve only the “necessary” water to fulfill the very purposes for which the federal reservation was created. Furthermore, for all other uses, the Court determined that Congress intended that the United States would acquire water rights in the same manner as any other private or public appropriator. Thus, in both cases, the US Supreme Court determined the original purpose of Congress in establishing the federal reservation and then proceeded to ascertain the necessary supply of water required to meet that purpose. This same type of analysis must be applied when Native American water rights are implicated. Native American Water Rights One major new factor in the water budget of many western states is the desire of Native American tribes to exercise previously unused vested water rights. In some cases, the amounts demanded by the tribes exceed the available streamflow. This problem has not been resolved and is an extremely volatile issue causing a great deal of strain between the tribes and existing appropriators, such as farmers who use water for irrigation. An in-depth discussion of Native American water rights is, however, beyond the scope of this text. Entire semesters can be spent studying just portions of Native American water law. Instead, a brief overview will be provided here, highlighting the key concepts. For a greater understanding of this fascinating area of the law, read Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law,20 the premier reference source on Native American law. Any discussion of tribal water rights must begin with the Winters doctrine, which states that an Indian reservation has implied water rights reserved to it at the time of its creation. These rights are not based on beneficial use and cannot be forfeited by nonuse. The priority date is no later than the date the reservation was established. Thus, an unused Winters doctrine right will be senior to many of the water uses already in existence for many years. This doctrine was established in 1908 by the US Supreme Court in Winters v. US.21 In this decision, the Court enjoined upstream non–Native Americans from interfering with the use of the Milk River that followed along the border



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of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. The Court determined that the settling of the Indians was only possible if the land was irrigated, as the lands were arid and, without irrigation, were practically valueless. The Court further determined that the purpose of the treaty that established the reservation was to convert “nomadic and uncivilized” people to “pastoral and civilized people.” Because it was assumed that Congress intended to deal fairly with the Native Americans, an implied reservation of water rights had to exist with the reservation, for without water, the reservation lands would be useless. Although the Winters doctrine recognizes that the Indian reservation has a reserved amount of water, it fails to answer a key question: Just how much water is reserved? This question was addressed by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. California.22 The Court held that the reserved amount of water was that amount required to irrigate all of the practically irrigable acres. The Court determined that because the Indian reservation included desert lands, water from the river would be essential to the life of Native American people, to the animals they hunted, and to the crops they raised. The Court ruled that there was an implied obligation to make the reservation livable. Thus, the only feasible and fair way by which the reserved water for the reservation could be measured was by irrigable acreage, not by unlimited water rights. One difficulty with the Winters decision and its progeny is the fact that all of the cases have arisen in prior appropriation states, where the concept of reserved water rights is meaningful. A question that has yet to be resolved is how this doctrine will be applied to Indian reservations in riparian rights states. Another question that remains unanswered is whether Native American nations can be subjected to state permitting systems. Native American nations are semi sovereign entities. This means that they are more sovereign than Alaska but less sovereign than Bolivia. Once again, a discussion on the amount of sovereignty a Native American nation possesses and how it affects state regulation of waters on the reservation is beyond the scope of this text.23 For our purposes, let it suffice to say that the issue is particularly complex and has required the attention of Congress to help reach a workable solution to Native American water rights claims. As a result, Congress enacted the McCarran Amendment, which provides state courts with jurisdiction to adjudicate the reserved water rights of Native Americans.24 It includes water rights previously acquired by the United States through appropriation, purchase, exchange, and other methods. It has no exceptions and includes appropriation rights, riparian rights, and reserved rights.25 In conclusion, to determine how much water to which a federal reservation has rights, it is necessary to ascertain the intention of Congress when the federal reservation was created. The reservation is entitled only to the amount of water that would fulfill its original needs. Expanded uses beyond these original needs will most likely be struck down by the courts.

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Recent Issues State Surface Water Law Many of the eastern states are abandoning the system of pure riparian rights and in its place are using a permit-based system. This change is a result of increasing demands for water and more frequent droughts. The system of pure riparian rights is no longer able to cope with the region’s conflicting water demands. Some permit systems only cover groundwater, others only surface water, while still others cover both. Some states use a permit system only during droughts. Typically, permits are issued for a specific period of time to allow for periodic reevaluation of the permit to ensure that the water use is still beneficial and reasonable. At the same time, western state water laws are evolving to include the influence of riparianism. For example, California, Nebraska, and Oklahoma have systems of prior appropriation with riparian rights.26 It is likely that individual state laws will evolve to some combinations of riparian and prior appropriation systems. General Stream Adjudication States will continue to utilize general stream adjudications to document the water sources and water uses in watersheds. This approach adds certainty to all users’ water rights by thoroughly documenting the amount and priority of the water use. Courts typically appoint a special master to oversee the process of a general stream adjudication. Once concluded, a subsequent appropriator must either apply to a state agency for a permit or request a modification to the general stream adjudication from the court. There are several types of adjudication for water management in California. Formal adjudication is used where adjudicated basins and special districts have accounting for pumping/recharge. This is used primarily in Southern California and Silicon Valley. Informal adjudication has voluntary price incentives but no accounting and is the most common type used in the remainder of the state.27 Reallocation of Water Supplies The trend of involuntary and voluntary reallocations of water supplies to address ecological and environmental concerns, such as restoration of wetlands, protection of wildlife habitat, and minimum streamflows will continue. An example of an involuntary reallocation is the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which limits the daily fluctuation in water flows passing through the Glen Canyon Dam resulting from hydropower generation. The daily fluctuations have adversely affected the environmental and recreational resources downstream in the Grand



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Canyon. Another example is the Central Valley Project Improvement Act of 1992, which reallocated eight hundred thousand acre-feet per year of water from the agricultural sector to implement fish and wildlife purposes of the Act.28 Voluntary allocations are water transfers purchased by state and federal agencies and environmental organizations. An example of a voluntary allocation is the lease of twenty thousand acre-feet of water by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in New Mexico. The district leased the water from a water project to ensure a minimum streamflow in the Rio Grande during the irrigation season. Water Banking Water banking is a system that allows for the transfer of water without direct negotiations between buyers and sellers. California has taken the lead in water banking as a result of the severe drought that occurred in 1991 and 1992 and even more so because of additional severe droughts occurring during the subsequent decades. In order to reallocate the water supply, the California Drought Emergency Water Bank purchased more than a million acre-feet of water to transfer to drought-affected portions of the state.29 In the Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) of Southern California, water banking is an important tool to provide water reliability and to protect IRWD customers from imported water shortages. This is done by obtaining low-cost water to store underground in wet periods and to recover this water for use in the IRWD area in dry periods or during emergencies. IWRD’s goal in its water banking program is to have sufficient water to meet about 15 percent of its customers’ needs during dry periods while maintaining reasonable costs. To ensure a reliable water supply, the IWRD created a diverse water supply with investments in water wells, treated groundwater, imported water, local water runoff capture in Irvine Lake, and an extensive water recycling system. Its imported water supplies come from the San Francisco Bay delta estuary and the Colorado River, but under environmental and other restrictions. Another western state to pursue water banking as a relatively new idea is Colorado, particularly the western part. Water planners there are working on ideas to protect water supplies for dealing with extended droughts as well as increasing water demand and unknown effects of climate change. Water banking is a voluntary, market-oriented process to assist attempts by interested sellers and buyers to transfer water from one to the other. The owners of water rights willing to release some of their water in one or more years would lease the water for a period of time to buyers who feel an urgent need for additional water. Water banking of this type helps to address the water concerns and needs of farms, cities, and the environment before a crisis stage occurs. It is important to recognize that water banking (http://www.coloradoriverdistrict.org/water-banking/) also could be helpful to

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deal with the decline of Colorado River supplies and low reservoir levels at Lakes Powell and Mead, and to face Colorado River Compact obligations. The mechanics of water banking must address the political and legal issues implicated by such water transfers. For example, riparian rights are not generally allowed to be transferred in a pure riparian system. Additionally, the selling of water to a water bank may constitute the forfeiture of a prior appropriation right. Furthermore, the transfer of water from a water-rich area to a water-poor area has the potential for arousing substantial political opposition. Water Rights in Groundwater and Off-Reservation Water Marketing The Winters doctrine addresses only implied reservations of surface water and does not address groundwater. Yet, groundwater is an important source of water on many Indian reservations. The question of whether the Native American tribes can prevent a junior water appropriator from interfering with the groundwater located beneath the reservation remains unanswered. Because of the uncertainty regarding this issue, there have been several negotiated settlements between Native American tribes and non–Native American water users regarding the use of such water. A corollary to that issue is whether Native American tribes can market their water rights to off-reservation users. Many tribes view such a use as a method for raising capital for uses on the reservation. As was the case with the groundwater question, this issue has been included in numerous negotiated settlements. Study Questions 1. What are the advantages of the prior appropriation system? What are the disadvantages? 2. What are the advantages of riparianism? What are the disadvantages? 3. Which system of water rights is used in your state for surface water? For groundwater? 4. Should a state be able to prevent its groundwater and surface water from being transported for use in another state? Explain. 5. Should Congress enact a statute that creates a uniform national groundwater system? What are the arguments for and against such a system? 6. Who owns the water in clouds? Does one state have the right to attempt, through cloud seeding, to have rain fall on its territory that would otherwise have fallen on another state? 7. Discuss possible solutions to the overallocation of water resources to western farmers and Native American tribes. Who should win? Why?



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8. Many water resource planners and water law experts contend that the complex systems of water laws that have evolved in the United States means there is no real national water policy. Give some arguments to support or oppose this finding. 9. Do a web search to find three or four books on water law and identify to which nations they belong. Notes 1.  Gleick, et al. (2012). A Twenty-First Century of U.S. Water Policy. New York: Oxford University Press. 2.  Gleick, et al., A Twenty-First Century of U.S. Water Policy, p. 23. 3.  Clark, R. (1978). Waters and Water Rights, vol. 5. Indianapolis: Allen Smith Company. 4.  Dunscombe, C. (1970). Riparian and Littoral Rights. New York: William-Frederick Press. 5. The Conservation Foundation. (1984). State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade, A Report from the Conservation Foundation. Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation. 6.  Clark, R. (1978). Waters and Water Rights, vol 6. Indianapolis: Allen Smith Company. 7.  Clark, R. (1978). Waters and Water Rights, vol. 1. Indianapolis: Allen Smith Company. 8. Clark, Waters and Water Rights, vol 5. 9. Clark, Waters and Water Rights, vol. 5. 10. Clark, Waters and Water Rights, vol 6. 11.  Viessman, W., Jr., and C. Welty. (1985). Water Management Technology and Institutions. New York: Harper & Row. 12.  Goldfarb, W. (1984). Water Law. Stoneham, MA: Butterworth Publishers. 13. Clark, Waters and Water Rights, vol. 5. 14. Clark, Waters and Water Rights, vol. 5. 15.  Goldfarb, W. (1984). Water Law. Stoneham, MA: Butterworth Publishers. 16. Goldfarb, Water Law; E. Behrens and M. Dore. (1991). Rights of Landowners to Percolating Groundwater in Texas, 32 5. Texas Law Review 185. 17. Goldfarb, Water Law; Behrens and Dore, Rights of Landowners to Percolating Groundwater in Texas. 18.  Cappaert v. United States. (1976). 426 US 128 19.  United States v. New Mexico. (1977). 438 US 696. 20.  Cohen, F. (1972). Handbook of Federal Indian Law. New York: AMS Press. 21.  Winters v. United States. (1908). 207 US 564. 22.  Arizona v. California. (1962). 373 US 546. 23.  For more information see Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, or read the following cases: New Mexico v. Mescalero Apache Tribe. (1983). 462 US 324; Ramah Navajo School Board v. Bureau of Revenue. (1982). 458 US 832; White Mountain Apache Tribe v. Becker. (1980). 448 US 136; Puyallup Tribe, Inc. v. Department of Game. (1977). 433 US 165; Williams v. Lee. (1959). 358 US 217.

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24.  McCarran Water Rights Suit Act. (1952). 43 USC 666; Colorado River Water Conservation District v. United States. (1976). 424 US 800; United States v. District Court for Water Division No. 5. (1971). 401 US 527. 25.  United States v. District Court for the County of Eagle. (1971). 401 US 520, 524. 26.  Thompson, S. A. (1999). Water Use, Management, and Planning in the United States. San Diego: Academic Press. 27.  Hanak, E., and E. Stryjewski. (2012). California’s Water Market, By the Numbers: Update 2012. Public Policy Institute of California. Retrieved from http://www.ppic.org 28.  US Department of Interior. (2018). Central Valley Project Improvement Act. Reclamation: Managing Water in the West. Retrieved from https://www.usbr.gov/mp/cvpia/ 29.  Gretches, D. (2008). Water Law in a Nutshell. 4th ed. St. Paul, MN: West Academic Publishing.

6 Federal Agencies, Legislation, and Intergovernmental Cooperation

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his chapter has three main sections. The first identifies the federal agencies involved with water resources and examines how they interact, and the second section provides an overview of the federal legislation addressing water resources development and environmental protection. The third section highlights several examples of major cooperative water resource efforts among federal, state, and local agencies. This chapter is not intended to provide a comprehensive analysis of these issues but rather to serve as an introduction to the federal regulatory scheme for water resources and to provide a look at some significant projects developed by joint efforts among different levels of government. Key Terms This section provides an overview of key terms important for gaining familiarity with federal legislation related to water resources planning. The knowledge gained by water resources planners in understanding these terms and concepts will help them in recognizing the importance of legislation and regulations for dealing with managing water resources and the environment. The terms used in this chapter are important to water resources planners but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms regarding agencies and legislation are the following. — 147 —

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Clean Water Act (CWA) Enacted by Congress to restore and maintain the physical, biological, and chemical integrity of the country’s waters by prohibiting discharge of pollutants and providing funds for planning, construction, and research. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Enacted in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider environmental consequences of their actions by requiring that an environmental impact statement (EIS) be prepared for proposals to undertake any major federal actions that significantly affect the quality of the human environment. Rivers and Harbors Act Federal act of 1899 that provides authority for the US Army Corps of Engineers to control all construction in the nation’s navigable waters. Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) Passed in 1974, this act seeks to ensure that public water supply systems meet national standards for protecting public health, such as requiring pipes and solder used in those systems to be free of lead and other contaminants. US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Under the Department of Defense, the Corps is the nation’s oldest water agency that functions as a civil works agency (versus its various military activities), dealing mainly with water resources through planning and construction activities on the nation’s navigable waters. US Department of the Interior (DOI) The DOI is the main cabinet-level agency in charge of water resources, especially through the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) The USDA does water resources planning through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS; formerly Soil Conservation Service), Forest Service, Agricultural Research Service, and Economic Research Service. US Geological Survey (USGS) Agency within DOI responsible for financing water resources research at universities, preparing technical reports on water management, and collecting data on the nation’s groundwater and surface water supplies. Water Resources Development Acts (WRDAs) Authorized water projects including nonstructural measures aimed at hazard mitigation. Water Pollution Control Act The first environmental legislation enacted by Congress. It required states to determine which lakes and streams were polluted past tolerable levels. The act proved to be inefficient and was replaced by the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. Water Quality Act The act reauthorized the CWA in 1987, focusing on control of nonpoint source pollution. It required states to do planning studies and make abatement plans for water degraded by nonpoint pollution.



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Organizational Structure All pieces of legislation require some form of implementer. In the United States, governmental agencies at the federal, state, and local levels administer legislation concerning water supply and water quality. In addition, certain regional organizations, composed of various agencies from these three levels, have been formed to aid in coordinating water resources planning efforts. What follows is a descriptive breakdown of the water resources management organizational structure at the federal level in the United States. Water resources planning and the administration of water resources programs in the United States are performed within a diverse organizational structure. On the federal level, water resources management and program preparation have historically been the responsibility of cabinet-level departments, principally the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Defense. The US Department of the Interior (DOI, www.doi.gov) is the main cabinetlevel body in charge of the nation’s water resources. Within the DOI, the US Geological Survey (USGS, www.usgs.gov) is responsible for financing water resources research at universities and various institutes. The USGS also prepares technical reports on new and existing water management practices and techniques and is responsible for monitoring and collecting data for the nation’s groundwater and surface water supplies. The Bureau of Reclamation, also part of the DOI, is responsible for monitoring and developing appropriate irrigation and agricultural land reclamation projects in the western states. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA, www.usda.gov) handles water resources planning and development through the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS; formerly Soil Conservation Service), Forest Service, Agricultural Research Service, and Economic Research Service. The NRCS (www.nrcs.gov) is the most notable of these agencies, particularly with regard to irrigation and flood control. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE, www.usace.army.mil), under the Department of Defense (DoD), is the nation’s oldest water resource agency. It is important to note that our concern is with the civil works side of the USACE. This element of the USACE functions primarily as a civilian federal agency and deals mainly with water resources through the construction and maintenance of physical structures located on the navigable waters of the United States. Its planning activity is closely tied to its construction activities. One of the USACE’s main responsibilities is flood control, and it has gained many friends and foes through its construction of numerous dams. In recent years, greater consideration has been given to nonstructural activities. The most significant example is the multibillion dollar Everglades restoration project that was started in the 1990s and will continue well into the twenty-first

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century. A significant and ongoing responsibility of the USACE is administration of the wetlands permitting program under Section 404 of the CWA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA, www.epa.gov) is the foremost federal agency with respect to water quality. It administers the CWA and has major responsibilities in pollution control enforcement, funding and managing municipal sewage treatment plants, and administering the nonpoint source pollution program through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitting program for stormwater runoff. Other cabinet- and executive-level agencies and departments also have some input into decisions affecting the nation’s water resources development. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, www.fema.gov) promotes floodplain management through the National Flood Insurance Program. The Department of Commerce (through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the Department of Transportation (through the US Coast Guard), and the Council on Environmental Quality have played significant roles in water resources programs in selected areas. An important and influential federal water resources agency over the past several decades was the former Water Resources Council (WRC). The WRC, established by the Water Resources Planning Act of 1965, was composed of the secretaries and directors of various federal departments and agencies, including the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Defense, and Transportation; the Council on Environmental Quality; the Office of Management and Budget; and the Attorney General. The WRC was established to oversee water resources planning and development from the federal level and to establish the basic structure and legislative framework for the solution of water resources problems. It was the most important administrative body for federal water resources planning and management since the Water Resources Committee of the 1930s. The WRC was intended to design the planning structure for the identification of problems and to coordinate and guide federal, state, and local water resources planning programs and policies. It was directed to conduct assessments of the nation’s water resources; develop and refine the principles and standards for water resources planning; coordinate, review, and evaluate agency water plans; sponsor research; and provide water resources information to the public. The WRC was terminated when its funding was eliminated in 1982. In its place, the Reagan administration formed the Cabinet Council on Natural Resources and the Environment, which assumed the WRC’s coordinative and planning functions. The WRC’s review of water projects was transferred to the Office of Management and Budget.



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Federal Legislation There are two distinct objectives of water legislation that are important to water resources planning. The first objective is characterized by the development of water resources. This objective treats water as something that should be exploited for navigation (the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899); for irrigation (the Reclamation Act of 1902); and for hydroelectric power generation (the Federal Water Power Act of 1920). The second objective involves legislation that focuses upon water quality and environmental protection. The first water quality act was passed in 1948, but not until the late 1960s and early 1970s were the first true environmental protection laws enacted. Legislation passed addressing these objectives falls into two categories: those that directly pertain to water quality and those that are indirectly related to water issues. Water Resources Development Legislation Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, also called the Refuse Act, is one of the most important pieces of water resources legislation ever enacted by Congress. The act provides authority for the US Army, acting through the USACE, to exercise control over all construction in the navigable waters of the United States.1 The original intention of Congress when enacting this legislation was to protect navigation and navigable capacity. These objectives were expanded through pressure and court decisions from the environmental movement of the 1960s and early 1970s to include environmental protection. For years, the USACE was only concerned about discharges that would interfere with navigation. It was not until 1973 that the US Supreme Court ruled, in spite of the long history of contrary interpretation by the USACE, that Section 13 of the Refuse Act created a total ban on any unauthorized deposits of foreign substances into navigable waters, regardless of the effect on navigation.2 The Court’s decision resulted in major environmental implications; it transformed the key section of the act into strong environmental legislation. Reclamation Act of 1902 In the Reclamation Act of 1902, Congress created the Bureau of Reclamation and placed it in the DOI.3 The Secretary of the Interior was authorized to construct irrigation projects in the western states and territories. The early projects provided storage reservoirs, diversion dams, and distribution canals. These projects were to be funded by the proceeds of public land sales in these areas.

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Only tracts of land less than 160 acres belonging to a single landowner were considered eligible under this act.4 This requirement was designed to guarantee a wide distribution of the act’s benefits among the small farmers of the nation. Furthermore, the owner had to be a bona fide resident on or near the land.5 If selected to receive the benefits of this act, the water users were required to repay the estimated construction costs without interest, in ten annual installments. The repayments were to be returned to the revolving Reclamation Fund for reuse. The program never operated as expected. Cost overruns, improper screening of applicants, and speculative land purchasing forced the farmers into difficulties when repayment time arrived. Congress attempted to resolve the repayment crisis by enacting the Reclamation Extension Act of 1914, which increased the repayment period to twenty years. However, the extension didn’t cure the problem, especially when a period of declining agricultural prices was followed by the Great Depression. Finally, Congress extended the repayment period to forty years with provisions for debt forgiveness. Over the years, the bureau’s duties expanded to include projects involving hydropower and industrial and municipal uses. Other legislation required the bureau to exercise greater concern for the economic efficiency of proposed projects. In 1982, Congress increased the acreage limit from 160 acres to 960 acres6 and removed the original requirement that the water user had to be a bona fide resident on or near the land.7 It also required the beneficiaries to repay a greater share of the project cost.8 The act was amended again in 1992 to establish a Western Water Policy Review Commission. The commission was charged with performing a comprehensive review of federal activities that directly or indirectly affect the allocation and use of surface and groundwater resources in the nineteen western states. Congress appropriated up to $10 million to the commission and imposed a deadline of the end of 1995.9 Federal Water Power Act of 1920 The Federal Water Power Act of 1920 (FWPA) was the first attempt by Congress to establish a comprehensive national hydroelectric power policy.10 The FWPA created the Federal Power Commission (FPC), which was authorized to administer the act.11 The FPC had the authority to license private hydropower facilities and to regulate all interstate sales and transmissions of electricity. If a project produced power by hydroelectric generation, it required an FPC permit. Congress enacted the FWPA in an attempt to coordinate the various water uses with their competing uses. In developing its comprehensive plan, the FPC was to address all aspects of water power planning, including navigation, irrigation, flood control, and hydropower.



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The FWPA has been renamed the Federal Power Act.12 In 1977, a newly created Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) assumed most of the functions that were performed by the now defunct FPC. In 1986, Congress amended the act to require that the FERC “consider fish and wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities and environmental quality in general as part of the licensing process.”13 National Flood Insurance Program The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)14 is directed by FEMA and is very important to planning for land development in flood-prone areas. This program requires local governments to enact floodplain management guidelines for private development in designated flood-prone areas.15 Local regulations must be as strict as the federal standards established by FEMA. If these guidelines are followed, the development is eligible for federally subsidized flood insurance. However, development located on any coastal barrier within the Coastal Barrier Resources System or on the Colorado River Floodway are excluded from the program.16 Failure by a local government to enact or adequately enforce the local floodplain ordinance can result in homeowners losing their eligibility for the federally subsidized flood insurance. This measure would leave many homeowners without any property insurance at all, as many insurance companies will not insure property in high-risk areas. A Flood Insurance Interagency Task Force was established in 1994 to develop recommendations for enforcing compliance with the program’s requirements.17 In addition to the task force, some members of Congress began to question why federal taxpayers should subsidize development in flood-prone areas. The NFIP was reauthorized and reformed in 1995, the first major revision since its inception. This action was largely a result of the devastation caused to South Florida by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and floods of 1993. The 1995 reforms made the program more efficient, flexible, and better able to handle both natural and technical disasters. In spite of these reforms, however, the devastation caused to New Orleans and surrounding areas in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and the damage to coastal New York and New Jersey in 2012 from Hurricane Sandy were enormous. Each region suffered hundreds of deaths and many billions of dollars in damages. Additional details on the NFIP are provided in chapter 10. Water Resources Development Acts Water Resources Development Acts are references to public laws enacted by Congress dealing with different aspects of water resources. They may cover programs such as environmental improvement, structural projects, navigation,

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flood protection efforts, hydrology, and other water-related concerns of the federal government. Typically, the USACE administers the bulk of the acts’ requirements. There have been numerous Water Resource Development Acts (WRDAs) enacted over the years. For example, the 1986 act18 was the first comprehensive water resources authorization bill since 1970. The act authorized numerous water projects and included several nonstructural measures aimed at hazard mitigation. One of the subsets of the 1986 act was adoption of the Dam Safety Act, which authorized $65 million over a five-year period to be distributed among qualifying states for use in meeting up to 50 percent of the implementation costs of state dam safety programs. The Water Resources Development Act of 2016 is a major action with respect to the nation’s water resources.19 It authorizes twenty-five critical USACE projects in seventeen states that have undergone congressional scrutiny and have completed reports by the chief of engineers. It aims to strengthen the nation’s infrastructure to protect lives and property, to restore and preserve vital ecosystems, and to maintain navigation routes for commerce and the movement of goods to remain competitive in the global marketplace. The act provides critical investment in the nation’s aging drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, assists poor and disadvantaged communities in meeting public health standards under the CWA and the Safe Drinking Water Act, and promotes innovative technologies to address drought and other critical water resource needs. It also responds to the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, by giving emergency assistance to Flint and communities across the country that are facing drinking water contamination. The act invests in the nation’s ports and inland waterways to improve commerce. To keep the waterways safe and efficient, they require dredging, maintenance, and modernization. The act authorizes improvements to ports across the country. It also improves flood protection and increased safety for communities by authorizing critical flood control and coastal hurricane protection projects, such as rebuilding levees in Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas. It also provides hurricane protection in Louisiana, including protection for Interstate 10, the major hurricane evacuation corridor for the city of New Orleans. The nation’s dams are inadequately maintained and aging quickly, posing significant safety and economic risks. Of the nation’s eighty-four thousand dams, average age is more than fifty years, and fourteen thousand dams are considered high hazard, where failure could cause substantial injury or loss of life and damage to surrounding areas. The act authorizes FEMA to provide assistance to rehabilitate high-hazard dams, and it updates the USACE’s emergency rebuilding authority for flood control projects. This allows the USACE to rebuild projects stronger than originally designed if doing so will reduce



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risk of loss of life and property and minimize life cycle rehabilitation costs. The act also allows the USACE to implement nonstructural alternatives, such as wetland, stream, and coastal restoration. The WRDA authorizes a number of projects to restore ecosystems and preserve the nation’s natural heritage, such as the ongoing restoration of the Florida Everglades and a project to revitalize the Los Angeles River. The act also aids restoration of significant water bodies and ecosystems, including the Great Lakes, Columbia River, Puget Sound, Salton Sea, Chesapeake Bay, North Atlantic Coast, Rio Grande, Lake Tahoe, and Long Island Sound. The act requires the USACE to prepare a plan to prioritize projects addressing identified threats to public health and to preserve or restore ecosystems of national significance. The WRDA also addresses high-priority regional water resources issues, focusing on regional actions impacting communities across the country. Actrelated initiatives have addressed sediment, ice jams, snowpack, and drought in the Missouri River basin; oyster bed restoration in the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay; flood risk reduction in the Columbia River; and provision of system-wide flood protection in the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Finally, the act increases the roles of local partners in implementing water resource projects and expanding opportunities for nonfederal interests to carry out USACE projects and to contribute goods and services for those projects. This also would help by modernizing the State Revolving Loan Fund programs and aiding disadvantaged communities by providing technical assistance and planning for infrastructure investments. Environmental Legislation Concern about water quality and quantity started to grow with the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1962 best seller, Silent Spring.20 In addition, several scientific reports in the mid-1960s were issued concerning environmental pollution. This era was experiencing fires on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, drastic soil and groundwater contamination from industrial chemicals in the Niagara Falls area, land and water pollution in New England, severe water contamination in the Great Lakes and other water bodies, and many other examples of all types of environmental contamination across the country. These conditions provided the impetus for the enactment of major federal environmental legislation. The main emphasis of environmental legislation has changed over the years. Initially, the major emphasis of water pollution control was on point sources. These are discernible, confined, and discrete conveyances from which pollutants are or may be discharged. However, recent legislation has focused upon nonpoint sources of pollution, one of the most troublesome being stormwater runoff.

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Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 The Federal Water Pollution Control Act was the first environmental legislation enacted by Congress.21 The act required states to determine which lakes and streams had become polluted beyond tolerable levels. Once these water bodies had been identified, it was necessary to locate the polluters and suppress the discharges that were causing the allowable pollution levels to be exceeded. However, determination of which polluter caused what pollution was an impractical and, most often, impossible task. It has been estimated that, over the years, at least $20 billion of public funds were spent attempting to perform this task. As a result of the inefficiency of such procedures, rivers were being turned into open sewers, the aquatic life of the Great Lakes was threatened with extinction, and the purity of water used for drinking, irrigation, and industrial uses was endangered. In response to this situation, Congress enacted the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 The Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 were more than mere additions to an existing program. Instead, they represented an entirely new approach by Congress to the problem of water pollution. The basic concept was a prohibition against all discharges of pollutants without a permit. Furthermore, the amendments abandoned the act’s earlier approach to water pollution control, which had consisted of ambient water quality standards that limited the concentration of pollutants in the water body. The new approach utilized effluent standards, which limited the concentration at the source of the pollution. The amendments were amended in 1977 and renamed the Clean Water Act. Clean Water Act of 1977 When Congress enacted the CWA, it stated that its intent was to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”22 Accordingly, Congress established the following six objectives: 1. The elimination of the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters by 1985 2. An interim goal that water quality be high enough to protect fish, shellfish, wildlife, and recreation by 1983 3. Prohibition of the discharge of toxic pollutants 4. Construction of publicly owned waste treatment works 5. Development of areawide waste treatment management planning processes



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6. Development of the technology to eliminate the discharge of all pollutants into navigable waters, waters of the contiguous zone, and the oceans23 To achieve these goals and objectives, Congress authorized grants for planning, construction of waste treatment plants, and research. Congress also enacted a system of regulations regarding water pollutants. CWA Section 404: Dredge and Fill Permits Perhaps the most far-reaching provision in the CWA is Section 404, in which Congress addressed the pressing issue of wetlands destruction.24 Section 404 requires a property owner to obtain a USACE permit before dredging and/or filling in the navigable waters of the United States. The USACE can issue two basic types of permits: a general permit or an individual permit. The general permit is issued to the public at large on a regional or national basis.25 This type of permit authorizes a range of activities that cause only minimal individual and cumulative environmental impacts.26 A general permit may also be issued when an individual permit would result in unnecessary duplication of regulatory control exercised by other federal, state, or local agencies. An individual permit is necessary for an applicant who wishes to conduct activities not already allowed under a general permit. Not all activities, however, need to comply with the permit requirements of Section 404. Congress has exempted the following activities from the permit requirements of Section 404: 1. Normal farming, silviculture, and ranching activities 2. Construction and maintenance of farm ponds, stock ponds, or irrigation ditches 3. Any activity regulated by a state under Section 208 of the CWA27 CWA Section 401: National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Section 401 of the CWA created the NPDES, a permit system, to enforce effluent limitations. The NPDES prohibits the discharge of pollutants through a point source unless that discharge has a NPDES permit.28 Although this provision allows for some permitted discharge of pollutants, the CWA’s ultimate objective, the total elimination of all discharges, remains in effect. The CWA authorizes the EPA to administer the NPDES program.29 However, individual states may assume responsibility for the program under agreements with the EPA. A general discharge permit may be granted for a maximum of five years. Each permit contains three parts: effluent limitations, a compliance schedule, and a

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reporting requirement. Upon expiration of the permit, the permittee must apply for a renewal. The permit may be modified or revoked during the permit period when an alteration to the permitted facility occurs, upon the USACE receiving new information, upon the enactment of superseding federal regulations, or upon an application for a variance. Three other sections should be noted. Section 208 requires statewide and areawide pollution control planning.30 The objective of this section is to reduce pollution from diffuse sources such as urban runoff, surface mining, and construction. The areawide plans must control the disposition of all residual waste generated in areas where water quality could be affected.31 Section 208 also includes a groundwater protection element, and it requires that these plans include a process to control disposal of pollutants on land and in subsurface excavations.32 Section 304(a) authorizes the EPA to develop and publish criteria for water quality that reflect the latest scientific knowledge about the kind and extent of all identifiable effects of water pollutants on health and the environment.33 Finally, Section 311 prohibits the discharge of hazardous substances in harmful quantities.34 Once a substance is classified as hazardous, a discharger must report any “spilling, leaking, pouring, emitting, emptying or dumping” of that substance, and the discharger is liable for the costs incurred to clean up the spill.35 The EPA is authorized to charge the discharger the costs incurred to restore the natural resources damaged by the spill as well as to impose penalties against the discharger.36 Water Quality Act of 1987 The CWA was reauthorized by the Water Quality Act of 1987.37 One of the key aspects of the 1987 act is that Congress added a new goal for the CWA. This goal focuses on the importance of controlling nonpoint sources of pollution.38 It was the first serious effort, at the federal level, to address pollution from nonpoint sources including agricultural fields and feedlots, urban streets, and sewers. Although there are no mandatory controls, Congress directed the states to conduct planning studies. States were required to identify and provide abatement plans for water degraded by nonpoint pollution.39 The $400 million of federal funds authorized by Congress to address nonpoint pollution would be used to pay for up to 60 percent of a state’s cleanup costs.40 Priority in funding would be given to runoff regulatory programs, innovative abatement practices, and programs that mitigate groundwater contamination caused by nonpoint pollution.41 The 1987 act resulted in an important change in the way NPDES programs can be delegated. Congress authorized partial delegation of Section 402 programs, instead of the previous all-or-nothing approach utilized in the CWA.42



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As a result of this change, the EPA and the individual states could split the categories of discharges regulated within the state. The act also addressed cleanup of toxic hot spots, restoration of ecologically important bays and estuaries, and the monitoring of water quality in the Great Lakes. This act also established the National Stormwater Program (NSWP) as a new, more organized way of implementing the stormwater section of the NPDES program of the CWA. In 1990, Congress amended the CWA to include the Great Lakes Critical Programs Act. This amendment required the Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) to adopt water quality standards and antidegradation policies and to implement procedures necessary to protect human health, aquatic life, and wildlife that utilize and depend upon the Great Lakes waters.43 Of particular importance is the requirement of a five-year study and demonstration project to control and remove toxic pollutants from bottom sediments.44 The amendment also identified Long Island Sound and Lake Champlain as water bodies in need of special protection and regulatory measures.45,46 The EPA proposed highly controversial regulations in 1999 to clarify and strengthen the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program. Prior to the July 4, 2000, congressional recess, Congress approved an appropriations bill with a provision to prevent the EPA from spending any funds in fiscal year 2000 or fiscal year 2001 to finalize or implement any new TMDL rules. President Clinton signed the bill on July 13, 2000, despite the TMDL provision, which the administration opposed (P.L. 106-246).47 On November 26, 2001, President Bush signed legislation to fund the EPA for fiscal year 2002 (P.L. 107-73, H.R. 2620). The act includes $1.35 billion for clean water state revolving fund (SRF) grants at the same level enacted for fiscal year 2001. President Bush’s budget for fiscal year 2002, presented in April, requested $850 million for clean water SRF grants and $450 million for a new grant program to assist municipal sewer overflow problems. Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 The purpose of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) is to ensure that public water supply systems meet national standards for the protection of public health. For example, the SDWA mandates that all pipes, solder, and flux utilized in any public water system must be “lead free.”48 Lead free, however, does not mean 100 percent free of lead but rather that such fixtures cannot contain a percentage of lead that exceeds that established in the SDWA.49 We have seen the disastrous case of excessive lead found in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water, first reported in 2014. The Flint water crisis started when the Flint River became the water source for the city of Flint. Because of inadequate

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water treatment, more than one hundred thousand residents were potentially exposed to high lead levels in the drinking water. A federal emergency was declared in January 2016 and residents of Flint were instructed to only use filtered or bottled water for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and bathing. Water quality returned to acceptable levels by early 2017, but residents were told to continue using bottled or filtered water until all the lead pipes were replaced, which was not expected to be completed sooner than 2020. Additional details on the Flint water crisis are presented in chapter 8. Congress authorized the EPA to create primary national drinking water regulations.50 The regulations are to identify contaminants occurring in drinking water that may have an adverse effect on health and to regulate the contaminants to the extent permitted by cost and technology.51 In 1986, Congress enacted the Federal Safe Drinking Water Amendments. The amendments’ major addition to the SDWA was the establishment of a wellhead protection program.52 In this program, states that establish wellhead protection plans are eligible to receive federal grants to implement their plans.53 The EPA was ordered to establish guidelines for these state programs. Unlike many guidelines in national programs, these guidelines recognize that each state is different, with varying sources of drinking water and unique types of problems. The SDWA addresses groundwater protection through the creation of a solesource aquifer protection program.54 This program is designed to protect the recharge areas of aquifers that are the principal sources of drinking water. Federal drinking water standards are established for contaminants in these areas, and underground injections are regulated.55 Enforcement of the SDWA can lead to civil or criminal penalties.56 In May 1987, the first criminal conviction under the SDWA was obtained. A federal district court sentenced a Michigan oil company and its president for knowingly and willfully violating the SDWA.57 The company’s president was sentenced to spend three months in prison and nine months on probation for concealing information from the EPA. The company had tampered with four underground injection wells to conceal the fact that the wells could not pass EPA tests. The 1996 amendments to the SDWA created a completely new approach to regulating contaminants in drinking water. Rather than setting standards for a set list or number of contaminants, the EPA took a commonsense, cost-effective approach to research and standard setting, focusing on contaminants that posed the greatest risks to human health. In addition, the 1996 amendments provided important new protections for consumers who may be at greater risk of experiencing adverse health effects from drinking water contaminants, especially children and the elderly. Released by President Clinton in 1998, new drinking water standards for cryptosporidium, other disease-causing microbes, and potentially harmful by-products of water treatment processes were the first standards set under the 1996 amendments.



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National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 Congress enacted the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969,58 representing its response to a growing movement of environmental concern. NEPA mandates an interdisciplinary planning approach to ensure that environmental considerations are included into project proposals, requiring that federal agencies consider the environmental consequences of their actions. The cornerstone of NEPA is the requirement that an EIS must be prepared as a part of “every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”59 The purpose of an EIS is to identify the environmental consequences of any proposal for a major federal action. The courts have referred to the EIS requirement as an “environmental full disclosure law.”60 NEPA does not, however, mandate that the EIS bring about certain results; it does not compel a federal agency to adopt the least environmentally damaging alternative.61 Rather, it requires that an agency explain why the least damaging alternative was not chosen. Congress relied upon an informed public to use the political process to provide pressure against environmentally unsound agency decisions. The US Supreme Court has been reluctant to enforce any of the other NEPA provisions except the EIS requirement. As a result, the other provisions that require the government to use “all practicable means” to achieve environmental protection goals through planning, interdepartmental coordination, and full consideration of interdepartmental values in the decision-making process have received little attention. 62 NEPA also authorized the creation of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which was placed under presidential jurisdiction.63 The CEQ is responsible for developing national environmental policies and reviewing the environmental consequences of federal programs. Its role has been expanded to include authorization to promulgate guidelines for the preparation of an EIS. The CEQ also organizes, manages, and administers the President’s Environment and Conservation Challenge Awards program, which recognizes outstanding environmental achievements by US citizens, enterprises, or programs.64 From 1993, the Office of Federal Sustainability (OFS) was housed in the CEQ.65 Endangered Species Act of 1973 The Endangered Species Act (ESA) prohibits direct harm to species that have been designated by the EPA as threatened or endangered.66 The ESA provision mandating the preservation of a protected species’s habitat was invoked to postpone the completion of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, in Tennessee. A federal court determined that the project would adversely affect the habitat of a protected species, the snail darter (a small fish), and, therefore, found

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that the dam could not be completed.67 Tellico Dam was eventually completed after Congress voted to grant the project an exception. As a result of the snail darter controversy, Congress amended the ESA to create a statutory exemption from the act’s requirements. This amendment authorized the Endangered Species Committee to grant an exception under certain conditions if an irreconcilable conflict exists after an analysis of the alternatives and mitigation plans is completed. In 1988, Congress passed a major reauthorization of the ESA. New provisions to the ESA include a requirement for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to monitor species close to being placed on the endangered list, increased protection for endangered plants, and increased penalties for violations of the act. Additionally, funding for endangered species protection, monitoring, and recovery was doubled. Substantial opposition to the ESA has resulted in ongoing delay to its reauthorization. There has been a concerted effort to greatly reduce the scope of the ESA due to concerns that it unduly interferes with private property rights. Authorization for funding the ESA expired in October 1992, but Congress appropriated funds in each succeeding fiscal year. As of August 31, 2018, a total of 1,396 species of animals and 948 species of plants had been listed as either endangered or threatened, of which the majority (716 animal species and 945 plant species) occurred in the United States and its territories. Of the 1,661 US species, 1,164 were included in recovery plans. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) provides the EPA with indirect control over surface and groundwater quality.68 Although the RCRA was enacted in 1976, it was not until November 1980 that the regulations promulgating the act were established. RCRA is known as the “Cradle-to-Grave Act” because it involves extensive regulation of land-disposed hazardous wastes. A paper trail is created from the moment the hazardous waste is created to the time it is disposed. It is through extensive documentation that the RCRA helps prevent the introduction of hazardous wastes into the environment. RCRA touches on water supply and wastewater treatment by providing that sludge from treatment plants may be included under a hazardous solid waste category. Waste materials from treatment plants other than sludge can also be regulated under RCRA as hazardous wastes. Current penalties for noncompliance are quite strict and have had a definite effect on the handling of wastes by water supply treatment facilities. In 1984, Congress passed amendments to RCRA that increased the EPA’s control over hazardous wastes. Congress directed the EPA to tighten regulations regarding land disposal operations. A new program was created to address the national problem of leaky underground storage tanks, giving the EPA the



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task of developing and implementing a comprehensive regulatory program for underground storage tanks.69 This measure reflected a growing concern about groundwater contamination. A state may administer the hazardous waste program in lieu of the EPA. To be eligible, the state must provide adequate enforcement of state regulations that are as strict as the federal regulations. Also, the state must provide information on the program to the public and must process applications in a fashion similar to the EPA’s.70 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), more commonly known as Superfund, was passed in 1980.71 CERCLA was enacted to address a growing national problem caused by accidental spills and releases of hazardous substances from old dumpsites, a problem directly affecting surface and groundwater. CERCLA created a $1.6 billion “Superfund” to be used to facilitate cleanup of hazardous waste disposal sites. The EPA prioritizes these sites on the basis of potential harm to the public health or environment. Higher priority sites are placed on a National Priorities List (NPL) for immediate action. This list is updated at least annually. Parties responsible for the spill or release of hazardous substances are held liable for the costs incurred in remedying the damages. In 1986, Congress passed the Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act (SARA) to accelerate Superfund activity. SARA expands and clarifies the EPA’s power and strengthens the standards used for cleanup procedures. For example, the EPA is allowed to obtain access to a site or facility without a warrant to inspect the site or facility and take samples.72 Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 The Toxic Substances Control Act73 was enacted in 1976—a period when the public was concerned about health threats from PCBs, lead, and mercury, particularly as related to water supplies. The act’s purpose is to protect the public health and the environment from unreasonable risks. It gives the EPA authority to regulate the commercial manufacture, use, and disposal of chemical substances from “cradle to grave.” As under RCRA, businesses must maintain records, send reports and notices to the EPA, and handle chemicals according to federal regulations.74 The act provides the EPA with the authority to regulate and collect information about chemicals that present an “unreasonable risk” to health or environment.

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Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) is the nation’s primary insecticide law.75 FIFRA requires pesticide manufacturers to register their products with the EPA prior to marketing the pesticides.76 Pursuant to FIFRA, the EPA was ordered to begin review of six hundred active ingredients found in pesticides. The EPA’s progress has not been what was anticipated by Congress when FIFRA was enacted. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has reported that, without reforms, the EPA will not finish reviewing the other ingredients until well into the twenty-first century. Intergovernmental Activities Water resource projects and actions are often conducted with the efforts and contributions of different layers of government. At a very broad scale, many projects and programs initiated and authorized by federal agencies are conducted by the cooperative actions of state, regional, and local agencies. There are many such large water projects that have been completed or are in process, any of which would be worth further investigation. Hoverer, this section presents an overview of only two major projects conducted in different parts of the country over the past few decades: the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin and the Chesapeake Bay. We hope that these two will be beneficial in reviewing the broad scope of water resources planning. Considerable information on these and most other large water resource projects can be found easily on the internet. You are encouraged to use this technology to learn more about water resources activities throughout the world. Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council was established in 2008 when the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact became state and federal law.77 Each of the state legislatures of the eight Great Lakes states ratified the compact, and the US Congress gave its consent for this historic agreement. The compact specifies how the states are to work together to manage and protect the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River basin. It provides a legal framework for each state to enact programs and laws protecting the basin. The compact includes the following items: • Economic development will be fostered through sustainable use and responsible management of Basin waters.



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• There is a ban on new diversions of water from the basin but limited exceptions could be allowed in communities near the basin. Communities that apply have a clear, predictable decision-making process; standards to be met; and, opportunities to appeal decisions. • States will use a consistent standard to review proposed uses of basin water. They have flexibility regarding their water management programs and how to apply this standard. • Regional goals and objectives for water conservation and efficiency have been developed and will be reviewed every five years. Each state will develop and implement a water conservation and efficiency program that may be voluntary or mandatory. • There is strong commitment to ongoing public involvement in implementing the compact. The Compact Council includes the Great Lakes governors, who continue to consult and coordinate with the premiers of Ontario, Québec, and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Water Resources Regional Body to protect the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. The council has been successful in integrating and improving the basin’s water quality and use, and the council continues to function to the present time. The Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement was signed by all member states and provinces and includes the following: • Waters of the basin are a shared public treasure and the states and provinces as stewards have a shared duty to protect, conserve, and manage these renewable but finite waters. • These waters are interconnected and form a single hydrologic system. • Protecting, conserving, restoring, and improving these waters is the foundation of water resource management in the basin and essential to maintaining the integrity of the basin ecosystem. • Managing to conserve and restore these waters will improve them as well as the water-dependent natural resources of the basin. • Continued sustainable, accessible, and adequate water supplies for the people and economy of the basin are of vital importance. • States and provinces must balance economic and social development and environmental protection as interdependent, mutually reinforcing pillars of sustainable development. • Even though significant progress has been made to restore and improve the health of the basin ecosystem, the waters and water-dependent natural resources of the basin remain at risk. • In light of possible variations in climate conditions and potential cumulative effects of demands placed on the waters of the basin, the states and

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provinces must act to ensure the protection and conservation of the waters and water-dependent natural resources of the basin for future generations. • Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as reason to postpone measures preventing environmental degradation. • Sustainable development and harmony with nature and among neighbors require cooperative arrangements for the development and implementation of watershed protection approaches in the basin.78 The objectives agreed to by all parties are comprehensive in seeking to gain the full cooperation of all of the members parties and to develop and maintain an effective tool for managing the quality of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway, among the largest and most significant freshwater bodies in the world. The objectives are: • To act together to protect, conserve, and restore the waters of the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River basin because current lack of scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to protect the basin ecosystem • To facilitate collaborative approaches to water management across the basin to protect, conserve, restore, improve, and efficiently and effectively manage the waters and water-dependent natural resources of the basin • To promote cooperation among the parties by providing common and regional mechanisms to evaluate proposals to withdraw water • To create a cooperative arrangement regarding water management that provides tools for shared future challenges • To retain state and provincial authority within the basin under appropriate arrangements for intergovernmental cooperation and consultation • To facilitate the exchange of data, strengthen the scientific information upon which decisions are made, and engage in consultation on the potential effects of withdrawals and losses on the waters and water-dependent natural resources of the basin • To prevent significant adverse impacts of withdrawals and losses on the basin ecosystem and its watersheds • To promote an adaptive management approach to the conservation and management of basin water resources, which recognizes, considers, and provides adjustments for the uncertainties in, and evolution of, scientific knowledge concerning the basin’s waters and water-dependent natural resources.79 Chesapeake Bay Chesapeake Bay is North America’s largest estuary, with a shoreline of more than 8,000 miles (12,800 kilometers). The bay is long and narrow, extending



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about 200 miles (322 km) from the Atlantic Ocean at the southern part of Virginia northward into Maryland. In addition to Virginia and Maryland, the bay drainage basin includes parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Important deepwater ports on the bay include Baltimore, Maryland, and Norfolk, Newport News, and Portsmouth, Virginia. Since the early twentieth century, the bay has experienced serious environmental degradation. Among its major problems were large reductions in sea grass, reduced amounts of finfish and shellfish, seasonal depletions of dissolved oxygen, and increased sedimentation. Environmental concerns were expressed in the 1970s about damage to key habitats and decline in water quality. Many species in the bay were negatively affected, causing serious threats to commercial and recreational activities. Most marine scientists believed that these effects were related to ecological stress from increased human actions, including deforestation, agriculture, urbanization, pollution, and sewage. Due to impacts from serious environmental threats, the EPA identified Chesapeake Bay as a damaged ecosystem and conducted a $27 million research study from 1976 to 1983. The study concluded that immediate and intensive efforts were needed to save this estuary and restore its health. The Chesapeake Bay Agreement was signed in 1983, with the federal government and Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia pledging to take action and reverse the environmental deterioration. Joint actions included the control of urban and agricultural runoff, especially manure and fertilizer runoff. Also included was constructing sewage treatment plants, reducing soil erosion, banning the use of phosphorous detergents, and requiring stricter discharge permits. The agreement set forth the goal of reducing nitrogen and phosphorus entering the bay by 40 percent by the year 2000. The Chesapeake Bay Agreement was amended in 1987, 1992, and 2000, and 2014 with the agreements reflecting the ongoing political process of strengthening regional, intergovernmental efforts to save the bay. Two important organizations working toward an improved Chesapeake Bay environment are the Chesapeake Bay Program and the Small Watershed Grants Program. The Chesapeake Bay Program is a partnership among Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission, and the federal government. The program considers itself to be “America’s Premiere Watershed Restoration Partnership.” It was formed in 1983 as a result of the first Chesapeake Bay agreement. The partnership has stated a number of bay protection and restoration goals, striving to mobilize resources of the governmental sector with the private sector to achieve its goals. The Chesapeake Bay Program operates as a voluntary, collaborative resource management program. It has set

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goals related to fisheries, wetlands, submerged grasses, nutrient reduction, toxins, sustainable development, and citizen involvement. The Small Watershed Grants Program awards grants to organizations working at the local level to protect and enhance watersheds in the bay basin and to build citizen-based resource stewardship. The grants program emphasizes water quality and living resource needs of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. The grants program was designed to encourage the development and sharing of innovative ideas among the many types of organizations involved in watershed protection activities. Efforts have been and continue to be made for improving the ecological health of Chesapeake Bay. Much progress has been made, but recovery of the bay will require long-term effort together with the active participation of the District of Columbia and all six states in the drainage basin. Projected population increases indicate that efforts to control nutrient and chemical discharges into its rivers and to improve waste treatment technologies are vital to protecting the water. The Chesapeake Bay Commission estimates that by the year 2020, population of the bay watershed will increase to more than seventeen million. Without continued and increased environment attention on the bay ecosystems, the commission has predicted that stress on the natural system would increase dramatically—not a desirable outcome. In summary, the expansive scope of the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River and the Chesapeake Bay are excellent examples of changes and improvements that can be made in our water resources by the cooperative efforts of multiple, interacting layers of government and its citizens.80 Study Questions 1. Should greater emphasis be placed on economic development of water resources or on their environmental protection? Are these two issues mutually exclusive? 2. Numerous pieces of federal legislation have been enacted over the years dealing with water quality and quantity. Identify the federal legislation that you feel has been most significant in dealing with water quality and water quantity. Explain your choice. 3. Should the Endangered Species Committee grant an exemption that will result in the extinction of an endangered species? What if the proposed project will have an enormous economic benefit to the state? 4. Should the federal government be involved in the regulation of water resources? 5. Should federal taxpayers continue to subsidize flood insurance for development in flood-prone areas?



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6. What, if any, rivers or river segments in your state have been designated as a Wild and Scenic River? 7. Determine whether your state has been delegated authority to implement the NPDES program or the Section 404 permit system. 8. Identify and review at list three websites on US water resources agencies and legislation. Do the same for your state. 9. What is your opinion of federal water legislation as it is today? Notes 1.  33 U.S.C. § 401 et seq. 2.  Noble, G., and E. Findley. (1975). Development of Water Quality Management Planning in the United States. In Handbook of Water Quality Management Planning, edited by J. Pavoni. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. 3.  43 U.S.C. § 371 et seq. 4.  43 U.S.C. § 431. 5.  43 U.S.C. § 431. 6.  43 U.S.C. § 390dd. 7.  43 U.S.C. § 390kk. 8.  The Reclamation Reform Act of 1982, 43 U.S.C. § 390aa, 390hh(a); Candee, H. (1989). The Broken Promise of Reclamation Reform. Hasting Law Journal, 40, pp. 657, 658–59. 9.  P.L. 102-575 (October 30, 1992). 10.  16 U.S.C. § 791 et seq. 11.  16 U.S.C. § 792. 12.  16 U.S.C. § 791a. 13.  Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation v. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, 592 N.Y.S. 2d 141, 144 (N.Y. 3 Dep’t), aff’d, 604 N.Y.S. 2d 18 (1993), cert. denied, 114 S. Ct. 2162 (1994). 14.  42 U.S.C. § 4011 et seq. 15.  42 U.S.C. § 4012. 16.  42 U.S.C. § 4028, 4029. 17.  P.L. 103-325, Title V § 561 (September 23, 1994). 18.  33 U.S.C. § 2201 et seq. 19.  US Congress. (2016). S.2848 Water Resources Development Act of 2016. US Congress. Retrieved from https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/2848; and USACE. (2018). Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) 2016. USACE. Retrieved from http:// www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Project-Planning/Legislative-Links/wrda2016/ 20.  Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 21.  Originally codified as 33 U.S.C. § 466 et seq., but as a result of extensive reorganization by amendments, it is now codified as 33 U.S.C. § 1251 et seq. 22.  33 U.S.C. § 1251(a). 23.  33 U.S.C. § 1251(a). 24.  33 U.S.C. § 1344. 25.  33 U.S.C. § 1344(a). 26.  33 U.S.C. § 1344(a).

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27.  33 U.S.C. § 1344(f). 28.  33 U.S.C. § 1342. 29.  33 U.S.C. § 1342(a). 30.  33 U.S.C. § 1288. 31.  33 U.S.C. § 1288(b). 32.  33 U.S.C. § 1288(b)(2)(A). 33.  33 U.S.C. § 1314. 34.  33 U.S.C. § 1321. 35.  33 U.S.C. § 1321. 36.  33 U.S.C. § 1321. 37.  P.L. 100-4 (February 4, 1987). 38.  33 U.S.C. § 1251(a)(7). 39.  33 U.S.C. § 1329(a). 40.  33 U.S.C. § 1329(h)(3). 41.  33 U.S.C. § 1329(h)(5). 42.  33 U.S.C. § 1342(n). 43.  33 U.S.C. § 1268(2). 44.  33 U.S.C. § 1268(7)(A). 45.  33 U.S.C. §§ 1269, 1270. 46.  42 U.S.C. § 300(f) et seq. 47.  Copeland, C. (2006). Water Quality: Implementing the Clean Water Act. Congressional Research Service. Digital Commons at University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1035&context=crsdocs 48.  42 U.S.C. § 300 (g)-6(d). 49.  42 U.S.C. § 300 (g)-(1). 50.  42 U.S.C. § 300 (g)-(1). International Fabricare Institute v. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (1992). 972 F.2d 384, 387 (D.C. Cir.). 51.  International Fabricare Institute v. United States Environmental Protection Agency. (1992). 972 F.2d 384, 387 (D.C. Cir.). 52.  42 U.S.C. § 300h-7. 53.  42 U.S.C. § 300h-7(k). 54.  42 U.S.C. § 300h-6. 55.  42 U.S.C. § 300h-2. 56.  42 U.S.C. § 300g-3. 57.  United States v. Jay Woods Oil Co., Inc. (E.D. Mich. No. 87 CR 20012 BC), unpublished opinion cited in Environmental Reporter, 18(6 [June 5, 1987]), p. 502). 58.  42 U.S.C. § 4321 et seq. 59.  42 U.S.C. § 4332(c) 60.  Farber, D. A. (1987). Disdain for 17-Year-Old Ruling Evident in High Court’s Ruling. The National Law Journal 9(34). 61.  Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens Council. (1989). 490 US 332. 62.  Farber, Disdain for 17-year-old Ruling Evident in High Court’s Ruling. 63.  42 U.S.C. § 4342. 64.  Executive Order 12761. (1991, May 21). 56 Federal Register 23645. 65.  Council on Environmental Quality (website). (n.d.). The White House. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/ceq/ 66.  16 U.S.C. § 1536(e).



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67.  Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978) 68.  42 U.S.C. § 6901 et seq. 69.  42 U.S.C. § 6911(f). 70.  42 U.S.C. § 6926. 71.  42 U.S.C. § 9601 et seq. 72.  42 U.S.C. § 9604(e)(3)–(4). 73.  15 U.S.C. § 2601 et seq. 74.  15 U.S.C. § § 2601, 2607. 75.  7 U.S.C. § 136 et seq. 76.  7 U.S.C. § 136a. 77.  Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council. (2017). Great Lakes Compact Council. Retrieved from http://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/ 78. Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council. (2009). Great Lakes Compact Council. Retrieved from http://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/Agreements .aspx#Implementing%20Agreements 79.  Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Council. (2017). 80. All information in this section is from Chesapeake Bay Program (website). (n.d.). https://www.chesapeakebay.net/

7 State and Intergovernmental Agencies and Programs

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his chapter provides an overview of water resources planning at the state and local levels. The regulatory schemes implemented in states from different parts of the United States are reviewed as examples of the various ways that water resources are planned for and managed. Although each state has its own regulatory scheme, combined these examples illustrate approaches upon which to consider how the planning and management of water resources can be accomplished. The examples that follow demonstrate many of the characteristics of good planning practice: a reliance on good data and science, integration of different levels of government, integration of water resource components (an integrated water resources management [IWRM] approach), collaborative decision making, recognition of the issues of scale and accommodations for it, iterative reassessments, extensive public engagement and monitoring, evaluation and follow-up, and easy access to documentation. The examples attempt to provide a range of planning applications from water supply planning in different locations in the United States to a water quality planning and management example in Wisconsin. The examples also provide a fair view of the different ways states have been influenced by riparian rights, prior appropriation, and combinations of these doctrines. Following the state examples, a few intergovernmental water programs are presented also from different regions of the United States. These are generally large, regional or multistate, long-term projects that include federal, state, regional, and local participation.

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Local Agencies Local water resources legislation is usually implemented through municipal and county water authorities or districts and deals primarily with drainage, water supply, or wastewater treatment. Much local water management is a result of federal and state delegation of powers. For example, the intrastate “special districts” are water management bodies that are “local units of government established by state law for planning, constructing, and ensuring the maintenance of local works.”1 Most municipalities have their own water treatment or management authorities, and many areas implement some type of water supply agreement to assure provision of sufficient quantities of water. Other local water planning organizations may be found in areas where unique water resources characteristics require special management policies and programs. In an attempt to coordinate the activities of the various federal agencies with those of the state agencies, a number of federal-state commissions, committees, and councils have been established. These organizations are typically composed of representatives from the various state and federal water resource agencies. Independent regional agencies also exist to coordinate the federal, state, and local water management policies. These agencies include interstate compact commissions, federal-state compact commissions, interagency committees, federal-state regional councils, intrastate special districts, and regional river basin commissions. All are composed of federal and local officials and have varying degrees of planning, executive, and coordinative powers concerning water resources management. State Agencies Most states have agencies that are counterparts of federal agencies in many ways because the states either elect to or are required to manage many of the federal programs. For example, every state has an environmental or water quality agency that works closely with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These agencies function at different levels throughout the country. Some state agencies have broad powers that allow for comprehensive authority, while other agencies are more limited in nature, being authorized only to issue permits. Other examples of state agencies include service commissions and public utility commissions, which frequently have some authority concerning water supply and wastewater treatment. Four types of state legislation relate primarily to water distribution: 1. Public utility acts, usually administered by public utility commissions and which set water service standards concerning quality and quantity and sometimes water rates

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2. State water supply statutes, basically health and safety standards similar to federal laws 3. Environmental statutes, most relating to federal regulations or environmental impact assessments 4. Water supply agreements, implemented mainly through local water authorities and usually used in western states2 The levels of application vary considerably among states, and legislative authority for state water resources planning is similarly diverse. A state may require statewide comprehensive water resources planning and management under the direction of a single state agency, continuous comprehensive water planning, static comprehensive planning, or continuous comprehensive planning with a static water plan.3 California The California Water Plan,4 started in 1957, is a planning framework for developing recommendations and making informed decisions for the state’s water future. It is updated every five years, with the most recent being released in 2014. The plan presents the status and trends of California’s water-dependent natural resources, its water supplies, and the agricultural, urban, and environmental water demands for various possible future scenarios. It also evaluates several combinations of regional and statewide water resources that would reduce water demand and increase efficiency, reduce flood risk, improve water quality, and enhance resource and environmental stewardship. Work performed for the plan helps to identify effective policies and actions to meet California’s resource management objectives in both the near and long term for several decades. The goal for each five-year update of the water plan is to receive input and support from Californians to produce a water plan that meets the state’s water code requirements, guides state investments in innovation and infrastructure, and promotes integrated water management and sustainable results. The 2014 update of the water plan was prepared over the prior five years with the involvement of state and federal agencies and hundreds of stakeholders from diverse communities. It is a multivolume plan also serving as a compendium of facts about where the state gets its water, how it is used, who pays for it, and what the many risks and opportunities of its complex, interconnected water management system are. The system’s coverage ranges from temperate rainforest to desert and reaches from California’s snowcapped mountains and substantial groundwater aquifers to the Colorado River. It also covers stormwater capture and recycled wastewater. The five-year plan sets forth ten priority actions for meeting urgent needs and setting the foundation for sustainable management of the state’s water resources.

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The 2014 update carries its plans to the year 2050. It has seventeen cross-cutting objectives and more than three hundred specific actions to reinforce implementation of the Governor’s Water Action Plan (2016). Its goals are to make conservation a normal way of life, to provide safe drinking water, to increase water storage capacity, to improve public safety, and to secure wastewater systems for all communities of the state. Three themes distinguish the California Water Plan Update 2014: • It emphasizes the accomplishments and potential of integrated water management to achieve social, environmental, and economic benefits within California’s interconnected water systems. • It calls for improved alignment of the way government manages data, does planning, establishes policy, prioritizes and administers public funding, and regulates the state’s large, complex, and decentralized water systems. • It focuses on the need for stable, effective funding sources to invest in water innovation and infrastructure. The 2014 update explains why it will take many billions of dollars of new investments over the coming decades to reduce flood risk, provide reliable and clean water supplies, recover overdrawn groundwater basins, and restore degraded ecosystems. The update includes a new finance planning framework and identifies potential revenue sources, such as federal grants and loans, general obligation bonds, revenue bonds, assessment districts, impact fees, private investments, public-private partnerships, and more. Detailed plan information both past and current is available at https://www.water.ca.gov/Programs/ California-Water-Plan/Water-Plan-Updates. Colorado The Colorado Water Plan’s executive summary provides a good overview of the efforts that went into preparing the plan for approval in 2015.5 The plan, including the executive summary, can be found at the following site: https://www .colorado.gov/pacific/cowaterplan/plan. This plan foresees an economy supporting vibrant and sustainable cities, productive agriculture, a strong environment, and a robust recreation industry. It provides strategies, policies, and actions that the state can use to address anticipated water needs consistent with this vision. The plan will be implemented by collaboration with basin roundtables, local governments, water providers, and other stakeholders. It provides a set of policies and actions, developed collaboratively, that all Coloradans and elected officials can support and help implement. Proposed solutions to address water needs are the result of more than 850 meetings in nine years, engaging hundreds of volunteer-participants statewide,

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drawing more than thirteen thousand comments from Colorado’s water community, interest groups, and the general public. The goals of the water plan are to defend the state’s compact entitlements, improve regulatory processes, and seek financial incentives while honoring the state’s water values and ensuring that its water resources are protected for future generations. The water plan is based on the legal and institutional system that governs use and allocation of Colorado’s water with three basic elements: interstate compacts and equitable apportionment decrees, Colorado water law, and local control. As Colorado and downstream states developed over time, there were many disputes over allocation of the waters of the Colorado River, an interstate stream among a number of states. Early litigation in the US Supreme Court that equitably apportioned water in rivers beginning in Colorado had nine formal agreements negotiated with downstream states; these agreements became legally binding contracts among the signatory states. Colorado water law is rooted in the prior appropriation system and has drawn widespread respect because of its success. It provides that water rights are property rights that can be bought and sold by willing parties and transferred to new users. It provides certainty among competing water uses by telling which takes priority. Colorado’s water is delivered by a network of water providers, public utilities, ditch and reservoir companies, individual water rights owners, and special districts, with each being unique; but each is local because Colorado’s structure of control is local. Municipal, county, and district officials make day-to-day decisions on issues ranging from water to emergency response. The water plan recognizes this local control structure as an asset to address water challenges but with state and local collaboration on water issues. About 70 to 80 percent of Colorado’s water falls west of the continental divide, but 80 to 90 percent of its population is located east, mostly along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Downstream states are legally entitled to water as determined by nine interstate compacts and two equitable apportionment decrees from the US Supreme Court. Wide variability in future precipitation is expected, including possible water supply shortfalls in the next few decades. The state’s legal and physical constraints present a gap between projected supply and demand in each basin. The Colorado Water Plan promotes a balanced strategy of conservation and reuse, alternative agricultural transfers, environmental and recreational projects, and municipal, industrial, and agricultural projects. The plan supports the watershed master plans that address needs from a diverse set of local stakeholders in each major watershed. In the development of the water plan, the Colorado Water Conservation Board is working with its sister agency at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to help representatives from each major river basin establish environmental water quantity



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and quality goals. The Colorado Water Plan also supports closer integration of water supply planning and land use planning. Texas Texas state water planning starts at the regional level with sixteen regional water planning groups from each of the state’s sixteen designated planning areas. The planning groups consist of members representing at least eleven interests, as required by Texas statute: agriculture, industry, public, environment, municipalities, business, water districts, river authorities, water utilities, counties, and power generation. During each five-year planning cycle, planning groups evaluate population and water demand projections and existing water supplies that would be available during times of drought. They also identify water user groups that will not have enough water during times of drought, recommend strategies that could address shortages, and estimate the costs of these strategies. Planning groups assess risks and uncertainties in the planning process and evaluate potential impacts of water management strategies on the state’s water, agricultural, and natural resources. Once the planning groups adopt their regional water plans, they are sent to the state’s water supply planning and financing agency, the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), for approval.6 The TWDB then compiles the state water plan to serve as a guide to state water policy, with information from the regional water plans and policy recommendations to the Texas legislature. Each step of the process is open to the public and provides numerous opportunities for public input. The state water plan for 2012 addressed the issues described below. Texas’s population is projected to increase by 82 percent over fifty years, but water demand in Texas is projected to increase by only 22 percent, from about 22,202 million cubic meters per year (18 million acre-ft./yr.) in 2010 to about 27,136.6 million cubic meters/year (22 million acre-ft./yr.) in 2060. On the supply side, surface water, and groundwater are projected to decrease about 10 percent, from about 20,969.2 million cubic meters/year (17.0 million acre-ft./ yr.) in 2010 to about 18,872.24 million cubic meters/year (15.3 million acre-ft./ yr.) in 2060. For planning purposes, existing supplies are those water supplies that are physically and legally available, defined as the amount of water that can be produced with current permits, current contracts, and existing infrastructure during drought. When projected water demands exceed the projected supplies available during drought conditions, the planning groups recommended water management strategies with specific plans to increase water supply or maximize existing supply. These strategies include 562 unique water supply projects designed to meet additional water needs for Texas during drought. This figure is lower than in

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previous plans because it does not separately count each entity participating in a given project. Four planning groups were able to identify strategies to meet all of the needs for water identified in their regions. Twelve planning groups were unable to meet all water supply needs for each water user group in their planning areas. Unmet water supply needs occur for all categories of water user groups, with the exception of manufacturing. Irrigation represents the vast majority of unmet needs in all decades. The state and regional water plans must be implemented to meet the state’s need for water during severe droughts. The planning groups also made a number of regulatory, administrative, and legislative recommendations that they believe are needed to better manage the water resources and to prepare for and respond to droughts. In 2016, the 2017 State Water Plan was adopted. Details on that plan and earlier ones can be found at: https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/swp/. Wisconsin With more than fifteen thousand lakes and eighty thousand miles of rivers and streams, water resources are very significant in Wisconsin. Watershed planning begins each year throughout the state with monitoring to evaluate the health of its waters. Biologists and trained volunteers gather monitoring data across the state on representative segments of rivers, streams, and lakes. Water quality data are evaluated against water quality standards to assess the condition of its waters. The state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR)7 staff conduct research to better define the pollutants, their sources, and their impairments and develop plans that identify management activities and strategies to enhance and protect the state’s waters. The DNR is required by the Clean Water Act (CWA) to develop a Continuing Planning Process Plan (CPP). The plan is an umbrella document that coordinates all aspects of water pollution control to help ensure that the state maintains progress toward protecting and preserving its water quality. The state CPP is a description of the state’s water quality management and planning activities, with references to technical documents and sources that explain water quality programs in greater detail. The CPP describes ongoing processes and planning requirements of the state’s Areawide Water Quality Management Plan (AWQMP). The Plan can be summarized by the following: • How decisions are made, how programs relate, and public involvement. • How programs are implemented, particularly within a specific basin or watershed, through monitoring, assessments, grants, and more. Basin/ watershed plans apply the rules, programs, and guidance, and identify opportunities for management actions at catchment (basin/watershed) and water (stream, lake, etc.) levels.

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• Basin plans identify ecological restoration/remediation priorities and goals and provide recommendations for specific management actions. • Sewer service area planning is used to develop and implement twenty-year sewer service area plans to protect water quality through systematic sewered development. Several methods are used to implement the state’s water quality programs. One is the AWQMP framework, a compilation of guidance and programs the state DNR uses to implement the CWA. Each of the federally required nine components of the AWQMP is updated individually. Some elements have individual processes that are automatically approved and certified as part of the state’s AWQMP, while others are transmitted in annual letters from the DNR secretary to the EPA as formal updates and amendments. This updating process varies with respect to triggers, time frames, public participation, and documentation procedures, but all elements are connected, and the DNR strives for consistency and continuity of program elements in efforts to have the highest standards of resource protection and restoration. Every two years, Wisconsin submits a list of waters considered impaired to the EPA for review and approval. The list identifies waters considered to be impaired, why they are impaired, and which pollutants to address through management actions. These activities are conducted when a total maximum daily load (TMDL) analysis is created, which quantifies pollutant loads and identifies pollutant load reduction goals based on the capacity of the water to process or assimilate those loads. TMDLs are management plans that go through public hearings and influence how point and nonpoint source activities are managed. Further information on Wisconsin’s AWQMP is at http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/ surfacewater/planning.html. Pennsylvania Pennsylvania has a complex set of water resources to manage: more than 138,000 kilometers (85,750 miles) of streams and rivers and more than 653 square kilometers (161,360 acres) of lakes. In addition, Pennsylvania is underlain by enough groundwater to submerge the entire state beneath 2.44 meters (8.0 ft.) of water. The state also has 101.389 kilometers (63 miles) of Lake Erie shoreline, 44 square kilometers (17 square miles) of Delaware Estuary, 5.12 hectares (12.65 acres) of tidal wetlands, and 4,039.24 hectares (9,981 acres) of freshwater wetlands. The Pennsylvania State Water Plan8 was approved by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) secretary in January 2009, replacing the outdated 1983 plan. That plan had prompted the DEP to conduct a series of sixteen water forums in the spring of 2001 that sought opinions from the public about

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water resource management. The forums helped the DEP set its strategic water resources management agenda and generated grassroots support for legislation to require the adoption of a new state water plan. The Water Resources Planning Act, signed into law December 16, 2002, established a Statewide Water Resources Committee and six Regional Water Resources Committees that have guided the DEP since 2003 in developing a new state water plan and updating it at five-year intervals. The water resources management priorities that were established by these six committees are extensive and were helpful in implementing the 2009 Plan in the subsequent updates and modifications. The State Water Plan offers tools and guidance to those making decisions that affect the state’s water resources or who make decisions based upon the availability of adequate water quantity and quality. The plan provides a qualitative and quantitative description of water resources based upon accurate, transparent, and readily accessible data. The plan consists of inventories of water availability, an assessment of current and future water use demands and trends, assessments of resource management alternatives, and proposed methods of implementing recommended actions. It also analyzes problems and needs associated with specific water resource usage such as navigation, stormwater management, and flood control. The basic intent of the plan is to identify and recommend strategies to avoid and resolve conflict among competing demands, and to ensure that water demands are met in a sustainable manner while providing natural resource protection. The plan also includes recommendations for action under various water resource topics, with a majority of those recommendations made to assure that surface water, groundwater, and riparian resources continue to be protected, restored, and enhanced. Further details of Pennsylvania’s water resources planning can be found at http://www.dep.pa.gov/Business/Water/PlanningConservation/State_Water_ Plan/Pages/default.aspx. Florida Florida is a water-rich state, receiving average annual rainfall of 134.62 cm (53 in).9 It has thousands of freshwater lakes and streams and has greater groundwater supplies than any other state. More than 7 percent of its total area is covered with inland freshwater. Like most water-rich eastern states, Florida applies the reasonable use doctrine of riparian rights. Florida is one of the fastest growing states in the nation. Its population grew by nearly 23.5 percent, or 3 million persons, during the 1990s, with its total population exceeded by only California and Texas.10 Florida’s population grew to more than 20 million in 2017, with an annual increase of more than 350,000.11 Among the reasons for this rapid and continuing growth are the state’s envi-



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ronmental resources, including the Everglades, thousands of miles of beautiful beaches, the Florida Keys and surrounding coral reefs, and plentiful sun and warm weather throughout the year. Florida’s freshwater use increased from 10.97 bld (2.9 bgd) in 1950 to 24.22 bld (6.4 bgd) in 2012. About 90 percent of the state’s 2010 population was served by a public supply system, 88 percent of which was groundwater. The growth in demand has slowed in recent years, but water disputes continue to arise between rural and coastal urban areas regarding the pumping of groundwater to the coastal urban areas, where 80 percent of Florida’s twenty million residents reside.12 Prior to the 1940s, the state’s dominant water management theme was drainage and land reclamation. Florida’s swamps, wetlands, rivers, and lakes were thought to be good mostly for alligators and mosquitoes. Accordingly, these water resources were diked, dammed, dredged, and drained. In 1949, the first multipurpose water management district was created, the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District (later named the South Florida Water Management District [SFWMD] in 1972), but its primary emphasis was on drainage and flood control.13 While the country experienced the start of the environmental movement in the 1960s, Florida was already witnessing detrimental environmental effects from growth and development. Severe droughts in South Florida in the late 1960s threatened its water supply, and the Everglades sustained several severe fires. As a result, the Florida Constitution was amended in 1968 to express a state policy of conservation and protection of Florida’s natural resources and scenic beauty.14 Beginning in the early 1970s, many significant Florida natural resources and environmental laws were passed. Relatively comprehensive lists of the environmental legislation in Florida can be found in several sources.15 Though there have been many other important water resource–related laws passed since 1972, a review of those laws and their importance would fill this textbook five times over. For expedience’s sake, the focus here is on the water resources planning aspects of Florida water law, particularly the 1972 Water Resources Act.16 It was this act that moved Florida into its modern era of water management by establishing the following policies: • To provide for the management of water and related land resources • To promote the conservation, development, and proper utilization of surface and groundwater • To develop and regulate dams, impoundments, reservoirs, and other works, and to provide water storage for beneficial purposes • To prevent damage from floods, soil erosion, and excessive drainage • To minimize degradation of water resources caused by the discharge of stormwater • To preserve natural resources, fish, and wildlife

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• To promote recreational development, protect public lands, and assist in maintaining the navigability of rivers and harbors17 The act was broad. As noted by Swihart, “All states have water management agencies of one kind or another. Most of these agencies in other states focus on single issues like water supply. Florida is remarkable for being the only state with a statewide system of regional water agencies with comprehensive water management responsibilities.”18 Unless specifically exempted by general or state law, all waters of the state are subject to the regulatory programs established by the act. “Waters of the state” were defined as “any and all water on or beneath the surface of the ground or in the atmosphere, including natural or artificial watercourses, lakes, ponds, or diffused surface water and water percolating, standing, or flowing beneath the surface of the ground, as well as all coastal waters within the jurisdiction of the state.”19 The act achieved its broad mission by creating an organizational structure for water management, with regulatory authority divided among five regional water management districts (WMDs) established along hydrologic basin boundaries rather than political boundaries (figure 7.1) as well as with the statewide environmental regulatory agency (the Florida Department of Environmental Protection [FDEP]). Generally, each WMD is governed by a unique nine-member civilian board appointed to four-year terms by the governor; board members receive no compensation. The act provides that the WMDs have authority to survey water resources, establish minimum flows and levels for surface and groundwater, declare water shortage emergencies, promulgate rules for the management and storage of surface waters, and develop alternative water supplies. The WMDs can tax, enter contracts, construct works, purchase land, establish basin boards, and regulate the construction of wells. The five WMDs have remained in effect for more than forty years and continue to function as the agencies for managing Florida’s water resources. The act also requires the WMDs to develop a permit system for the consumptive use of water that must be obtained for most uses, excluding domestic (selfsupplied) consumption by individual users. To receive a permit, applicants must demonstrate that the water use is a reasonable-beneficial use, will not interfere with any existing legal use, and is consistent with the public interest. It must be noted that the term “consumptive use” here is not the strict interpretation cited previously. Generally, consumptive use as referred to in this context relates more to total water withdrawals. With regard to water resources planning for the state, the FDEP is the state agency responsible for administering the Water Resources Act and exercising general supervisory authority over all the WMDs. Water supply planning is carried out at the state, regional, and local levels, as depicted in figure 7.2.

FIGURE 7.1 Florida Water Management Districts.

FIGURE 7.2 Legal Framework for Florida Water Planning. Source: South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD). (2016). 2016 Support Document for Water Supply Plans Updates: Reference Document, p. 4. West Palm Beach, FL: SFWMD.

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The Florida Water Plan is an overarching plan, a composite compilation of the water resources implementation rule, the WMD plans (now generally Strategic Plans [three–five years]), and water quality standards. The Regional Water Supply Plans are long-range plans (up to twenty years) that are updated approximately every five years. The purpose of the plans is to provide detailed information and recommended actions to ensure that projected water needs are met. All five WMDs must submit Regional Water Supply Plans for areas that may not have adequate water supplies within a twenty-year planning horizon. Hence the state is covered either by plans (where deficits are expected) or not covered by plans (if supply is adequate for the twenty-year planning horizon). The SFWMD has committed to preparing water supply plans that cumulatively cover its entire region. Most Regional Water Supply Plans of the WMDs are similar and include: • Population projections and water demand projections for six categories of water use • A water supply development component (the SFWMD’s 2018 Strategic Plan emphasizes the need for promoting the development of alternative sources, such as new surface water storage, reclaimed water, and desalination of brackish and saline water) • An analysis of the planning area’s water resources • A water resource development component, including a reasonable and sufficient funding strategy • The minimum flows and levels established for the planning area’s water resources • Water reservations20 Figure 7.2 also shows the role of the local government work plans that provide some of the basis of this planning framework. Taking this entire planning framework into consideration, one might wonder about the efficacy of the Florida Water Plan and possibly other state-level plans (as opposed to regional or local). In his book, Florida’s Water: A Fragile Resource in a Vulnerable State, Swihart states that the Florida Water Plan has had little influence.21 He states that Dr. John DeGrove (known as the “father” of Florida growth management) felt that this plan and other state plans were undercut in their effectiveness by a lack of funding for growth management. Swihart suggests that an agency focused on review and issuance of permits (such as the FDEP), has little time to dedicate to long-term planning efforts. Coincidentally, he refers to Dzurik22 for citing a reference that states, “the day to day pressure of regulatory decision [making] is simply a foreign environment for long-range planning.”23 This same concern could be leveled at the WMDs that also permit as well as plan. Perhaps the more local scale of planning and the WMDs’ ability to procure independent funding may enable the WMDs to be nimbler in this regard and continue to pursue both

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tasks successfully. For more complete information on this topic, the reader is encouraged to consult the Florida Water Plan website.24 As for water quality, the Florida legislature enacted the Water Quality Assurance Act in 1983 that focuses on groundwater protection and hazardous waste management with key objectives to: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Develop a groundwater monitoring program Establish a wellhead protection plan Set strict standards for on-site sewage disposal facilities Require the DEP to establish statewide criteria for underground petroleum storage tanks 5. Restrict the use of pesticides 6. Establish a cleanup program for hazardous-waste sites The FDEP division of environmental assessment and restoration is charged with monitoring and assessing Florida’s surface and groundwaters.25 The state continues to face major water problems as its population continues to grow, and concerns about climate change, sea level rise, and resource sustainability add to those problems. Solutions to these problems are controversial and expensive, and thus the planning function becomes essential to address them. Intergovernmental Water Projects and Programs This section provides summaries of several major water projects. They include the Everglades restoration program, the Chesapeake Bay restoration program, and the CALFED Bay-Delta program that has been going on in Northern California since 1994. These projects illustrate how large projects are undertaken at great expense, lasting many years and involving many layers of government. It is important to note that all have also faced a number of difficulties in their implementation, but overall, they have had significant success with managing and improving their water resources. Everglades National Park The Everglades represents the largest single marsh system in the United States and is home to a diverse spectrum of birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, including fifty-six federally listed endangered or threatened species and twentynine candidate species. The Everglades originally stretched a hundred miles from the southern end of Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay but is now confined to an area south of Miami. Everglades National Park is estimated to contain about 15 to 20 percent of the original Everglades.26

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Historically, water flowed in sheets across the four million acres from the upper Kissimmee chain of lakes to Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay,27 but the flow was altered substantially by construction of a massive water control system in the mid-twentieth century to provide water to South Florida and to control flooding.28 Between 1950 and 1974, what is now the SFWMD spent more than $300 million for the construction of the water control system.29 Water supply to the Everglades was further diminished during the 1960s when the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) channelized ninety-eight miles of the Kissimmee River to help control water flow to South Florida.30 Years of mismanagement had a devastating effect on the ecological integrity of the Everglades. Agricultural and urban sprawl replaced about half of the sawgrass wetlands, accompanied by stormwater runoff from phosphorus-enriched agricultural areas, nonnative plant infestation, mercury contamination, and the decimation of wildlife populations.31 The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) was developed in 1999 as a collaboration between the USACE and SFWMD. The goal was to restore the hydrologic connectivity of the Everglades to the predrainage conditions, being aware that some of the damage was permanent. The restoration comprised forty major projects, with sixty-eight project components to be completed at a cost of $10.9 billion in 2004 dollars. These projects include increasing storage capacity and improving water quality in addition to restoring predrainage hydraulic connectivity.32 The National Research Council’s Committee on Independent Scientific Review of the Everglades Restoration Progress noted in its first biennial review, in 2006, that the previous efforts in the region, including the Kissimmee River Restoration Project and the various stormwater treatment areas and best management practices implemented outside of the CERP, had improved natural systems and proved effective at reductions in phosphorus concentrations. However, the committee also noted that delays in construction schedules and the lack of funding could derail progress.33 This committee has continued providing biennial reports. These, as well as other material on the restoration plan and project, can be found at www.evergladesrestoration.gov. Unlike the older view of the Everglades as a swamp to be drained, the present plan reflects a drastically changed attitude toward environmental resources, even at a cost of billions of dollars. The benefits of undoing decades of damage is enormous. South Florida and the entire Everglades ecosystem will be healthy, with many of its original natural characteristics restored. Agricultural and urban water uses will enjoy an enhanced water supply, and flood protection will be maintained and partially improved in this hurricane-prone region. Chesapeake Bay Restoration The Chesapeake Bay Program was organized as a large, regional partnership to undertake restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. The voluntary program includes



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a number of federal, state, academic, and local organizations gathered to develop policies supporting Chesapeake Bay restoration. It combined the resources and strengths of the individual organizations to adopt and follow a unified plan for bay restoration. Included as signatories to the Chesapeake Bay Agreement are the Chesapeake Bay Commission (a legislative assembly representing Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania); the states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland; the District of Columbia; the EPA; the headwater states of New York, Delaware, and West Virginia; eleven additional federal agencies; sixteen academic institutions; and a large number of other organizations having an interest in restoration and maintenance of the bay. Since approval of the 1983 agreement, the Chesapeake Bay Program adopted three additional agreements to provide overall guidance for bay restoration: the 1987 Chesapeake Bay Agreement, the Chesapeake 2000, and the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement. The following list tracks the progress of those agreements. 1. The 1987 Chesapeake Bay Agreement established the program’s goal to reduce the amount of nutrients, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, that enter the bay by 40 percent by 2000. In 1992, the program partners agreed to maintain the 40 percent reduction goal beyond 2000 and to attack nutrients at their source in the bay’s upstream tributaries. 2. In June 2000, the program adopted Chesapeake 2000, an agreement meant to guide restoration activities throughout the bay’s watershed through 2010. It also provided the opportunity for the adjoining states of Delaware, New York, and West Virginia to increase their involvement in the partnership. These states now work with the program to reduce nutrients and sediment flowing into rivers from their jurisdictions. The renewed bay agreement was planned to guide restoration activities throughout the bay watershed through 2010. The agreement has five major categories dedicated to restoration and protection of the bay’s health: living resources, vital habitat, water quality, sound land use, and stewardship and community engagement. 3. Because the 2000 and 2010 targets were not met, President Obama issued an executive order in 2009, which ultimately resulted in the EPA establishing a TMDL for the Chesapeake Bay and the entire watershed in 2010 (a requirement of updates of the CWA). It is often called the “pollution diet” for the Chesapeake Bay. It was designed so that all pollution control measures to fully restore the bay and its tidal rivers would be in place by 2025, with 60 percent of the actions completed by (midpoint) 2017. This regulatory, enforceable tool set watershed load limits for nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediments, and set targets for submerged vegetation. The EPA was to use two-year milestones to track progress.

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4. On June 16, 2014, the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement was signed and included representatives from the entire watershed, which for the first time committed full partnership to the bay’s headwater’s states. The collaborative plan established goals and outcomes for the bay, its tributaries, and the lands that surrounded them. The partners promised to engage the citizens of the watershed to implement the goals. This effort launched the watershed implementation plans currently (as of 2018) underway. 5. In June 2017, the EPA performed its midpoint evaluation of progress to date. It provided reports to the following entities: federal agencies, the District of Colombia, and the states of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The EPA maintains a separate website for the TMDL program,34 and an extensive set of information regarding the entire Chesapeake Bay Program can be found at ChesapeakeBay.net. 6. As a sample of the results of the midpoint assessment, a review of Maryland’s Fiscal 2019 Budget Overview35 found that Maryland reported that it was on track to achieve its statewide 2017 targets for phosphorus and sediment but that it was not achieving its 2017 statewide target for nitrogen. Specifically, it was missing its 2017 nitrogen targets for agriculture, urban/suburban stormwater, and septic sectors. The report also stated that matters were improving for 2017 phosphorus and sediment targets and that the state was in compliance for all sectors except for urban/suburban stormwater. They reported that, as expected, the EPA has increased its oversight of Maryland’s stormwater sector due to lack of progress. Most likely the other states received similar results. 7. In January 2018, the different sub-basin jurisdictions submitted their 2018–2019 milestones to the EPA. 8. In terms of the overall “health index” of the bay, the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Report Card website scored a C grade for the bay in 2017, basically the same as in 2016. The bay exhibited some improvement but maintained poor to moderate conditions. Of the fifteen regions reporting, the region’s highest score was in the lower bay, while the regions surrounding the Patapsco and Back Rivers scored the lowest. Measures of success by specific ecologic indicators as well as by specific regions are also reported on the website, as well as trends from 1986 to at least 2017.36 CALFED Bay-Delta Program/Delta Stewardship Council The importance of CALFED becomes evident when understanding that the delta, located in Northern California, is a unique ecosystem and the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast, serving as home to more than 750 species of flora and fauna. It is also home to more than 500,000 people, and it is a major year-



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round recreation and tourist destination. The delta is faced with problems of a fragile system subject to the forces of land subsidence, seasonal flooding, potential effects of climate change, and the threat of earthquakes and collapse of its ecosystem. The CALFED Bay-Delta Program started in 1994,37 resulting from the California water crises of the early 1990s and conflicts among numerous agencies and interest groups. Its value was shown by providing a mechanism for increased interaction and cooperation among these organizations. Funding issues in the early 2000s further showed the value of the program, when it was seen as a wise alternative to costly and time-consuming legal conflicts among the many delta interests and as a means to resolve conflicts to benefit the system. In 2009, the CALFED Program transitioned to the Delta Stewardship Council. In May 2013, the Delta Stewardship Council adopted its first plan, the Delta Plan. The plan’s purpose was to create new rules and recommendations to further the state’s coequal goals for the delta: (1) Improve statewide water supply reliability, and (2) protect and restore a vibrant and healthy delta ecosystem, all in a manner that preserves, protects, and enhances the unique agricultural, cultural, and recreational characteristics of the delta. The development of the plan involved public meetings and public comments over a two-year period. The Delta Plan is guided by the best available science and is founded on cooperation and coordination among federal, state, and local agencies. It also carries regulatory authority such that state and local agencies need to be consistent with the Delta Plan. From a planning perspective, the juxtaposition of what would traditionally be two conflicting missions—water supply versus environmental protection—has taken hold here, and the state, through an intensive collaborative effort, is forging solutions for the betterment of both goals. Overall, the plan aims to do the following: • Reduce reliance on water from the delta by requiring those who take water from, transfer water through, or use water in the delta to describe and certify that they are using all feasible options to use water efficiently and to develop additional local and regional water supplies. • Identify ways to improve statewide water supply reliability throughout California by calling for state investments in improved local and regional supplies and water use efficiency. The plan also calls for improved delta conveyance and expansion of groundwater and surface storage. • Protect, restore, and enhance the delta ecosystem by designating six highpriority locations in the delta and Suisun Marsh to recover endangered species, rebuild salmon runs, and enhance habitat for wildlife. The plan also prioritizes actions to reduce pollution, ensure improved water quality, and limit invasive species, while moving to establish a more natural pattern of water flows in the delta.

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• Protect the uniqueness of the California delta by preserving rural lands for agriculture and habitat use, and requiring that new residential, commercial, or industrial development is located in areas currently designated for urban use. • Reduce risks to people, property, and state interests in the delta by prohibiting encroachment on floodways and floodplains, requiring a minimum level of flood protection for new residential development of five or more parcels, and committing to develop priorities for state investment in delta flood protection by 2015. • Integrate governmental actions and the best available science through both regulatory policies and nonbinding recommendations. • Call for swift and successful completion of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), which seeks to modernize the existing water conveyance system and improve the health of the estuary. If the BDCP meets the requirements of law, it will be incorporated into the Delta Plan.38 Backed by sound science and committed partners, this is another effort worth further investigating, monitoring, and serving as an example from which other organizations can learn from. The Delta Stewardship Council maintains a website at www.deltacouncil.ca.gov. Conclusion Although the procurement and distribution of water occurs locally for most of the US population through local water utilities, the regulation and management of the resource (groundwater and surface waters) often occurs at the state or regional level. The EPA report that more than 97 percent of the nation’s public water systems are small systems.39 But the underlying state water law as described in chapter 5 is the authority by which water is actively or passively managed in each state. And as discussed above, the states also administer the water quality regulations per requirements of the EPA, sometimes delegating these activities to local governments, but usually maintaining the administrative oversight of the state’s programs. The examples provided above reside in this legal, regulatory framework. Yet the framework, relatively static, has given rise to changes in groundwater management, how and for what water is planned for, and how perturbations in climate and demand are being accommodated. The examples above demonstrate that water planning is growing and maturing at a rapid rate. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that in a 2013 survey, twenty-eight of forty-seven states reported that they have water supply plans, while others were in the process of developing such. The GAO reports that thirty-eight of forty-eight states also had drought preparedness plans. Furthermore, states have been taking on a much more active role in assessing the future availability of water in their states (see table 7.1).

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TABLE 7.1 States with Assessments, 2003 and 2013 Number of States That Have Assessed Statewide Availability, Withdrawals, and Consumption Type of Assessment Availability Withdrawals Consumption

Number of States in 2003

Number of States in 2013

25 out of 47 36 out of 47 24 out of 47

26 out of 50 39 out of 50 25 out of 49a

In 2013, only 49 states responded to this question.

a

Source: GAO. (2014, May). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning, p. 37. GAO-14-430.

As the states wrestle with greater complexity—increased conflicts for water and external stresses such as increased population, legacy water systems, land use changes, and climate change implications—it is important that they maintain this momentum. Issues such as long-term funding, political or institutional changes in missions, or priorities of short-term gains over long-term outcomes threaten to derail these efforts. Armed with a greater set of planning tools, a collaborative approach and a One Water or IWRM framework, this progression (as exemplified above) should hopefully continue unabated. Study Questions For a state assigned to or selected by you, find the following information: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Which agencies are responsible for regulating water uses? What water classifications and permitting requirements exist? What water resources planning has been done? Does the state have a state water use plan? If yes, what are the plan’s goals and objectives? Identify which goals and objectives are most appropriate and explain why. Which state agencies are involved in major land developments in your state? Describe them, if water resource considerations are included. What are the most significant water quality and quantity laws that your state has adopted? Find out if your state uses comprehensive planning, and describe how it protects water resources. Explain what kinds of water resources planning is done at the local and state level and in what regard that would differ if multistate or federal involvement was involved. Name some specific examples of projects most likely seen at the local/state level and why they would not need other state or federal involvement.

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Notes 1.  Cunha, L. V., V. A. Figueiredo, M. L. Correia, and A. S. Goncalves. (1977). Management and Law for Water Resources. Fort Collins, CO: Water Resources Publications. 2.  The National Water Commission. (1973). A Summary Digest of State Water Laws. Washington, DC: GPO. 3.  US Water Resources Council. (1980, Apr). State of the States: Water Resources Planning and Management. Washington, DC: GPO. 4.  California Department of Water Resources. (2018). Water Plan Updates. California Department of Water Resources. Retrieved from https://www.water.ca.gov/Programs/California-Water-Plan/Water-Plan-Updates 5.  Colorado Water Plan Leadership Team. (2018). Colorado’s Water Plan. State of Colorado. Retrieved from https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cowaterplan/plan 6.  Texas Water Development Board. (2018). 2017 State Water Plan. State Water Planning. Retrieved from https://www.twdb.texas.gov/waterplanning/swp/ 7. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. (2017). Wisconsin Areawide Water Quality Management Planning. Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Retrieved from http://dnr.wi.gov/topic/surfacewater/planning.html 8. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. (2018). State Water Plan. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Retrieved from http://www.dep .pa.gov/Business/Water/PlanningConservation/State_Water_Plan/Pages/default.aspx 9.  No Author. (1995, Oct. 29). Water, Water Everywhere, but Sunshine State Still Going Dry, 10B. Tallahassee Democrat. 10.  Florida Land Use & Water Planning Task Force (1994, Dec. 1). Final Report: Recommendations of the Land Use & Water Planning Task Force. 11.  US Census Bureau. (2017). Quick Facts: Florida. US Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/FL/PST045216 12.  No Author, Water, Water Everywhere, but Sunshine State Still Going Dry. 13.  USACE. (1994). Central and Southern Florida Project Comprehensive Review Study. Jacksonville District. Jacksonville, FL: USACE. 14.  Fla. Const. art. II. 15.  Swihart, T. (2011). Florida’s Water: A Fragile Resource in a Vulnerable State. New York: RFF Press; Purdum, E. (2002). Florida Waters, A Water Resources Manual from Florida’s Water Management Districts. Brooksville, FL: Southwest Florida Water Management District; and St. Johns River Water Management District. (2018). Florida Water Management History. Palatka, FL: SJRWMD. Retrieved from https://www.sjrwmd.com/history/1970-1999/ 16.  Fla. Stat. § 373 (1995). 17.  Fla. Stat. § 373.016(2)(a)(i) (1995). 18. Swihart, Florida’s Water, p. 34. 19.  Fla. Stat. § 373.019(8) (1995). 20.  SFWMD. (2016). 2016 Support Document for Water Supply Plans Updates: Reference Document. West Palm Beach, FL: South Florida Water Management District. 21. Swihart, Florida’s Water, p. 46. 22.  Dzurik, A. A. (2003). Water Resources Planning, p. 110. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 23.  May, J. W., and S. Snaman. (1986). A Critique of Water Resources Planning in Florida. Vol. 4 of A Report to Five Water Management Districts. Tallahassee: Florida State University.



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24.  Florida Water Plan (website). (2018). FDEP. Retrieved from https://floridadep.gov/ water-policy/water-policy/content/florida-water-plan 25.  Division of Environmental Assessment and Restoration. (2018). FDEP. Retrieved from https://floridadep.gov/dear 26. US Department of the Interior. (1994, Mar.). The Everglades, Coastal Louisiana, Galveston Bay, Puerto Rico, California's Central Valley, Western Riparian Areas, Southeastern and Western Alaska, the Delmarva Peninsula, North Carolina, Northeastern New Jersey, Michigan, and Nebraska, p. 123. Vol. II of The Impact of Federal Programs on Wetlands. A Report to Congress by the Secretary of the Interior. Washington, DC: Department of the Interior. 27.  The Everglades: Back to the Future. (1995, Winter). Florida Water, 16. 28.  The Everglades, 16. 29.  No Author. (1996, Jan). South Florida Water Managers Get Mixed Reviews. Florida Agriculture, 55(1), p. 1. 30. USACE, Central and Southern Florida Project Comprehensive Review Study, p. 36. 31.  The Everglades, 16. 32. National Research Council. (2007). Progress Towards Restoring the Everglades: The First Biennial Review, 2006. Committee on Independent Scientific Review of the Everglades Restoration Progress. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https:// www.evergladesrestoration.gov/content/documents/NAS_report/NAS_report_2006.pdf 33.  National Research Council, Progress Towards Restoring the Everglades. 34.  Chesapeake Bay TMDL (website). (2018). EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/ chesapeake-bay-tmdl 35.  State of Maryland. (2018). Chesapeake Bay Fiscal 2019 Budget Overview. Annapolis, MD: Department of Legislative Services, Office of Policy Analysis. 36.  University of Maryland. (2018). Chesapeake Bay Report Card. Center for Environmental Science. Retrieved from https://ecoreportcard.org/report-cards/chesapeake-bay/health/ 37.  CALFED-Bay Delta Program Archived Website. (2007). CALFED-Bay Delta Program Archived Website. State of California. Retrieved from http://calwater.ca.gov/ 38.  Delta Stewardship Council. (2013). Final Delta Plan Cover Letter. State of California. Retrieved from http://deltacouncil.ca.gov/delta-plan-0 39.  EPA. (2016). Learn About Small Water Drinking Systems. EPA. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/dwcapacity/learn-about-small-drinking-water-systems

8 Water Quality

Introduction

W

ater quality is a relative concept. For example, different processes and water “needs” may require different levels of quality. Water that is high in dissolved solids may be viewed as low in quality for textile manufacturing but satisfactory for industrial cooling and even desirable for beverage production. Water for public supplies may be considered hard or soft and will have varying taste characteristics depending on its mineral content. Surface waters such as streams and lakes may be clear or muddy, warm or cool, and have a variety of other characteristics, including the level or degree of pollution. The word pollution is often mentioned in the same breath as water quality even though this problem is just one aspect of water quality concerns, since water quality is influenced by a number of natural and human-made factors. In the United States, the Clean Water Act (CWA), introduced in chapter 6, is the primary legislative mechanism to ensure good water quality. In order to address the goals of the CWA, it is imperative to have a clear understanding of water quality and pollution. This chapter deals with water quality issues in regard to certain uses or standards. It discusses how nature affects water, especially through the hydrologic cycle, and it considers the effects of humans and their wastes on water quality. It also provides an overview of the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of water quality and offers examples of how water quality is degrading across these three characteristics. It also provides a brief overview of the legislative framework that governs water quality planning. — 194 —



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Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resources planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms on water quality are the following. Water pollution The introduction of concentrations of a particular substance into water for a long enough period of time to cause deleterious effects, or, more generally, a material or condition that renders water unfit for a particular use. Water quality Those characteristics that are distinctive to a particular supply or body of water in relation to some use such as drinking, manufacturing, agriculture, recreation, or propagation of fish and wildlife. No single definition is satisfactory for all purposes. Stormwater Rainwater or melted snow that runs off streets, lawns, and other sites and accumulates in natural or constructed stormwater storage systems during or immediately following a storm event.1 Stormwater runoff Precipitation that does not percolate or evaporate from a storm event and which flows onto adjacent land or water areas and is routed into drain or sewer systems.2 Point source Source of pollution that involves discharge of wastes from an identifiable point, such as a smokestack or sewage treatment plant. Point source pollution Pollution from a single, identifiable source, such as a factory or refinery; also called single point source pollution. Nonpoint source pollution Pollution from many diffuse sources; any source of water pollution that does not meet the legal definition of “point source” in Section 501(14) of the Clean Water Act. Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) The sum of the individual waste load allocations (WLAs) for point sources and load allocations (LAs) for nonpoint sources. The Hydrologic Cycle and Water Quality As discussed in chapter 3, water continually moves over, on, and under the earth’s surface. It moves from the land to the oceans, to the atmosphere, and back again. In the course of this process, the water quality changes (see figure 8.1, which shows the movement of pesticides in the water environment).3 If we start with the evaporation part of the cycle, we find water in its purest natural form. Water molecules escape to the atmosphere as vapor, and the minerals remain on land or in the parent water body. As the water particles move through the atmosphere, they may absorb salts, solid particles, and gases. Rainfall has

FIGURE 8.1 Effects of the Hydrologic Cycle on Water Quality. Source: United States Geological Survey (USGS). (2014). Pesticides in Stream Sediment and Aquatic Biota. National Water-Quality Assessment Project. USGS Fact Sheet 092-00. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/ nawqa/pnsp/pubs/fs09200/.



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few minerals, but in some cases, the amount of dissolved substances may be substantial. Perhaps the most notorious example is “acid rain,” which appears to be related to certain air pollutants. Upon rainfall, more particles are washed from the atmosphere, and the water then moves through the land portion of the cycle. When moving over land, water can dissolve many substances as well as absorb substances or carry particles in suspension. Rivers that move rapidly have tremendous powers of erosion. Soils and rocks are broken down and moved, soluble minerals are dissolved, sediments are carried in suspension, organic matter is carried along, air is absorbed, and a continuous process of biological and chemical reactions take place. The amount of dissolved minerals found in water depends on the nature of rocks and soils that the water flows over or through, for these are the sources of many of them. Suspended sediments similarly depend on the nature of rocks and soils. All surface waters contain sediments, even mountain streams that may appear to be crystal clear. Sediment ranges in size from fine to coarse. Fine-grained sediments such as clay, silt, and sand are easily moved in suspension. Muddy rivers typically carry large quantities of clay and silt. Coarse sediments such as gravel are not held in suspension, but they can be carried great distances along the bottoms of relatively steep, rounded, fast-moving streams. In the process, they become broken down into smaller particle sizes. Groundwater characteristics are strongly influenced by the types of soils and rocks that the water permeates. Groundwater is modified both physically and chemically by the minerals and gases that it dissolves. Groundwater typically moves very slowly and remains in contact with the substrate for a long time. Accordingly, the water is able to dissolve many minerals and will contain stronger concentrations of dissolved minerals than are usually found in surface waters. River waters tend to have mineral properties similar to groundwater, providing there is base flow in dry periods. During rainy seasons or periods of extensive snowmelt, however, water flow in rivers will be much higher, more diluted, and less mineralized. Nature’s Effects on Water Quality Natural processes have influenced the characteristics of water quality as long as water has existed. The chemical, physical, and biological characteristics vary from place to place and from time to time, depending on the numerous natural factors acting upon the flowing water. These three types of characteristics are important in measuring the quality of water and are discussed below.

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Chemical Characteristics and Measures Pure water is a chemical compound whose formula can be represented as H2O; that is, two parts of hydrogen and one part oxygen.* For all practical purposes, however, chemically pure water does not exist in nature because water is able to dissolve many substances. Thus, water contains small amounts of dissolved minerals or salts. It also has dissolved gases, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide. Both surface water and groundwater are really solutions of many substances. It has been determined that most of earth’s known chemical elements have been identified in its waters.4 Of course some of the dissolved substances are common and are found in significant amounts, whereas most are found only in minute or trace amounts. Acidity is an important measure of natural water quality. The measure of the acidic or basic nature of water is defined as the logarithm of the reciprocal of the hydrogen-ion concentration. In other words, the pH Pure water at 24°C is balanced in terms of H+ and OH− ions, and it contains 10−7 moles per liter of each type.5 Thus, its pH is 7. (Recall that water with a pH less than 7 is acidic; greater than 7 is basic.) The range of pH is 0 to 14, with 6 to 8 being common for natural freshwater. The alkalinity of water is a measure of its capacity to neutralize acids and is measured in milligrams per liter (mg/l) of equivalent calcium carbonate (CaCO3), whereas acidity is the capacity of water to neutralize alkalis. It is also measured in mg/l of equivalent CaCO3. Other chemical parameters that are particularly common include dissolved oxygen, biochemical oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, and hardness. There is also a variety of chemical constituents that appear regularly in water quality measurements. Dissolved oxygen (DO) is considered to be one of the most important measures of water quality. The higher the concentration of dissolved oxygen, the better the water quality. Oxygen is only slightly soluble in water; thus, the saturation concentration is low; at 20°C (68°F) it is 9.2 mg/l. At 0°C (32°F) it is 14.6 mg/l, and at 30°C (86°F) it is only 7.6 mg/l. The dissolved-oxygen concentration drops substantially as water temperature goes up. At best, the saturation level of surface water is only about 12 mg/l, but warm weather, in combination with other factors, may cause it to drop below 5 mg/l. Dissolved oxygen is essential for most aquatic organisms, and the nature of the organisms depend on the levels of DO. Heavy, organic pollution loads will cause a sharp decrease of DO as bacteria use it up rapidly in decomposing the organic material. As they metabolize the organic material, the bacteria consume oxygen and break down the organics into simpler compounds such as CO2 and H2O. If oxygen is not continually replaced *Rare forms of water exist that combine deuterium and tritium isotopes of hydrogen with oxygen to give “heavy water.” Three oxygen isotopes also exist, allowing many chemical combinations.



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in the water, then the DO will decrease, depending on the quantity of organic pollutants to be decomposed. The need for oxygen by microbes is the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). Together, DO and BOD are the most common acronyms used in water quality and pollution control. Chemical oxygen demand (COD) is another water quality parameter that measures all organic constituents, including nonbiodegradable substances. A chemical test that uses a strong oxidizing agent—sulfuric acid—and heat can give a COD test result in as little as two hours. Much like BOD, it is a measure of the amount of dissolved oxygen needed to decompose chemical substances. Although COD values are always higher than BOD values for the same water sample, there is not a consistent correlation between them for samples of different wastewaters. Hardness is the term used to indicate the properties of certain highly mineralized waters, and it is measured in mg/l of equivalent CaCO3. Dissolved minerals cause practical problems, such as scale deposits in pipes and difficulty in producing soap lather, rather than any harmful health effects. Calcium and magnesium ions cause the greatest portion of hardness in natural waters, which results primarily from contact with soil and rock, especially limestone. Groundwater is generally harder than surface water because it remains in contact with mineral deposits for longer periods of time. Numerous other chemicals exist in water both naturally and from disposal of various chemical substances. Among the many other chemical substances that occur naturally in water, fluorides and chlorides occur frequently. The latter is especially common because it is a constituent of common salt, which appears naturally in groundwater and surface water. Other common chemical substances in water include sulfates and nitrogen and phosphorous compounds. The magnitude and variety of chemical compounds that appear in surface water and groundwater are receiving increasing attention. Physical Characteristics and Measures Physical characteristics of water provide another important dimension of quality. The important physical characteristics are (1) total suspended and dissolved solids; (2) turbidity; (3) color; (4) taste and odor; and (5) temperature.6 Factors such as color, taste, and odor may relate to both chemical and biological factors. For example, disagreeable tastes and odor are often caused in nature by microscopic organisms, decaying organic matter, and certain dissolved salts. Suspended and dissolved solids are physical measures of water quality that can be detected through laboratory analysis. Total solids can be found by evaporating a water sample and weighing the dry residue, and suspended solids can be determined by filtering another sample of the same water. The difference between total and suspended solids is the number of dissolved solids. Information

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on total suspended solids is important in the design of water treatment facilities, and the total dissolved solids concentration may be an important consideration for various water uses. Turbidity is the presence of small particles suspended in water that tend to scatter and absorb light rays, giving the water a murky or turbid appearance. Silt, clay, fragments of organic matter, and microscopic organisms are some of the substances causing turbidity. Groundwater normally has low turbidity because of filtration that occurs as water moves through the soil, whereas rivers and streams have comparatively high turbidity, especially after a heavy rain that causes soil erosion. Excess turbidity in surface water reduces the depth of sunlight penetration, which affects the photosynthesis of microscopic plants or algae and the overall biological balance of the water. Turbidity can also be an important factor in water treatment and water use. Color is a physical measure that may be caused by dissolved or suspended colloidal particles, usually from decaying leaves or microscopic plants. Tea is an example of an organic colloidal color. Rivers and streams with tributaries in swampy areas are particularly susceptible to coloration. Color may also result from various dissolved chemicals, both from natural sources and from human activity, such as industry. Color often gives one a clue as to what organic and chemical contaminants may be in the water. Unpleasant tastes and odors are common indicators of low water quality because they often stem from decay processes. Hydrogen sulfide gas, for example, is a common cause of odor in water supplies. The unpleasant smell of this gas may be encountered in water that has been in contact with natural deposits of decaying organic matter. Groundwater supplies that have this problem are sometimes called “sulfur wells.” Swampy areas, or heavily polluted areas, also give off sulfurcompound odors because of the decay of organic material that is taking place. Drinking water should generally be free of all color, tastes, and odor. Temperature is another important physical measure of water quality. Although aquatic organisms require certain temperature conditions in order to live and reproduce, most species can adapt to moderate changes. If the change is excessive, however, the organisms will perish or move to a new location. Usually an increase in temperature will cause more damage than a decrease because the solubility of oxygen in water decreases as the water temperature increases. Fish and other organisms need the oxygen to survive; moreover, their rate of metabolism increases with higher temperatures. Even though these sections describe the natural physical and chemical characteristics of water, the following example offers a brief overview of water quality impacts resulting from human interventions (or lack thereof), to highlight the relevance of physical and chemical water quality characteristics, whether they are artificial or natural.



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Example 1. Physical and Chemical Water Quality Characteristics: Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis In early 2016, a number of news outlets started reporting on lead poisoning of public waters in Flint, Michigan. For example, NBC News reports suggested that the residents of Flint who were on municipal water supply had, for almost two years, been consuming water that was contaminated with high levels of lead, a potent neurotoxin that is also responsible for various other adverse health effects such as skin rashes, hair loss, memory loss, and other long-term health impacts.7 The lead concentrations, whose origins are described by Fonger,8 affected the chemical water quality characteristics, but residents complained of the taste, color, and odor of the unpalatable water that was being delivered to their taps, and those physical water quality characteristics were of concern. Thus, the Flint, Michigan, case serves as an example of impaired physical and chemical water quality. Moreover, there are many perspectives with which water resource managers may approach this particular case study. These include economic, environmental, socioeconomic, and political, to name a few. These aspects are described below. For a detailed timeline of the events in Flint, please refer to compilations developed by news outlets such as CNN,9 NPR,10 Vox,11 and AP Reuters.12 These sources and others were used in developing the following summary. Economic Impacts. With a 2016 population of approximately 100,000, and a median income of $24,862, according to the US Census Bureau, approximately 41.2 percent of Flint residents live below the poverty line.13 The city had been experiencing the effects of a slow economy since the 1980s when General Motors, once the largest employer in the area, downsized. An audit in 2011 revealed a $25 million budget deficit, setting Flint on a potential path to bankruptcy. This led to the appointment of an “emergency manager” for the city, who reported to the state (and the governor’s office), thus taking power away from city officials, including the mayor. The officials then reached into a $9 million water supply fund and directed it toward a general fund. The plan was for Flint to build its own pipeline and connect to the Karengnondi Water Authority (KWA)—an option expected to save the region $200 million over twenty-five years. That project was slated to provide water to Flint by 2017. As this involved a lag of two years, the water source was temporarily switched to the Flint River rather than the current Lake Huron water, delivered through the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, as a money-saving measure. One of the biggest “economic” oversights occurred when the officials decided against spending $100/day on anticorrosion measures to address the Flint River’s highly corrosive water. These corrosive water properties would eventually lead to leaching of lead from the old lead distribution pipes, causing the poisoning event.

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At the time (2016), Governor Snyder estimated that it would cost $800 million to replace Flint’s faulty infrastructure. According to Business Insider, court documents released in 2017 noted that Michigan would set aside $97 million over the next three years to replace the lead pipes that affected more than eighteen thousand homes.14 The economic impacts also included paying for the filters that were provided to each household, for continued testing and analysis to monitor the lead levels, and for any other ailments that might result from the exposure and all associated health monitoring and treatment. Other relevant economic impacts were loss of property values, and potential loss of jobs and income as community members either recovered from the health effects of the consumption of contaminated water or cared for family members who were dealing with adverse impacts. Environmental (Human Health) Impacts. There is a substantial difference in quality between lake and river water. The Flint River in particular was the recipient of effluent from a number of industrial sources in the area and contained water nineteen times more corrosive than water from Lake Huron.15 However, in order to save the $100/day required to treat the corrosion in the water with appropriate chemicals, this aspect of the water quality was completely ignored. Therefore, even though the river water went through the conventional treatment units at the water treatment plant, its corrosive quality remained as it was released into the piping and distribution systems. The distribution system brought the treated water to local residents in their homes, schools, and offices. The corrosive water caused the leaching of lead from the old lead pipes that formed Flint’s distribution system, and levels of lead in the water arriving at residents’ taps increased significantly. While the lead concentration levels were not immediately noted, residents were complaining of the taste, color, and odor of the unpalatable water that was being delivered to their taps. They were assured that these characteristics were simply the aesthetic qualities of water, and while the water may look, smell, and taste that way, it was completely safe to drink. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set National Primary Drinking Water Standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and they are the primary safeguards for drinking water from a human health and well-being perspective. However, aesthetic characteristics are usually addressed under the National Secondary Drinking Water Standards, which are not enforceable under current regulations. A series of violations were reported since August 2014. These included detection of fecal coliform, prompting “boil water” advisories. Then, when excess chlorine was used to disinfect the bacteria, high levels of harmful disinfection by-products were produced. The high levels of lead became yet another violation. In late 2015, a team of researchers from Virginia Tech first raised concerns about the testing methodology used by state labs to determine the lead levels.



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The team’s tests of 252 homes revealed that Flint’s 90th-percentile lead value at twenty-five parts per billion (ppb) was well over EPA’s allowable limit of fifteen parts per million (ppm) applied to high-risk homes.16 Moreover, a physician at a local hospital also noted that the blood lead levels in children had doubled in a short time period since the switch in the water source. In the weeks and months that followed these revelations, Flint switched back to water from Detroit, the EPA established a Flint Safe Drinking Water Task Force, and several lawsuits were filed. The state of Michigan declared a state of emergency, and several state and federal agencies got involved. Details on the various entities and their involvement are captured in several news timelines referenced previously as well as the Virginia Tech Flint Water Study led by Marc Edwards, whose website was used to develop parts of this summary.17 Unfortunately, the lead issue is not limited to Flint, Michigan. USA Today developed an interactive portal with information on lead exceedances across the United States.18 Socioeconomic Impacts. The exposure to lead in the drinking water supplies is bound to have long-term consequences, especially on the health of the young children in the community. With more than half of Flint’s population being African American and more than 40 percent of residents living and working below the poverty line,19 environmental justice concerns have been voiced regarding this postindustrial city. Environmental justice is the requirement for federal agencies to guard against disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority and low-income populations (discussed further in chapter 9). Campbell et. al. describe the tragedy in Flint through an environmental justice lens and provide lessons learned as a way to move forward in correcting situations like these in the future.20 A CBS news report indicated that state government officials had been receiving bottled water a year before the residents.21 Programs are now being implemented to correct the situation, including long-term monitoring. Political Impacts. As this story emerged amid the 2016 presidential elections, political finger-pointing was also a major theme in this story. As this discussion is beyond the scope of this textbook, the reader is referred to a number of news outlets that covered the issue in great depth. A succinct synopsis can also be found in Grigg and other references.22 Numerous lessons can be learned. It is clear that decisions broke down at the technical level, and the management level failed to understand the ramifications of its actions and to adequately communicate among its members and with others. The financial problems of the city had been long-coming, and numerous opportunities over the years to alter this path could have been taken. The bottom line is that for water resources planners, several of the factors listed here as well as others come into play when planning for the management of water resources for a community, municipality, or region.

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Biological Characteristics and Measures Biological factors are significant in determining the quality of surface water and groundwater. A variety of organisms, ranging from bacteria and other microscopic organisms to large fish, commonly exist in natural surface waters. They are usually absent from most groundwater, however, because of the filtering action of the aquifer. The presence or absence of living organisms in water may be one of the more important measures of its quality. The diversity of species, especially fish and insects, gives an indication of the biological balance of the water body. A large number of different species usually indicates that the water is not polluted, whereas a smaller diversity together with the absence of certain species and excess of other groups generally results from pollution. Microscopic organisms, primarily coliform bacteria, are also important indicators of water quality, especially for assessing drinking water and sewage. There are two major categories among the various species of bacteria. Bacteria that need oxygen for their metabolism are called aerobic bacteria, whereas those that can live only in an oxygen-free environment are called anaerobic. The distinction between aerobic and anaerobic bacteria is important in water pollution and wastewater treatment. An important component of aquatic life is algae. Algae are microscopic plants that support themselves by converting inorganic matter into organic matter using energy from the sun. In the photosynthesis process, they take in carbon dioxide from the air and give off oxygen. Algae lack roots, stems, and leaves. Even though most species of algae are microscopic, they can be easily observed when their numbers proliferate in the water to become an algal bloom. Protozoa, the simplest of animal species, are single-celled microscopic animals that consume solid organic particles, bacteria, and algae for food. In turn, they are ingested as food by higher-level multicellular animals. These zooplankton, which float freely in water, are an essential part of the aquatic food chain and are significant in biological wastewater treatment systems. One group of protozoa, the flagellates, is propelled in water by a threadlike strand with whiplike action. One particular protozoon, Giardia lamblia, is an intestinal parasite that causes a form of dysentery in humans. One of the most important characteristics of high-quality water is that it is free of disease-causing organisms, including pathogenic bacteria, viruses, protozoa, or parasitic worms. Water that is contaminated with sewage may contain pathogenic organisms excreted by infected individuals. If such contaminated water is ingested before being properly treated, the disease cycle can continue to expand to epidemic proportions. Testing water for individual pathogens is difficult, time-consuming, and impractical. A more practical and reliable approach,



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however, is to test for a single species that would indicate the possible presence of contamination. If sewage is present, it is a safe assumption that the water may also contain pathogenic organisms and is therefore a threat to public health. A species serving this purpose is known as an indicator organism. As noted previously, the most important biological indicator of water quality and pollution is a group called coliform bacteria. Coliforms, which are not pathogenic, are always present in the intestinal tracts of humans, and millions of these bacteria are excreted with body wastes. Thus, water recently contaminated with sewage, if not treated, will always contain coliforms. An important indicator species of coliforms present in domestic sewage is Escherichia coli or E. coli. Even if the water is only slightly polluted, these bacteria are still very likely to be present. Coliform bacteria are hardy organisms that survive longer in water than most pathogens, and they are relatively easy to detect. If a sample of water does not contain coliforms, it can generally be concluded that there has not been recent sewage pollution and that there probably are not any pathogens. But if coliforms are detected, there is a reasonable probability of recent pollution from sewage. Groundwater Quality Chapters 10 and 11 and portions of 13 deal with issues relating to surface water, runoff, its treatment (or not), and methods to curb and treat surface water pollution. Therefore, this section will focus more heavily on issues pertaining to groundwater contamination. Though the focus is on groundwater in most cases, the potential for frequent and complex interaction of ground and surface waters (as described in chapter 3) is always present and should always be taken under consideration. Again, it is One Water. As noted in chapter 3, the National Groundwater Association (NGWA) estimates that approximately 44 percent of the US population relies on groundwater as a drinking water source, either directly through wells or through public municipal systems.23 Future use of groundwater can be expected to increase substantially in many regions because groundwater in many areas is the only high-quality, economical source available. At the same time, there is a dramatic increase in concern for groundwater contamination—generally with regard to drinking water supplies that have been affected. Many natural and other substances are stored and spread on or under the earth’s surface. These substances may infiltrate into the underlying soils and reach the groundwater table during precipitation events. The rate and direction of movement of contaminants (see figure 8.2) is a function of the type of pollutant and the hydrogeology of the local area.

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FIGURE 8.2 Typical Routes of Groundwater Contamination.

Groundwater contamination sources may include leaking septic tanks that percolate large amounts of effluent, sanitary sewers that leak wastewaters into surrounding porous soils, industrial waste impoundments, landfills, and storage piles, to name but a few. These and numerous other land uses pose threats to groundwater in many areas, with the degree of contamination ranging from slight to major concentrations of toxic substances. Agricultural activities cover vast areas and generally contribute substantial amounts of contamination, such as nitrates and dissolved salts, which leach into the soils.24 Amounts of precipitation and wastewater discharge are primary factors in moving pollutants through a soil profile. Surface water passes through the unsaturated zone and disperses in an aquifer in a definite pattern depending on local conditions. Under ideal conditions, a recharge mound forms on the water table and flows laterally outward. A sloping water table has inflow extending a short distance upstream, but most of the recharge spreads in a down-gradient direction in clearly defined boundaries. Figure 8.3 provides an example through a schematic developed by the US Geological Survey (USGS) that shows groundwater movement in an agricultural system. Groundwater contaminants thus move in a definite pattern rather than being subject to dilution by the entire



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FIGURE 8.3 Groundwater Movement in an Agricultural System. Source: Domagalski, J. L., and H. Johnson. (2012). Phosphorus and Groundwater: Establishing Links between Agricultural Use and Transport to Streams. Fact Sheet 2012-3004. USGS. Retrieved from https://pubs.usgs .gov/fs/2012/3004/.

body of groundwater underlying a disposal site. The direction and rate of dispersion are influenced by the rate of water movement. Polluted water in an aquifer forms a plume extending along the path of flow from the source. Although dispersal tends to reduce the concentration of a contaminant, mixing with groundwater is often limited by physical and chemical characteristics, and the plume may not fan out. The persistence of contaminants is a very serious concern for groundwater quality. Whereas the residence time of pollutants is days for water in a river, the average residence time of pollutants in groundwater ranges from decades to hundreds of years. A pollutant that is not readily decomposed or adsorbed underground can remain as a groundwater pollutant for an indefinite period (see “Example 2”). Continued concern about hazardous wastes in the United States is recognition of this fact. In addition to human contaminants, groundwater is affected by the nature of percolated soil and the aquifer. Groundwater is generally more mineralized than surface water but is also generally uniform in quality and stable in temperature. After filtering through the unsaturated zone, groundwater is normally free of microorganisms and suspended solids. The primary natural chemicals found in groundwater are dissolved salts, iron and manganese, fluoride, arsenic, radionuclides, and trace metals.

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Example 2: Groundwater Contamination: Industrial Waste Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) Contamination in New York and Vermont In 2015, levels of 18,000 parts per trillion (ppt) of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were found in groundwater samples of the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics facility in Hoosick Falls, New York. On June 4, 2015, 600 ppt of PFOA were recorded in four public water supply samples of Hoosick Falls. These levels greatly exceeded the provisional health advisory level of 400 ppt for PFOA that was established by the EPA in lieu of an enforceable drinking water standard for PFOA. Lower levels were also noted in some private wells.25 PFOA, also known as C8, and the related perfluoroctane sulfonate (PFOS) have excellent heat and stain resistant properties in addition to being biodegradable. This made them an excellent choice in the manufacture of products such as nonstick cookware, stain-resistant carpet, and firefighting foam, among others.26 Nearby, in Bennington, Vermont, residents around Chemfab, a manufacturer of Teflon coatings for fabrics, requested testing of their well water, as did those of the North Bennington municipal water supply. While the municipal water supply was not contaminated, levels above Vermont’s provisional drinking water health advisory limit for PFOA of 20 ppt were recorded in the five private wells that were tested.27 These completely synthetic agents are part of the perfluorinated compound (PFC) group of chemicals now recognized as being persistent and bioaccumulative in the environment. An extensive review of its properties, exposure pathways, toxicological and epidemiological studies, and relevance as an emerging drinking water contaminant is provided by Post et al.28 The Hoosick Falls–Bennington areas are not the first to have their water supplies contaminated with PFOAs. A number of states across the United States, as well as other countries, have been affected by PFOA contamination, a fact that is documented across multiple articles. This discovery, however, has raised further questions about the rules and regulations that govern the fate, transport, and overall management of chemicals in the environment. For water planners, it is imperative to be informed about the regulations that govern the disposal into water bodies of chemicals that may impair water quality and affect the communities that rely on these water bodies for various activities. This is a greater challenge in the case of new and emerging contaminants that do not have a maximum contaminant level associated with them, and where the provisional health advisory level may be different in different states, compared to the recommended EPA levels.



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Saltwater Intrusion Another “contaminant” of concern for groundwater supplies is saltwater intrusion. Although saltwater intrusion is a natural process, it is often exacerbated by human activity. Figure 8.4 shows how saline groundwater can rise as a result of a deepened channel and subsequent lowering of the water table. Saline water occurs because of reduced pressure of the overlying freshwater. Heavy pumping from wells usually causes intrusion of saltwater into aquifers in coastal areas. As coastal populations grow rapidly, especially on the South Atlantic and Gulf coasts and parts of the Pacific coast of the United States, groundwater withdrawals will continue to increase and induce additional saltwater intrusion. Innovative solutions will be needed, such as freshwater injection wells to store water during periods of excess flow and to reverse the hydraulic gradient in the aquifer.

FIGURE 8.4 Migration of Saline Water Caused by Lowering Stream Water Levels.

Domestic Pollution The most serious, widespread source of groundwater contamination is subsurface disposal of domestic wastewater from individual household systems, particularly septic tank absorption fields and cesspools. The absorption field usually consists of perforated pipe laid in gravel-lined trenches. Organics decompose in the aerobic environment of the bed, which is ventilated to the house

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plumbing stack, and the water seeps down into the soil profile. If a water supply well is nearby and the soil is permeable, seepage reaching the water table can be withdrawn from the well water. Approximately 25 percent of the US population dispose of their domestic wastes through individual on-site systems; 96 percent of those are septic tanks.29 A well may be easily polluted by disposal systems nearby, as evidenced by numerous examples throughout the country. A largescale problem results when disposal units pollute groundwater supplies over a broad area. Correction of widespread septic contamination is expensive, for it generally requires replacement of individual septic tanks with public sewers and central sewage treatment. Municipal and private landfills and solid waste dumps have been used in much of the country as a means of “disposing” of waste. Many sites in the past were in places highly sensitive to groundwater pollution, such as marshes, abandoned mines, quarries, and limestone sinkholes. As little knowledge of or concern for groundwater pollution then existed, such sites were intended for “reclamation.” Increased knowledge of groundwater contamination together with stringent federal and state regulations have substantially altered the landfill approach to waste disposal. Modern landfills are strictly controlled and designed to prevent infiltration of leachate and other contaminants into the ground. Industrial Pollution Much like municipal solid waste, industrial wastes, sludge, and by-products are also sources of groundwater contamination. These contaminants have often been placed in impoundments or in landfills. Percolation into the ground ultimately results in contamination of underlying groundwater in most cases. Similarly, accidental spills of liquid wastes, toxics, petroleum products, and other substances can result in migration through the unsaturated soil zone to groundwater. Hydrocarbons are commonly reported as spills from leaking or ruptured underground pipelines and storage tanks. Hydrocarbons in groundwater persist for years, and even trace levels in water cause an unpleasant taste and negative health effects. Agricultural Pollution As rainfall or irrigation water is applied to agricultural land, it filters dissolved substances from surface soils. As some of this water experiences evapotranspiration, the water that infiltrates has a higher concentration of dissolved salts (two or three times greater than in the applied water). Irrigation generally applies more water than is consumed by evapotranspiration and direct percolation, resulting in either overland runoff or subsurface seepage to surface watercourses,



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groundwater, or both. In arid climates (with vast acreage in irrigation), this process increases the concentration of dissolved minerals with each water application and/or reuse. Groundwater quality in the southwestern and south-central states has deteriorated as a result of this process, and salt buildup is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Fertilizers and pesticides similarly can migrate into the groundwater under cultivated land. The most troublesome health-related pollutant from agriculture is the nitrate ion, carried by water percolating through unsaturated soil and groundwater flow in the saturated zone. The use of synthetic fertilizers has increased substantially. Because the application of inorganic nitrogen is often in excess of the amounts removed by the crop, buildup in the soil results in increased percolation of the substance into the underlying groundwater. For example, in a study in seven watersheds in the Minnesota–St. Paul area, it was determined that 80 percent of the nitrogen inputs through lawn fertilizer application and pet waste were retained in the watershed as nitrogen leached into the groundwater.30 Even though the previous sections described how various activities contribute to groundwater pollution, it is important to note that these contaminant pathways may also reach surface water sources such as lakes, rivers, streams, and so on, and cause surface water pollution. Quality Control Prevention is essential to groundwater quality control because remedial actions are expensive, if possible at all, and natural cleansing requires many years. Knowing potential sources of pollution and understanding the hydrogeology of a region are both needed to prevent groundwater pollution. Figure 8.5 summarizes the hydrologic system from source identification through environmental impact, and the methodologies for prevention, monitoring, and abatement of groundwater pollution. The nature of a groundwater system determines the techniques available to prevent, monitor, and abate degradation. Emerging Contaminants and Water Quality Increasing research and development of products in the United States has led to large number of emerging contaminants, whose effects on water quality are currently being researched. Several have no definitive policies related to sampling, analysis, monitoring, or treatment in place. Two categories of these emerging pollutants are described in this section. The EPA maintains a website that provides users a wide array of information and links regarding chemicals and toxics.31

FIGURE 8.5 The Hydrologic System Controlling Groundwater Contamination.



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1. Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) The World Health Organization defines pharmaceuticals as “synthetic or natural chemicals that can be found in prescription medicines, over-the-counter therapeutic drugs and veterinary drugs, and they contain active ingredients that evoke pharmacological effects and confer significant benefits to society.”32 The benefits of pharmaceutical products have also been juxtaposed against environmental and human health concerns, as shown in these news headlines: “Frogs, Fish, and Pharmaceuticals—A Troubling Brew”33 or “Fish on Prozac: Our Pharmaceutical Drugs Are Turning Up in the Environment and in Animals. What Will the Consequences Be?”34 The headlines, both published in 2003, appeared after a national reconnaissance of streams was conducted by the USGS, in which 139 streams across the United States were monitored over a period of one year, from 1999–2000, and the report published in 2002.35 This study described the analytical results (using five different analytical methods) of monitoring the 139 streams for organic wastewater contaminants (OWCs) in what is considered the first national reconnaissance of the occurrence of pharmaceuticals, hormones, and related OWCs. The results implied that several PPCPs persist beyond wastewater treatment and biodegradation and may pose a threat to human life and the environment. Since the late 2000s, several advances have been made in the analytical procedures used to detect these micro constituents in water. With regard to pharmaceutical compounds, Daughton reported that the active pharmaceutical ingredients currently detectable in the environment vary over approximately nine orders of magnitude (for example, from nanograms/liter in drinking water to kilograms/liter in manufacturing wastes and sewage biosolids).36 The EPA is one of several agencies that have provided significant funding to determine the fate and transport of such PPCPs in the environment and to better understand the potential impact of these constituents on the human health and the environment. In addition to the USGS study that focused on groundwater, the reader is referred to critical review articles on the occurrence of PPCPs in the marine environment, such as one by Arpin-Point et al.37 Their findings reveal that human activities have greatly influenced the presence of PPCPs in the marine environment, with high prevalence of antibiotics such as erythromycin in seawater. 2. Nanomaterials The National Nanotechnology Initiative defines nanotechnology as “the understanding and control of matter at dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications.”38 The technology involves manipulation of materials at the nanoscale to take

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advantage of the unique properties exhibited by materials at this scale, such as their reactivity, melting point, mechanical strength, fluorescence, and electrical conductivity, among others.39 A number of researchers, including those at the EPA, are working on determining the fate and transport of nanomaterials in the environment. For example, the EPA has developed case studies on engineered nanomaterials such as nanoscale silver (used in disinfectant sprays)40 and nanoscale titanium dioxide (used in topical sunscreens).41 This is an important consideration for water resources planners particularly because one of the main environmental applications of nanotechnology is in the water sector. Specifically, as desalination has been proclaimed as one of the best solutions to counter the growing threat of limited water supply across the world, the use of carbon nanotube membranes is expected to reduce desalination costs. Nanofilters are already increasingly being used in wastewater and groundwater treatment. In fact, nanosensors are being developed to detect waterborne contaminants.42 Thus, even as nanomaterials and technology spread across the water sector, additional research and determination of the fate, transport, and effects of such materials in the environment is essential. Impacts of Land Use on Water Quality There is a widespread and ongoing concern about the interrelations between water resources and land use. For years, those administering federal water programs have talked of “water and related land resources.” The reality, however, is that little attention actually had been given to the interrelations, largely because of institutional conflicts. Many federal agencies maintain that land use regulation is a local responsibility and so they have not intruded into this area of control. The National Flood Insurance Program, for example, requires appropriate land use regulations in floodplains, but these regulations are to be prepared and implemented by local governments. Similarly, land use control measures directed at improving water quality are minimal and left largely to local governments. Because water quality and other water resources programs are dominated by federal legislation, and administration and land use regulation are primarily the prerogative of local governments, intergovernmental cooperation and coordination are essential for dealing with water–land use interrelations. The relationship between land use and water quality is very strong, with respect to both surface water and groundwater. This has become particularly apparent over the past decades, as stormwater runoff has become a dominant issue with regard to the CWA and the nation’s water quality, and it has caught the attention and dedication of the planning profession.43 Urban stormwater runoff, which can have serious effects upon receiving waters, is a direct function of urban land use. The regulatory structure that can prevent stormwater



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from impairing water quality is discussed in the next section, while the topic of managing stormwater is covered at length in chapter 11. Similarly, agricultural runoff is a function of rural land use and management practices. Surface water and groundwater have been contaminated in numerous places, both urban and rural, because of unwise land use practices. Hazardous wastes from landfills and industrial sites, mining operations, contamination from fertilizers and pesticides, and pollutants from septic tanks are but a few of the ways in which water becomes contaminated. All are directly tied to land use practices. It is important, therefore, for planners to recognize and accommodate the many interrelations between water resources and land use in their plans, as discussed in chapter 3. Water resource managers and planners, along with a variety of stakeholders and professionals, must be cognizant and articulate in a wide field of disciplines. These managers, planners, and agencies will need sufficient technical, economic, social, financial, and environmental skills to be able to communicate with and work in a collaborative way to solve water resource problems.44 Open Space and Agriculture A dominant water pollutant originating on agricultural land is suspended soil particles. With about one-half of the sediment that reaches lakes and streams originating on cropland, it is easy to visualize the pollution from this source. Runoff from agricultural land usually contains enough nutrients for growth of algae. Runoff of nutrients from agricultural land into freshwater and ocean water systems as well as groundwater has been extensively studied over the past several decades. Numerous collaborative agencies (for example, the Lake Champlain Basin Program)45 and university agricultural extensions (for example, the ones at the University of Florida or North Carolina State)46,47 have published extensively on this topic, documenting the impact of agricultural nutrient pollution on the regional waters. The main improvement has come from controlling the runoff before it is discharged to surface waters (see chapter 11). The use of fertilizers and pesticides will continue to be substantial, and thus the runoff of such nutrients to waterways can be expected to continue as a major water quality problem. Pesticide use has increased dramatically in recent years, and the problem is compounded by the diversity of chemical substances used. The characteristics of pesticides that are of most concern to water quality management are toxicity, solubility in water, persistence in the environment, and potential for bioaccumulation. Runoff is the usual path of pesticides to surface water, moving either in solution or adhering to soil particles. Each heavy rainfall, especially those following land applications of pesticides, becomes a threat to water quality. Another important agricultural pollutant is organic loading from animal and crop residues. Animal feedlots, for example, are one of the major nonpoint

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TABLE 8.1 BOD of Wastes from Selected Industries Source of Waste Brewery Beer slop Cannery Grain distilling Molasses distilling Laundry Milk processing Meat packing Pulp and paper Sulfite Sulfite-cooker Tannery Textiles Cotton processing Wool scouring

BODs, 20° C, mg/l 500–1,200 11,500 300–4,000 15,000–20,000 20,000–30,000 300–1,000 300–2,000 600–2,000 — 20 16,000–25,000 500–5,000 — 50–1,750 200–10,000

Source: McGauhey, P. H. (1968). Engineering Management of Water Quality New York: McGraw-Hill.

sources of organic pollutants to many surface waters. The primary effect of these organic pollutants is to generate large oxygen demands when they enter waterways. The oxygen demand of agricultural wastes is clearly demonstrated in table 8.1. Crop residues, or materials such as stalks, stems, and seeds, left in the agricultural field following a harvest are another major potential source of pollution, but good agricultural practices will stabilize these residues and work them into upper soil layers. Numerous other nonpoint sources of water pollution exist in open land. Thus, all stormwater flows that cannot be traced back to their origin, as is the case with most agricultural runoff, and end up untreated in a water body, are considered nonpoint sources of pollution. Over one-third of US land is in forest, two-thirds of which are classified as commercial. The effects of silviculture on water quality can be substantial, even though intermittent and irregular. Much like agriculture, the major effects are from sediments, nutrients, and pesticides. Outdoor recreation areas pose similar threats to water quality and may be especially troublesome because of the proximity of aquatic recreation. Another substantial threat to water quality occurs in fracking and mining areas. Acid drainage from both surface and deep mines may produce crystal clear water but only because of the absence of any aquatic organisms—such organisms are decimated by the high acidity of the water associated with mining operations.

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Example 3. Land-Water Interaction: Hydraulic Fracturing First introduced in the 1940s, hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is the process of fracturing rock by a pressurized liquid. It is a process of mining employed to enhance the extraction of oil and gas from subsurface reserves. Hydraulic fractures can form naturally and can result in formations like veins or dikes. However, induced hydraulic fracturing is a technique that injects a solution of water mixed with sand and chemicals into a well at high pressure. The process involves the construction of deep vertical wells, supported by a horizontal well at depth, where explosive charges are used to produce small fractures. Once the well is drilled and the charges are set off to induce fracturing, fracking fluid is injected into the well under high pressure. The components of the fracking fluid are • 90 percent water • 9.5 percent proppant • 0.5 percent chemical additives48 The water is used to dilute the solution and to have a viscosity low enough to pump through the well. Proppants include granular material used to prop open the fissures to maximize the output from the fractures. There are many different types of chemical additives commonly used in the fluid, including the water, diluted acids, corrosion inhibitor, biocides, friction reducers, gelling agent, crosslinking agents, breaker solution, oxygen scavenger, iron control and stabilizing agent, surfactant, scale inhibitor, and proppant. For a more detailed breakdown of these additive types, main compounds, and purpose, see Chen et al.49 The types of chemicals that are added to obtain maximum efficiency of the well are introduced to avoid erosions of the well pipe, to protect the surrounding formation, and to prevent breakdown of the pipe connection seals. Other chemicals are added depending on the geology of the site to erode the rock away and get more product. In 2011, the gas and oil industry released the name of 750 chemical compounds that the fluid could be. Most of these chemicals were found to be harmless. However, there are also twenty-nine chemical compounds that are known or are possible carcinogens to humans, such as • Benzene (B) • Lead • Toluene (T) • Ethyl benzene (E) • Xylene (X) • Methanol50

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The fracking fluid that is returned is called “flowback” (or produced water) and is typically stored onsite in tanks or pits before treatment, disposal, or recycling. The composition of the flowback includes salts, metals, BTEX, radioactive materials, and fracking chemicals and their breakdown products. Approximately 10 to 100 percent of the injected fluids may return, depending on the type of shale formation.51 Hydraulic fracking accounted for slightly more than 50 percent oil and more than 70 percent gas production in 2015. Directional drilling operations from 2000 onward allowed access to shale deposits (for example, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania or the Bakken Shale in North Dakota). Approximately 13,000 new wells are drilled each year.52 The EPA studied more than 1,200 articles and reports on hydraulic fracking and provided its final assessment in 2016.53 The report stated that the following combinations of activities and factors are most likely to result in more frequent or severe impacts to water quality: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Withdrawing water for hydraulic fracking from water stressed areas Mismanagement during fracking operations, resulting in spills Injection of fracking fluids into sensitive areas of the aquifer Disposal or discharge of inadequately treated hydraulic fracking wastewater to surface waters or unlined pits that may impact groundwater resources

Urban Land Use and Development The two major sources of urban water pollution are industrial and domestic sewage and stormwater runoff. Most industrial and domestic sewage, where effluents are discharged through a pipeline, may be categorized as point source pollution. Stormwater may be categorized as either point source or nonpoint source of pollution, depending on whether the stormwater is discharged through a storm or sewer piping system or simply runs off urban landscapes and directly reaches a water body without entering a pipe. Much of the public supply water use (less system water loss and seepage) is returned to municipal sewage treatment systems for processing before being returned to natural water bodies. There is a wide range in the level of treatment, and the effects on receiving surface waters vary accordingly. In general, all treatment plants provide some form of pretreatment, which involves screening and grit removal, and primary treatment, which largely involves sedimentation or settling to allow most of the total suspended solids (TSS) to settle out and be removed. Congress requires secondary treatment, which typically involves a biological system, such as an activated sludge system, to remove BOD and additional TSS. Thus, most treatment systems apply at least secondary treatment, but the effluent from such systems is fairly high in nutrients. Largely because of the CWA, more emphasis has been placed on tertiary treatment in recent years, in order to remove most of the nutrients before the effluent is released to receiving waters.



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One of the major sources of surface water pollution in and near urban areas is urban storm runoff. Very simply, increased urban development results in increased runoff volume from structures and paved surfaces. Together with the increased runoff comes increased dust, dirt, and residue generated by urban activity. Rainfall may be viewed as a cleansing agent for the city, but the result is polluted runoff to nearby surface waters. Generally, the greater the interval between rainfalls, the higher the accumulation of pollutants to be washed off with the next rain. Precipitation passing over urban surfaces is exposed to a variety of contaminants; accumulated debris, animal droppings, eroded soil, tire and vehicular exhaust residue, air pollution fallout, heavy metals, deicing compounds, pesticides, decayed vegetation, and hazardous material spills are among the most significant sources of contaminants carried by urban stormwater.54 Other contaminants may be introduced to sewers through openings in the sewer system. Street drains often are used as receptacles for waste automobile oil, dog droppings, leaves, and lawn trimmings. Although many cities may have storm sewer systems, which allow for transporting storm runoff to sewage treatment plants, much urban storm runoff ends up in surface waters without any treatment at all. Related to urban storm runoff is the runoff from construction activity. In the absence of any controls, substantial amounts of sediment can be eroded from construction sites. An increasing number of communities now require retention basins not only for construction sites but also for large completed projects such as shopping malls and office complexes. Stormwater planning and management is covered in more detail in chapter 11. Industrial Use Industrial wastewater varies considerably according to the industry and the manufacturing process. In the late 1960s, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland became famous when it caught fire because of the heavy load of industrial discharges it was receiving. Episodes on the Rhine River in 1987 again showed the potential harmful effects on water quality of uncontrolled releases of industrial products and wastes. Heavy industrial waste discharges to water bodies still occur in many countries and remain a major challenge for pollution control. Aside from the many possible toxic wastes from industry, the organic load of a number of industries is very high and frequently requires on-site treatment processes (see table 8.1). The pulp and paper industry, for example, often has extensive water treatment facilities on-site to handle its large volumes of process water with high organic loading. Electrical power plants may result in effluent discharges that impact the water temperature of the receiving water bodies, affecting dissolved-oxygen concentrations and causing other biochemical changes that may be detrimental to aquatic life.

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Land-Water Interfaces Four significant land-water interfaces are environmentally sensitive and should be given careful consideration with respect to land uses: watersheds, shorelands, estuarine wetlands, and floodplains. A watershed is the land over which water drains to a particular point in a stream. When development is planned in a watershed, natural drainage patterns should be preserved and adequate open space should be provided. Acquisition of critical land areas, zoning, and other land management methods might be used depending on the terrain, type of development, and allowable practices in that jurisdiction. A watershed approach is one of the fundamental components of the integrated water resources management (IWRM) framework. Shorelines, defined as “where a large body of water meets land,” including land adjacent to streams or lakes, have significant effects on water quality, especially in wetlands. Shorelines are part of a watershed, and the precautions regarding development in watersheds identified above are also important for shoreline development. Shorelines have some unique problems, too, including pollution from septic tanks, erosion from land clearing, loss of aesthetic values, and disruption of natural environments. Problems of these types should lead to shoreline ordinances, including building-permit systems to control minimum lot sizes, waterfront setbacks, tree cutting, dredging and filling, draining, and septic tank installations. Additionally, with sea level rise, coastal shorelines require further consideration to allow space for the shorelines to adapt in order to maintain their ecological and hydrologic properties. A floodplain is the relatively flat and lowland area adjacent to a stream or river. Restrictions that should be enforced in a floodplain are discussed more fully in chapter 10. An estuary occurs where water from streams or rivers mixes with saltwater from the ocean or other major saltwater bodies. Estuaries and adjacent wetlands are important ecological areas that provide much of the spawning habitat for marine life. Intrusion into estuaries and wetlands can cause serious disruption of ecologic processes that depend on a number of factors, such as freshwater inflow, temperature, sediment load, and nutrient levels. Some human activities associated with urban development that could seriously affect an estuary are damming streams that feed the estuary, filling in wetlands and the estuary itself for construction or other purposes, dredging stream bottoms and wetlands for navigation, diverting the freshwater supply, discharging wastes directly into surface waters, using the water for cooling, and using pesticides and fertilizers on nearby land. While the interactions presented so far have historically challenged planners, climate change continues to pose additional and complex concerns across these land-water intersects in direct and indirect ways. Planners also have to increasingly deal with emerging issues, where policy is either not established or nonuni-



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form across the nation, thus adding to uncertainties and requiring flexibility. A great example of such a land-water interaction is hydraulic fracturing. Water Quality Planning: The Legislative Take A major focus of water resources planning over the past five decades has been on water quality, particularly under the impetus of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 (P.L. 92-500)55 and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-580).56 These were described in chapter 6, but as a reminder, P.L. 92-500 set forth bold water quality goals to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters. The six specific goals developed to meet this objective were also noted in chapter 6, and they ranged from eliminating the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters, to developing technology necessary to ensure such elimination. Under provisions of Section 305 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, a biennial report to Congress is prepared by the EPA; titled the National Water Quality Inventory Report to Congress (305[b] report). It is the primary vehicle for informing Congress and the public about general water quality conditions in the United States. This document characterizes water quality, identifies widespread water quality problems of national significance, and describes various programs implemented to restore and protect the nation’s waters. The EPA website lists past 305(b) reports.57 In 2002, the EPA decided that the 305(b) reports should be integrated with the reports submitted under Section 303(d), in which states are required to submit lists of impaired water bodies in the state. EPA’s 2017 national water quality inventory summarizes results from previous surveys and assessments and notes the following:58 Rivers and streams: 46 percent of river and stream miles are in poor biological condition, according to the National Rivers and Streams Assessment of 2008–2009. The primary chemical stressors are nitrogen and phosphorus. Lakes, ponds, and reservoirs: 21 percent are hypereutrophic (according to the National Lakes Assessment of 2012), defined as water bodies with high nutrient concentrations, primarily due to nitrogen and phosphorus, and hence increased productivity. Coastal waters: Based on the National Coastal Assessment of 2010, 18 percent of the US coastal waters are in poor biological conditions, primarily due to phosphorus. Wetlands: Based on the National Wetland Condition Assessment of 2011, 32 percent of the nation’s wetland areas are in poor biological condition, due to stressors such as soil compaction and vegetation removal.

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A summary of the assessed rivers, lakes, and estuaries is shown in table 8.2.59 The EPA inventory also provides cumulative lists of the leading causes and sources of impairments to these water bodies by state.60 While some top causes and sources are unknown, the following list provides three known causes and sources for each category: Rivers and streams: Causes—pathogens, sediment, nutrients Sources—agriculture, hydromodification, atmospheric deposition Lakes, ponds, and reservoirs: Causes—mercury, nutrients, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) Sources—atmospheric deposition, unspecified nonpoint sources, agriculture Bays and estuaries: Causes—PCBs, nutrients, mercury Sources—legacy/historical pollutants, urban-related runoff/stormwater, atmospheric deposition Coastal shoreline: Causes—mercury, pathogens, turbidity Sources—municipal discharges/sewage, urban-related runoff/stormwater, hydromodification Ocean and near coastal: Causes—mercury, organic enrichment/oxygen depletion, pathogens Sources—atmospheric deposition, unspecific nonpoint source, recreation and tourism (non-boating) Wetlands: Causes—organic enrichment/oxygen depletion, mercury, metals (other than mercury) Sources—natural wildlife, agriculture, atmospheric deposition Summaries of these periodic assessments provide important information about primary causes of impaired water quality in the United States as well as probable sources of pollution. For example, pathogens top the list of causes of impairment of assessed rivers and streams, followed by sediment and nutrients; agriculture, unknown sources, and atmospheric deposition are the top three leading probable sources of contamination in the assessed rivers and streams.61 Under Section 303(d) of the CWA, states are required to develop a list of impaired waters for rivers, lakes, coastal waters, and estuaries that do not meet water quality standards.62

18,318,177 41,666,049

44.0

31.2

5,336,908 30,309 12,950,960

1,101,371 3,533,205

514,845 4,495 582,031

Source: Environmental Protection Agency, 2017

Total Assessed Waters Total Waters Percent of Waters Assessed

Good Waters Threatened Waters Impaired Waters

64.0

7.9

4,615 58,618

3,325

44,619 56,148 87,791

1,290

11,529

12.6

6,835 54,120

6,218

617

Ocean and Coastal Bays and Shoreline Near Coastal Estuaries Rivers and Lakes, Reservoirs, Streams (Miles) and Ponds (Acres) (Square Miles) (Miles) (Square Miles)

Size of Water

TABLE 8.2 Summary of Assessed Waters in the United States

1.1

1,234,822 107,700,000

665,494

569,328

Wetlands (Acres)

85.7

4,457 5,202

4,355

102

Great Lakes Shoreline (Miles)

20.0

39,231 196,343

39,230

1

Great Lakes Open Water (Square Miles)

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Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) allocations are then developed for water bodies placed on this list to specify the maximum amount of a pollutant that the water body can safely receive in order to meet the water quality standards. A TMDL is defined as the sum of the individual Waste Load Allocations (WLAs) for point sources and Load Allocations (LAs) for nonpoint sources. Mathematically, this is represented as: TMDL = ΣWLA + ΣLA + MOS where MOS = margin of safety Wastewater Planning The major components of a wastewater treatment process were briefly described previously. While those described the cleanup process, a comprehensive plan is necessary for effective development of wastewater management facilities to meet the present and future needs of a community. Comprehensive planning considers the physical, social, economic, environmental, and related characteristics of an area and evaluates alternative plans, as described in chapter 2. Comprehensive wastewater management planning for a particular community should consider past, current, and projected growth; existing sewerage facilities; the projection of needs; development and evaluation of alternatives to meet those needs; recommendation of alternatives; and development of an implementation program, including costs, scheduling, and financing. With reauthorization of the CWA, billions of dollars were made available in the United States into the 1990s to plan and construct sewage and wastewater treatment facilities. A facility plan prepared under EPA guidelines should document existing conditions, project future needs, and propose and evaluate alternatives. Following input from the community, an alternative is selected and an implementation program is prepared. After an alternative is selected, it must undergo the process of being evaluated for potential impacts and ways to lessen them. When the environmental impact document is accepted, a grant application can be prepared and local and other nonfederal monies committed. Receipt of the grant is followed by construction and operation of the new or expanded facilities. In order to plan properly for wastewater facilities, it is important to understand a community’s needs, desires, and financial capabilities, and also what is technically possible. The planning process sheds light on these issues and generally consists of the steps outlined previously. The planning process as applied to water quality is explored further in table 8.3, which shows a typical outline for a

TABLE 8.3 Typical Outline for Comprehensive Planning Report • Characteristics of municipal wastes A. Letter of Transmittal to the contracting and wastewater volumes, strengths, agency flow rates B. Acknowledgments. List of individuals • Characteristics of industrial wastes, and agencies submitting information or quantities, and amenability to assistance during the project treatment with municipal wastes C. Table of Contents • Water pollution control requirements; • Index of text federal, state, and interstate receiving • List of tables water classifications • List of figures • Wastewater reduction, reclamation, D. Findings, Conclusions, and and reuse Recommendations. Many times, • Extent of interim and private on-site included in Letter of Transmittal sewage disposal (adequacy, present, E. Need and Scope of Project and future) F. Background • Suitability of soils for onsite disposal • General and historical • Overview • Geography, hydrology, meteorology, • Environmental assessment geology, surface, and groundwater, etc. • Summary and recommendations • Soil characteristics and subsurface H. Wastewater Collection conditions • Existing collection systems (conditions • Demographics: population density and adequacy including infiltration, and characteristics (past, present, surface, and stormwater flows) future) • Areas needing collection systems (and • Employment: industry, commercial, timetables) service, government • Soil, rock, groundwater conditions • Transportation and mobility; • Routing and rights of way adequacy and effects produced both • Stormwater drainage and collection present and future system impacts • Residential, industrial, commercial, • Stormwater separation (feasibility recreational, agricultural, and holding tanks, special considerations, institutional development and local ordinances, enforcement) on redevelopment older systems • Land use: present and future I. Preliminary Analysis for Wastewater (including land use in detail in the Treatment and Disposal vicinity of existing and proposed • Pollution load, degree of treatment wastewater facilities) required, and outfall considerations • Drainage, water pollution control, • Facility siting requirements, including and flood control management buffer zone, foundation conditions G. Water Pollution Control Conditions • Areas served, areas not served • Field surveys and investigations • Trunkline and pumping stations (including physical, chemical, • Property and easement acquisition biological, and hydrological problems characteristics of receiving waters) • Industrial waste flows and • Existing methods of municipal and pretreatment (if required) industrial wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal (continued)

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• Effect of stormwater flows (on receiving waters, need for holding tanks or treatment) • Treatment plant outfall sewer design considerations • Grit, screening, and sludge handling and disposal • Design criteria summary J. Alternatives • Alternative solutions, total costs, and annual operating cost • Evaluation and analysis of alternatives K. Regional Considerations • Alternative solutions and plans • Economic, social, and ecologic evaluation of alternatives • Site development and reuse plans • Regional planning development • Recommendations

L. Administration and Financing • Public information • Administration arrangement, management, and costs • Financing methods: general obligation bonds (alternate revenue bonds or special assessment bonds); grants; incentives; federal aid; state aid; or sewer use charge • Cost distribution • Legislation, monitoring, enforcement M. Summary and Recommendations N. Appendices • Applicable laws • Special data • Charts, tables, illustrations O. Glossary P. References

Source: P. T. Carver (1986) “Planning for Wastewater Collection and Treatment,” in Urban Planning Guide (New York: American Society of Civil Engineers).

comprehensive water quality planning report. It emphasizes the key role of planning in maintaining and enhancing water quality. The land use planning and control strategies identified in table 8.4 provide a number of means for achieving water quality goals. These methods have potential for achieving high water quality by (1) reducing the amount of point and nonpoint discharge of pollutants, (2) balancing the discharges with the assimilative capacity of receiving streams and lakes, and (3) conserving natural features that protect water quality and quantity.63 The strategies and techniques include control of rural point and nonpoint sources of pollution as well as urban sources. A number of specific implementation techniques are associated with each of the strategies. These techniques include various government actions such as zoning, building moratoriums, infrastructure investments, tax policies, and development permits. Site development practices could be controlled by zoning, subdivision, building, and other regulations. In essence, the strategies that are likely to be most effective are those that can be implemented directly through public regulation or capital expenditures. All levels of government have major roles in managing and improving water quality. Finally, to be able to deal with the impacts of climate change and prepare for cybersecurity threats, wastewater planning must also entail asset management plans (as all wastewater treatment infrastructure is categorized as critical infrastructure) as well as take measures to ensure that all electronic, controls, systems, and data associated with the wastewater facilities are secure and protected against cyber threats.

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TABLE 8.4 Role of Land Use Planning and Control in Water Quality Management GOALS Reduce and balance point discharges

Reduce and balance nonpoint discharges

Conserve natural features

STRATEGIES Regional Strategies

Site Development Strategies

Land Management Strategies

Modify growth rates

Modify site location practices

Modify growth distribution

Modify project size and mix

Conserve environmentally sensitive areas and open space Control siting of “critical users”

Improve site planning and development

Control construction related erosion Utilize agriculture and silviculture conservation practices Manage floodplain and shoreline uses Control resource extraction activities

Source: American Society of Civil Engineers. (1974). Management of Urban Storm Runoff. PB-234 316. Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service.

Conclusion Water quality planning and management is undertaken by a variety of means, some direct and others indirect. Although water pollution control facilities, such as sewage treatment plants, are essential to maintaining and improving the quality of the nation’s waters, the pollutants controlled by such facilities are but a fraction of the pollutants affecting water quality. Numerous nonpoint sources of pollution, both rural and urban, have serious negative effects on water quality. This section called attention to the many land use planning and control strategies that can affect water quality. Water is not an isolated resource but one that is inextricably linked to the land. Thus, comprehensive water quality planning and management call for careful attention to land use planning and management. Study Questions 1. Describe the differences between point and nonpoint sources of pollution. Give examples of each. 2. How does land use affect water quality? Give examples in your region of land uses that have a negative effect on surface water.

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3. What is the difference between BOD and COD? How are they important in determining water quality? 4. What role do bacteria play in water quality? In which ways can bacteria be helpful in maintaining and improving water quality? 5. Name the three most polluted streams and lakes in your state. What are the probable sources of pollution? 6. Identify potential sources of groundwater contamination in your area. How can the situation be improved? 7. Go to https://www.epa.gov/tmdl and look for your EPA region to see if there are any TMDLs listed for water bodies in your region. Characterize the sources of the pollution in general terms (agricultural, urban runoff, industrial, etc.) and determine how many different states or cities may lie in this region. 8. What are the differences, if any, between pollutants generated from agricultural uses versus urban uses? Notes 1.  Cesanek, W., V. Elmer, and J. Graeff. (2017). Planners and Water, p. 131. PAS Report 588. Chicago: American Planning Association. 2.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water, p. 131. 3. USGS. (2014). Pesticides in Stream Sediment and Aquatic Biota. National WaterQuality Assessment Project. USGS Fact Sheet 092-00. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/ nawqa/pnsp/pubs/fs09200/ 4.  Swenson, H. A., and H. L. Baldwin. (1965). A Primer on Water Quality. Washington, DC: US Geological Survey. 5.  Linsley, R. K., and J. B. Franzini. (1979). Water-Resources Engineering. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. 6.  Linsley and Franzini, Water-Resources Engineering. 7.  Riordan Seville, Lisa, Hannah Rappleye, and Tracy Connor. (2016, Jan. 18). Bad Decisions, Broken Promises: A Timeline of the Flint Water Crisis. NBC News. Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bad-decisions-broken-promises-timeline-flint-water-crisis-n499641 8.  Fonger, R. (2015). Here’s How That Toxic Lead Got into Flint Water. MLive. Retrieved from http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/10/see_step_by_step_how_lead_is_g .html 9.  CNN. (2017). Flint Water Crisis Fact Sheets. CNN Library. Retrieved from http://www .cnn.com/2016/03/04/us/flint-water-crisis-fast-facts/ 10.  Kennedy, M. (2016). Lead-Laced Water in Flint: A Step-by-Step Look at the Making of the Crisis. National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo -way/2016/04/20/465545378/lead-laced-water-in-flint-a-step-by-step-look-at-the-makings -of-a-crisis 11.  Nelson, L. (2016). The Flint Water Crisis, Explained. Retrieved from https://www.vox .com/2016/2/15/10991626/flint-water-crisis



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12.  Associated Press. (2016). A Timeline of the Water Crisis in Flint, Michigan, Associated Press. Retrieved from https://apnews.com/e6210d0001be4092943826c5381f0f13/timeline -water-crisis-flint-michigan 13. US Census Bureau. (2017). Community Facts. US Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml?src=bkmk 14.  Provenzano, B. (2017). The State of the Flint Water Crisis, by the Numbers. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/flint-water-crisis-facts-num bers-2017-3 15.  Roy, S. (2015). Test Update: Flint River Water 19X More Corrosive than Detroit Water for Lead Solder; Now What? Flint Water Study Updates. Retrieved from http://flintwater study.org/2015/09/test-update-flint-river-water-19x-more-corrosive-than-detroit-water-for -lead-solder-now-what/ 16.  Roy, S. (2015). Our Sampling of 252 Homes Demonstrates a High Lead in Water Risk: Flint Should Be Failing to Meet the EPA Lead and Copper Rule. Flint Water Study Updates. Retrieved from http://flintwaterstudy.org/2015/09/our-sampling-of-252-homes-demonstrates -a-high-lead-in-water-risk-flint-should-be-failing-to-meet-the-epa-lead-and-copper-rule/ 17.  Virginia Tech Research Team. (2018). Flint Water Study Updates (website). Retrieved from http://flintwaterstudy.org/ 18. Young, A., and M. Nichols. (2016). Beyond Flint: Excessive Lead Levels Found in Almost 2,000 Water Systems across All 50 States. USA Today. Retrieved from https://www .usatoday.com/story/news/2016/03/11/nearly-2000-water-systems-fail-lead-tests/81220466/ 19.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 20.  Campbell, C., R. Greenberg, D. Mankikar, and R. D. Ross. (2016). A Case Study in Environmental Justice: The Failure in Flint. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 135, p. 951. doi:10.3390/ijerph13100951 21.  CBS News. (2016). State Workers in Flint Got Bottled Water as Crisis Brewed. CBS News. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/flint-water-crisis-state-workers-in -flint-got-bottled-water-as-crisis-brewed/ 22. Grigg, N. S. (2016). Integrated Water Resource Management: An Interdisciplinary Approach. London: Palgrave Macmillan; Bodin, M. (2016, Oct.). Deep Trouble. Planning Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.planning.org/planning/2016/oct/; and Virginia Tech Research Team, Flint Water Study Updates. 23. NGWA. (2010). Groundwater Facts. National Groundwater Association. Retrieved from http://www.ngwa.org/fundamentals/use/pages/groundwater-facts.aspx 24.  Groundwater Foundation. (2017). Groundwater Contamination. Groundwater Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.groundwater.org/get-informed/groundwater/contamina tion.html 25.  Enck, J. (2015). Letter to the Mayor of Hoosick Falls, NY, USEPA, Region 2. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-12/documents/hoosickfalls mayorpfoa.pdf 26.  Berger, B. J. (2009). The Trouble with PFOA: Testing, Regulation and Science concerning Perfluorooctanoic Acid and Implications for Future Litigation. Defense Counsel Journal, 76(4), 460–469. 27.  Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. (2016). Summary for Legislators: PFOA Contamination in North Bennington. Vermont. Retrieved from http://dec.ver mont.gov/sites/dec/files/documents/PFOASummaryForLegislatorsvFINAL3.25.16.pdf

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28.  Post, G. B., P. D. Cohn, and K. R. Cooper. (2012). “Review: Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), an Emerging Drinking Water Contaminant: A Critical Review of Recent Literature.” Environmental Research, 116, 93–117. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2012.03.007 29.  EPA. (2002). Onsite Wastewater Treatment Systems Manual, pp. 1–4. EPA/625/R-00/008. Washington, DC: Office of Water, Office of Research and Development, EPA. 30. Hobbie, S. E., J. C. Finlay, B. D. Janke, D. A. Nidzgorski, D. B. Millet, and L. A. Baker. (2017). Contrasting Nitrogen and Phosphorus Budgets in Urban Watersheds and Implications for Managing Urban Water Pollution. PNAS, 114(16), 4177–4182. doi:10.1073/ pnas.1618536114 31.  EPA. (2018). Chemicals and Toxics Topics. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/ environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxics-topics 32.  World Health Organization. (2011). Pharmaceuticals in Drinking-Water, p. ix. WHO/ HSE/WSH/11.05. Geneva: World Health Organization. 33.  Walton, M. (2003). Frogs, Fish, and Pharmaceuticals—A Troubling Brew. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/11/14/coolsc.frogs.fish/ 34.  Svitil, K.A. (2003). Fish on Prozac: Our Pharmaceutical Drugs Are Turning Up in the Environment and in Animals. What Will the Consequences Be? Discover Magazine. Retrieved from http://discovermagazine.com/2003/dec/fish-on-prozac1127#.US92yaJ7vkc 35.  Koplin, D., E. Furlong, M. Meyer, E. M. Thurman, S. Zaugg, L. Barber, and H. Buxton. (2002). Pharmaceuticals, Hormones, and Other Organic Wastewater Contaminants in US Streams, 1999–2000: A National Reconnaissance. Environmental Science & Technology, 36, 1202­–1211. 36.  Daughton, C. G. (2010, September 12). Drugs and the Environment: Stewardship and Sustainability, p. 13. Report NERL-LV-ESD 10/081, EPA/600/R-10/106. Las Vegas, NV: National Exposure Research Laboratory, Environmental Sciences Division, US Environmental Protection Agency. 37.  Arpin-Point, L., M. Bueno, E. Gomes, and H. Fenet. (2016). Occurrence of PPCPs in the Marine Environment: A Review. Environmental Science Pollution Research, 23, 4978–4991. 38.  Karn, B., T. Kuiken, and M. Otto. (2009). Nanotechnology and In Situ Remediation: A Review of the Cost Benefits and Potential Risks. Environmental Health Perspectives, 117(8), 1823–1831. 39.  EPA. (2013). Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials Research. EPA. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2013-12/documents/nanotechnology-fact-sheet.pdf 40. EPA. (2012). Nanomaterial Case Study: Nanoscale Silver in Disinfectant Spray. EPA/600/R-10/081F (Final Report). Washington, DC: EPA. 41.  EPA. (2010). Nanomaterial Case Studies: Nanoscale Titanium Dioxide in Water Treatment and in Topical Sunscreen. EPA/600/R-09/057F (Final). Washington, DC: US EPA. 42.  Mansoori, G. A., T. R. Bastami, A. Ahmadpour, and Z. Eshaghli. (2008). Environmental Application of Nanotechnology. Chapter 2 of Annual Review of Nano Research, vol. 2, edited by G. Cao and C. J. Brinker. Retrieved from https://www.uic.edu/labs/trl/1.OnlineMaterials/nano .publications/08.ENVIRONMENTAL_APPLICATION_OF_NANOTECHNOLOGY.pdf 43.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water; and APA. (2016). APA Policy Guide on Water. Retrieved from https://www.planning.org/media/document/9107281/ 44.  Cosgrove, W. J., and D. P. Loucks. (2015). Water Management: Current and Future Challenges and Research Directions. Water Resources Research, 51,4823–4839. 45.  Lake Champlain Basin Program. (2018). Publications Library. LCBP Media Center. Retrieved from http://www.lcbp.org/media-center/publications-library/



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46.  University of Florida. (2018). Research. Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. Retrieved from http://research.ifas.ufl.edu/ 47.  North Carolina State University. (2018). Agriculture and Food. North Carolina State Extension. Retrieved from https://www.ces.ncsu.edu/categories/agriculture-food/ 48.  Chen, L., P. C. Richmond, and R. Tomson. (2017). Wastewater Treatment and Disposal for Unconventional Oil and Gas Development, p. 243. In Sustainable Water Technologies, vol. 2, edited by D. H. Chen. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 49.  Chen, Richmond, and Tomson (2017). Wastewater Treatment and Disposal for Unconventional Oil and Gas Development, p. 244. 50.  Whittemore, D. O. (and other Kansas Geological Survey staff). (2011). Water Quality and Hydraulic Fracturing. Kansas Geological Survey. Retrieved from http://www.kgs.ku.edu/ Hydro/Publications/2012/Fracturing/index.html 51.  EPA. (2016). Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States, p. 31. EPA/600/R-16/ 236F (Final Report). Washington, DC: US Environmental Protection Agency. 52.  Lallanilla. M. (2018). Facts About Fracking. Live Planet. Retrieved from https://www .livescience.com/34464-what-is-fracking.html 53.  EPA, Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas: Impacts from the Hydraulic Fracturing Water Cycle on Drinking Water Resources in the United States. 54.  Field. R. (1975). Urban Runoff Pollution Control: State-of-the-Art. Journal of the Environmental Engineering Division, 101(2). 55.  EPA. (2016). EPA History: Water—The Challenge of the Environment; A Primer on EPA’s Statutory Authority. EPA. Retrieved from https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/epa -history-water-challenge-environment-primer-epas-statutory-authority.html 56.  EPA. (2016). Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Laws and Regulations. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/rcra 57.  EPA. (2017). National Water Quality Inventory Report to Congress: Water Data and Tools. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/waterdata/national-water-quality-inventory -report-congress 58.  EPA. (2017). National Water Quality Inventory: Report to Congress. EPA 841-R-16011. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-12/documents/305brtc_ finalowow_08302017.pdf 59.  EPA. (2004). The National Water Quality Inventory: Report to Congress for the 2004 Reporting Cycle: A Profile. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/ files/2015-09/documents/2009_01_22_305b_2004report_factsheet2004305b.pdf 60.  EPA. (2018). National Summary of State Information. EPA. Retrieved from https:// ofmpub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control 61.  EPA. (2018). National Summary of State Information. EPA. Retrieved from https:// iaspub.epa.gov/waters10/attains_nation_cy.control#prob_surv_states 62. EPA. (2008). Understanding Impaired Waters and Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Requirements for Municipal Stormwater Programs. EPA 833-F-07-009. EPA Region III. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-11/documents/ region3_factsheet_tmdl.pdf 63.  American Society of Civil Engineers. (1974). Management of Urban Storm Runoff. PB234 316. Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service.

9 Economic Analysis

Introduction

T

he study of economics deals largely with the allocation of scarce resources, as is the case with water resources. Literature on water resource economics goes beyond this vision to look at the broader picture. An extensive and thorough investigation of the topic is provided by R. C. Griffin in Water Resources Economics (2006).1 Among numerous publications on water resources, recent titles incorporate such concepts as the political economy of water, the new water economics, water marketing, and the privatization of water resources.2 The reader who wishes to gain a better understanding of the various economic issues in water resources planning and management is encouraged to review such material. This chapter, however, focuses on the more traditional view of economic analysis of water resources to provide a basic understanding. Economic analysis has been long recognized as an important aspect of water resources planning, for it provides essential inputs to rational decision-making.3 Although a proposed action may be politically attractive, technologically feasible, and environmentally acceptable, economic analysis may show that the action costs more than it provides in benefits. This chapter discusses methods for the economic formulation, analysis, and comparison of alternatives. It includes some basic economic concepts, important elements of benefit-cost analysis, and considerations of cost allocation and cost-sharing procedures. The chapter provides only highlights of economic analysis as applied to water resources. For a more thorough treatment of the topic, refer to books on water resources economics.4 An excellent website that provides — 232 —



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information on many aspects of water resources planning and economics is provided by the official homepage of the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Institute for Water Resources (IWR), at http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/. Key Terms Below are a number of terms used in this chapter that are not likely to be in other chapters. Each term with a brief explanation should help as you move ahead to water resources economics. Keep in mind the terms shown below are given in the approximate order they are used in this chapter and that not all terms or concepts used in this book are listed here. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in economics are the following. Water ownership Which person, persons, or organization claims to own a portion of water. Privatization Action taken to claim ownership of a portion of water, whether by purchase or other means, giving the owner control over the use of that water. Public-private partnership The joint ownership and control over a body of water by a mix of public and private parties. Demand and supply Two primary economic aspects of managing a commodity, in this case water. Demand is the amount desired of the item, whereas supply is the amount available. Production function This shows the relationship of a commodity’s output to the various inputs needed to produce the commodity. It often appears as a mathematical equation. Equity versus efficiency Often conflicting, efficiency is spending so that returns are greater than expenditures, while equity is concerned with social and political considerations, such as who pays and who benefits. Environmental Justice A 1994 presidential executive order5 that requires all federal agencies to achieve in federal projects, through identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies and activities on minority populations and low-income populations. This specifically included Native American Tribes. Value and time These stem from the notion that time is money and money is time. A dollar or other monetary unit is often used in economics because of convenience. But then time enters through the simple idea that a dollar now does not have the same value as a dollar in the future. Discount rate Term used to compare monetary amounts over different time periods. The idea is that a dollar a year from now is not worth the same as now.

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Water Resources Development Acts (WRDA) The current set of water-related omnibus acts authorized by the US Congress to deal with various aspects of water resources: environmental, structural, navigational, flood protection, and hydrology, among others. Typically, the USACE administers the bulk of the act’s requirements. Benefit-cost analysis A method for comparing the value or benefit of an item or project with the cost of creating that item or project. It is intended to aid in decision making about proceeding with a project. Almost daily, one performs a benefit-cost analysis of sorts, on decisions whether or not to do something as compared with expected benefits or losses from it. Benefit-cost ratio The ratio of present value of benefits to present value of costs. Discounting techniques Methods used to make comparisons of value over time in order to consider the economic merits of different plans. Rate-of-return A method that finds the discount rate where the present net worth of all benefits and costs of a project’s life-span is equal to zero, as determined by trial and error. Net present worth (net present value) The algebraic sum of the present values of benefits and costs. Who Owns the Water? It is worth considering briefly who owns the water that covers about twothirds of the earth’s surface and is essential for all forms of plant and animal life. When it falls from the sky as rain, sleet, or snow, it is not owned by any person, entity, or nation. When major storms cause flooding, no one really wants to claim ownership of the flood waters; they just want them to go away. So who owns what water—individuals, corporations, governments, or what? One might reasonably conclude that water should be readily available with ownership of it shared by all. But how much, when, what quality, and how delivered are just a few of the questions that might be considered about the ownership and use of water. The earlier chapter on US water law showed that access to and ownership and use of water vary among states—and they vary widely among nations. If we are to consider economic analysis of water, it is worthwhile to briefly consider water ownership. Most freshwater is essentially under public ownership and management through various laws and regulations, as discussed in earlier chapters. But the control and use of water is often a matter of dispute, especially when involving shared water among cities, states, and nations. And most of the world’s major water bodies, in fact, are shared by two or more jurisdictions. The Danube River, for example, is shared by seventeen different nations, and the Mississippi River borders or passes through ten states. The Ohio River starts in Pittsburgh at the



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confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and joins the Mississippi River between Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri after being in or touching seven states. Similarly, other major rivers are shared by several nations, states, or provinces throughout the world. Multiple jurisdictions over water bodies can lead to disputes and disagreements about such issues as public ownership, control, and use of the water. Privatization of water can add to possible conflicts. Generally, there are two types of private-sector activity that may be involved in water supply and water sanitation. The first, full privatization, exists when assets are permanently sold to a private company. The other type is a publicprivate partnership, where ownership of assets stays public but certain functions are sold to a private company for a specified period. Full privatization of either water supply or water sanitation is not common at present, existing in only a few countries and several US cities. The most common type of privatization presently is public-private partnerships in water supply and sanitation. Reasons for water privatization differ among cases and often influence the choice of the type of privatization. For example, contracts for management may be used to improve efficiency and quality of service. On the other hand, asset sales mainly tend to reduce the fiscal burden and access to water supply and sanitation. Ideological motives and external influences regarding public versus private ownership may also play a role. The March 2016 issue of Atlantic Monthly featured an article on “Liquid Assets” and the efforts of a maverick investor to buy substantial water rights in America’s western states.6 The author looked at the question of whether the investor’s plan could help solve the region’s water crisis. Prior appropriation had been established under western water law, but now the western state water laws were being blamed for serious shortages. The investor saw water as a resource everyone needed but most didn’t value. Millions of dollars of water rights were sold, but substantial losses were incurred by numerous small towns and farms both large and small. Water deals are offered frequently in the West, and some have provided farmers with new income to help keep them going or to allow some wanting to quit farming to cash out and move on. As millions of dollars traded hands with the sale of water, few of the dollars were reinvested in communities. Families moved away, factories shut down, businesses closed, stores went bankrupt, and communities and counties fell into collapse. Questions were raised whether the water was the property rights holder’s to sell or whether the water rights were merely a license to use water that ultimately belonged to the public. The question of who owns the water has not been resolved, but issues of water ownership, regulation, and control will continue to change as various suggested solutions are tested and tried to provide fair and beneficial use for water resources planning and management. This section has briefly touched on the question of ownership and control of water resources. The following

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sections of the chapter deal with financial and economic aspects of managing and regulating water. They cover several economic concepts and procedures as applied to water resources. Principles of Public Investment Analysis Demand, Supply, and Production Functions As stated previously, economics deals with the allocation of scarce resources, which usually means making choices based on costs and benefits. Almost daily we make benefit-cost types of choices although we might not recognize them as such. We intuitively have a sense of doing or not doing something based on limited cost, time, effort, and so forth that we have as compared with the expected rewards, payoff, or benefits, although we don’t usually do any formal analysis of these factors. Traditional benefit-cost analysis analyzes and compares costs and benefits of undertaking certain projects with a limited amount of resources. The scarce resource is typically dollars, and expenditure decisions must be made to yield satisfactory returns. Price is a basis for doing economic analysis because it provides a common unit of measure. Demand and supply and production functions all use price (usually dollars or other monetary units) as the common accounting unit. Consider first a simple demand function in which the quantity demanded is a function of its price. For example, the demand for water can be portrayed as a function of price, as in figure 9.1. Although this simple demand curve does not accurately portray the current price-demand relationship for water, it gives the general simplified structure of a demand curve. In this typical representation of a demand function, the quantity demanded is a function of price; a lower unit price will generate a greater demand. Similarly, a supply curve portrays the relationship between price and the quantity of water provided by the supplier. Again, if we simplify the market for water, the supplier would be willing to provide more if the price were higher (see figure 9.1). The particular set of demand and supply curves is for a given market situation with all other factors assumed to be held constant. The intersection of the demand and supply curves provides the equilibrium condition of demand equal to supply at price P1 and quantity Q1. In other words, at price level P1, suppliers will provide quantity Q1 and consumers will purchase that same quantity. At a higher price, supply will exceed demand, whereas a lower price will yield excess demand. Any basic economics textbook explains supply and demand curves extensively and builds upon those elementary notions to consider other factors affecting prices, production, and consumption.

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FIGURE 9.1 Demand and Supply Curves.

Production functions play an important role in water resources economics. The functions portray the relationship of output to various required inputs. For example, the production of water for municipal use requires extracting water from a source, pumping it to a treatment plant, providing storage, and distributing the water through a network of water lines. There are many expenditures required to provide water to individual customers; these expenditures can be aggregated into capital expenditures (the hardware for the system), labor (for operating and maintaining the system), and resources (the land and raw water needed as inputs to the system). In this simple case, one can regard water as having no cost, for water is typically drawn from surface or groundwater sources with no cost for the resource itself. Thus, the production of water can be viewed as a function of capital, labor, and land. The production function provides, in mathematical or graphic form, the relationship of output to the inputs of capital, labor, and resources. In this example, the production function can be stated as follows:

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where:

Q = aK + bL + cR

Q = output of finished water K = capital expenditures L = labor inputs R = land or resource costs. These terms may be further broken down into the numerous components of each to obtain a more detailed analysis. Equity versus Efficiency Making a decision based on economic factors often depends upon one’s perspective, particularly with regard to public investment decisions, an area that incorporates the vast majority of water resources decisions. What may be defined as a gain to one person may be a loss to another. Therefore, it is important to consider questions of who benefits and who pays. These questions do not focus on individuals but on large groups of people with respect to water resources. Allocation of public dollars for water resources projects in one region of the nation may mean that those dollars are not available for other purposes. At the same time, however, such an expenditure might provide a net gain in the nation’s economic well-being. The latter notion is taken from the viewpoint of efficiency in the allocation of resources. One definition sometimes used is that an efficient reallocation is one in which at least one person will be made better off with no one else becoming worse off. A more useful interpretation of efficiency is that it is an allocation of resources whereby the returns or benefits are greater than the incurred costs. Equity considerations deal with the distributional aspects of costs and benefits. A project may be economically efficient, but at the same time it could be grossly inequitable. Public investments in water resources projects are often financed by society as a whole through its taxation system. The benefits of a particular project, however, often accrue to a specific segment of society or a particular region. Benefits from large irrigation projects, for example, may favor certain agricultural interests, or provision of flood protection may give substantial benefits to a small region. There is nothing inherently wrong in these equity problems, for they result from policy decisions that are deemed to be in the overall interest of society. Equity questions in water resources planning remain among the major points of contention and debate and will remain so into the future. Considerations of environmental justice can be difficult and contentious, but such considerations are investigated through the scoping phase



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and the NEPA process. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in particular, has taken the lead in providing guidelines in this matter, along with the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.7 Nonfederal water planners also consider these issues as they embark on water resources planning projects. It is well documented that issues of inequity or disproportionate impacts are best addressed if identified very early in the planning process. These issues emphasize the fact that water resources planning is not a simple application of technological or economic solutions but involves broad concerns of public policy that bring into play various social, political, economic, and environmental considerations. Comparisons of Value and Time In preparing an economic analysis of water projects, two difficulties must be overcome in the evaluation and comparison of alternatives in commensurable units: differences in kind and differences in time. In economic analysis, one attempts to provide information on the relative merits of alternative courses of action from an economic perspective. If two outputs are expressed in diverse units, such as gallons of water stored, and acres irrigated, no meaningful comparisons can be made. Thus, a first step is to find a common measure. The commonly used unit in economic analysis, of course, is the dollar or some comparable monetary unit. Monetary units are used in economic analysis because of their convenience, not because of any notion that dollars are more important than nonmonetary values such as health and safety. In reality, diverse values are more easily understood in terms of monetary units than any other kind of measure. The second aspect of economic analysis is the question of time: whether a cost or a benefit this year has the same value as that cost or benefit at some future time. Clearly, differences in time preference are important to rational economic decisions. The existence of interest rates (assuming no inflation or deflation) arises partly from the preference of people to consume a benefit now rather than later. In economic analysis, if an investment is delayed for a period of time, those resources can be used elsewhere for that period. Therefore, monetary values must be established by time as well as amount. Amounts in different periods of time can be compared by using a factor that becomes progressively smaller the further we look into the future. This factor is the discount rate, which is expressed as a percent per time period. This procedure is analogous to using the interest rate on a savings account to compute the future value of a deposit made today. The discount rate used in project analysis can have a significant effect on the economic analysis, for high discount rates place greater emphasis on present and short-term costs and benefits, whereas low discount rates give more weight to future values.8

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The interest rate is usually expressed as a percentage of capital over a time period; two simple examples are 6 percent per year and 1.5 percent per month. It is important to stress the time period. For example, 12 percent per year computed or compounded annually is not the same as 1 percent per month compounded monthly. In general, interest rates inversely reflect the willingness of the owner of capital to make money available. Among the many factors influencing interest rates are the following: • State of the economy: A growing economy typically has a good market for lenders because of high demand for capital and a corresponding willingness to pay higher interest rates. • Risk: Loans that are highly likely to be paid back carry lower interest rates, which reflect decreased risks to the lender. Good examples are found in cases where government institutions develop water projects. Because government institutions are less likely to go bankrupt, they are assumed to be a lower risk and can enjoy lower interest rates. • Inflation: An inflationary period will cause a lender to increase interest rates in order to compensate for anticipated loss in purchasing power. Each of these factors assumes that all other factors remain constant. In reality, these and many other factors combine to determine the interest rate at any particular time. Many water resources projects are undertaken by the federal government, and the interest rate used in economic analysis is tied by law to movement of the federal reserve interest rate. The common practice of discounting future amounts to transform them to present values is essential to economic analysis. It allows comparison of common units (dollars) at a comparable period of time (present). In order to make realistic economic evaluations and investment decisions, it is necessary to identify each monetary value by both amount and time. Amounts at different times are not comparable units. In subsequent sections of this chapter, the following terms and notation will be used: P F A i n

= a capital amount at the present = a capital amount at some future time = a uniform annual amount over a period of time = the interest rate per time period (per year unless specified otherwise) = the number of time periods (years unless specified otherwise)

The calculations of equivalent economic values will usually involve four of these five quantities.



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Benefit-Cost Analysis Benefit-cost analysis is the commonly used procedure for economic evaluation of public projects. A market mechanism does not exist for making decisions in most water resources projects, so a rational procedure must be used to determine whether projects are justified on economic grounds. Benefit-cost analysis in federal water resources planning goes back to the Flood Control Act of 1936 (P.L. 74-738), which stated that the federal government should improve or participate in the improvement of navigable waters or their tributaries for flood control “if the benefits to whomsoever they may accrue are in excess of the estimated costs.”9 This phrase sounds logical and simple, but in actual practice such guidelines are difficult to implement and have been the source of many disagreements over the years. The difficulties lie in determining benefits and costs, in setting the appropriate discount rate, and in dealing with the questions of who pays and who benefits. Subsequent to the 1936 act, several handbooks were prepared to guide federal water resources agencies in their economic analyses. The first important one was a report by the Subcommittee on Benefits and Costs of the Inter-Agency Committee on Water Resources, entitled Proposed Practices for Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects.10 This report, commonly known as the “Green Book,” was originally issued in May 1950 and revised in May 1958. It was used extensively in the 1950s and early 1960s. This report was followed in 1962 by Policies, Standards, and Procedures in the Formulation, Evaluation, and Review of Plans for Use and Development of Water and Related Land Resources, commonly known as “Senate Document 97.”11 With the adoption of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 as a major component of federal decision making, a new guide was drafted by the Water Resources Council and adopted in 1973 that incorporated environmental quality objectives: Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources, popularly called “Principles and Standards (P&S).”12 This document required that federal and federally assisted planning be directed toward achieving two equal national objectives: (1) national economic development (NED) and (2) environmental quality (EQ). Changing political and economic conditions in the early 1980s led to the use of a revised document that identified only one national objective: NED. This document was the Water Resources Council’s Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies, or “Principles and Guidelines (P&G),” issued in March 198313 (see https:// planning.erdc.dren.mil/toolbox/guidance.cfm?Id=269&Option=Principles%20 and%20Guidelines). This document specifically stated that the one national objective was “to contribute to national economic development consistent with

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protecting the nation’s environment pursuant to national environmental statutes, applicable executive orders, and other planning requirements.” Since that time, further revisions to the P&G have been made. In an attempt to rectify or amplify the status of nonmonetary or other social attributes of federal programs, the Council on Environmental Quality in 2013 released the Principles and Requirements for Federal Investments in Water Resources, followed by the 2014 publication of Interagency Guidelines. Together these documents are referred to as the PR&G, intended to replace the P&G. The revised PR&Gs apply to the Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce; the EPA; the USACE; the Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Enabling legislation for these changes are found in the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 1965 and the WRDA of 2007. The new objective of the PR&G, derived from the WRDA 2007 states, Federal water resources investments shall reflect national priorities, encourage economic development and protect the environment by: 1. Seeking to maximize sustainable economic development 2. Seeking to avoid the unwise use of floodplains and flood-prone areas and minimizing adverse impacts and vulnerabilities in any case in which a floodplain or flood-prone area must be used 3. Protecting and restoring the functions of natural systems and mitigating any unavoidable damage to natural systems

According to J. J. Boland, [The] language is notable for not mentioning cost and for implying that the various parts of this objective should be achieved simultaneously. The PR&G addresses the cost issue by noting that federal investments “should strive to maximize public benefits, with appropriate consideration of costs.” But public benefits are defined to “encompass environmental, economic, and social goals, include monetary and nonmonetary effects and allow for the consideration of both quantified and unquantified measures.” Given this array of potential benefits, quantified and not, monetary and not, it is entirely unclear what would constitute “appropriate consideration of costs.”14

Implementation of the PR&G requires federal agencies to adopt agency-specific procedures. These procedures would provide guidelines on how each agency would navigate obtaining the above, relatively vague objective(s), with regard to its specific goals. In addition to providing some overall guiding principles, the PR&G lists the need for preparation of alternative plans, proposing five variations: 1. A plan that relies on changes in existing statutes authorities, regulations, etc. 2. A plan that addresses the problem primarily through the use of nonstructural measures

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3. A plan that is preferred by the local sponsor 4. An environmentally preferred plan 5. A plan that mitigates, to the extent possible, unavoidable adverse effects As of January 2018, a few agencies started to draft their specific guidelines, but none was yet in effect. Given the ambiguity and complexity of the PR&G directives, it will be interesting to see how these revisions are embraced and implemented. The Council on Environmental Quality no longer lists the PR&G on its website; an archived copy was obtainable at the following address: https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/ceq/initiatives/PandG. Before proceeding further into the chapter, it is important to note additional federal guidelines related to the USACE. As the nation’s premier water resources planning agency, the USACE embarks upon numerous water-related investigations. Ecosystem restoration is but one of those missions. The April 2000 Planning Guidance Notebook (ER 1105-2-100) section on ecosystem restoration specifically states that in evaluating the effects of these different alternative plans, cost-effectiveness and incremental analyses may be used in lieu of a NED objective. This substantiates the assertion in the USACE’s Planning Primer (1997), which states that the USACE ecosystem restoration studies use cost-effectiveness, rather than a NED plan, in plan selection. Hence plan selection regarding ecosystem restoration replaces benefit-cost analysis with costeffectiveness/incremental cost analysis.15 This guidance is specific for ecosystem restoration at the USACE and does not apply to other missions of the USACE, such as flood control, hurricane and storm damage reduction, navigation, hydropower generation, recreation, and water supply, among others. With this brief background provided on the various federal initiatives regarding economic evaluation, the following sections do not deal with the specific procedures of the federal government but rather provide generic analytical procedures under the broad heading of public investment analysis. Discounting Techniques Public investment analysis, as any other economic analysis, requires comparisons of time and value, as discussed earlier. Four different discounting techniques can be used to deal with comparisons of time and value in considering the economic merits of alternative plans. All are based on the premise that comparisons of value can only be made for alternatives with comparable planning periods. The methods are: 1. Present-worth method: Determines the discounted algebraic sum of benefits minus costs over the period of analysis, using an appropriate discount rate, and selects the alternative with the largest net present worth.

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2. Rate-of-return method: Identifies the discount rate at which the present net worth of all benefits and costs over the analysis period is equal to zero. 3. Benefit-cost ratio method: Determines the ratio of present value of benefits to present value of costs. 4. Annual-cost method: Converts all benefits and costs into equivalent uniform annual values, and selects the alternative with the largest net annual benefit (or the lowest net annual cost). Although the methods are different ways of analyzing the same information, each emphasizes a particular economic aspect, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Cash Flow Before proceeding to elaborate upon each method, it is useful to consider measurement techniques. The discount rate discussed earlier is used to convert a monetary value at one time period to a monetary value at another time period. For example, most water resources projects require a substantial initial cost that yields benefits over a number of subsequent years. As a starting point, it is useful to establish a cash-flow diagram that portrays all identified costs and benefits over the life of the project (n), as in figure 9.2. The standard graphic representation shows receipts, or benefits, as arrows pointing upward from the baseline at the appropriate time period, and expenditures, or costs, pointing downward. The length of the arrows is proportional to the monetary value, and the horizontal axis is laid out in uniform increments of time. For convenience, all cash flows during any year are combined and treated as a single receipt or expenditure at the end of the year. Thus, each arrow represents the income or expenditure during the year immediately preceding (or other time period). Figure 9.2 is a cash-flow diagram that can be used to represent a typical flood control and water supply project. Suppose we have a project as listed in table 9.1. The table gives numerical values, whereas figure 9.2 shows a corresponding graphic representation. They both show the initial project construction costs as large expenditures in the first two years, followed by annual operation and maintenance (O&M) expenses every year thereafter. At regular ten-year intervals, larger costs are portrayed that reflect periodic replacement costs. The benefits side of the graph shows gradually increasing benefits after completion of the project until it is in full operation five years later. Benefits then remain uniform until the tenth year, when the new water supply system is extended in order to serve an increasing population. The cash-flow diagram terminates at year n, the useful life of the project. Another view of this information can be shown by a cash position diagram, which shows the financial or cash position at any point in time. It is simply the integral or cumulative value of the

BENEFITS ($ million)

10

5

1

10

20

30

40

YEARS n = 40 years

COST ($ million)

5

50 FIGURE 9.2 Hypothetical Cash Flow Diagram.

TABLE 9.1 Hypothetical Cash Flow Analysis for a Flood Control and Water Supply Project Project Life:

N = 40 Costs (millions of dollars)

Initial construction: Annual operations and maintenance: Periodic replacement:

$50/year 1, 2 $1/year for 40 years $4 at 10, 20, 30 years

Benefits (millions of dollars) Flood control benefits: Water supply benefits:

$0–5 uniformly increasing, years 0–5 $5/year, years 6–40 $2/year, years 11–40

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cash-flow diagram over time. Accordingly, the cash position diagram continues to decline while the cash-flow diagram is in the expenditure mode, but it starts to increase when benefits exceed costs. The information provided in figure 9.2 could be provided in tables or in textual form, but the diagram helps one to readily visualize the economic consequences of a certain course of action. Compound-Interest Factors In order to use one of the discounting techniques, alternative discounting factors must be considered to convert cash flows to a single number. We need to consider various ways of doing this, with time, dollars, and interest rates as the applicable variables. This section presents different functional relationships using the following variables: present value (P), future value (F), uniform annual value (A), interest rate (i), and number of time periods or years (n). The single-payment compound amount factor gives the amount that will have accumulated after n years for each dollar invested at the beginning at a rate of i percent, as in a savings account with a compound annual interest. Common notation for this factor is (F/P, i%, n), which indicates a future value (F) of a present amount (P) invested at i percent for n years or time periods. Algebraically, for P dollars invested, the value after one year would be: F = P (1 + i) With interest compounded annually, the final value after n years would be: F = P (1+i)n Figure 9.3 graphically portrays some selected basic compound-interest factors. Using appropriate interest tables instead of the above equation, the final value can be determined by multiplying the initial amount, P, times the factor (F/P, i%, n). Appendix 9-A gives the numerical factor for several different values of i and n. The single-payment present-worth factor is the inverse of the compound interest factor in that it gives the amount that must be invested initially at i percent in order to have one dollar at the end of n years or time periods. The notation for this factor is (P/F, i%, n), which indicates a present value (P), which must be invested at i percent for n years in order to yield a future value (F) (figure 9.3a). For F dollars obtained after n years at i percent, the present value is: P=F

1 (1 + i)n

FIGURE 9.3 Selected Compound Interest Factors.

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The single-payment present-worth factor is important when finding the present value of future costs or benefits that appear as discrete values. The factors for various values of i and n are given in appendix 9-A. Frequently, costs and/or benefits will occur in uniform amounts year after year. The previous factor could be used for calculating a single present value, but much work can be relieved by using the uniform annual series factors. The factors show present or final values of equal annual amounts (A) (figure 9.3b). For example, the present value of an annual amount is denoted by the factor (P/A, i%, n). Numerical values for the four different uniform annual series factors are given in appendix 9-A for various values of i and n. 1. The sinking-fund factor gives the uniform amount that must be invested at i percent at the end of each of n years to accumulate one dollar, with the functional notation being A

i

A

( F , i%, n) = (1 + i) – 1 = F n

2. The capital-recovery factor shows how much can be withdrawn in equal amounts at the end of each of n years if one dollar is deposited initially at i percent. The notation for this factor is A

(P

)

, i%, n =

i (1 + i)n (1 + i)n – 1

=

A P

3. The series compound-amount factor gives the amount that will accumulate if one dollar is invested at the end of each of n years at i percent, or F

(A

)

, i%, n =

(1 + i)n – 1 i

=

F A

4. The series present-worth factor gives the present value (or amount that must be invested initially) at i percent to yield one dollar at the end of each of n years: (P/A, i%, n) =

(1 + i)n – 1 i(1 + i)

n

=

P A

Another factor that aids in computation is the “uniform gradient-series present-worth factor,” which indicates the amount that must be invested initially at i percent in order to obtain one dollar after one year, two dollars after two years, and continuing to n dollars after n years (figure 9.3c). The notation for this factor is

Economic Analysis



(P/G, i%, n) =

(1 + i)n+1 – (1 + ni + i) i2(1 + i)n

249

=

P G

where G is a uniformly increasing amount. To determine the present worth of a uniformly decreasing series, subtract a uniformly increasing series from a uniform annual series. By preparing a cash-flow diagram that shows the variety of costs and benefits associated with a project, it is easier to determine which factors and combinations of factors are appropriate for determining present values. A number of other factors can be obtained for dealing with a variety of distributions. Among them are: • uniform gradient-series annual-worth factor • uniform gradient-series single-payment factor • uniform percentage gradient-series present-worth factor • accelerated growth present-worth factor • deferred growth present-worth factor These and other factors are beyond the scope of this chapter, but they should be kept in mind for more detailed economic analysis in water resources planning. Further details and appropriate factor tables are available in various texts on engineering and resource economics. (See appendix 9-A for various gradientseries factors.) Hypothetical Example In order to understand some of the factors described above, consider the cashflow diagram presented in table 9.1 and figure 9.2. Assuming that the values are the best estimates available, we can determine the present value of benefits and costs for the specified discount rate by using the appropriate factor from appendix 9-A, as follows: 1. Costs a. Determine present value (at year 0) of construction costs using the singlepayment present-worth factor (P/F, i, n). P/F1 = 50(P/F, 5%, 1) = 50(.9524) = 47.620 P/F2 = 50(P/F, 5%, 2) = 50(.9070) = 45.350 Adding the two values, 47.620 + 45.350= 92.970

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b. Determine present value of O&M costs using the series present-worth factor (P/A, i, n). P/A = 1(P/A, 5%, 40) = 17.159 c. Determine present value of replacement costs for each period using the single-payment present-worth factor (P/F, i, n). P/F1 = 4(P/F, 5%, 10) = 4(.6139) = 2.456 P/F2 = 4(P/F, 5%, 20) = 4(.3769) = 1.508 P/F3 = 4(P/F, 5%, 30) = 4(.2314) = 0.926 Adding the three values, 2.456 + 1.508 + 0.926 = 4.890 d. Find present value of all costs by adding totals from 1a, 1b, and 1c. PV costs = 115.019 2. Benefits a. Determine present value of flood control benefits in the first five years using uniform gradient-series present-worth factor (P/G, i, n). P/G = 1(P/G, 5%, 5) = 12.566 b. Determine the present value at year 5 of flood control benefits for years 6–40 using the series present-worth factor P/A (as determined by formula). P/A = 5(P/A, 5%, 35) = 5(16.374) = 81.870 c. Determine the present value at year 0 of flood control benefits for years 6–40 using the single-payment present-worth factor (P/F, i, n) applied to the value determined for year 5 in step 2b above. P/F = 81.870(P/F, 5%, 5) = 81.870(.7835) = 64.145 d. Determine the present value at year 10 of water supply benefits at $2 per year for years 11–40 using the series present-worth factor (P/A, i, n). P/A = 2(P/A, 5%, 30) = 2(15.3725) = 30.745 e. Determine the present value at year 0 of water supply benefits for years 11–40 using the single-payment present-worth factor (P/F, i, n) applied to the value determined for year 10 in step 2d above. P/F = 30.7449(P/F, 5%, 10) = 30.745(.6139) = 18.875 f. Find the present value of all benefits by adding totals from 2a, 2c, and 2e above. PV benefits = 95.586

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Using the calculated present values of costs and benefits, we can determine the benefit-cost ratio to be 95.586/115.019 = 0.831. Clearly the B/C ratio shows that the project is not economically favorable. In most cases, such a project would not go forward, but remember that there are factors other than economic evaluation that could make such a project desirable. Another possibility is that estimated costs and benefits would be reviewed to find if any changes could be made to make the project more attractive economically. Project designers might find less costly designs that would provide similar benefits but at a lower cost. As seen from this relatively simple example, calculation of benefits and costs can be tedious, but factor tables or built-in spreadsheet formulas make the job much easier. Complete benefit-cost studies for real projects are lengthy and detailed, but the procedures for finding present values are much the same as in the previous example. A greater task than the calculations is identification, valuation, and timing of all relevant benefits and costs. It should be evident that identifying these costs and benefits cannot be done with a crystal ball. Foretelling the future must be done with caution and a fair amount of wise judgment. Now that discounting factors have been explained, it is appropriate to consider the four discounting techniques in more detail and with consideration of the problems that might be encountered. Present-Worth (or Present-Value) Method This method chooses the alternative with the largest present worth of the discounted sum of benefits minus costs over the project life. In other words, annual net benefits (benefits minus costs) are calculated for each year of the project, the present value of each is determined, and the net sum of all present values is calculated. In order to make correct choices, James and Lee have identified a set of rules to be followed in comparing the calculated present worths: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Figure all present worths to the same time base. Figure all present worths by using the same discount rate. Base all present worths on the same period of analysis. Calculate the present worth of each alternative. Choose all alternatives having a positive present worth. Reject the rest. 5. In a set of mutually exclusive alternatives, choose the alternative having the greatest present worth. 6. If the alternatives in the set of mutually exclusive alternatives have benefits which cannot be quantified but are approximately equal, choose the alternative having least cost.16 The present-worth method gives the difference between the present worth of benefits and the present worth of costs. By using net present worth, we are able

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to make comparisons of costs and benefits on an equivalent basis throughout the life of the project. If the net present worth is positive, then the project is deemed to be economically feasible. Periodic costs and benefits are treated as cash flows, which are converted to comparable present worths at the beginning of the project (time = 0). Individual future amounts are discounted using the present-worth factor (P/F, i%, n). A series of equal amounts over n years (periods) can be discounted using the uniform series present-worth factor (P/A, i%, n). For a nonuniform series of payments, present worth can be determined by calculating all individual present worths or by using a uniform gradient-series factor, if appropriate. Rate-of-Return Method This method identifies the discount rate at which the present net worth of all benefits and costs over the project life is equal to zero as determined by trial and error. It allows direct comparisons between the earning power, or return from the proposed investment, and alternative forms of investment. The decision rules identified by James and Lee that apply here are different: 1. Compare all alternatives over the same period of analysis. 2. Calculate the rate of return for each alternative. Choose all alternatives having a rate of return exceeding the minimum acceptable value. Reject the rest. 3. Rank the alternatives in the set of mutually exclusive alternatives in order of increasing cost. Calculate the rate of return on the incremental cost and incremental benefits of the next alternative above the least costly alternative. Choose the costlier alternative if the incremental rate of return exceeds the minimum acceptable discount rate. Otherwise, choose the less costly alternative. Continue the analysis by considering the alternatives in order of increased costliness, the alternative on the less costly side of each increment being the costliest project chosen thus far.17 The incremental procedure described in rule 3 must be used in place of choosing the mutually exclusive alternative having the highest rate of return, in order to have the same decisions as provided by the present-worth method. To accomplish the rate-of-return analysis, the discount rate must be calculated by trial and error in order to make discounted benefits equal to discounted costs. Either present worth of costs and benefits or the equivalent uniform annual cash flows may be used. If the internal rate of return of a proposed investment exceeds the attractive minimum rate of return, the project is considered to be economically feasible.

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The rate-of-return method is used less than the previously discussed methods because it requires the prior calculation of net present worth, and it must be used with caution in comparing alternatives. Benefit-Cost Ratio Method Public investment analysis is commonly done using the benefit-cost ratio method, particularly by US government agencies. Benefit-cost analysis was first used by the USACE under a directive from Congress to show that total benefits that accrue from a water resources project exceed total costs (construction, maintenance, and operation).18 In other words, the ratio of benefits to costs (B/C) must exceed 1.0 in order for a project to be considered economically feasible. The analysis requires the resolution of a project into favorable and unfavorable consequences, with a monetary value determined for each, and these values combined with capital and operating costs to determine economic feasibility. The benefit-cost method relies on the approaches discussed previously. Essentially, all benefits and costs must be identified individually, with appropriate monetary values assigned and time periods determined. Then all benefits and costs must be brought to a comparable time. This step is most commonly done using present-worth analysis. Benefits are generally viewed as all the positive returns from a project, regardless of who benefits. Costs are measured as the outlays made by the project sponsors as well as losses suffered by groups directly affected by the project. The latter concern appears in two different forms in the benefit-cost calculation: B–D B or C C+D where: B = benefits C = costs D = disbenefits, hardships, or losses caused by the project Obviously, the alternative forms will give slightly different results for the same set of numbers. Thus, it is important to be consistent in applying one ratio or the other and to know which one is being used for comparisons with other alternatives. Identifying Benefits and Costs One of the main difficulties of doing a reliable benefit-cost analysis is properly and realistically identifying and measuring benefits and costs associated with a

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project. Although it may seem straightforward to prepare a list of benefits and costs, the reality is much more problematic because of the many types of benefits and costs and the means of measuring some of them. Direct, measurable benefits and costs are the easier part of the process. For cost and benefit estimation techniques, as published by the USACE, see http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/Missions/Economics/ Direct benefits can be defined as those improvements or gains enjoyed by those who make direct use of the goods and services provided by a project. For example, a flood control project would include the direct savings of reduced potential flood damages to residences, businesses, and public infrastructure. Direct benefits might also include increases in land value because of the increase in market value of property protected from potential flood damages. Direct benefits for a flood control project might thus be considered as damages avoided. Indirect benefits are those induced by a project, such as new businesses or residences locating in direct response to a newly completed project. However, if a new activity is a transfer of an existing activity from another location, it should not be counted as a benefit from a national point of view except for any value added to the new location. The total amount would be a gain to the area where the project is located, but an economic loss from the area it left, resulting in no net national benefit. Intangible benefits are those benefits that cannot be quantified and are not included directly in the benefitcost analysis. These benefits must be incorporated in some other way if they are to be part of the overall study. Direct costs are those actual costs of goods and services that are incurred to design, construct, operate, and maintain a project. This would include such expenses as rights-of-way, labor, and materials. Expenditures by those who receive direct benefits of a project in order to utilize it are considered associated costs. Indirect costs are those costs necessary to obtain indirect benefits. Intangible costs do not have quantified values and must be evaluated in some other manner in order to consider them in the analysis. Limitations and Cautions Benefit-cost analysis has been the subject of much criticism; it has been misused, abused, and misunderstood.19 A word of caution is in order here regarding some of the limitations and shortcomings of benefit-cost analysis. The first and most obvious concern is that not all costs and benefits can be assigned monetary values. This point is particularly significant in water resources planning, because most public investments are large and have a variety of impacts. For example, aesthetic values vary widely among people and cannot be assigned a true monetary value. But flooding a valley through the construction of a dam and reservoir may destroy certain aesthetic values. On the



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other hand, this loss may be replaced with the creation of new aesthetic values. Similarly, the value of fish and wildlife, aquatic ecosystems, vegetation, and the like cannot be assigned a true monetary value. Estimates are frequently made by using surrogate measures, such as the commercial value of fish or trees or the value of hunting and fishing experiences. There is an extensive body of literature dealing with nonquantifiables and noncommensurables.20 The net effect of these concerns is that they will have to be treated in the decisionmaking process in some other manner. The issue of the appropriate discount rate has been the subject of much debate. Many federal water resources project planners—the USACE and the Bureau of Reclamation in particular—have been criticized for using low discount rates. The actual figure is set by legislation, however, so that all US agencies are consistent in their selection of a discount rate. Annual-Cost Method This method is similar to the present-worth method, but it converts present worths for a project to equivalent uniform annual values. As described previously, annual net benefits are calculated each year of the project, the present value of each is determined, and the net sum of all present values is obtained. Once this value is obtained, the appropriate capital recovery factor (A/P, i%, n) is applied to determine equivalent annual figures. The appropriate decision rule in this method is to select the alternative having the greatest annual benefit. Although the annual-cost method is much like the present-worth method, it is often preferred by people more accustomed to thinking of annual costs than of present worth. Cost Allocation and Cost Sharing After economic analysis and the tests for various feasibility criteria have been completed, the issue of allocating costs remains. Although economic analysis itself does not focus on who benefits and who pays, those questions still must be addressed as part of the financial aspects of water resources planning. When financial responsibility for a project is divided among two or more parties—a frequent occurrence in water resources projects—the total cost must be divided appropriately among those parties through the procedure known as cost allocation. The objective of cost allocation is to divide costs of a project according to the different purposes the project will serve so that all purposes have an equitable share. After developing a formula for allocating costs, the results must become part of a legally binding cost sharing agreement.21 In US government projects, cost allocation essentially divides total project costs among dif-

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ferent project purposes, and cost sharing determines the division of costs among various government and local interests according to established federal law. Allocation Rules Cost allocation often has no absolutely correct answer; planners must recognize this fact and follow a uniform set of procedures. Each party involved in a project would like the other parties to assume the largest possible share of costs, but standard rules and procedures must be followed to resolve conflicts among the parties. In order to obtain equitable distribution of costs, they should be distributed so that: 1. The allocated cost to any purpose does not exceed the benefits of that purpose. 2. Each purpose will carry at least its separable cost.22 Separable cost for any purpose is obtained by subtracting the cost of a multipurpose project without that purpose from the total cost of a project with the purpose included. An example of cost allocation can be seen in a typical large, multipurpose dam that provides water supply, flood control, and hydroelectric power. For each of these purposes, specific costs are connected to elements of the project required for the specific purpose; all other costs, such as land, easements, and the dam structure itself, would have joint costs to be allocated to the different purposes. One of the key issues is how to allocate these overall costs to the individual purposes. That decision is left to the responsible agency for the project and must be based on rational and informed judgment. Three methods of allocation are recognized as appropriate by federal water agencies: 1. Separable costs-remaining benefits (SCRB) method 2. Alternative justifiable expenditure method 3. Use-of-facilities method The SCRB method is preferred by the USACE for general use in water resources planning. The method usually provides for equitable distribution of total project cost among the various project purposes. Objectives of the SCRB method are: 1. To allocate to each project purpose all costs associated with inclusion of that purpose in the project. This amount, referred to as “incremental” or “separable” cost, is the minimum that would be allocated to the purpose.

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2. To allocate costs in such a way that costs allocated to a purpose do not exceed benefits for that purpose or the cost of the most economical alternative way to provide equivalent benefits. This amount would be the maximum to be allocated to the purpose. 3. To distribute joint costs among all purposes in such a way that each purpose shares equitably in the advantages of multipurpose development as compared with alternative single-purpose developments. The basic principle of the method is that “all project costs are distributed among the purposes on the basis of the alternative costs that could justifiably be incurred to achieve equivalent benefits by alternative means.”23 Cost Sharing After costs are allocated according to different purposes in federal water resources projects, they are usually shared among different parties according to a set of federal laws and policies. Such policies cover the sharing of costs and other responsibilities among state and local governments as well as among different federal agencies. The amount of nonfederal involvement depends on the nature of the project as well as applicable laws and policies. In recent years, the federal government has taken a position of increased nonfederal sharing and payment by direct beneficiaries of vendible services produced by water projects. One of the primary objectives of the US Congress in authorizing federal involvement in any resource development or environmental protection project is to see that maximum contribution to the public good is achieved while maintaining a reasonable balance between federal and nonfederal responsibilities. The Congress has determined generally that the federal government: • Should undertake only those activities that local levels of government or private enterprise cannot do as readily or as well from the standpoint of the national interest. • May bear a part of the costs of programs that benefit the nation as a whole or are deemed necessary to protect the interest of future generations, particularly in fields in which profit-making organizations do not operate. • Should provide for mitigation of any damaging effects of federal projects or carry out measures to compensate for such effects. • May in special circumstances in the national interest provide services that normally would be provided by private enterprise or nonfederal public entities. • May construct certain works for which local interests will be willing to pay, or may provide subsidies, as by permitting repayment at low federal interest rates.

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• May develop comprehensive plans that include purposes for which a high degree of responsibility remains with nonfederal entities. • Should not consider all purposes to warrant equal or maximum federal participation.24 Ultimately the costs of developing, implementing, and maintaining water resources projects must be borne by the nation, whether it be through the federal government, state and local governments, or private entities and individuals.25 Table 9.2 provides an overview of the range of cost-sharing responsibilities between the USACE and other sponsors related to construction, and O&M. The WRDA of 1986 was the most significant in altering the cost sharing; it required greater levels of non-federal cost sharing for water projects and programs that continue today. TABLE 9.2 USACE Cost Shares for Construction and O&M Project Purpose Navigation Coastal Ports: 50 ft. harbor Inland Waterways Flood and Hurricane Damage Reduction Inland Flood Control Coastal Hurricane and Storm Damage Reduction except Periodic Beach Renourishment Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Multipurpose Project Components Hydroelectric Power Municipal and Industrial Water Supply Storage Agricultural Water Supply Storage Recreation at USACE Facilities Aquatic Plant Control

Maximum Federal Maximum Federal Share of Construction Share of O&M — — 80%a 65%a 40%a 100%c — 65% 65% 50% 65% — 0%d 0% 65%e 50% not applicable

— — 100%b 100%b 50%b 100% — 0% 0% 0% 0% — 0% 0% 0% 0% 50%

Percentages reflect that nonfederal sponsors pay 10%, 25%, or 50% during construction and 10%, over a period not to exceed thirty years. Appropriations from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, which is funded by collections on commercial cargo imports at federally maintained ports, are used for 100% of these costs. c Appropriations from the Inland Waterway Trust Fund, which is funded by a fuel tax on vessels engaged in commercial transport on designated waterways, are used for 50% of these costs. d Capital costs initially are federally funded and are repaid by fees collected from power customers. e For the seventeen western states where reclamation law applies, irrigation costs initially are federally funded and then repaid by nonfederal water users. a

b

Sources: 33 U.S.C. § 2211–2215, unless otherwise specified above; Carter, N., and C. Stern. (2017). Army Corps of Engineers: Water Resource Authorizations, Appropriations and Activities, p. 14. Congressional Research Service 7-5700, R41243. Retrieved from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41243.pdf



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Study Questions  1. Examine the production function shown earlier in this chapter and discuss the limitations of it. Identify additional variables that might make the production function more realistic.  2. In a large-scale water project, a variety of direct and indirect costs and benefits typically accrue. Select a particular type of project and discuss the various costs and benefits that might be involved. Are any of these costs and benefits more important than the others? If so, why?  3. Waterways have played an important historical role in the development of the nation. In building a major new waterway to improve navigation, who should pay the costs? Why?  4. Why is cost sharing an important element of water resources projects?  5. What arguments can you give in favor of the efficiency approach to water resources planning? What are some arguments against it?  6. The discount rate used in federal water resources projects has frequently been a source of contention, particularly when rates were set far below prevailing market rates. Show how a change in the discount rate from 2 percent to 6 percent can have serious consequences in the evaluation of a major project.  7. Identify a water resources project currently (or recently) under consideration for an area with which you are familiar. Based on your knowledge of the circumstances, which public agencies should be involved with the project and why? Are any special interest groups likely to have input on the project? Are they likely to have a major effect on the outcome?  8. Construct a cash-flow diagram for the example you used in question 7, using the best available information on costs and benefits.  9. Find an example of a water resources project in a developing country where major investments in water resources were made to improve the overall national economy. Did the investment appear to be rational in comparison with other possibilities for investment? 10. The federal prime interest rate has been kept very low since attempting to recover from the great recession that started in December 2007. With that in mind, use an interest rate of i = 2 percent with other terms kept unchanged, and calculate the steps under costs and benefits for the hypothetical example in this chapter. What does this show you about the effects of lowering the interest rate? 11. Name what you think are the pros and cons with regard to the changes from the P&G to the PR&G. How do you think they will affect water resource management projects at the federal level? 12. Explain what is meant by accounting for differences in “value (kind)” and differences in “time.”

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Notes 1.  Griffin, R. C. (2006). Water Resource Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2.  See, for example, Anderson, T. L., and P. J. Hill. (1996). Water Marketing: The Next Generation. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield; Spulber, N., and A. Sabbaghi. (1997). Economics of Water Resources: From Regulation to Privatization. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Reilly, W. K. (1999). The New Water Economics. In ITT Industries Guidebook to Global Water Issues. Retrieved from http://www.itt.com/waterbook; and World Bank. (2000). Water Economics: Political Economy of Water Reform. World Bank. Retrieved from http:// lnweb18.worldbank.org 3.  Krutilla, J. V., and O. Eckstein. (1958). Multiple Purpose River Development. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Maas, A., et al. (1962). Design of Water-Resource Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 4.  See, for example, Eckstein, O. (1958). Water Resource Development: The Economics of Project Evaluation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; James, L. D., and R. R. Lee. (1971). Economics of Water Resources Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill; Smith, S. C., and E. N. Castle, Eds. (1964). Economics and Public Policy in Water Resource Development. Ames: Iowa State University Press; Merrett, S. (1997). Introduction to the Economics of Water Resources: An International Perspective. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 5.  Council on Environmental Quality. (1997). Environmental Justice, Guidance Under the National Environmental Policy Act. Washington, DC: CEQ; EPA. (1998). Final Guidance for Incorporating Environmental Justice Concerns in EPA’s NEPA Compliance Analyses. Washington, DC: EPA; EPA and National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Public Participation and Accountability Subcommittee. (2000, Feb). The Model Plan for Public Participation. EPA-300-K-00-001. Washington, DC: USEPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/ production/files/2015-02/documents/model-public-part-plan.pdf 6. Lustgarten, A., and ProPublica. (2016). A Free Market Plan to Save the American West from Drought. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2016/03/a-plan-to-save-the-american-west-from-drought/426846/ 7.  Council on Environmental Quality, Environmental Justice, Guidance Under the National Environmental Policy Act; EPA, Final Guidance for Incorporating Environmental Justice Concerns in EPA’s NEPA Compliance Analyses; and National Environmental Justice Advisory Council Public Participation and Accountability Subcommittee, The Model Plan for Public Participation. 8.  Schad, T. M. (1979). Water Resources Planning—Historical Development. ASCE, Journal of the Water Resources Planning and Management Division, 105(WR1). 9.  Schad, Water Resources Planning—Historical Development. 10.  Inter-Agency Committee on Water Resources. (1950). Proposed Practices for Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects. Washington, DC: GPO. 11.  US Congress. (1962). Policies, Standards, and Procedures in the Formulation, Evaluation, and Review of Plans for Use and Development of Water and Related Land Resources. Senate Document 97. Washington, DC: GPO. 12.  US Water Resources Council. (1973). Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources. Washington, DC: GPO. 13.  US Water Resources Council. (1983). Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies. Washington, DC: GPO.



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14.  Boland, J. J. (2018). Personal communication based on lecture notes from Johns Hopkins University. 15. USACE. (2006). Environmental Benefits and Performance Measures: Defining National Ecosystem Restoration and How to Measure Its Achievement: A Discussion Paper. Adopted by the Chief of Engineers Environmental Advisory Board. USACE. Retrieved from https://www.usace.army.mil/Portals/2/docs/Environmental/EAB/ebpm_mar07.pdf; and USACE. (1997). Planning Primer. IWR Report 97-R-15. Prepared by K. D. Orth and C. E. Yoe. Fort Belvoir, VA: IWR. 16.  James and Lee, Economics of Water Resources Planning. 17.  James and Lee, Economics of Water Resources Planning. 18.  Jewell, T. K. (1986). A Systems Approach to Civil Engineering Planning and Design. New York: Harper & Row; USACE. (1980). Engineer Regulation 1105  2-300. NED Benefit-Cost Analysis. Washington, DC: USACE. 19.  Bromley, D. W. (1976). The Benefit-Cost Dilemma. Chapter 12 of Forty Years of CostBenefit Analysis, edited by Robert Dorfman. Discussion Paper No. 498. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Institute of Economic Research. 20.  See, for example, Haimes, Y. Y., and W. A. Hall. (1974). Multiobjectives in Water Resources Systems Analysis: The Surrogate Worth Trade-off Method. Water Resources Research, 10(4); G. D. Lynne. (1976, December). Incommensurables and Tradeoffs in Water Resources Planning. Water Resources Bulletin, 12(6). 21.  James and Lee, Economics of Water Resources Planning. 22.  USACE, NED Benefit-Cost Analysis. 23.  Petersen, M. S. (1984). Water Resources Planning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 24. Petersen, Water Resources Planning and Development. 25.  Carter, N., and C. Stern. (2017). Army Corps of Engineers: Water Resource Authorizations, Appropriations and Activities, p. 14. Congressional Research Service 7-5700, R41243. Retrieved from https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41243.pdf; and Viessman, W. J. (2009). A History of the United States Water Resources Planning and Development. In The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making, edited by Clifford S. Russell and Duane D. Baumann. IWR Maass-White Series. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

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Appendix 9-A: Compound Interest Factors The values of compound interest formulas presented in these tables are a function of the interest rate (i) and the number of time periods (n). Compound interest factors for various values of i and n are given for single payment compound amount, single payment present worth, uniform payment sinking fund, uniform payment capital recovery, uniform payment compound amount, uniform payment present worth, and arithmetic gradient present worth. Values for any factor can be calculated by using the appropriate equation. More complete tables of factors can be found in engineering economics textbooks. Alternatively, most computer spreadsheets provide the underlying equations in the form of functions, which can be used to generate any desired compound interest factor.

i = 2% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.020 1.040 1.061 1.082 1.104

0.980 0.961 0.942 0.924 0.906

1.000 0.495 0.327 0.243 0.192

1.020 0.515 0.347 0.263 0.212

1.000 2.020 3.060 4.122 5.204

0.980 1.942 2.884 3.808 4.713

0.980 2.903 5.730 9.425 13.954

6 7 8 9 10

1.126 1.149 1.172 1.195 1.219

0.888 0.871 0.853 0.837 0.820

0.159 0.135 0.117 0.103 0.091

0.179 0.155 0.137 0.123 0.111

6.308 7.434 8.583 9.755 10.950

5.601 6.472 7.325 8.162 8.983

19.282 25.375 32.203 39.734 47.938

11 12 13 14 15

1.243 1.268 1.294 1.319 1.346

0.804 0.788 0.773 0.758 0.743

0.082 0.075 0.068 0.063 0.058

0.102 0.095 0.088 0.083 0.078

12.169 13.412 14.680 15.974 17.293

9.787 10.575 11.348 12.106 12.849

56.785 66.246 76.296 86.906 98.051

16 17 18 19 20

1.373 1.400 1.428 1.457 1.486

0.728 0.714 0.700 0.686 0.673

0.054 0.050 0.047 0.044 0.041

0.074 0.070 0.067 0.064 0.061

18.639 20.012 21.412 22.841 24.297

13.578 14.292 14.992 15.678 16.351

109.707 121.847 134.450 147.492 160.952

21 22 23 24 25

1.516 1.546 1.577 1.608 1.641

0.660 0.647 0.634 0.622 0.610

0.039 0.037 0.035 0.033 0.031

0.059 0.057 0.055 0.053 0.051

25.783 27.299 28.845 30.422 32.030

17.011 17.658 18.292 18.914 19.523

174.807 189.038 203.623 218.544 233.783

30

1.811

0.552

0.025

0.045

40.568

22.396

314.113

40

2.208

0.453

0.017

0.037

60.402

27.355

489.349

50

2.692

0.372

0.012

0.032

84.579

31.424

673.784

i = 3% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.030 1.061 1.093 1.126 1.159

0.971 0.943 0.915 0.888 0.863

1.000 0.493 0.324 0.239 0.188

1.030 0.523 0.354 0.269 0.218

1.000 2.030 3.091 4.184 5.309

0.971 1.913 2.829 3.717 4.580

0.971 2.856 5.601 9.155 13.468

6 7 8 9 10

1.194 1.230 1.267 1.305 1.344

0.837 0.813 0.789 0.766 0.744

0.155 0.131 0.112 0.098 0.087

0.185 0.161 0.142 0.128 0.117

6.468 7.662 8.892 10.159 11.464

5.417 6.230 7.020 7.786 8.530

18.493 24.185 30.500 37.398 44.839

11 12 13 14 15

1.384 1.426 1.469 1.513 1.558

0.722 0.701 0.681 0.661 0.642

0.078 0.070 0.064 0.059 0.054

0.108 0.100 0.094 0.089 0.084

12.808 14.192 15.618 17.086 18.599

9.253 9.954 10.635 11.296 11.938

52.786 61.202 70.055 79.310 88.938

16 17 18 19 20

1.605 1.653 1.702 1.754 1.806

0.623 0.605 0.587 0.570 0.554

0.050 0.046 0.043 0.040 0.037

0.080 0.076 0.073 0.070 0.067

20.157 21.762 23.414 25.117 26.870

12.561 13.166 13.754 14.324 14.877

98.909 109.194 119.767 130.603 141.676

21 22 23 24 25

1.860 1.916 1.974 2.033 2.094

0.538 0.522 0.507 0.492 0.478

0.035 0.033 0.031 0.029 0.027

0.065 0.063 0.061 0.059 0.057

28.676 30.537 32.453 34.426 36.459

15.415 15.937 16.444 16.936 17.413

152.965 164.446 176.100 187.907 199.847

30

2.427

0.412

0.021

0.051

47.575

19.600

260.962

40

3.262

0.307

0.013

0.043

75.401

23.115

384.865

50

4.384

0.228

0.009

0.039

112.797

25.730

503.210

n

i = 4% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.040 1.082 1.125 1.170 1.217

0.962 0.925 0.889 0.855 0.822

1.000 0.490 0.320 0.235 0.185

1.040 0.530 0.360 0.275 0.225

1.000 2.040 3.122 4.246 5.416

0.962 1.886 2.775 3.630 4.452

0.962 2.811 5.478 8.897 13.006

6 7 8 9 10

1.265 1.316 1.369 1.423 1.480

0.790 0.760 0.731 0.703 0.676

0.151 0.127 0.109 0.094 0.083

0.191 0.167 0.149 0.134 0.123

6.633 7.898 9.214 10.583 12.006

5.242 6.002 6.733 7.435 8.111

17.748 23.068 28.913 35.237 41.992

11 12 13 14 15

1.539 1.601 1.665 1.732 1.801

0.650 0.625 0.601 0.577 0.555

0.074 0.067 0.060 0.055 0.050

0.114 0.107 0.100 0.095 0.090

13.486 15.026 16.627 18.292 20.024

8.760 9.385 9.986 10.563 11.118

49.138 56.633 64.440 72.525 80.854

16 17 18 19 20

1.873 1.948 2.026 2.107 2.191

0.534 0.513 0.494 0.475 0.456

0.046 0.042 0.039 0.036 0.034

0.086 0.082 0.079 0.076 0.074

21.825 23.698 25.645 27.671 29.778

11.652 12.166 12.659 13.134 13.590

89.396 98.124 107.009 116.027 125.155

21 22 23 24 25

2.279 2.370 2.465 2.563 2.666

0.439 0.422 0.406 0.390 0.375

0.031 0.029 0.027 0.026 0.024

0.071 0.069 0.067 0.066 0.064

31.969 34.248 36.618 39.083 41.646

14.029 14.451 14.857 15.247 15.622

134.371 143.654 152.985 162.348 171.726

30

3.243

0.308

0.018

0.058

56.085

17.292

218.354

40

4.801

0.208

0.011

0.051

95.026

19.793

306.323

50

7.107

0.141

0.007

0.047

152.667

21.482

382.646

i = 5% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.050 1.103 1.158 1.216 1.276

0.952 0.907 0.864 0.823 0.784

1.000 0.488 0.317 0.232 0.181

1.050 0.538 0.367 0.282 0.231

1.000 2.050 3.153 4.310 5.526

0.952 1.859 2.723 3.546 4.329

0.952 2.766 5.358 8.649 12.566

6 7 8 9 10

1.340 1.407 1.477 1.551 1.629

0.746 0.711 0.677 0.645 0.614

0.147 0.123 0.105 0.091 0.080

0.197 0.173 0.155 0.141 0.130

6.802 8.142 9.549 11.027 12.578

5.076 5.786 6.463 7.108 7.722

17.044 22.018 27.433 33.235 39.374

11 12 13 14 15

1.710 1.796 1.886 1.980 2.079

0.585 0.557 0.530 0.505 0.481

0.070 0.063 0.056 0.051 0.046

0.120 0.113 0.106 0.101 0.096

14.207 15.917 17.713 19.599 21.579

8.306 8.863 9.394 9.899 10.380

45.805 52.487 59.381 66.452 73.668

16 17 18 19 20

2.183 2.292 2.407 2.527 2.653

0.458 0.436 0.416 0.396 0.377

0.042 0.039 0.036 0.033 0.030

0.092 0.089 0.086 0.083 0.080

23.657 25.840 28.132 30.539 33.066

10.838 11.274 11.690 12.085 12.462

80.997 88.415 95.894 103.413 110.951

21 22 23 24 25

2.786 2.925 3.072 3.225 3.386

0.359 0.342 0.326 0.310 0.295

0.028 0.026 0.024 0.022 0.021

0.078 0.076 0.074 0.072 0.071

35.719 38.505 41.430 44.502 47.727

12.821 13.163 13.489 13.799 14.094

118.488 126.009 133.497 140.939 148.321

30

4.322

0.231

0.015

0.065

66.439

15.372

183.995

40

7.040

0.142

0.008

0.058

120.800

17.159

246.704

50

11.467

0.087

0.005

0.055

209.348

18.256

296.171

i = 6% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.060 1.124 1.191 1.262 1.338

0.943 0.890 0.840 0.792 0.747

1.000 0.485 0.314 0.229 0.177

1.060 0.545 0.374 0.289 0.237

1.000 2.060 3.184 4.375 5.637

0.943 1.833 2.673 3.465 4.212

0.943 2.723 5.242 8.411 12.147

6 7 8 9 10

1.419 1.504 1.594 1.689 1.791

0.705 0.665 0.627 0.592 0.558

0.143 0.119 0.101 0.087 0.076

0.203 0.179 0.161 0.147 0.136

6.975 8.394 9.897 11.491 13.181

4.917 5.582 6.210 6.802 7.360

16.377 21.032 26.051 31.378 36.962

11 12 13 14 15

1.898 2.012 2.133 2.261 2.397

0.527 0.497 0.469 0.442 0.417

0.067 0.059 0.053 0.048 0.043

0.127 0.119 0.113 0.108 0.103

14.972 16.870 18.882 21.015 23.276

7.887 8.384 8.853 9.295 9.712

42.757 48.721 54.816 61.008 67.267

16 17 18 19 20

2.540 2.693 2.854 3.026 3.207

0.394 0.371 0.350 0.331 0.312

0.039 0.035 0.032 0.030 0.027

0.099 0.095 0.092 0.090 0.087

25.673 28.213 30.906 33.760 36.786

10.106 10.477 10.828 11.158 11.470

73.565 79.878 86.185 92.464 98.700

21 22 23 24 25

3.400 3.604 3.820 4.049 4.292

0.294 0.278 0.262 0.247 0.233

0.025 0.023 0.021 0.020 0.018

0.085 0.083 0.081 0.080 0.078

39.993 43.392 46.996 50.816 54.865

11.764 12.042 12.303 12.550 12.783

104.878 110.983 117.004 122.932 128.757

30

5.743

0.174

0.013

0.073

79.058

13.765

156.124

40

10.286

0.097

0.006

0.066

154.762

15.046

201.003

50

18.420

0.054

0.003

0.063

290.336

15.762

233.219

i = 8% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.080 1.166 1.260 1.360 1.469

0.926 0.857 0.794 0.735 0.681

1.000 0.481 0.308 0.222 0.170

1.080 0.561 0.388 0.302 0.250

1.000 2.080 3.246 4.506 5.867

0.926 1.783 2.577 3.312 3.993

0.926 2.641 5.022 7.962 11.365

6 7 8 9 10

1.587 1.714 1.851 1.999 2.159

0.630 0.583 0.540 0.500 0.463

0.136 0.112 0.094 0.080 0.069

0.216 0.192 0.174 0.160 0.149

7.336 8.923 10.637 12.488 14.487

4.623 5.206 5.747 6.247 6.710

15.146 19.231 23.553 28.055 32.687

11 12 13 14 15

2.332 2.518 2.720 2.937 3.172

0.429 0.397 0.368 0.340 0.315

0.060 0.053 0.047 0.041 0.037

0.140 0.133 0.127 0.121 0.117

16.645 18.977 21.495 24.215 27.152

7.139 7.536 7.904 8.244 8.559

37.405 42.170 46.950 51.717 56.445

16 17 18 19 20

3.426 3.700 3.996 4.316 4.661

0.292 0.270 0.250 0.232 0.215

0.033 0.030 0.027 0.024 0.022

0.113 0.110 0.107 0.104 0.102

30.324 33.750 37.450 41.446 45.762

8.851 9.122 9.372 9.604 9.818

61.115 65.710 70.214 74.617 78.908

21 22 23 24 25

5.034 5.437 5.871 6.341 6.848

0.199 0.184 0.170 0.158 0.146

0.020 0.018 0.016 0.015 0.014

0.100 0.098 0.096 0.095 0.094

50.423 55.457 60.893 66.765 73.106

10.017 10.201 10.371 10.529 10.675

83.080 87.126 91.044 94.828 98.479

30

10.063

0.099

0.009

0.089

113.283

11.258

114.714

40

21.725

0.046

0.004

0.084

259.057

11.925

137.967

50

46.902

0.021

0.002

0.082

573.770

12.233

151.826

i = 10% Single Payment

Arithmetic Gradient

Uniform Payment Series

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Sinking Fund Factor

Capital Recovery Factor

Compound Amount Factor

Present Worth Factor

Gradient Present Worth

n

F/P

P/F

A/F

A/P

F/A

P/A

P/G

1 2 3 4 5

1.100 1.210 1.331 1.464 1.611

0.909 0.826 0.751 0.683 0.621

1.000 0.476 0.302 0.215 0.164

1.100 0.576 0.402 0.315 0.264

1.000 2.100 3.310 4.641 6.105

0.909 1.736 2.487 3.170 3.791

0.909 2.562 4.816 7.548 10.653

6 7 8 9 10

1.772 1.949 2.144 2.358 2.594

0.564 0.513 0.467 0.424 0.386

0.130 0.105 0.087 0.074 0.063

0.230 0.205 0.187 0.174 0.163

7.716 9.487 11.436 13.579 15.937

4.355 4.868 5.335 5.759 6.145

14.039 17.632 21.364 25.180 29.036

11 12 13 14 15

2.853 3.138 3.452 3.797 4.177

0.350 0.319 0.290 0.263 0.239

0.054 0.047 0.041 0.036 0.031

0.154 0.147 0.141 0.136 0.131

18.531 21.384 24.523 27.975 31.772

6.495 6.814 7.103 7.367 7.606

32.891 36.715 40.481 44.167 47.758

16 17 18 19 20

4.595 5.054 5.560 6.116 6.727

0.218 0.198 0.180 0.164 0.149

0.028 0.025 0.022 0.020 0.017

0.128 0.125 0.122 0.120 0.117

35.950 40.545 45.599 51.159 57.275

7.824 8.022 8.201 8.365 8.514

51.240 54.603 57.841 60.948 63.920

21 22 23 24 25

7.400 8.140 8.954 9.850 10.835

0.135 0.123 0.112 0.102 0.092

0.016 0.014 0.013 0.011 0.010

0.116 0.114 0.113 0.111 0.110

64.002 71.403 79.543 88.497 98.347

8.649 8.772 8.883 8.985 9.077

66.758 69.461 72.029 74.466 76.773

30

17.449

0.057

0.006

0.106

164.494

9.427

86.503

40

45.259

0.022

0.002

0.102

442.593

9.779

98.732

50

117.391

0.009

0.001

0.101

1163.91

9.915

104.804

10 Floodplain Management

Introduction

F

looding is a natural phenomenon, as natural as snow and rain that occurs regularly. Nonetheless, floods inflict major human loss and suffering as well as economic loss with annual regularity and genuinely catastrophic damage to large regions of the nation. Floods are unpredictable and are a major concern with respect to the natural environment.1 Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, a changing philosophy has caused floodplains to be viewed as areas to be carefully managed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines floodplain management as “a decision-making process that aims to achieve wise use of the nation’s floodplains.” It goes on to explain that “wise use” includes minimizing losses associated with floods as well as protecting the functionality that floodplains provide as a natural resource.2 Increasing concerns with flood hazards and environmental values of floodplains have led to considerable legislation and administrative action to provide new management tools. This chapter provides an overview of floods, floodplains, and streamflow analysis. It then covers the legislative history, current policies, and various planning and management techniques and remedial strategies with regard to floodplain management that have evolved over the years. Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resource planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of — 270 —



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definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in floodplain management are the following. Floodplain management The operation of an overall program of corrective and preventive measures for reducing flood damage, including but not limited to, emergency preparedness plans, flood-control works, and floodplain management regulations.3 Floodplain Any land area susceptible to being inundated by floodwaters from any source.4 Mitigation Efforts to reduce loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters. This risk reduction effort includes but is not limited to: modifying existing structures and future construction, in the pre and post-disaster environments, via regulations, local ordinances, land use, and building practices and other practices that reduce or eliminate long-term risk from hazards and their effects. Resilience The ability to prepare and plan to absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Flooding and Floodplains Flooding is primarily associated with two phenomena: hurricanes and excessive channel flow or streamflow. The latter may come from heavy rain or excessive snowmelt. Flooding may be categorized as coastal or riverine, for most flooding takes place along coasts or rivers. Coastal, or tidal, flooding results primarily from hurricanes and other major storms. Eleven named systems strike the Atlantic basin in a year on average. This includes an average six hurricanes, three of which are Category 3, with winds between 178–209 km/hr, or 111–130 mph or greater in strength on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.5 High winds, intense rain, and heavy flooding can be linked to tropical cyclones. These factors cause social, economic, and physical damage to an area. Physical damage can range from minor incidents, such as fallen trees, to major incidents, including flooded and/or fallen buildings or freshwater supplies inundated by sea water. A hurricane is centered on low atmospheric pressure, which causes a storm surge or raised water level. This situation is compounded by large, wind-driven, high-energy waves. Under the worst possible conditions, a storm surge on top of normal high tides, combined with large waves, can raise the water level to as much as 3 to 5 m (10 to 15 ft.) or more above the mean sea level. In some circumstances, structures are used to minimize coastal flooding, but often coastal areas rely on various nonstructural techniques.

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Riverine and backwater flooding is caused by exceptional rainfalls, spring thawing, and the inability of a stream channel to accommodate the runoff from its watershed. Continued development in floodplains has increased the potential hazard, but the situation is further complicated by the fact that such development typically causes additional runoff and therefore increases problems to downstream areas that were originally out of the hazard zone. The solutions to flood hazards are varied, ranging from various structural techniques to numerous nonstructural approaches. Floodplains Floodplains are the low, relatively flat land areas adjacent to rivers, lakes, oceans, and other areas subject to flooding. They are normally dry land areas, but under certain conditions they become inundated. Two reference base floods that are commonly used are: (1) the 100-year flood, or one that has a 1 percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year, and (2) the 500-year flood, or one that has a 0.2 percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year. The 100-year flood is most commonly used in defining the floodplain. It is important to remember, however, that many lesser floods occur with a much higher probability of occurrence. Although contained within the 100-year floodplain and not as severe as the 100-year flood, they frequently cause significant damage to buildings and other developments. Moreover, one of the biggest takeaways from our ever-growing understanding of climate change phenomena is that wetter areas will see an increased rate of precipitation, while drier areas will get drier. For example, Milly et. al. reported a statistically significant trend in increased frequency of flooding and hence enhanced flood risk due to anthropogenic factors that have exacerbated climate change.6 Floodplains have evolved with other earth forms by natural processes. They are important ecosystems in themselves and are parts of larger ecological systems. The floodplain, as a geological system and as a biological system, always exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Any disturbance to the floodplain leads to a new equilibrium. For example, a major development in a floodplain will cause a redefinition and readjustment of that particular floodplain and a change in conditions of probable flooding. Furthermore, the effects of the readjustments toward a new equilibrium may extend over areas far from the original disturbance and may last for years. Floodplains provide a number of benefits when in their relatively natural condition. The values for water resources include modulation of floods, maintenance of water quality, and recharge of groundwater. The floodplain also has important biological values, including the support of large and diverse populations of plants and animals. The numerous cultural values of floodplains range from



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archaeological and historical interests to recreational and scientific ones. In addition, the floodplain is usually very productive for agriculture and forestry. All of these benefits are spelled out in greater detail in FEMA’s A Unified National Program for Floodplain Management.7 Streamflow Analysis Hydrologic principles about flood magnitude are especially important in floodplain management. Dunn and Leopold (among others), who have provided an excellent introduction to hydrology and flooding for planners, argue that planners can and should understand these basic concepts.8 Runoff Surface runoff from rainfall can be estimated for an area through the use of hyetographs and hydrographs. A hyetograph is simply a plot of precipitation over time (see figure 10.1). It is derived by taking accurate field measurements of precipitation intensity at set intervals of time. The results are seldom uniform, as precipitation intensity is rarely uniform. The hyetograph is useful for purposes of comparison with the hydrograph, which shows discharge over time and is described below. A simplified method for estimating peak runoff rates in small areas is the rational formula, which provides a quick estimate for drainage areas of less than 80.9 hectares (200 acres) in size: Q = 0.0028 CIA (SI) or Q = CIA (US customary units) where Q is the peak rate of runoff in cubic meters per second or cubic feet per second (cfs) from the drainage area, C is a coefficient of runoff based on the type of surface area under consideration, I is the rainfall intensity in mm/hour or in/ hr, and A is the drainage area in hectares or acres, respectively, for SI units or US customary units. A number of websites provide information and examples on the rational method. Table 10.1 provides typical coefficients of runoff for the rational model. The method has been used for more than a hundred years and has been found to be reasonably reliable, but its use is generally limited to urban catchment areas of less than 2.6 square kilometers (one square mile). At best, it is an approximation for dealing with peak drainage problems. A modified rational method was developed to provide better results, and a number of much more sophisticated runoff models have been developed for estimating peak flow of stormwater runoff from a drainage basin.9

FIGURE 10.1 Typical Hyetograph.

TABLE 10.1 Typical Values of the Rational Runoff Coefficient Areas Developed Areas Paved (brick, asphalt, concrete) Rooftops Lawns 2% slope Undeveloped Areas Sandy soil Loam Clay Land Use Type Commercial Residential: single family Residential: multifamily Industrial Parks, cemeteries Playgrounds

C — .70–.95 .75–.95 .05–.17 .15–.35 — .10–.20 .30–.40 .40–.50 — .50–.95 .25–.50 .40–.75 .50–.90 .10–.25 .20–.35



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A more important tool to the planner is the hydrograph, which shows discharge over time at a given point in a channel. For example, figure 10.2 shows hypothetical inflow and outflow hydrographs for a given channel. The particular pair of hydrographs indicate reservoir action within the valley. In other words, water flows in at a faster rate than the outflow. As water flows in, it is progressively stored and the level raised, causing the outflow to increase. If the inflow accumulates more than the channel capacity, it will overflow its bank onto the floodplain.

FIGURE 10.2 Inflow and Outflow Hydrographs.

The hydrograph is composed of three elements: surface, subsurface, and groundwater runoff. Groundwater runoff is the water that maintains a stream’s base flow during periods of arid weather. The nature of the hydrograph is determined by: 1. The climatic characteristics of the catchment, such as the nature of the precipitation (Rainfall’s effect is felt immediately whereas snowfall’s effect may take months; furthermore, the hydrograph’s peak from rainfall is usually higher than from snowfall) 2. The physical factors of the watershed or catchment, including area, shape, elevation, slope, soil type, drainage system, water storage capability, and vegetal cover 3. Evapotranspiration and interception 4. Rainfall intensity 5. Duration of rainfall 6. Areal distribution of rainfall 7. Distribution of rainfall over time 8. Direction of storm movements

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FIGURE 10.3 Unit Hydrograph.

Naturally, the intensity and duration of rainfall are the two most dominant factors; intensity and duration usually result in hydrographs that are not as uniform as shown in figure 10.2. Sherman formulated a simple hydrograph in 1932 that was known as the unit hydrograph (UH). The unit hydrograph (figure 10.3), derived from actual hydrographs, is the direct runoff hydrograph resulting from a rainfall of one unit of rain uniformly distributed over the catchment over a period of time (T). This definition only applies to rainfall.10 Sherman based the UH on three assumptions: 1. There is a constant baseline: for a given catchment, the duration of runoff is essentially constant for all rainfalls of a given duration and independent of the total volume of runoff. 2. Proportional ordinate: different intensities of rain of the same duration produce hydrographs of runoff for which the ordinates at any given time are in the same proportion to each other as the rainfall intensifies. 3. Superposition: it is assumed that linearity of the hydrograph of a particular rainfall can be superimposed with concurrent runoff due to preceding rainfalls.11 The unit hydrograph can be manipulated to show different time durations of rainfall. If the new time period is a multiple of the unit hydrograph’s duration,

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277

then the use of the S-Curve becomes necessary. The S-Curve, similar in shape to that of the outflow hydrograph in figure 10.2, results from the summation of a set of unit hydrographs representing longer storm duration. For example, a base time period of two hours may be extrapolated to a new period of seven hours. The unit hydrograph has several serious limitations. A hydrograph resulting from a single rainfall is rare. Hydrographs are usually produced by sequences of rainfalls. Furthermore, there is difficulty in obtaining accurate estimates of the excess rainfall because the amount of infiltration and interception varies widely with each season and the preceding weather conditions. The hyetograph and hydrograph are valuable to good water management practices. Through their use, it becomes possible to estimate such things as: 1. The amount of discharge of a river that will be found at extreme flood levels 2. The volume of discharge that can be reduced by altering runoff variables, such as the number of paved surfaces and vegetal covering 3. The cost of flood prevention compared with the damage that may arise if no measures are taken Yet, a planner must remember that the use of the hyetograph and the hydrograph is only as accurate as the data collected to create them. For that reason, the planner should never consider these tools as representing the total picture. Frequency Frequency analysis is a procedure for estimating the frequency of recurrence or probability of recurrence of past and future events. Such an analysis requires that the data be homogeneous and independent. The restriction of homogeneity assumes that all observations are from the same population (e.g., in situations where a stream-gaging meter has not been moved; or the watershed has not been urbanized).12 The restriction of independence assumes that a hydrologic event such as a single storm does not enter the dataset more than once. Furthermore, for the prediction of frequency of future events, the restriction of homogeneity requires that the data on hand be representative of future flows (i.e., there will be no new structures on the river and no land use changes). Probability theory deals with events and variables of random phenomena. Probability (P) is defined as the ratio of favorable events (M) to the number of total events (N), so that P = M/N with M < N. Probability plotting of hydrologic data requires that individual data points be independent of each other and that the sample data be representative of the population.13 There are four common types of sample data: complete duration series, annual series, partial duration series, and extreme value series. The annual series consists of one value per year, such as the maximum peak flow each year. The partial duration series consists of all values above a certain base. An example would be all

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peak flows of more than 1,500 cubic meters per second (53,000 cubic feet per second) in a river. The extreme value series consists of the largest or smallest observation in a given time interval. Which series should be used depends on the purposes of the analysis. For information about fairly frequent events, the partial series would be best. But if the purpose of the analysis is to determine the maximum flood capacity that a dam with a hundred-year lifespan should hold, the annual series would be preferable. The recurrence interval, or return period, is the time that, on average, elapses between two events that equal or exceed a particular level. The recurrence interval (T) is defined as T=

(N + 1) M

where N = number of years of data and M = rank or flow occurrence. There have been many analytical flood frequencies estimated over the past few decades, but the fact remains that the methods used are based on questionable assumptions. There are no direct theoretical connections between any analytical form of frequency distributions and the mechanism governing flood flows.14 A study group in 1968 composed of eighteen representatives from twelve federal agencies studied the six popular methods of determining flood frequency. There were large differences produced by the six methods, especially in studies covering long periods of time. Therefore, it is important to realize that statistical forecasts are only as good as the data and techniques used. It is questionable whether any method of extrapolation to one hundred years is worth a great deal when it is based on data from the past thirty years. Another point of emphasis is the noncyclical nature of random events. The 100-year flood may occur next year or in two hundred years, or perhaps there will be several of them in the next one hundred years. The concept of the 100-year event, however, is convenient for planning and management purposes. Furthermore, as previously suggested, if the basin has been altered, the data are no longer necessarily going to represent the true flood potentials, which will possibly make all predictions of recurrence intervals moot. The methods used for determining potential flooding, whether coastal or riverine, range from the simple rational formula to hydrographs and complex computerized models and satellite imagery. Regardless of the prediction technique, the norm for floodplain management is generally the 100-year storm, or the 100-year floodplain. It is a probability estimate based on long-term data. These data are now being questioned in conjunction with predictions related to climate change and altered weather patterns. Major storm events are occurring at a frequency that appears to be higher than historic records would indicate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fifth



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Assessment Report notes that glaciers continue to shrink worldwide, affecting runoff and water resources downstream. Climate change is causing permafrost warming and thawing in high latitude regions and in high-elevation regions.15 Moreover, with sea levels reported to rise by 3.2 mm (0.13 in) each year, and projections likely to be as high as 16 mm (0.63 in) a year by 2081, impacts on flooding and related damages could be high as well. In fact, according to the IPCC, if the Antarctic ice sheets completely melted, sea levels would rise as much as 57 meters or 187 feet.16 Thus, historic data on climate and flooding must be used with caution and a factor of safety in anticipation of continuing changes. Despite this concern, historical information on precipitation and floods together with some reasoned judgment about future expectations is essential for planning associated with rivers, coasts, and floodplains, for land use planning and regulation, for engineering design, and for other aspects of floodplain management. Once the potential flooding in a given area has been determined, a variety of methods can be used to minimize flood damage. The following sections describe why floods matter and different approaches for dealing with potential losses from flooding. How Floods Matter In the nineties, the “Great Flood of 1993” that devastated nine midwestern states during the summer months was considered among the worst in US history. An area twice the size of New Jersey was inundated, and an estimated $15 billion in damages were incurred. The floods claimed fifty lives, left almost seventy thousand homeless, and caused crop losses of close to $8 billion.17 The six weeks of unrelenting rains of June and July nearly doubled the amount of water flowing in the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers as well as numerous smaller rivers that feed them.18 This, of course, caused the rivers to substantially exceed their capacities and to overflow. As waters surged to record levels in some locations, television news broadcasts brought pictures of the devastation and suffering. Requests for aid followed, and an outpouring of assistance came from both public and private sources. The images of catastrophic flooding on televised newscasts captured the attention of the public and its representatives in Washington. As one might expect, substantial commentary, discussion, research, and writing soon followed. Hearings were held, new bills were introduced, and the Clinton administration appointed a task force to address the issues associated with the flooding. Many people questioned the merits of building perilously close to riverbanks, where flooding occurs periodically. Others questioned the virtue of building levees to prevent flooding, since levees tend to raise the river’s overall water level throughout its course and

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to cause flooding elsewhere. Should taxpayers pay to bail out people who did not choose to protect themselves against such a foreseeable disaster? Perhaps the most economically devastating hurricane to strike the United States in the nineties was Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. It was a small but ferocious storm that struck along a path through the northwestern Bahamas, the Miami-Dade County area of South Florida, and southern Louisiana.19 Damage from wind and flooding was estimated at $25 billion, making it the most expensive natural disaster in American history at the time. Dade County alone was left with fifteen deaths and as many as 250,000 people homeless.20 These events represent many of the challenges, small and big, associated with floods—the ones that came before these nineties’ events and the ones that followed. This pattern of loss of human lives, small to large-scale damage and destruction of property, and related economic losses are what makes floods so devastating and floodplain management so crucial. Over time, loss of human life has minimized but economic losses continue to be staggering. Recent Floods Details, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on the most famous twenty-first-century hurricanes in the United States are presented below:21 1. Hurricane Isabel: Made landfall near Cedar Island, North Carolina, as a Category 2 hurricane on September 18, 2003, causing 17 deaths, and damage worth $3 billion. 2. Hurricane Charley: Affected the entire west coast of Florida in August 2004. It was a Category 4 hurricane at landfall and led to 24 deaths and 792 injuries, with $11.2 billion in damages. 3. Hurricane Frances: Right behind Charley, in September 2004, Hurricane Frances made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane, causing seven deaths and $8.9 billion in damage. 4. Hurricane Ivan: Made landfall in September 2004, as a Category 3 hurricane, causing fourteen deaths, sixteen injuries, and $4.5 billion damages in the western panhandle of Florida and the Alabama Gulf Coast. 5. Hurricane Jeanne: The third September 2004 hurricane made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Stuart, Florida (same area as Hurricane Frances), killing five people and causing $6.9 billion damage. 6. Hurricane Dennis: Made landfall on July 10, 2005, near Navarre Beach, Florida, as a Category 3 hurricane and caused three deaths and $2.23 billion in damages. 7. Hurricane Katrina: Made two landfalls in August 29, 2005: the first near Miami, Florida, as a Category 1 hurricane and the second near Buras,



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 Louisiana, as a Category 3 hurricane. It resulted in more than 1,500 fatalities and damages greater than $100 billion.  8. Hurricane Rita: Made landfall on September 24, 2005, near Johnson’s Bayou, Louisiana, as a Category 3 hurricane, resulting in seven deaths and causing $10 billion in damages.  9. Hurricane Wilma: Made landfall near Naples, Florida, on October 24, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane, resulting in six deaths and damage totaling $20.6 billion. 10. Hurricane Ike: Made landfall near Galveston, Texas, in September 2008 as a Category 2 hurricane, causing twenty deaths and $6.9 billion in damages. Among the most recent (as of this publication) record storms and flooding were those of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico in 2017; Europe and the states of Louisiana and Oklahoma in 2016; India and northern Chile in 2015; southeastern Europe, Alberta, Canada, and New York in 2014; and northern India, southwestern China, Europe, and Alberta, Canada, in 2013.22 Hurricane Irene in 2011 made landfall as a tropical storm in New York City and caused more than $16 billion damage, mainly due to inland flooding throughout New England. The year 2017 produced Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, making that year the most expensive hurricane season in US history.23 Disregarding the high frequency of these events, the cumulative cost exceeded $300 billion, a new US annual record that far exceeded 2005, the year of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Hurricane Harvey, which struck on August 26, 2017, is considered the worst tropical cyclone event in the United States, as its strength and duration set a new US rainfall record of 153.87 cm (60.58 in), well beyond the previous record rainfall of 132.08 cm (52 in). As seen from these multiple international events, flood-related destruction is a global concern. The United Nations reports that the more than two thousand water-related diseases documented from years 2000 to 2006 killed close to 290,000 people, causing more than $400 billion in damage. Eighty three percent of these disasters occurred in Asia.24 In 2014 alone, floods caused $4 billion in damages worldwide. In August 2014, there was flooding in the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic United States; China suffered two severe floods; and India, Nepal, Japan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Pakistan, and South Korea experienced flooding losses of property and people. In Africa, Niger flooding resulted in thousands of damaged buildings and eighteen deaths. In Europe, flooding in Italy, Sweden, and Demark caused loss of life and property.25 Even as severe storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and other such events are becoming the norm rather than the exception, costs continue to rise, as seen in the cumulative figures provided by NOAA (figure 10.4) displaying prominent disaster costs from 1980 through 2017.26 As seen in figure 10.4, costs were highest in 2017 and followed by the years 2015, 2012, 2011, 2004, and 2008, respectively,

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FIGURE 10.4 Billion-Dollar Disaster Event Costs in the United States (1980–2017) (CPI Adjusted). Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). (2018). U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. National Centers for Environmental Information. Retrieved from https://www.ncdc .noaa.gov/billions/.

all well above the average (solid black line). NOAA reports that of these costs, tropical cyclones were the costliest, followed by drought, severe storms, and inland flooding. Tropical cyclones and flooding represent the second and third most frequent events, following severe storms, which were the most frequent. In the same report, NOAA depicts the rapid rise in frequency of these billion-dollar weather disaster occurrences from 1980 to 2017. The National Weather Service also provides a historical list of flood loss damages (it cautions the figures are rough estimates) from 1903 to 2014 on one of its websites.27 Proper floodplain management could help reduce these spiraling costs. The next section addresses just that: it provides, first, a detailed overview of the various legislative and policy changes that have led to the current flood regulations and floodplain management protocols, and, second, strategies on how to reduce the impacts from flooding events. Floods and Floodplains: History, Policies, and Legislation Early History Many of civilization’s first cities may have been created in conjunction with the twin problems of floods and droughts. The irresistible attractions of a water-



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front location, agricultural productivity, access to drinking and irrigation water, and easy transportation overpowered the threat of flooding. The first great civilizations did not spring up in the Middle Eastern floodplains by chance. The great rivers of that area were utilized as a transportation system as well as a model for the irrigation ditch and the canal. The village cultivators were forced to unite in order to repair the damage of sudden floods and to guide the water into their fields via canals to overcome the problems of drought conditions. As noted by Lewis Mumford, “The construction of these utilities demanded a degree of social intercourse, cooperation, and long-range planning that the old self-contained village culture, complacently accepting its limitations, did not need to encourage. The very conditions that made large urban settlements a physical possibility also made them a social necessity.”28 The bounties the Egyptians realized from the annual floods of the Nile are well known. They realized a favorable benefit-cost ratio by leaving the floods alone. Even today, there are some excellent reasons why the floodplain is used so intensely in the face of property damage and personal hazard. The many advantages of being located near a waterway operate almost as strongly today as they have in the past. The genuine benefits of economics and amenities derived from floodplain occupancy cannot be ignored; the best policy for floodplain management is not a flat prohibition of floodplain usage but a regulation of development for some “optimal,” productive uses.29 Most large cities are located on a river or coastline and can take advantage of the possibilities such a site offers. Although waterborne transportation is not quite so important as it was a century ago, there are still many factors fostering floodplain development. There are some activities that must be sited on a waterway: docks, some electrical power plants, and other utilities, to name a few. Other activities can be located elsewhere but receive quantifiable benefits from floodplain sites, such as farms and some manufacturing firms. Finally, some residents of the floodplain perceive other “amenities”; waterside locations are often desirable sites for reasons of aesthetics and access to recreational opportunities. Flooding-Related Policy and Legislation This early historical background was the basis for twentieth-century US efforts at floodplain management. The local, state, and national governments were very slow in regulating development of the floodplain, at least partly because there were good reasons not to prohibit development. The Congress and the executive branch had moved reluctantly in creating a strong role for the federal government in floodplain management. The principal national expenditure in the nineteenth century was directed at levee construction and very little else. The Mississippi River Commission, established in 1879, was charged with planning and implementing flood control works on the lower Mississippi.

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This plan was prompted by the total failure of the uncoordinated levee systems that had been constructed by private groups, and the resulting abandonment of much fertile land. Hesitant steps toward a broader approach were begun in the early part of the twentieth century, but the revolution in the federal role was the enactment of the Flood Control Act of 1936, which declared that there was a federal responsibility in flood control and authorized more than two hundred construction projects. Both the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) shared responsibility for such projects under the act. The result is 64,373.76–80,467.2 kilometers (40,000–50,000 miles) of levees and more than 78,000 dams along our rivers and coasts.30 The act also included the famous provision that projects would be limited to only those in which “the benefits to whomsoever they accrue exceed the costs”—the first important federal use of a benefit-cost ratio. One of the problems with this test for project approval was the implied disincentive for local areas to use nonstructural measures in floodplain management. The federal government traditionally paid part or all of the costs of structural control works but none of the costs of nonstructural controls; thus, local government officials saw unrealistic advantages in structural works. Other disputes have centered on the method of calculating the ratio itself—what should be included in the calculations, how they should be measured, and what discount rate should be used. The 1936 Flood Control Act was a bold advance in floodplain management, but it had severe built-in limitations. The act noted only one method of solving problems caused by floods: the use of physical structures to hold back or divert the onrush of high water. Floodplain managers now regularly use a variety of other methods to combat the threat of floods that were not often used or commonly recognized in 1936. The writings of Gilbert F. White (often known as the “father” of floodplain management) and his associates at the University of Chicago (and later at the University of Colorado at Boulder) have done much to expand the meaning and application of floodplain management.31 James Goddard of the Tennessee Valley Authority also proselytized in the cause of a broader conception of floodplain management (see figure 10.5).32 The increasing flood disaster costs were the primary backdrop of two significant policy changes in the later twentieth century. In 1966, a presidential task force on floods produced a report calling for a “unified national program for managing flood losses” that outlined specific recommendations.33 One immediate consequence of the report was the issuing of Executive Order 11296, which required all federal agencies to consider the flood hazard in their operations. A later consequence of the report was the passage of the National Flood Insurance Act (NFIA) of 1968. As this has been one of the most influential piece of legislation that controls floodplain management, a detailed overview on the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is provided in the next section.

Source: Goddard, J. E. (1963, Nov.). Flood Plain Management Improves Man’s Environment, Journal of the Water Ways and Harbors Division. ASCE.

FIGURE 10.5 Elements of Flood Damage Prevention.

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Four general principles from the 1966 presidential task-force report established the background for floodplain management: 1. Although the federal government has a fundamental interest, the basic responsibility for regulating floodplains lies with state and local governments. 2. The floodplain must be considered a definite area of interrelated water and land to be managed within the context of its community, its region, and the nation. 3. Flood loss reduction should be viewed as one of several management considerations that must be addressed in planning for economic efficiency and environmental quality. 4. Sound floodplain management is built upon the following premises: • The goals and objectives of floodplain management are defined as wise use, conservation, development, and planning of interrelated land and water resources. • Decision-making responsibility is shared among various levels of government and private individuals. • Future needs and the role of the floodplain must be understood in the context of both the physical and the socioeconomic systems of which it is a part. • All strategies for flood loss alleviation must be given equal consideration for their individual or combined effectiveness. • There must be full accounting for all benefits and costs and for interrelated impacts likely to result from floodplain management actions. • All positive and negative incentives must be utilized to motivate individuals who make decisions influencing the floodplain. • Government programs must be coordinated at and between all levels of government, as well as among the different areas of floodplain management. • There must be ongoing evaluation of management efforts with periodic reporting to the public.34 The complexity of individual and government response to floods is evident. The “flood control” principle of the early to mid-1900s has undergone significant changes, starting in the late 1980s through the twenty-first century to date. Starting in 1986, if communities wanted the federal government to assist them in building flood control projects, the nonfederal share moved from 0 percent in 1930 to 35 percent. After it was built, local sponsors were required to become the owner and to perform all operation and maintenance (O&M) on the flood control structure in the future. In the late 1980s, nonstructural mitigation became a key part of programs like the Disaster Relief Program and the NFIP.



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The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) While the floodplain often proves to have desirable soil and topographic characteristics for agriculture, or locational advantages for commerce, industry, or housing, major flood events always challenge the wisdom of using those floodplain locations for various activities. Without reviewing the entire flood scenarios, the floods of 1993 and 1994 should have been reason enough to rethink the nation’s flood response. The floods were caused by unusual combinations of rainfall and antecedent conditions, such that many may consider them to be anomalies and unlikely to happen again. A more rational view is that similar flood events will occur again and again, as was seen in the case of Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017. Thus, four lessons that Philippi had identified from the Great Flood of 1993— lessons that “may have to be learned again”—are worth noting:35 • Floods produce too much damage, and no matter what we do, the damages continue to grow. • New floodplain development is very expensive to the taxpayer and should be curtailed. • The many (taxpayers) pay too much to benefit the few who freely choose to live, work, and farm in flood-prone areas. • The flood-control program leads to substantial environmental damage.36 From an insurance perspective, extreme damages caused by natural disasters may be difficult to insure against. For example, Botzen et al. conducted a stated preference survey to determine the willingness to pay for various climate change events of one thousand homeowners in a Dutch river delta.37 Their results indicated that willingness to pay increases less than the risk-based insurance premium if climate change were to cause a large increase in the flood probability, which might result in a considerable market decline in the market penetration of flood insurance. This may impair the ability of insurers to pool risks between a large number of policyholders and could disrupt the function of insurance to spread the societal costs of flooding. In the United States, the Congress established the NFIP on August 1, 1968, with the passage of the NFIA. The NFIP was broadened with the passage of the Flood Disaster Protection Act of 1973, which expanded the available limits of flood insurance coverage and imposed new requirements on property owners and communities. The 1973 act restricted federal agencies or federally backed financial institutions from approving any financial assistance for acquisition or construction purposes in flood hazard areas unless the community in which the area is located is participating in the NFIP. The NFIP was further modified by the National Flood Insurance Reform Act (NFIRA) of 1994 and the Flood Insurance Reform Act (FIRA) of 2004. The NFIP is administered by the FEMA.38

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To participate in the NFIP, a community must agree to require building permits in the identified flood hazard areas of the community and to review building permit applications in that area to determine whether the proposed building sites will be reasonably safe from flooding. Building permits are only required in the identified flood-prone portion of the community; usually a map designating these areas is issued by the flood insurance agency. The common maps used for flood analysis by FEMA are Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs. A FIRM is the official map of a community on which FEMA has delineated both the special flood hazard areas and the flood risk premium zones applicable to the community. One of the main purposes for the maps is to show areas of a community that have a 1 percent chance of being flooded in a given year—that is, to delineate the 100-year floodplain.39 It is required that structures within the flood hazard areas be designed and anchored to prevent flotation, collapse, or lateral movement of the structure. For residential structures within the area of flood hazard, the community must require new construction and substantial improvements to existing structures to have the lowest floor elevated to or above the level of the base flood. Further regulations state that building in a coastal hazard area is not permitted unless the site is landward of the mean high tide level and the lowest floor is elevated to the level of the base flood plus an allowance for wave action on adequately anchored piles. The space below the lowest floor must be kept open and free of obstruction. The low structural members of the floor system of a new building in such an area, or any part of the outside wall, should be above the base flood elevation. Elevated structures should be serviced by mechanical equipment that is also elevated or flood-proofed above the base flood level and by utility systems that are designed to minimize or resist flood damage and infiltration. Owners, builders, developers, and communities that have no alternative but to construct in a flood hazard area should anticipate utility disruptions and seek comprehensive engineering data and professional guidance to prevent and minimize them. Some highlights of the NFIP that may be especially relevant to planners include the following: • National flood policy impacts most people in the United States, even though only 10 percent live in high flood risk areas. • Forty percent of small businesses do not reopen after a major flood. • More than twenty-two thousand communities in the nation belong to the NFIP because they are prone to flooding from rivers or coastal storms. • The NFIP has more than five million flood insurance policies, with about 20 percent of those policies outside identified floodplains.40 In April 2015, the Homeowners Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 was changed to include an increase in the reserve fund assessment, the implementa-



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tion of a surcharge on all new and renewed policies, an additional deductible option, an increase in the federal policy fee, and rate increases for most policies. A final rule to implement changes to both the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 and the Homeowners Flood Insurance Affordability Act of 2014 has been effective since January 1, 2016, amending six regulations, focusing on insuring detached structures, and implementing banking reforms.41 In November 2017, Congress passed the 21st Century Flood Reform Act. This bill amended the NFIA of 1986 to extend the NFIP through 2022. Some of the provisions of this bill included capping the maximum flood insurance premiums at $10,000 per year for residential properties; authorizing $1 billion in preflood mitigation assistance grants to elevate, flood proof, buy out, or mitigate high-risk properties; and enabling communities to develop more accurate flood maps. Additional changes and specifics of the changes may be reviewed at https://www .congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2874. Twenty-First Century Issues and Reforms The state- and federally subsidized insurance programs have helped greater settlement in high-risk coastal areas, where, historically, insurance for flooding and windstorms would have been expensive. This has also had the unintended consequence of making all taxpayers pay large amounts of money during disasters. The eastern and Gulf coasts of the United States are expected to see a sea level rise that is higher than the global average. With a warming planet, the probability for increasingly stronger hurricanes and the corresponding devastation is greater. These climate-based factors have to be accounted for in any insurance program reformation.42 Recent federal and state initiatives emphasize a floodplain risk management approach of flood control. Much of the conversation around flooding in the twenty-first century is dominated by climate change– related exacerbation and increased disasters. The environmental areas that face the greatest threats are the coastal wetlands and estuaries that border the coastline. With more than 141,622.27 kilometers (88,000 miles) of tidal shoreline, including vast coastal wetlands and more than one hundred estuaries in the United States alone, biodiversity is at risk from saltwater intrusion. In addition, rising sea levels threaten contamination of freshwater that humans currently rely on. The Association of State Wetland Managers provides an extensive list of current research and reports on the topic of wetlands and sea level rise. It reports that scientists predict that the rapid rate of sea level rise will outpace the adaptive capacity of local flora and fauna.43 Research at the global level reports that a one-meter rise in sea level would affect seventy-six developing countries and territories and that the large majority of impacts would be experienced in East Asia and the Pacific as well as the Middle East and North Africa. Estimates of economic loss from such inundation is estimated to be $630 million/year.44

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The 2007 report by the IPCC projected that climate change is likely to increase the intensity of storms and rainfall events, resulting in an increased number of hurricanes and tropical cyclones, and accompanied by sea level rises. Scientists have found that “over the past century . . . the Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) has risen by 10-20 cm (four to eight in). However, the annual rate of rise over the past 20 years has been 0.33 cm (0.13 in) a year, roughly twice the average speed of the preceding 80 years.”45 While the rough estimates of future water level rising rates remain rough, common projections follow a recent study that states a rise of “between (0.7 m) 2.5 and (2 m) 6.5 feet by 2100.”46 These estimates are easily “enough to swamp many of the cities along the US East Coast.”47 According to NOAA, “[a]bout 40 percent of all Americans—more than 123 million people—live in coastal counties and depend on these resources for food, jobs, storm protection, and recreation.”48 Globally, approximately 147 to 216 million people live on land that will be below sea level or regular flood levels by the end of the century, assuming emissions of heat-trapping gases continue on their current trend. Of the countries that are most at threat, China, Vietnam, Japan, India, and Bangladesh are in the top five, while the United States is just slightly farther down the list, at number 12.49 In the United States, the NFIP is currently the only flood insurance provider and, as mentioned above, is administered by FEMA, with an ability to borrow from the US treasury at low interest rates. Climate-related factors have posed a dual challenge for society. On one hand, providing subsidized insurance premiums to coastal properties has encouraged development there as well as in environmentally sensitive areas such as wetlands, which may have offered protection against future floods. On the other hand, the ceaseless onslaught of disasters has posed a significant burden on all taxpayers that seems to have no endpoint. Perhaps a different risk management model, insurance reform, public awareness, education, and innovative rebuilding, rezoning, and coastal planning are a taste of various challenges that planners will have to think about. The American Planning Association (APA) and its chapters and divisions support the following objectives to address the issue of flooding: • Gathering and maintaining current information on the location and level of risk within communities • Land use regulations that minimize new development within areas subject to flooding • Elimination of incentives that encourage land development (or redevelopment) within flood hazard areas • New projects to protect existing residents from flooding, with the goal that natural solutions are generally preferable to structural controls • Revised flood insurance premiums to more closely reflect the true, full actuarial cost phased in over time and with programs to assist policyholders in an affected area.50



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To achieve these outcomes, the APA and its chapters and divisions support policies ranging from an ongoing update to small area flood maps, to predictive modeling and the use of several tools that are described in the sections below, including conservation, easements, and zoning. The APA policies also support the establishment of federal, state, and local land-use-planning decision frameworks, with a specific intent to adopt the right strategies to avoid locating critical infrastructure and vulnerable populations in high-risk areas and adopting the right building codes and providing tax incentives to build community resilience. They also emphasize the need for continued research, funding, and cost-balance analyses to make the best decisions in these challenging areas. Flood Resilience Regulations, insurance, and best management practices aside, flood resilience is becoming part of all modern planning vocabulary. There are many definitions of resilience, starting with one provided by Holling in 197351 and rephrased as engineering resilience in 1996.52 Relating it to ecosystems, Holling explained that resilience implied the ability to absorb internal and external changes without creating a “regime change.” The National Research Council defines resilience as “[t]he ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.”53 The NRC’s assumption is that this resilience is related to disasters arising from natural hazard events and their associated impacts. Resilience has been a guiding tenet of disaster loss reduction since 2005. Resilience was associated with management of natural hazards, such as flooding, by Pelling in 2003,54 and Berkes in 2007.55 In the context of flooding, resilience is the capacity of a system (community, society, or environment), to adapt, resist, and/or recover from floods in order to maintain or achieve an acceptable level of functioning as shown by Pelling. Getting further into flooding resilience, Zevenbergen56 notes that the properties of robustness (capacity of a system to withstand external disturbances [such as storm surges and cloudbursts], without loss of function), redundancy (ability of a system’s components to be substituted for lost/damaged ones), and the system’s ability to rapidly recover (under a wide range of flood or wave intensities) and restore function are central. Resiliency is also explored, discussed, and procedures recommended in a National Academy report on dam and levee safety, raising the importance and awareness of issues in addition to coastal storm events.57 From a planning perspective, based on multiple discussions with planners conducted by the Metropolitan Institute and Virginia Tech, Dsouza et al. suggest that planners consider two aspects of resilience. First, they recommend looking at the process of planning and designing—that is, being concerned about the features of the process. Second, they relate resilience to the physical artifacts and plans that are designed, showing that resilience allows planners to look

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at the features of such plans and objects. Thus, they underscore that there is a relationship between the four aspects of planning—planning, plans, designing, and physical artifacts—but these relations are not always obvious. For example, they question whether resilience planning leads to the construction of resilience plans, and whether these resilience plans incorporate elements that allow for resilience designs.58 Therefore, planners should explore the full range of tools available for floodplain management, including the ones mentioned in previous sections, such as insurance, regulations, and technical and nontechnical best practices, for planning with an eye toward resilience is going to be critical in long-term floodplain management. The EPA also provides assistance in floodplain management through its Green Infrastructure Program.59 Flood Damage Reduction Measures The basic objective of floodplain management is to achieve an acceptable level of direct and indirect impacts of flood losses to the individual and the community. A variety of options, tools, and alternative strategies for producing desired uses or changes in uses of the floodplain may be employed to attain this objective. Flood hazard problems, whether caused by coastal hurricane or interior riverine flooding, should be evaluated in the context of possible alternative strategies. In the early versions of the Unified National Program for Floodplain Management, the Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force had outlined three alternative strategies for flood loss reduction: (1) modify susceptibility to flood damage, (2) modify flooding, and (3) modify the impact of flooding. In 1994, a fourth category was added: (4) preserve and restore the natural resources of floodplains. Each of the original three strategies is described in the following sections, but the first is emphasized because of its planning and management focus. Modifying Human Susceptibility to Flood Damage and Disruption This strategy avoids unwise use of the floodplain and thus avoids the dangers associated with flooding. It includes land use regulations, development and redevelopment policies, disaster or emergency preparedness and response plans, flood forecasting and warning, flood-proofing, and evacuation, as follows: 1. Land use regulations are suited for the management of the floodplain in areas adjacent to streams or coastal areas that are not intensely developed. Measures that can be used to regulate construction and encroachment on the floodplain are floodplain zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, and building code permits.

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2. Development and redevelopment policies may be applied at all levels of government through the design and location of utilities and services, policies of open space and easement acquisitions, redevelopment, or permanent evacuation of an area. 3. Disaster or emergency preparedness and response plans are suited to any areas in which risk to life exists due to flooding or in which property damages due to flooding could be mitigated by protective actions. 4. Flood forecasting and warning systems can be designed and installed to give adequate notice of the potential dangers from flooding. 5. Flood-proofing can provide for development in lower-risk floodplain areas by reducing or eliminating flood damages through preventing water from entering the structures. Damages can be reduced by relatively simple measures, such as waterproofing, elevating, or diking around flood-prone structures.60 In many communities, urban growth pressures encroach on flood-prone areas, and a number of areas are developed in the floodplain because of recreational and aesthetic benefits obtained from being on or near open water. This latter trend is likely to continue; hence, the use of flood-prone lands and the construction of dwellings on such lands should be given special consideration by communities to reduce potential flood damages. Lowlands subject to flooding and unsuitable for high-density development should be used for open space purposes. In order to discourage development in flood hazard areas, local governments should adopt policies that resist the extension of utilities and streets and the construction of schools and other facilities in these hazard areas. Infrastructure development on lands that are not flood-prone should be given priority, and land management tools, such as zoning, should be used to supplement infrastructure policies. Land Use Controls Land use controls are a major element in many current programs of floodplain management. Regulating activities on the floodplain can maximize economic efficiency and productive use of the area while minimizing the hazards of property damage and loss of human life. Regulation of land in the face of the hazard of inundation is based on well-founded legal principles. The increasing number of legislative actions encouraging or requiring regulatory management of floodplain uses is partly a result of increasing awareness of the legality of such regulations. The Flood Insurance Act of 1968 and its subsequent revisions impose land use controls that would have been nearly impossible years ago.61 The original act authorizing the federal role in flood insurance

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granted federal subsidies in flood insurance to flood-prone communities that instituted certain kinds of floodplain management regulations. No community was required to participate, nor were property owners in participating communities required to purchase the insurance when it was available. The only incentive the original act provided was that the subsidized insurance was available only to prospective purchasers in communities whose floodplain management program met the requirements of the act. Zoning. Land use controls have evolved in our system of law to include zoning and subdivision regulation as major regulatory devices. The authority to exercise land use controls such as these is derived from state or home rule powers. However, most states provide specific authority to engage in land use controls through enabling legislation. Zoning has become prominent as a means of securing certain public goods necessary to society’s well-being by legal means. It falls under the broad heading of the police power of government. However, the courts require that there must be a “rational connection” between the regulations and the promotion of the public health, safety, and welfare. The procedural and substantive safeguards included in a legally defensible program of floodplain management protect the program both from legal attack and from the possibility of injustice with regard to the occupants of the floodplain. Floodplain zoning, subdivisions, health ordinances, and the other traditional tools of the floodplain manager, however, have not always proven adequate by themselves. Zoning programs are sometimes subject to tremendous political pressure and may represent a very limited and static approach. Eminent Domain. An alternative to the police power of government is its power to acquire land. Eminent domain is the traditional device used by governments to take property for public purposes. Whereas the police power only allows for regulation of the use of property in the interest of the public, the power of eminent domain allows for the taking of private property for public purposes with just compensation provided to the owner. With respect to floodplain management, there is a thin line between the application of zoning and the utilization of eminent domain. The question is raised: To what degree can we use the police power to control floodplains and to what degree do we have to use eminent domain, that is, pay for it? In the past, courts have objected to those communities that attempted to get something for free and have found that they should pay. However, courts are increasingly sustaining broader applications of zoning by placing a greater emphasis on community needs.62 Easements. Another approach to regulating and controlling development is the use of easements—an approach that had been largely ignored in the past. An easement can be used as an alternative to outright purchase of properties located in the floodplain. In other words, a part of the bundle of rights normally



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associated with landownership could be purchased to accomplish land use objectives while leaving title with the owner. With the utilization of an easement, the property remains on the tax roll and the owner still retains certain benefits of ownership. The easement approach offers a form of equity that is not possible through zoning or other forms of regulation by government. Tax Policies. Tax adjustments can be effective in preserving floodways. Tax valuation of rural lowlands adjacent to developing urban areas and of open lands within urban areas is increasing throughout the nation. Tax increases may reach the point where land productivity is marginal (e.g., for agricultural purposes) or where it no longer can be used profitably for open space, but appropriate tax adjustments could prevent this problem. The tax adjustment procedure also can be used to encourage property owners to use flood-prone lands in a manner consistent with a proposed land use plan. It may include assessment on the basis of current use rather than potential use and deferred payment of taxes on land sold for development prior to public purchase. These tax abatements involve agreements by the owners to forfeit certain development rights in return for a reduced tax assessment over a period of time. This procedure is most often known as preferential assessment. Yet another land use control technique is use-value assessment. Use-value assessment taxation is based on the current producing capacity of property. It is to be distinguished from the usual market-value assessment approach, which considers the potential for development and the sale price of similar properties. The use-value approach is, in reality, a preferential assessment whereby certain classes of property are assessed at a use value rather than a market value. A preferential assessment is expected to be administered on a quid pro quo basis; that is, the landowner’s taxes are reduced on lands that should not be developed because of the paramount interests of the health, safety, and welfare of the community. As a floodplain management tool, the primary objective is to limit the tax burden on property in the floodplain and thereby to encourage low-intensity development or no development at all. Transferable Development Rights. Another innovation of increasing popularity is “transferable development rights” (TDR). Ownership of property is commonly defined as the possession of a “bundle of rights,” including the right to develop the land and to sell it. In communities that adopt TDR plans, development is restricted in some parts of the jurisdiction, but compensation is made in the form of development rights, which may be sold to property owners in other parts of the community who wish to exceed the usual zoning limits on density. To be legally defensible, the value of the development rights a property owner is allowed to transfer by sale must bear a near relation to the full development potential of his or her property that has been denied by the TDR plan. The basic purpose of TDR is to provide a mechanism for equitable treatment of those landowners whose rights may be restricted as a result of the inequities

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embodied in zoning. Therefore, the utilization of TDR may be an applicable and rational approach to floodplain management and preservation of environmentally sensitive areas. The TDR technique can also be used by local governments to restrict development in an area while minimizing use of the police power. TDR is a land management device based on the underlying principle that the development potential of privately held land is, in part, a community asset that government may allocate in order to enhance the general welfare. TDR is an attempt to mesh law, equity, and economics in the growth and development process.63 Modifying Flooding The strategy of modifying floods involves construction of dams and reservoirs or dikes, levees, and floodwalls; channel alterations; on-site detention measures; bridge and culvert modifications; and tidal barriers. Such modifications may change the volume of runoff, peak stage of the flood, the time of concentration and direction, the extent of areas flooded, and the velocity and depth of floodwaters. In most instances, flood modifications acting alone, without other nonstructural strategies, leave a residual flood loss potential and may encourage inappropriate uses of the land being protected through an unwarranted sense of security. The following list elaborates upon the various strategies cited above: 1. Dams and reservoirs help to control the broad range of flood flow velocities, extent of area flooded, timing, and so on. Flood reservoirs may function singly or in combination with other purposes (e.g., water supply, recreation). Flood control may also be aided by the construction of detention structures to delay local runoff and reduce downstream flood stages. 2. Dikes, levees, and floodwalls protect portions of the floodplain by acting as a barrier to confine floodwaters. These structures must include provisions for discharging interior drainage from precipitation that falls inside the protected area, and they must be built high enough to contain a high level of flooding. 3. Channel alterations reduce flood stages by improving flow conditions within the channel and thereby increasing the flow capacity of the stream. Methods generally used to obtain improvements of channels include straightening the channel to remove undesirable bends; deepening or widening it to increase the size of a waterway; clearing it to remove brush, trees, and other obstructions; and lining the channel with concrete to increase the flow efficiency. An important consideration is that channel alterations should not increase flood problems downstream, a frequent problem with such modifications. 4. Land treatment measures modify flooding by increasing infiltration rates or time for infiltration and decreasing the runoff rate and volume. Mea-



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sures include making changes in vegetative cover, strip cropping, contour plowing, implementing runoff interceptors and diversions, or constructing small detention and erosion control structures and terrains. Such measures are effective in headwater areas and function in combination with other measures to ameliorate flood conditions in larger watersheds. 5. On-site detention measures can provide temporary storage of urban runoff waters by retarding flows and thereby extending the period of runoff to reduce flood peaks. This strategy works well in growing communities within small river basins and could be incorporated into master drainage plans for urban areas. 6. Modifications can be made to hydraulically inadequate bridges and culverts to provide sufficient capacity for streamflow. This technique would also reduce damages caused by water backing up behind such structures. 7. Tidal barriers prevent high-tide stages from inundating a developed area. They are generally designed with gate or navigation openings to provide drainage from the protected area and maintain normal uses of the watercourse. These systems are costly and are usually major construction projects for the protection of large urbanized areas.64 Modifying the Impact of Flooding on Individuals and Communities This approach is designed to assist the individual and the community in the preparatory, survival, and recovery phases of floods. Tools include information dissemination, arrangements for spreading the costs of the loss over a period of time, and purposeful transfer of some of the individual’s loss to the community through flood emergency and postflood recovery measures. 1. Information and education on flood hazards is essential in an effective floodplain management program. This effort should lead to more informed decisions by individuals regarding use of the floodplain. Such decisions may include the installation of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), covered in chapter 11, on their properties. 2. Flood insurance is a mechanism for spreading the cost of losses both over time and over a relatively larger number of similarly exposed risks. Although flood insurance does not reduce flood damage, it does provide a means for minimizing flood losses to individual property owners. 3. Flood emergency measures, such as flood-proofing and flood-fighting plans, can be completed in anticipation of flooding for areas where flood warning time would permit these actions. Such measures should help to reduce flood damages. 4. Postflood recovery requires a plan to ensure that public facilities and services are restored and aid is given to individuals suffering flood damages.

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Recovery plans are also needed where poor natural conditions prevail and assistance is needed to drain flooded subareas when rivers and tidal floods recede. Postflood recovery plans should be in place and regularly updated in communities and areas that have the potential for sustaining flood damages.65 A number of communities are required to develop hazard mitigation plans that include flood-related planning. Managers of critical infrastructure systems are also responsible for developing asset management plans. Flood Insurance As noted previously, flood insurance is available through NFIP. When a community becomes a participant in the program, property owners within a flood hazard area may apply to have structures and their contents insured. Flood insurance does nothing to reduce existing flood hazard or damages; it lessens but does not eliminate the economic burden of flooding on the floodplain occupants. As funding is a challenge, FEMA instituted a voluntary program called a “Community Ranking System” (CRS), which offers incentives to communities that go beyond the NFIP requirements. Ranks range from Class 1, representing communities that have implemented the most measures, awarding them a 45 percent discount on NFIP premiums, to Class 10, where communities do not get any discounts. Reforming the NFIP has posed a significant challenge; however, some progress has been made. With funding allocated under the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, FEMA was finally able to start revising its flood maps for the first time since the 1980s, revealing that flood waters may reach much more inland than previously thought. However, the back and forth on how insurance rates and premiums should be adjusted, that is, whether they should be subsidized or not and by how much and who should pay for the large expenses incurred with every storm, has been extremely challenging. At the request of FEMA, the National Academy studied the affordability issue of the competing objectives of the Biggert-Waters 2012 Act: (1) to insure reasonable insurance premiums for all, (2) to have risk-based premiums that would signal the cost of the floodplain location choices, (3) to secure widespread community participation (including policy purchases), and (4) to earn premium and fee income that would eventually pay for the claims and the program expenses. The two-year process resulted in two reports.66 Through considerable research and analysis, Report 1 discusses how to identify when the NFIP premiums would prove a cost burden on policyholders, decisions that would need to be made by policy makers when designing an assistance program, and policy options for delivering such and reducing premiums for all policyholders. Report 2’s aim



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was to develop alternative approaches for evaluating affordability policy options. That report describes analytical methods to evaluate affordability policy options and how FEMA could expand its analytical capabilities: it discusses data issues, it draws examples from a pilot analysis of a particular state, and it discusses how data needs for a national affordability study could be addressed.67 Some recommendations to insurance reform, made by the Union of Concerned Scientists to lower risk, include the following:  1. Ensure premiums reflect risk.  2. Include sea level rise projections in flood maps.  3. Discourage development in floodplains.  4. Remove unfair subsidies.  5. Allow for home buyouts.  6. Communicate flood risks.  7. Mandate flood insurance.  8. Offer incentives for relocation and upgrades.  9. Set smart guidelines for rebuilding. 10. Raise awareness of the CRS. 11. Use risk transfer tools. 12. Update protective recommendations.68 Conclusion Floodplain management has gone through an evolutionary process in this country. As urbanization has increased and floodplains have been brought into more intense use, annual flood damages have increased substantially and have shown that there is a need for more effective management of the floodplain. There has been a shift of emphasis from local to federal responsibility regarding floodplain management, but the federal government has created incentives for state and local governments to assume increasingly greater roles. A major component of state and local efforts, under federal legislation, is directed toward control of floodplain usage through regulatory measures. All of the states possess the power to legislatively manage the floodplain. All of them have done so, but some more reluctantly than others. Similarly, the response of local governments in controlling use of the floodplain has been mixed. For example, some 5.5 million NFIP policies are in effect today, but they do not provide coverage for all the property found in the 100- and 500-year floodplains in the United States. About 60 percent of these policies are in three states: Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, with the remainder distributed widely throughout the United States.69 Taken together, the evidence is that management of floodplain uses by government is increasing and based on solid legal grounds.

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The issues are complex, as are the methods proposed to resolve them, but it seems clear that a comprehensive program of floodplain management, involving all levels of government, will be necessary in the future. The issues do not call for building flood control structures at one extreme or prohibiting use of the floodplain at the other but rather a total program of floodplain management involving the appropriate mix of structural and nonstructural measures for any particular situation. As an aid in this process, innovative land use controls offer the potential for more effective floodplain management. Study Questions 1. Discuss the hydrologic cycle and how human interaction with it can affect the quantity of runoff. 2. How does urbanization affect runoff? Use the hydrograph to compare preand postdevelopment runoff conditions in your explanation. 3. Describe and compare structural and nonstructural approaches to reducing potential flood damages. Is one necessarily better than the other? 4. Discuss the merits of and trade-offs between structural and nonstructural approaches to floodplain management. 5. Why do flood damages continue to increase in spite of continually increasing expenditures on flood control? 6. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of flood insurance as a mechanism for dealing with flood damages. What is your opinion of the National Flood Insurance Program as it applies to coastal properties? 7. List the advantages and disadvantages of the rational method for calculating peak runoff rates. Use the internet to find other methods of calculating peak runoff. 8. How much change was caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? What amount was from floods? 9. Name the four greatest floods to affect the United States since 2000. Notes 1.  Hoyt, W. G., and W. B. Langbein. (1955). Floods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2.  FEMA. (2018). Unit 1: Floods and Floodplain Management, pp. 1–29. FEMA. Retrieved from https://www.fema.gov/pdf/floodplain/nfip_sg_unit_1.pdf 3.  FEMA. (2018). Definitions: Floodplain Management. FEMA. Retrieved from https:// www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program/definitions 4.  FEMA, Definitions: Floodplain Management.



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5.  NOAA. (2018). Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. Retrieved from http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/general/lib/laescae.html 6.  Milly, P. C. D., R. T. Wetherald, K. A. Dunne, and T. L. Delworth. (2002). Increasing Risk of Great Floods in a Changing Climate. Letters to Nature, 415, pp. 514–517. 7.  FEMA. (1986). A Unified National Program for Floodplain Management. Washington, DC: GPO. Retrieved from https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1503-20490 -9177/fema100.pdf. 8.  Dunne, T., and L. B. Leopold. (1990). Water in Environmental Planning. San Francisco: Freeman; Leopold, L. B. (1997). Water, Rivers and Creeks. Sausalito, CA: University Science Books; Bedient, P., and W. Huber. (2001). Hydrology and Floodplain Analysis. New York: Prentice Hall. 9.  Walesh, S. G. (1989). Urban Surface Water Management. New York: Wiley. 10.  Linsley, R. K., and J. B. Franzini. (1991). Water-Resources Engineering. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill; Mays, L. W. (2001). Water Resources Engineering. New York: Wiley. 11.  Sherman, L. K. (1932). Streamflow from Rainfall by the Unit-Graph Method, Engineering News-Record, 108, pp. 501–505. 12.  Haan, C. (1977). Statistical Methods in Hydrology. Ames: Iowa State University Press. 13.  Yevjevich, V. (1972). Stochastic Processes in Hydrology. Fort Collins, CO: Water Resources Publications. 14. Haan, Statistical Methods. 15.  IPCC. (2014). Summary for Policymakers. In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects, p. 4. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess ment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf 16.  Bakalar, Nicholas. (2015). 3.2 Millimeters, A Troubling Rise in Sea Level. New York Times: Science, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/science/3-2-millimeters-a-troubling-rise-in-sea-level.html 17.  NOAA. (1996). The Great USA Flood of 1993. NOAA’s Hydrology Laboratory. Retrieved from www.nws.noaa.gov/oh/hrl/papers/area/great.htm 18.  Mississippi River Home Page. (n.d.). Statistics, Stories, and Chronology from the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1993. Mississippi River Home Page. Retrieved from http://www .greatriver.com/FLOOD.htm 19. NOAA. (1998). Preliminary Report. Hurricane Andrew. Retrieved from www.nhc .noaa.gov/1992andrew.html 20.  Edwards, R. (n.d.). Roger’s SkyPix. Storms Observed. Retrieved from www.stormeyes .org/tornado/SkyPix/skypixha.htm 21.  NOAA. (2017). Hurricane Timeline. Hurricane Research Division, Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory. Retrieved from http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/ J6.html 22.  NOAA. (2016). State of the Climate: Global Climate Report—Annual 2015. National Centers for Environmental Information. Retrieved from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/ global/201513. 23. Drye, W. (2017). 2017 Hurricane Season Was the Most Expensive in US history. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/2017 -hurricane-season-most-expensive-us-history-spd/

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24.  UN Water. (2013). Water and Disasters. United Nations Water. Retrieved from http:// www.unwater.org/fileadmin/user_upload/unwater_new/docs/water_disasters.pdf 25.  AON. (2014). Global Catastrophe Report: August 2014. AON Benfield Impact Forecasting, Retrieved from http://thoughtleadership.aonbenfield.com/Documents/20140905_if_ august_global_recap.pdf 26.  NOAA. (2018). U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. Overview. National Centers for Environmental Information. Retrieved from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ 27.  National Weather Service. (2015). Hydrologic Information Center: Flood Loss Data. Retrieved from http://www.nws.noaa.gov/hic/ 28.  Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. 29.  White, G. F. (1965). Optimal Flood Plain Management: Retrospect and Prospect. In Water Research, edited by A. Kneese and S. Smith. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future. 30.  Association of State Floodplain Managers. (2015). National Flood Programs and Policies in Review (2015). Association of State Floodplain Managers. Retrieved from http://www .floods.org/ace-images/NFPPR_2015_Rev8.pdf 31.  White, G. F. (1942). Human Adjustment to Floods, Department of Geography Research Paper No. 29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 32.  Goddard, J. E. (1963). Flood Plain Management Improves Man’s Environment. Journal of the Water Ways and Harbors Division, (November), 67–84. 33.  US House of Representatives. (1966). A Unified National Program for Managing Flood Losses. Document No. 465, a Report by the Task Force on Federal Flood Control Policy. Washington, DC: GPO. 34. FEMA, A Unified National Program. 35.  Philippi, N. (1994–1995, Winter). Plugging the Gaps in Flood-Control Policy. Issues in Science and Technology, 11(2). 36.  Philippi, Plugging the Gaps in Flood-Control Policy. 37. Botzen, W. J., and J. C. M. van den Bergh. (2012). Monetary Valuation of Insurance against Flood Risk under Climate Change. International Economic Review, 53(2), pp. 1005–1025. 38.  FEMA. (2011). How Was the NFIP Established and Who Administers It? In National Flood Insurance Program: Answers to Questions about the NFIP, p. 1. Retrieved from https:// www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1438-20490-1905/f084_atq_11aug11.pdf 39.  FEMA. (2018). Flood Map Service Area. FEMA. Retrieved from https://msc.fema.gov/ portal 40.  Association of State Floodplain Managers, National Flood Programs and Policies in Review. 41.  US Department of Treasury. (2015). Flood Insurance: Final Rule. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Retrieved from https://www.occ.treas.gov/news-issuances/bulletins/ 2015/bulletin-2015-33.html 42.  Cleetus, R. (2014). Overwhelming Risk, Rethinking Flood Insurance in a World of Rising Seas. Union of Concerned Scientists. Retrieved from http://www.ucsusa.org/floodinsurance 43. Association of State Wetland Managers. (2018). Protecting the Nation’s Wetlands. ASWM. Retrieved from https://www.aswm.org/wetland-science/wetlands-and-climate -change/sea-level-rise 44. Blankespoor, B., S. Dasgupta, and B. Laplante. (2012). Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Wetlands: Impacts and Costs. The World Bank, Policy Research Paper Working Paper 6277. Development Research Group, Computational Tools & Environment and Energy Teams. Re-



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trieved from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/16383/wps6277 .pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y 45. Bowermaster, J. (2013). If Sea Levels Keep Rising, a Lot of Us Will Be Swimming to Work.  TakePart. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/04/22/rising-sea -levels-causes-and-solutions 46.  US Global Change Research Program (2017). Projected Sea Level Rise. In chapter 12 of Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), Volume 1. Retrieved from https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/12/ 47.  National Geographic. (2017). Sea Level Rise. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeo graphic.com/environment/global-warming/sea-level-rise/ 48.  NOAA. (2013). Preparing the Nation for Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding, p. 1. Climate-Smart Nation. Retrieved from https://cpo.noaa.gov/sites/cpo/About_CPO/Coastal_ Final.pdf 49. Climate Central. (2014). New Analysis Shows Global Exposure to Sea Level Rise. Climate Central. Retrieved from http://www.climatecentral.org/news/new-analysis-global -exposure-to-sea-level-rise-flooding-18066 50.  APA. (2016). APA Policy Guide on Water. APA. Retrieved from https://www.planning .org/policy/guides/adopted/water/ 51.  Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics, 4. 52.  Folke, C., S. R. Carpenter, B. Walker, M. Scheffer, T. Chapin, and J. Rockstrom. (2010). Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability, and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(4), p. 20. 53.  NRC. (2012). Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 54.  Pelling, M. (2003). Social Vulnerability in the City. In The Vulnerability of Cities: Natural Disasters and Social Resilience, pp. 47–49. New York: Earthscan. 55. Berkes, F. (2007). Understanding Uncertainty and Reducing Vulnerability: Lessons from Resilience Thinking. Natural Hazards, 41(2), pp. 283–295. 56. Zevenbergen, C. (2016). Flood Resilience. IRGC Resource Guide on Resilience. Lausanne: EPFL International Risk Governance Center. Retrieved from https://www.irgc.org/ irgc-resource-guide-on-resilience/ 57.  NRC. (2012). Dam and Levee Safety and Community Resilience: A Vision for Future Practice. Washington, DC. National Academies Press. 58.  Desouza, K. C., T. Flanery, J. Alex, and E. Park. (2012). Getting Serious about Resilience in Planning. Planetizen. Retrieved from https://www.planetizen.com/node/57827 59.  EPA. Manage Flood Risk. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastruc ture/manage-flood-risk 60. FEMA, A Unified National Program. 61.  FEMA. (2017). National Flood Insurance Program: Laws & Regulations. FEMA. Retrieved from https://www.fema.gov/national-flood-insurance-program-laws-regulations 62.  Dzurik, A. A. (1978) Land Use Controls in Flood Plain Management. AGRIS. 63.  Shlaes, J. B. (1974). Who Pays for Transfer of Development Rights? Planning 40(6); Costonis, J. J. (1974). Whichever Way You Slice It, TDR Is There to Stay, Planning 40(6); Rose, J., Ed. (1975). The Transfer of Development Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University. 64. FEMA, A Unified National Program.

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65. FEMA, A Unified National Program. 66.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2015). Affordability of National Flood Insurance Program Premiums: Report 1. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2016). Affordability of National Flood Insurance Program Premiums: Report 2. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 67.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Affordability of National Flood Insurance Program Premiums: Report 2. 68. Cleetus, Overwhelming Risk, Rethinking Flood Insurance in a World of Rising Seas. 69.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Affordability of National Flood Insurance Program Premiums: Report 1.

11 Stormwater Planning and Management

Introduction

T

he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines stormwater as “rainwater or melted snow that runs off streets, lawns, and other sites.”1 Stormwater is often a result of impervious surfaces preventing the precipitation from naturally percolating into the ground. Generally, the precipitation accumulates in natural or constructed stormwater storage systems during or immediately following a storm event. When some of it is directed into wastewater (sewer) pipes, from a pollution standpoint, it is considered a point source, as discussed in chapters 8 and 10. This excess stormwater can overload wastewater treatment plants’ capacity, forcing overflows and negatively affecting surface and groundwater supplies. When treated and stored well, it can ultimately serve as a drinking water source (see figure 11.1). When not directed and captured and allowed to flow into streams, rivers, bays, estuaries, and the oceans, it adds pollution and debris (acting as a nonpoint source of pollution), an iconic image being the vast seas of plastics and debris found on the planet’s oceans and in coral reefs.2 Thus, stormwater management is directly linked to the qualitative and quantitative aspects of water management. Properly stored and treated in droughtprone areas, stormwater can be a lifeline, serving as a source of drinking water or providing other beneficial reuses, such as irrigation. When correctly planned and managed, the stored or directed precipitation (rainfall) has the potential to invigorate fertile floodplains and recharge lakes, rivers, and aquifers.

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Stormwater

Water Resilience

Wastewater

Traditional infrastructure (ex. culverts, storm drains, pipes, catch basins, detention ponds)

Green infrastructure (ex., rain gardens, rainwater harvesting, permeable pavements, green roofs)

Drinking Water

FIGURE 11.1 Connections between Stormwater, Wastewater, and Drinking Water.

Chapter 10 addressed issues relating to the causes of flooding and its various manifestations both inland and coastal from a quantitative standpoint. The causes, impacts, and potential policy and engineering and nonengineering strategies to plan for, control, manage, and mitigate flooding were covered. However, stormwater planning and management include an important qualitative component as well. Chapter 8 first introduced some of the qualitative concerns associated with stormwater. This chapter expands on the water quality considerations of chapter 8, from a stormwater perspective. However, the primary focus of this chapter is point source pollution or, specifically, point sources of stormwater pollution. It provides an overview of relevant stormwater regulations, once again differentiating between point and nonpoint sources of stormwater, and it presents a brief summary of various green practices being implemented to plan and manage stormwater as a beneficial use and reuse resource, through preventing and mitigating stormwater pollution. Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resource planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms for stormwater planning and management are the following. Stormwater Rainwater or melted snow that runs off streets, lawns, and other sites, and accumulates in natural or constructed stormwater storage systems during or immediately following a storm event.3



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Stormwater runoff Precipitation that does not percolate or evaporate from a storm event and which flows onto adjacent land or water areas and is routed into drain or sewer systems.4 Point source Source of pollution that involves discharge of wastes from an identifiable point, such as a smokestack or sewage treatment plant. Point source pollution Pollution from a single, identifiable source such as a factory or refinery; also called single point source pollution. Nonpoint source pollution Pollution from many diffuse sources. Any source of water pollution that does not meet the legal definition of “point source” in Section 501(14) of the Clean Water Act. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit Permit issued under the NPDES for companies discharging pollutants directly into waters of the United States. Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) The sum of the individual waste load allocations (WLAs) for point sources and load allocations (LAs) for nonpoint sources. Low-impact development (LID), green infrastructure (GI), green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) Variations of the definition of a method that seeks to manage runoff using distributed and decentralized microscale controls. The goal is to mimic predevelopment hydrology through methods that utilize infiltration, filtering, storage, evaporation, and water detention. These are often applied in small-scale landscape practices and design approaches that preserve natural drainage features and patterns.5 These terms are often used interchangeably in a stormwater context. The chapter provides the subtle differences in the definitions of each of these terms. Best management practice (BMP) Activities or structural improvements that help reduce the quantity and improve the quality of stormwater runoff. BMPs include treatment requirements, operating procedures, and practices to control site runoff, spillage or leaks, sludge or waste disposal, or drainage from raw material storage. What Is in Stormwater Discharges? Lack of understanding and education among the public regarding the fate and transport of stormwater is associated with continued discharge of household products such as paints, oils, pharmaceutical and other personal care products, and detergents into the ground and into stream runoff. Stormwater runoff also carries with it pollutants from lawns and gardens, such as pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and other products and contaminants from streets and parking lots with automobile residuals such as oil, antifreeze, gasoline, brake linings, and more.

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Because of the wide range of contaminants carried by stormwater runoff, its characterization is more difficult than that of municipal or industrial wastewater. Urbanization (see figure 11.2), the primary cause of increased impervious land cover across much of the United States and the rest of the world, has led to a hastened deterioration of water bodies, and such trends are expected to only worsen. Nelson found that nearly half of the built environment—mainly residential—needed to support an expanding population will be built between 2000 and 2030, indicating that a third of what will need to be built doesn’t yet exist.6 Changing land cover and land use influence physical, chemical, and biological conditions of downstream waterways and waterbodies. These effects are documented in various publications including the Clean Water Act (CWA) 305(b) reports, EPA’s surveys of the nation’s waters, ecosystem assessment reports, and other monitoring and results provided through local, state, and national programs. Some of these details were presented in chapter 8.

FIGURE 11.2 Water Cycle Changes Associated with Urbanization. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1993). Guidance Specifying Management Measures for Sources of Nonpoint Source Pollution in Coastal Waters. 840-B-92-002. Washington, DC: US EPA.



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Legal/Regulatory Framework As noted in chapters 2 (planning), 6 (federal legislation and agencies), and 8 (water quality), the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Act amendments were succeeded by the 1972 CWA to address the industrial and municipal water pollution of the 1970s for point sources. The 1972 amendments to the CWA prohibited the discharge of any pollutant from a point source to waters of the United States unless the discharge is authorized by a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit. The NPDES permit ensured that the discharges from point sources did not exceed specified effluent standards, based on the best available treatment technology or equivalent. Examples of point sources include industrial, municipal wastewater, or stormwater effluents that are discharged through a pipe. Specifically, in the case of point sources of stormwater in municipalities, given their large number, the EPA developed a “general” permit that covered smaller outfalls of municipal stormwater and similar sources but generally did not require these sources to meet effluent requirements or to monitor their effluent. At the time, the role of stormwater in polluting the nation’s waters was not clearly recognized. However, by 1987, the US Congress recognized the role of stormwater runoff in water pollution. An assessment by the EPA reported that nonpoint sources and diffused point sources are responsible for between one-third and two-thirds of existing and threatened contamination of US waters. Congress therefore directed the EPA to develop and implement federal stormwater regulations. In 1987, the EPA developed Section 402(p) to regulate the largest stormwater discharges through the 1987 amendments to the CWA. These covered most of the known point sources of stormwater pollution. The NPDES permit was separated into two phases. Phase 1 NPDES Permit Finalized in 1990, the Stormwater Phase I program addressed sources of stormwater runoff that had the greatest potential to negatively impact water quality. Under Phase I, EPA required NPDES permit coverage for stormwater discharges from: • “Medium” and “large” municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) located in incorporated places or counties with populations of one hundred thousand or more. • Eleven categories of industrial activity, one of which is construction activity that disturbs five or more acres of land.

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Operators of the facilities, systems, and construction sites regulated under the Phase I NPDES Storm Water Program can obtain permit coverage under an individually tailored NPDES permit (developed for MS4s and some industrial facilities) or a general NPDES permit (used by most operators of industrial facilities and construction sites). The regulatory definition of an MS4 is a conveyance or system of conveyances (including roads with drainage systems, municipal streets, catch basins, curbs, gutters, ditches, man-made channels, or storm drains): (i) Owned or operated by a state, city, town, borough, county, parish, district, association, or other public body (created to or pursuant to state law) . . . including special districts under state law such as a sewer district, flood control district or drainage district, or similar entity, or an Indian tribe or an authorized Indian tribal organization, or a designated and approved management agency under Section 208 of the Clean Water Act that discharges into waters of the United States. (ii) Designed or used for collecting or conveying storm water; (iii) Which is not a combined sewer; and (iv) Which is not part of a Publicly Owned Treatment Works (POTW) as defined at 40 CFR 122.2.7

In practical terms, operators of MS4s can include municipalities and local sewer districts, state and federal departments of transportation, universities, hospitals, military bases, and correctional facilities. The Storm Water Phase II Rule added federal systems, such as military bases and correctional facilities, by including them in the definition of small MS4s. Phase II NPDES Permit Finalized in 1999, Phase II requires NPDES permit coverage for stormwater discharges from: • Certain regulated small municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) • Construction activity disturbing between one and five acres of land (i.e., small construction activities) This rule was further revised on December 9, 2016, when the EPA finalized modifications to its Phase II stormwater regulations and the MS4 General Permit, following public comments on the proposed rule. The rule became effective January 9, 2017. Under this rule, the EPA and the states with approved NPDES programs, known as the “Permitting Authority” could choose between two alternative means of establishing permit requirements in general permits for small MS4s.8 It is important to note that the NPDES program does not regulate nonpoint source pollution, which is defined in the CWA as “any source of water pollution



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that does not meet the legal definition of ‘point source’ in Section 501(14) of the Clean Water Act.” This means sources such as agricultural runoff and even all stormwater runoff not connected to a specific point are considered nonpoint sources of pollution. These fall outside the NPDES purview. Managing nonpoint source pollution is left to the states, and it is implemented through nonregulatory mechanisms such as BMPs.9 One exception is the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program of EPA described previously, in chapter 6. You may recall that once lists of impaired water bodies become available, states are expected to develop TMDLs for the impaired waters, to protect their water quality. In developing a TMDL for an impaired body of water, both point and nonpoint sources of pollution are considered, and a Waste Load Allocation (WLA) is assigned to each source. Initially, the WLA was to be numeric. However, for nonpoint sources, it is extremely difficult to characterize stormwater discharges—because of the highly variable frequency and duration of storm events—to be able to determine the waste loads. Therefore, the EPA issued a memorandum in November 2002 that recommends effluent limits for NPDES-regulated municipal stormwater practices as BMPs rather than as numeric effluent limits. In 2014 however, the 2002 memorandum was updated by the EPA. The memorandum stated that with improved monitoring, the states and EPA had gained considerable experience in developing TMDLs and WLAs that address stormwater sources. Therefore, the 2014 guidance was to replace the 2002 recommendations, acknowledging that some situations may merit a case-by-case assessment. Thus, the topics covered in the 2014 revisions include the following: 1. Include clear, specific, and measurable permit requirements and, where feasible, numeric effluent limitations in NPDES permits for stormwater discharges 2. Disaggregate stormwater sources in a WLA 3. Designate additional stormwater sources to regulate and develop permit limits for such sources.10 Managing Municipal Stormwater Pollution The EPA has provided excellent resources to dive into NPDES permits for industrial and construction activities.11 As the population grows, as the urban-rural divide widens, and as communities become increasingly aware of the composition of stormwater and their role in it, municipal stormwater management continues to evolve at a fast pace. Historically, most municipalities had combined sewer systems (CSS)—that is, municipal sewage and stormwater would all flow into a single piping system that went to the local Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), and

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was treated before being discharged into an approved water body. This point discharge was regulated under the NPDES permit. This system worked well under dry weather conditions but not during periods of high rainfall, when the excess stormwater overwhelmed the capacity of the STP and resulted in the discharge of untreated sewage mixed with stormwater directly into the receiving waters. These discharges are called combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and are proving to be a challenge for many municipalities that are dealing with aging infrastructure, increasing rainfall, and shrinking budgets. These systems are not being installed since 2005. Instead, Separate Sanitary Sewer (SSS) systems are the norm. In these, the sewer pipes are separated from stormwater pipes, thus preventing CSOs. However, it should be noted that the construction of two separate piping systems is an expensive capital investment. These are still considered point sources of pollution and fall under the NPDES purview. All NPDES permit holders, regardless of the source of the discharge they are managing, are expected to develop a Stormwater Management Program (SWMP) focused on reducing discharge of pollutants from their sewer system and addressing the following areas: • Construction site runoff control • Illicit discharge detection and elimination • Pollution prevention/good housekeeping • Postconstruction runoff control • Public education and outreach • Public involvement and participation • Program effectiveness12 Stormwater Management Programs and Plans The way a state or local government prepares its SWMP can vary largely from one place to the next. In some areas, it may be a collection of maps, data and basic designs, related stormwater literature, and rules. In others, it could be a complex analysis of stormwater quantity and quality data, linked with database systems such as geographic information systems (GIS) with sophisticated imaging and forecasting capabilities. In general, a basic three-step process described by Debo and Reese may benefit designers of a SWMP.13 1. Make a needs analysis. Since “stormwater planning” means different things to different people, it is important to define the final product. The community stormwater issues and needs must be clearly understood before a design process begins. Involvement with stakeholders may help in developing a process that is a good working solution for commonly occurring



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problems. Focus may also be on avoiding such specific problems and defining steps to be taken to solve them. 2. Determine the constraints to possible solutions. With problems come a list of possible solutions, and it is very important to consider each one with reason and practicality. If implementing structural BMPs were found to be the best solution but insufficient funding was available, it might be better to revisit the problem and select the next best alternative rather than realizing after half of the construction is complete that lack of finances will place the project on hold. Thus, constraints may be financial or they may be legal, political, or even social. Each option must be weighed carefully with regard to the possible constraints. 3. Formulate the technical approach. The technical capabilities of an SWMP will be totally dependent on the agency’s needs, the technical expertise of the personnel, and funding available. For example, while integrating existing models with GIS or other sophisticated tools may be in the long-term interest of the plan, if the personnel are not adequately trained in handling such systems, the plan will deteriorate. Example: Portland, Oregon Stormwater Management Program (SWMP) Portland, Oregon, developed its SWMP following the 1990s NPDES and MS4 requirements. The team at Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services (BES) followed some of the following steps to create its SWMP: 1. Reviewed existing city regulations, procedures, and practices 2. Implemented and monitored new techniques to determine BMP feasibility and effectiveness 3. Created a matrix highlighting successes and failures in the context of the regulations that had to be met 4. Collaborated across multiple departments to develop new BMPs that would successfully meet the regulatory criteria while providing effective stormwater management 5. Revised codes to ensure private property owners complied with regulations 6. Created the Stormwater Policy Advisory Committee (SPAC) with diverse stakeholders and used multiple experts to develop the city’s stormwater management manual Some of the most successful of the various programs they implemented included: 1. Downspout disconnection by more than fifty thousand residents, resulting in the removal of nearly 1 billion gallons per year (bg/yr) of stormwater from city CSOs

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2. Incentives for homeowners to reduce their stormwater footprints 3. Green streets: retrofits with landscaped curb extensions, swales, planter strips, pervious pavement, and street trees, to intercept and infiltrate stormwater and reduce the impervious streets See additional details at https://www.werf.org/liveablecommunities/studies_ port_or.htm. Overall, planning should encompass entire watersheds. Since watersheds know no political boundaries, interagency coordination and teamwork is essential to good stormwater planning and management. Various agencies have set up approaches to meet the same goal of stormwater planning. The EPA has set up a three-step process for watershed protection, comprised of identifying problems, involving stakeholders, and integrating actions.14 It also has a nine-step stormwater quality plan, similar to the one described below, which was developed by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).15 These steps include: 1. Identify the various problems associated with the watershed 2. Develop a set of objectives for the watershed 3. Inventory the resources within the watershed, including air, soils, water, vegetation, and wildlife 4. Analyze the resources within the watershed 5. Develop alternatives to address the problems and opportunities within the watershed 6. Evaluate and analyze the alternatives 7. Make decisions concerning the alternatives 8. Implement the decisions 9. Reevaluate the progress and make adjustments The above descriptions of prescribed steps needed to plan for and manage stormwater mirror the planning steps previously described in chapter 2. They provide a skeletal planning framework that lies within the current integrated water resources management (IWRM) approach. Through the use of a systematic, rational planning method, a systems approach (through identifying objectives and constraints), utilization of a watershed approach, and involving the public, the guidance above is a robust overview of stormwater planning procedures. As mentioned in several preceding chapters, the use of the IWRM, or the One Water, framework has shed light upon and intensified efforts in solving stormwater management problems from large- to small-scale. From within states (Florida lists several water bodies that have established TMDLs)16 to multistate efforts (e.g., the Chesapeake Bay, as discussed in chapter 7), to cities and neighborhoods, stormwater is being addressed in various places by various means. At the local level, local governments usually control stormwater management



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and flood control. But as the American Planning Association (APA) notes, “In general, there is not set standard or organizational structure for local governments to follow in determining responsibility for stormwater management.”17 The marriage of the IWRM/One Water framework with the planning profession has been profound. In 2017, the APA acknowledged how planners play a key role in influencing land use patterns (at all scales) and helping communities plan for those land uses.18 They recognized the opportunity for planners to advance more sustainable water systems, both structural and nonstructural. As a backdrop to the 2017 report, the APA and its chapters and divisions provided the following objectives for stormwater management. • Stormwater should reach streams and rivers in ways that  mimic natural runoff patterns to the maximum degree possible. • Policy and infrastructure design should shift away from the fast conveyance of rainfall runoff and achieve more natural stormwater control through the integration, implementation, and maintenance of low impact development and green infrastructure approaches. • Stormwater drainage systems, which for the most part are largely unfunded due to the lack of service fee structures, need to be reconceived as a formalized service provided to communities.19 To achieve these outcomes, the APA supports policies that range from developing specific content for managing stormwater as part of APA’s Sustaining Places comprehensive plan standards to upholding others already developed by federal, state, and local entities, under various acts, rules, and legislation. They encourage net low-impact development from a stormwater management perspective, through innovative land use planning and urban design, watershedwide planning, and interagency cooperation. They also urge the development of a national catalogue of green infrastructure best practices and successful case studies of mitigation and adaptation, to highlight integrated approaches to stormwater management. They also support funding research in this area, development of performance standards, incentives, and training and education.20 In addition, the 2017 APA report cites stormwater as one of the three basic types of water infrastructure systems (the other two being water supply and wastewater). With stormwater seen as a vector for planning involvement, several specific examples of stormwater planning and management are highlighted, including development regulations, source control for pollutants, stream and creek restoration, and integration of CSO/SSO remediation projects with streets projects. Innovations in interdisciplinary stormwater management are also described from cities such as Burnsville, Minnesota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Bellevue and Seattle, Washington; Greater New Orleans, Louisiana; Marin County

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and Los Angeles, California. It is particularly important to note that of these and other examples in the report, the use and management of stormwater were not singularly directed toward proper disposal only. Rather some of the examples show how the stormwater is being reused, hence serving as an alternative source of water (other examples of alternative sources of water were described in chapter 4) for beneficial purposes such as promotion of economic activity, environmental enhancement, irrigation, recreation, aesthetics, indirect water supply recharge, and nonpotable reuse. Several of the specific stormwater practices utilized in the above descriptions and more are described in the following section. Stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs) A fundamental component of a stormwater management program is the development of stormwater pollution prevention plans. These plans typically involve the installation and/or implementation of stormwater control measures (SCMs), commonly known as best management practices (BMPs)—tools that are used to prevent stormwater discharges, regulated by a permit, from degrading water bodies. Best Management Practices (BMPs) A stormwater BMP is a technique, measure, or structural control that is used for a given set of conditions to manage the quantity and improve the quality of stormwater runoff in the most cost-effective manner. BMPs can be either engineered and constructed systems (“structural BMPs”), which improve the quality and/or control the quantity of runoff with devices such as detention ponds and constructed wetlands, or they can be nonstructural. Nonstructural BMPs can make substantial improvements through such measures as public education or pollution prevention practices designed to limit the generation of stormwater runoff or reduce the amounts of pollutants contained in the runoff. No single BMP can address all stormwater problems. Each type has certain advantages and limitations based on the drainage area served, available land space, cost, and pollutant removal efficiency, as well as a variety of site-specific factors such as soil types, slopes, and depth of groundwater table. Careful consideration of these factors is necessary in order to select the appropriate BMP or group of BMPs for a particular location.21 Note on terminology: Some literature refers to these practices as stormwater control measures (SCMs). Some practices may also be tagged as low-impact development (LID), green infrastructure (GI), or green stormwater infrastructure (GSI). There may be slight variations in the definitions of each of



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these terms, when used broadly. However, in the stormwater context, these terms are often used interchangeably. For example, LID methods focus on the natural features of the landscape as a way to manage stormwater. The goal is to reduce peak runoff volume, simultaneously increasing infiltration, groundwater recharge, and improving water quality. The EPA defines GI as “a cost-effective, resilient approach to managing wet weather flows” and distinguishes it from BMPs, noting that while the basis of the design of conventional gray stormwater infrastructure was conveyance of the stormwater away from its point of origin in a safe manner, GI aims to reduce the impacts of stormwater right at the source.22 These decentralized practices are intended to help manage both quantity and quality of stormwater runoff using existing or creating new natural landscapes and habitats in parallel with the hydrology. The EPA defines GSI as “a cost-effective, resilient approach that incorporates vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage wet weather impacts that provides many community benefits.”23 With a range of designs, including rainwater harvesting, rain gardens, green roofs, permeable pavements, and others, GSI benefits extend beyond soaking up flood waters. By using soils and plants effectively, these engineered systems provide habitat and improvements in air and water quality, and they add to the aesthetics of an area while minimizing the urban heat island effect. Thus, the BMPs described in the next section may be modified to become LID or GSI or may even be used interchangeably, depending on the context and source. One of the main goals of implementing BMPs from a stormwater quantity perspective is flow control, followed closely by managing the stormwater quality. When a building project or a new development is under consideration, BMPs may be suggested that include site design features such as providing rain barrels, dry wells, or infiltration trenches to capture rooftop and driveway runoff. Other approaches are through general construction practices such as minimizing disturbance of soils and avoiding compaction of lawns and greenways with construction equipment to help maintain the infiltrative capacity of soils. The preceding is just a sample of the many approaches that can be taken to minimize stormwater runoff. Several websites provide valuable information on a wide range of stormwater issues, especially on BMPs and GI. The International Stormwater BMP database at http://www.bmpdatabase.org/ is an exhaustive resource on the design, data, performance, and other reviews and metrics related to BMPs, from across the world. The reader is urged to carefully review the database and the vast amount of information that can be found directly and through links to other sites. The quality issue is more complex to handle. However, there are several ways to remove pollutants from urban stormwater using BMPs. These include:

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1. Sedimentation: Removing suspended particles from stormwater by gravity settling. Pollutants such as metals, hydrocarbons, nutrients, and oxygendemanding substances can become adsorbed or attached to particulate matter, particularly clay soils. Removal of these particulates by sedimentation can therefore result in the removal of a large portion of these associated pollutants. 2. Flotation: Separation of particulates with a specific gravity less than that of water. Trash such as paper, plastics, Styrofoam, and other low-density materials can be removed from stormwater by the mechanism of flotation. 3. Filtration: Removing particulates from water by passing the water through a porous medium. The medium may be sand or gravel, among others. 4. Infiltration: The most effective means of controlling stormwater runoff. It reduces the volume of runoff that is discharged to receiving waters by infiltration to the ground. 5. Adsorption: Dissolved metals contained in stormwater runoff can be bound to the clay particles as stormwater runoff percolates through clay soils in infiltration systems. 6. Biological uptake and conversion: Microorganisms such as bacteria may degrade toxins and other pollutants. 7. Degradation: Occurs through processes such as volatilization and hydrolysis. 8. Source reduction: One of the best ways of reducing the degradation of urban stormwater, just as it is a proven and effective method of pollution reduction of any type. It can be accomplished by a number of different processes including: • Limiting applications of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides • Periodic street sweeping to remove trash, litter, and particulates from streets • Collection and disposal of lawn debris • Periodic cleaning of catch basins • Elimination of improper dumping of used oil, antifreeze, household cleaners, paint, and on the like into storm drains • Identification and elimination of illicit cross-connections between sanitary sewers and storm sewers. Structural BMPs/Green Infrastructure A number of technologies are in use today to reduce the contamination load of stormwater runoff.24 Following are some of the more commonly used methods.



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Infiltration Systems Infiltration systems include infiltration basins, previous pavement systems, and infiltration trenches or wells. An infiltration BMP is designed to capture a volume of stormwater runoff, retain it, and infiltrate that volume into the ground. Thus, water quantity reduction is achieved with water quality control. However, problems may arise with contaminated stormwater infiltrating the groundwater aquifers, which may serve as a drinking water source. Constant maintenance is required. Care must also be taken during construction to limit compaction of the soil layers underlying the BMP. Excessive compaction due to construction equipment may cause a reduced infiltrative capacity of the system. Other problems also exist. Hence proper design of the infiltration basins should be implemented. Local stormwater ordinances often require that infiltration basins be designed to drain within seventy-two hours to prevent mosquito breeding and potential odor problems due to standing water and to ensure that the basin is ready to receive runoff from the next storm. Pervious Pavement Pervious pavement is an infiltration system where stormwater runoff is infiltrated into the ground through a permeable layer of pavement or other stabilized permeable surfaces. These systems can include porous asphalt, porous concrete, modular perforated concrete block, cobble pavers with porous joints or gaps, or reinforced/stabilized turf. These may be used in several places, including pavements and residential driveways. Pervious pavements require maintenance, including periodic vacuuming or jet-washing to remove sediment from the pores. When properly designed, and maintained, pervious pavement systems can be an effective means of managing urban stormwater runoff.25 Infiltration Trenches and Wells An infiltration trench or well is a gravel-filled trench or well designed to infiltrate stormwater into the ground. Some portion of the overall volume of stormwater runoff is diverted into the trench or well. From there, it infiltrates into the surrounding soil. Typically, infiltration trenches and wells can only capture a small amount of runoff and therefore may be designed to capture the first flush of a runoff event. For this reason, they are frequently used in combination with another BMP, such as a detention basin, to control peak hydraulic flows. Infiltration trenches and wells can be used to remove suspended solids, particulates, bacteria, organics, and soluble metals and nutrients through the mechanisms

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of filtration, absorption, and microbial decomposition. They are also useful to provide groundwater recharge and to increase base flow levels in nearby streams. Detention Systems These systems intercept a volume of stormwater runoff and temporarily impound the water for gradual release to the receiving stream or storm sewer system. Detention systems are designed to completely empty out between runoff events and therefore provide mainly water quantity control as opposed to water quality control. Detention basins can provide limited settling of particulate matter, but a large portion of this material can be resuspended by subsequent runoff events. There are several detention systems available, including detention basin, underground vaults, pipes, and tanks. The main purpose of a detention basin is quantity control by reducing the peak flow rate of stormwater discharges. They are designed to not retain a permanent pool volume between runoff events. Most basins are designed to empty in a time period of less than twenty-four hours. The treatment efficiency of detention basins is usually limited to removal of suspended solids and associated contaminants due to gravity settling. A typical cross-section is seen in figure 11.3.

FIGURE 11.3 Detention Basin Cross-Section. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1999). Stormwater BMPs. Washington, DC: US EPA.

Retention Systems Retention systems include wet ponds and other retention systems, such as underground pipes or tanks. Retention systems are designed to capture a volume of runoff and retain that volume until it is displaced in part or in total by the next runoff event. Retention systems can provide both water quantity and quality control. Retention ponds (wet ponds), when properly designed and maintained, can be extremely effective BMPs, providing both water quality improvements



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FIGURE 11.4 Typical Cross-Section of a Retention Pond System. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1999). Stormwater BMPs. Washington, DC: US EPA.

and quantity control as well as providing aesthetic value and aquatic and terrestrial habitat for a variety of plants and animals. Pollutant removal in retention ponds can occur through a number of mechanisms. The main mechanism is the removal of suspended solids and associated pollutants through gravity settling. Aquatic plants and microorganisms can also provide uptake of nutrients and degradation of organic contaminants. Retention basins that incorporate an aquatic bench around the perimeter of the basin that is lined with aquatic vegetation can have added pollutant removal efficiency. A typical wet pond retention system is shown in figure 11.4. Constructed Wetlands Constructed wetland systems incorporate the natural functions of wetlands to aid in pollutant removal from stormwater. Constructed wetlands (also discussed in chapter 13) can also provide for quantity control of stormwater by providing a significant volume of ponded water above the permanent pool elevation. However, some disadvantages exist. A water balance must be performed to determine the availability of water to sustain the aquatic vegetation between runoff events and during dry periods. In addition, a sediment forebay or some other pretreatment provision should be incorporated into the wetland system design to allow for the removal of coarse sediments that can degrade the performance of the system (see figure 11.5).

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FIGURE 11.5 Constructed Wetland System. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1999). Stormwater BMPs. Washington, DC: US EPA.

Filtration Systems A filtration system is a device that uses a medium such as sand, gravel, peat, or compost to remove a fraction of the constituents found in stormwater. There are a wide variety of filter types in use. There are also a variety of proprietary designs that use specialized filter media made from materials such as leaf compost. Filters are primarily water quality control devices designed to remove particulate pollutants. Such systems are installed above surface and underground. Specialty filters include the Delaware sand filter (figure 11.6) and the StormFilter by Contech,26 among others. Bioretention Bioretention systems are designed to mimic the functions of a natural forest ecosystem for treating stormwater runoff. Bioretention systems are a variation of a surface sand filter, where the sand filtration medium is replaced with a planted soil bed. Stormwater flows into the bioretention area, ponds on the surface, and gradually infiltrates into the soil bed. Pollutants are removed by a number of processes including adsorption, filtration, volatilization, ion exchange, and decomposition. For example, Stafford County, Virginia, used multiple stakeholder input to craft a new stormwater ordinance and a design manual that included requirements for LID on private lots, with the result that almost 95 percent of developers are now using bioretention, including rain gardens, as the primary method of managing on-site runoff.27

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FIGURE 11.6 Delaware Sand Filter. Source: US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (1999). Stormwater BMPs. Washington, DC: US EPA.

In addition to the above-listed structural BMPs, there are some not so complex ones, including grass swales. There are also a wide variety of miscellaneous and proprietary devices that are used for urban stormwater management. Many of these systems are “drop-in” systems and incorporate some combination of filtration medium, hydrodynamic sediment removal, oil and grease removal, or screening to remove pollutants from stormwater. A few of the systems available include: • BaySaver • CDS Technologies • Hydrasep® • Stormceptor® • StormFilter™ • StormTreat™ System • Vortechs™

www.baysaver.com www.cdstech.com www.hydrasep.com www.imbriumsystems.com www.conteches.com www.stormtreat.com www.conteches.com28

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Nonstructural BMPs These BMPs require little, if any, construction but they can have a major effect on reducing pollutants from stormwater runoff, as shown in the following list of some commonly used nonstructural BMPs. Education, Recycling, and Source Controls This includes several options, including community awareness and education outreach programs about the ill effects of illegal dumping and other polluter problems and the harm they can cause to our environment and water supplies. Yard and pet waste and other forms of garbage need to be handled carefully. Automobile gas leaks, oil drippings, and so on need to be considered closely. Good housekeeping and purchase of environmentally friendly products such as selective fertilizers, manure, and other products go a long way in creating a cleaner urban runoff. Maintenance Practices Standard basin maintenance of stormwater systems and sweeping regularly to clean streets and parking lots need to be performed. Regular road and ditch maintenance, cleaning up after ice-melting salt trucks pass by, or even removing sediments and floatables from BMPs/GI should help. Vegetative BMPs/GI, such as constructed wetlands, grassed filter strips, vegetated swales, and bioretention facilities require periodic maintenance activities, including vegetation maintenance, to enhance performance. In addition to sediment removal and vegetation maintenance, periodic maintenance and repair of outlet structures are needed, filtration media need to be periodically replaced, and eroded areas need to be repaired, among other tasks. Overall, some of the performance and design standards that a stormwater management plan must follow include rate control: in peak postdevelopment, stormwater discharge rates shall not exceed the peak predevelopment rates for all critical duration storms, with return period frequency of up to and including the twenty-five-year storm period. Other features include design provisions for maintenance, design standards and design life, sedimentation and erosion control, design capacity, flood zone grade change restrictions, stormwater discharge off-site, and public dedication of stormwater management facilities, among others. For example, Philadelphia’s Green Roof Tax Credit and other, similar programs are looking to institutionalize GI practices. These have helped in dealing with both the NPDES requirements as well as the CSO discharges. Santa Monica, California, offers homeowners four different rebates to encourage rainwater harvesting.29 Another financial incentive



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program is being explored by the City of Baltimore, which is planning on joining Washington, DC, in embarking on a new form of financing: “clean water bonds.” The program matches investors to the range (risk) of progress made in GI projects aimed at curbing urban stormwater runoff. Washington, DC, issued clean water bonds for the first time in 2017.30 Conclusion Stormwater planning processes for quantity and quality involve many complex issues. With the right approaches, situation assessment, public participation, and implementation of good design and engineering principles, successful plans can be prepared, monitored, and revisited. Various agencies have guiding documents and step-by-step processes that can be followed. The BMPs and other structural and nonstructural efforts to control runoff volume and quality should be noted carefully and implemented as suited to a particular neighborhood, municipality, or region. Integration of improved methods in agriculture practices should also be pursued with vigor. Financing for stormwater treatment programs, like other environmental programs, continues to be a challenging problem. Traditional and creative financing paths are being explored. Along with these creative financing methods, a greater variety of individuals are now involved in stormwater planning. Traditionally the purview of engineers, stormwater management is now replete with interdisciplinary teams that are addressing human health and safety, environmental issues, and resiliency. Finally, public perception can help change the face of stormwater problems; therefore, public education and outreach should continue to be greatly encouraged. Study Questions 1. Describe the difference between detention and retention stormwater systems. 2. Discuss the effect of paved surfaces on stormwater. 3. What is the effect of urbanization on flood-prone areas? Give an example. 4. What do you think is the best structural BMP? Why? 5. In treating stormwater runoff, what are the kinds of methods that are directed from the federal level versus methods that would be undertaken at a local level? What is the difference and why? 6. What is an MS4 and how does it relate to the NPDES? 7. Provide an example of how stormwater can be reused and utilized as an additional water source for a different purpose.

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Notes 1. EPA. (2017). EPA Facility Stormwater Management. EPA. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/greeningepa/epa-facility-stormwater-management 2.  Briggs, H. (2018). A Third of Coral Reefs “Entangled with Plastic.” BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42821004; Popular Science. (2016). A Sea of Plastic: How Scientists and Entrepreneurs Are Tackling the Growing Problem of Our Ocean’s Trash. Popular Science. Retrieved from https://www.popsci.com/sea-plastic; Ted Talks. (2009). Captain Charles Moore on the Seas of Plastic. Algalita. Retrieved from http://www.algalita.org/video/ted-talks-captain-charles-moore-on-the-seas-of-plastic/ 3.  Cesanek, W., V. Elmer, and J. Graeff. (2017). Planners and Water. PAS Report 588. Chicago: American Planning Association. 4.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 5.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 6.  Nelson, A. C. (2004). Toward a New Metropolis: The Opportunity to Rebuild America. A Discussion Paper prepared for the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20041213_Rebuild America.pdf 7.  Code of Federal Regulations. Title 40. Chapter 1. Subchapter D. Part 122. Subpart B. Section 122.26. Storm Water Discharges. Retrieved from https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx ?type=simple;c=ecfr;cc=ecfr;rgn=div5;idno=40;q1=122.2;sid=f733bdee898692b798e007b2e5 0158d6;view=text;node=40%3A22.0.1.1.12#se40.24.122_126 8.  EPA. (2016). Fact Sheet, Final Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) General Permit Remand Rule. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016 -11/documents/final_rule_fact_sheet_508.pdf 9.  Angelo, M. J., J. J. Czarnezki, and W. S. Eubanks. (2013). Maintaining a Healthy Water Supply While Growing a Healthy Food Supply: Legal Tools for Cleaning up Agricultural Water Pollution. Agriculture and the Clean Water Act. In Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Law (ELI Press). Retrieved from https://law.ku.edu/sites/law.ku.edu/files/docs/ law_review/symposium/angelo-materials.pdf 10.  EPA, Office of Water. (2014). Establishing Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Wasteload Allocations (WLAs) for Stormwater Sources and NPDES Permit Requirements Based on Those WLAs. Revisions to the November 22, 2002, Memorandum. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-12/documents/epa_memorandum_estab lishing_tmdl_wlas_for_stormwater_sources_2014_00000002.pdf 11. EPA. (2018). Stormwater Discharges from Industrial Sources, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/npdes/stormwater -discharges-industrial-activities 12. EPA. (2016). Stormwater Discharges from Municipal Sources, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/npdes/stormwater -discharges-municipal-sources#developing 13.  Debo T. N., and A. J. Reese. (2002). Municipal Storm Water Management, p. 1176. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 14.  EPA. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.epa.gov/OWOW/watershed/statewide/chaptr1 .htm 15.  Debo and Reese, Municipal Storm Water Management.



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16.  Florida DEP. (2018). Final TMDL Reports. Florida DEP. Retrieved from https://florida dep.gov/dear/water-quality-evaluation-tmdl/content/final-tmdl-reports 17.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 18.  Cesanek, Elmer, and Graeff, Planners and Water. 19.  APA. (2016). Policy Guide on Water. APA. Retrieved from https://www.planning.org/ policy/guides/adopted/water/ 20.  APA, Policy Guide on Water. 21.  Livingston, E., E. Shaver, and J. Skupien. (1997). Operation, Maintenance and Management of Stormwater Management Systems. Tallahassee, FL: Watershed Management Institute; EPA. (2017). Best Management Practices (BMPs) Siting Tool. EPA. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/water-research/best-management-practices-bmps-siting-tool 22. EPA. (2015). What is Green Infrastructure? Green Infrastructure. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/green-infrastructure/what-green-infrastructure 23. EPA. (2016). Green Infrastructure and Climate Change: Collaborating to Improve Community Resiliency. EPA 832-R-16-004. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/sites/ production/files/2016-08/documents/gi_climate_charrettes_final_508_2.pdf 24.  EPA. (1999). Water Topics. EPA. Retrieved from www.epa.gov/ost/stormwater/usw_c .pdf 25.  National Ready Mixed Concrete Association. (2011). Pervious Concrete Pavement: An Overview. Pervious Pavement. Retrieved from http://www.perviouspavement.org/ 26.  Contech. (2018). StormFilter Stormwater Treatment. Contech Engineered Solutions. Retrieved from http://www.conteches.com/products/stormwater-management/treatment/ stormwater-management-stormfilter 27. EPA. (2010). Green Infrastructure Case Studies: Municipal Policies for Managing Stormwater with Green Infrastructure. EPA-841-F-10-004. Washington, DC: EPA Office of Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds. 28.  Livingston, Shaver, and Skupien, Operation, Maintenance and Management. 29.  EPA, Green Infrastructure Case Studies: Municipal Policies for Managing Stormwater with Green Infrastructure. 30.  Baltimore Sun. (2018, March 26). “City Plans New Clean-Water Bonds.” Baltimore Sun, p. 2.

12 Models in Water Resources Planning

Introduction

S

ince the middle of the twentieth century, mathematical modeling of water resources phenomena has grown from its infancy to become an important part of water resources planning and management. One of the first teams to begin the development of water resources systems analysis was part of the Harvard Water Program in the 1950s. A seminal publication in water resources modeling, The Design of Water Resource Systems,1 was published in 1962 as a result of that effort. Other early works by Eckstein,2 Hufschmidt and Fiering,3 Hall and Dracup,4 and Hamilton et al.5 helped form the basis for what is now an important component of water resources planning. The body of literature in this area has increased dramatically with rapid increases in computer technology and application development, substantially decreased costs and easy access to various electronic devices, expanded scopes and applications, the availability and use of geographic information system (GIS)– based information and models, and a substantial level of funding. This funding came about because of growing interest in systems analysis throughout government and industry, concern for environmental quality and improved resource management, and increasing water resource management problems worldwide, especially in the face of scarce financial resources. As an indicator of the scope of water resources modeling today, an internet search using the keywords “water resources models” will generate a listing of hundreds of websites on the topic and thousands of other water resources models-related articles, books, reports, and so forth. — 328 —



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TABLE 12. 1 Major Research Centers for Water Resources Modeling Research Center

Website

EPA’s Center for Exposure Assessment Modeling (CEAM), in Athens, GA US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Hydrologic Engineering Center, in Davis, CA USACE Research and Development Center USGS’s National Research Program NOAA’s National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Agricultural Research Center USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Technical Service Center International GroundWater Modeling Center at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, United Kingdom Deltares, formerly Delft Hydraulics

https://www.epa.gov/ceam/about-epa-centerexposure-assessment-modeling-ceam http://www.HEC.usace.army.mil

http://www.ERDC.usace.army.mil/ https://water.usgs.gov/nrp/software.php http://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/model-guidancemodel-area.php https://www.ars.usda.gov/research/software/ https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/ national/programs/technical/ http://igwmc.mines.edu/

https://www.ceh.ac.uk/about https://www.deltares.nl/en/

Evidence of the institutional commitment to water resources modeling in the United States exists today in major research centers, including the ones shown in table 12.1. These centers are widely recognized for their activity and their prominent roles in water resources modeling. Likewise, many regions in the United States, including various states and localities, develop and employ models and serve as centers of expertise for more site-specific applications in addition to independent agencies, consultants, and university researchers who also provide expertise and methodological leadership.6 Models can be defined briefly as representations of real-world phenomena. They can range from very simple to very complex. Water resources planners and engineers have long used analog models of water resource systems, such as scale models of hydraulic systems. We are concerned here, however, with mathematical models of water resource systems in which a series of equations depict realworld phenomena, particularly cause-and-effect relationships. Water resource models are analytic tools that help, for example, in determining causes of water degradation, in forecasting the quantity or quality of water, or in determining the water resource consequences of some proposed actions. A model uses num-

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bers, symbols, and relationships in mathematical form to represent a system. Even the most complex model is a simplification of the system it represents, for it is not possible to account for every detail in a complex system, nor is it desirable. A model’s value is in its ability to represent the salient features of a system, reduce the number of factors under consideration to manageable size, and depict the characteristics of interest and how they change under different conditions so that meaningful results are obtained. Some of the more salient attributes of successful modeling applications contain a systems focus or orientation, use of interdisciplinary teams, and the use of formal mathematics. Other attributes of a successful model would be a successful completion of the particular analysis at hand (analysis success), if or how it was used or implemented in the planning process (application success), and how the information and application of the model affected the system design, operation, or socioeconomic welfare of those involved (outcome success).7 And as noted by Grigg,8 models “are useful because you gain valuable information from using them, even if you are not sure the information is 100% correct. The point is that having information is better than operating on pure guesswork.” Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resources planners, but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in modeling are the following. Model A simplified representation of real-world phenomena, usually in the form of a mathematical expression. Simulation model A model that predicts system performance for a user-specified set of variable values. A simulation model is a representation of a system used to predict the behavior of the system under a given set of conditions. Alternative runs of a simulation model are made to analyze the performance of the system under varying conditions, such as for alternative operating policies.9 Deterministic model “Mathematical model in which outcomes are precisely determined through known relationships among states and events, without any room for random variation. In such models, a given input will always produce the same output, such as in a known chemical reaction. In comparison, stochastic models use range of values for variables in the form of probability distributions.”10 These fix the relationships among the elements of the system, yielding results as the mean values of the different parameters. Such models are based on physical laws and empirical information. Probabilistic (stochastic) model “Statistical analysis tool that estimates, on the basis of the past (historical) data, the probability of an event occurring



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again.”11 These rely on assumptions about the system and include some measure of uncertainty or randomness in developing variable relationships. Static model Describes steady-state conditions in which the values of the variables do not change over time. Dynamic model When some parameters vary over time or when the effects of transient phenomena must be evaluated. Optimization “A means of seeking solutions by defining specific desired criteria and then minimizing or maximizing among them using weighted values that address the trade-offs between conflicting criteria.”12 A means of searching for an “optimum” set of decision variable values. Collaborate To work together in partnership toward a common goal or set of objectives. Shared vision planning “A particular application of computer aided dispute resolution (CADRe) that integrates planning principles with systems modeling and collaboration to provide a practical forum for making water resources management decisions.”13 Decision support system (DSS) An integrative and collaborative modeling and participatory process that uses interactive software system comprising data, models, and logic to provide decision-makers with useful information to support their choices. Model Types Water resource models can be categorized in any number of ways.14 The most convenient and perhaps the most common division is between water quantity and water quality models. Water quantity models are concerned with the physical allocation of water since it is a resource often located spatially and temporally away from where it is needed.15 Water quantity models have been developed to predict flooding, stormwater runoff, agricultural irrigation requirements, expected demand, and water supply shortfalls and/or droughts.16 They encompass the full range of waters from saline to fresh and from surface waters to groundwaters. These models can be integrated with other models, can be site-specific within one or more watersheds or “problem-sheds,”17 or they may have environmental foci such as wetland models or natural resource models.18 Water quality models, on the other hand, focus on pollution or some other degradation of the resource that may affect its use for wildlife, industry, or recreation. Water quality models have been developed for numerous physical attributes, chemical substances, biological processes, and other important quality parameters of waterbodies.19 The spatial dimensionality of the model may be considered as another means of categorization. Although water resource systems are three-dimensional

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through time, acceptable accuracy for depicting water quality can be attained by modeling in one dimension (lateral mixing) or two or three dimensions (lateral and vertical mixing). Similarly, water quantity models may often be represented in one, two, or three dimensions. The ability to use and integrate GIS with computer aided design (CAD) and other visualization tools has allowed for an increasing growth of three-dimensional models. Other features are also important in understanding the uses and types of models. Descriptive models can aid in analyzing how a system works. Simulation models are of this type and serve the planner by organizing the information needed in the analysis. A simulation model is particularly valuable in studying the behavior of a system without observing the physical system itself.20 Predictive or forecasting models are useful, for example, in determining some level of water quantity or quality based on a set of given conditions.21 Models can also be designed as optimizing tools to determine the best available outcome that satisfies a set of given requirements or constraints. Another differentiation of models is between deterministic and probabilistic (stochastic) approaches. Deterministic models fix the relationships among the elements of the system, yielding results as the mean values of the different parameters. Such models are based on physical laws and empirical information. Stochastic models rely on assumptions about the system and include some measure of uncertainty or randomness in developing variable relationships. Stochastic models require large amounts of data to determine the probability distribution of the variables and to validate the model once it is developed. Similar to treating space via different modeling approaches, there are different approaches to dealing with models and time. Models can be viewed as either static or dynamic. Static models describe steady-state conditions in which the values of the variables do not change over time. Dynamic models are used when some parameters vary over time or when the effects of transient phenomena must be evaluated. These models can range from transient to quasi-continuous to continuous.22 As a rule, static models are simpler to develop and solve; they lend themselves more easily to long-term planning objectives than to relatively short-term control considerations. The choice of model(s) to be used depends on several issues, such as the purpose of the model, the questions to be addressed, and the level of detail required. The listing in table 12.2 shows a range of modeling techniques that might be used in water resources systems analysis. Simulation models, optimization models, statistical techniques, and collaborative decision-making models are discussed in the following sections.

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TABLE 12.2 Selected Systems Analysis Techniques Optimization Models Mathematical programming: Linear Quadratic Nonlinear Integer Dynamic programming Goal programming Lagrangian analysis Geometric programming Control theory Probabilistic Models Queuing theory Information theory Statistical decision theory Inventory analysis

Statistical Techniques Multivariate analysis Regression analysis Factor analysis Principal component analysis Simulation Models Simulation Sampling theory Related Techniques Game theory Benefit-cost analysis Input-output

Source: Meta Systems, Inc. (1975). Systems Analysis in Water Resources Planning. Port Washington, NY: Water Information Center.

Simulation Models Simulation models are the most common type of model used among water resources planners. They are usually descriptive, computerized equations characterizing a system in the form of functional relationships. They ask the “what if” or the “how” questions. Simulation models often explain a cause-and-effect connection between policy and model parameters. They use quantifiable relationships among variables and describe outcomes of operating a system under given inputs and operating conditions. They allow the user considerable flexibility when studying a water resource system, including compression or expansion of time, specification of model detail, and selection of outputs. Simulation models use trial and error to assess the response of selected outputs to the input variables. Large numbers of potential solutions often cause these models to bog down in computation and may lead the planner to nonfeasible solutions to the problem. Development of a simulation model requires the following: 1. Components: design variables or economic decision points where investment can change the value of the response 2. Relationships: rules by which the components are operated, rules that specify the physical features of the prototype, rules that govern the response computation

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3. Variables: symbolic representations of elements or components of the system; conditions affecting the system, both external and internal 4. Time interval: a finite characteristic period of time operating on the system A simulation may be either time-sequenced or event-sequenced or sometimes both.23 The time-sequenced form uses a fixed time interval to examine the state of the system at different time intervals. If the time interval selected for the simulation is too small, the computation will be overly involved and will require considerably more time to solve; if the interval is too large, then many of the approximations on which the model is based may not be valid. An eventsequenced model simulates a sequence of events when they happen. The time between events is allowed to fluctuate randomly, and the model focuses only on the events of interest. The structure of water resource data makes the timesequenced model more appropriate for most uses. An early example of water resource simulation modeling is the Lehigh River system simulation program,24 which uses time sequencing as applied to hydrologic parameters to test the outcome of various system designs on flooding. The hydrologic data for the simulation program consists of correlation coefficients, regression coefficients, and flood parameters taken from historical records. The system design variables constitute the attributes of the structures contemplated, or the system constraints. Once the simulation “run” is initialized, the model considers the outcomes for each month in the period under consideration. In contrast to the relatively modest Lehigh model, the EPA’s Stormwater Management Model (SWMM),25 developed at the University of Florida, is one of the most comprehensive mathematical models available for simulating storm and sewer systems, their accompanying storage and treatment facilities, and their impacts on receiving bodies. After many years in use, it remains one of the leading stormwater models into the twenty-first century. SWMM is widely used by North American planners and engineers because of its reliability and its currency. Workshops are held regularly to train new users on the use of SWMM and to update those already using the model. SWMM can be applied to urban stormwater and combined systems, surface water routing as well as urban watershed analysis, including baseflow contributions. SWMM simulates overland water quantity and quality produced by storms in urban watersheds. Several modules, or blocks, are included to model a wide range of quality and quantity watershed processes. The rainfall/runoff simulation is accomplished by the nonlinear reservoir approach. The lumped storage scheme is applied for soil/groundwater modeling. For impervious areas, a linear formulation is used to compute daily and hourly increases in particle accumulation. For pervious areas, a modified Universal Soil Loss Equation determines sediment load. The concept of potency factors is applied to simulate pollutants other than sediment. SWMM simulates stormwater movement from

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a watershed through a combined sewer/stormwater drainage system (including holding ponds and treatment facilities) into the receiving waterbodies. The model quantifies water quality changes resulting from natural or artificial sources along the simulation route. Enhancements in SWMM now include a suite of tools to design for low impact development (LID) controls. Another simulation model, the South Florida Water Management Model (SFWMM), played a prominent role in the Everglades restoration planning efforts.26 It simulated the surface and subsurface hydrology under different specified conditions. Simulation is a multiple-trial (iterative) technique that evaluates the anticipated performance of the system rather than an analytic process that yields optimal output. Accordingly, it is useful to question how reliable the results are for a given number of trials, and how the analyst proceeds from trial to trial. One of the key problems in simulation modeling is to determine the number of design and operating policies that are to be simulated. Optimization Models Optimization models differ from simulation models in that they primarily ask “what should be.” These models are aimed at arriving at preferred values of system design and policy operating criteria but are also useful for screening or eliminating inferior alternatives.27 Optimization models are an effective means for choosing the best combination of factors, considerations, and policies, or at least eliminating the worst choices.28 For this reason, many water quality management models are optimization models. Most optimization problems focus on maximization of some function, although minimization is used in some cases. Model Structure The first significant step in formulating optimization models is to select adequate objective criteria, such as maximization of system efficiency or minimization of operational cost. The mathematical formulation of a specific objective, f(x1, x2, . . . xn), is known as the objective function. Together with this function is a set of mathematical relationships among the decision elements, which represent physical, environmental, legal, financial, social, and other limitations on the variables and are known as constraints. Constraints may be inviolate physical limitations of the objective function, such as the conservation of mass or the existing capacity of a facility, or they could be an imposed limitation, such as scheduling or budgeting. A solution that does not violate any constraints is known as a feasible solution, and an optimal solution is one that gives the optimum value (maximum or minimum) of the objective function while satisfying all constraints.

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Typical water management models include at least one objective function to be optimized (maximized or minimized) and a number of constrained decision elements. For example, suppose that wastes are generated along a stream at sites 1 and 2. Without proper treatment, the wastes will degrade water quality at site 3 downstream. The task is to find the level of treatment required at sites 1 and 2 to achieve the desired standards at site 3 at minimal cost. The problem may be stated as follows: Objective function: Minimize Z = C1 x1 + C2 x2 Constraints: q2 + a12 W1 x1 ≥ Q2 q3 + a13 W1 x1 + a23 W2 x2 ≥ Q3 xi ≥ 0.30; i = 1,2 xi ≥ 0.95; i = 1,2 where: Z xi Ci qi Qi Wi aij

= = = = = = =

total treatment cost fraction of waste removed at site i cost per unit fraction removed at site i actual quality milligram per liter (mg/1) at site i desired quality (mg/1) at site i waste input at site i transfer coefficient (improvement in water quality index at site j per unit of waste removed at site i).

The objective function is to minimize the total cost of removing waste fractions x1 and x2. The required constraints are to satisfy water quality standards at site 3 (Q3); to have at least 30 percent waste removal at each site (x1), corresponding to primary treatment standards for municipal waste; and to have a maximum of 95 percent waste removal at each site, corresponding to best available technology.29 Linear and Nonlinear Models Optimization models are divided into three main groups: linear mathematical programming, nonlinear mathematical programming, and nonlinear iterative methods. Linear programming is an operations research technique that has found wide use in water resources planning. The above sample problem is typical of relatively simple linear programs. The method is particularly suitable for problems attempting to optimize the allocation of scarce resources among various activities.30 Linear programming requires that the objective function and all



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constraints are linear mathematical functions. This method is most efficient in solving continuous problems when both the cost function and the constraints can be written as linear inequalities. The disadvantage of this technique lies in the limitation of using only linear functions and approximations in order to fit the problem to the method. Although the algorithms for solving linear programming require complex calculations for any problem with more than three variables, there is software widely available for such purposes so the analyst only needs a knowledge of how to use the program and apply it to the specific problem(s) at hand. Successfully applying linear programming methods requires some utility function that needs to be maximized or minimized. In reservoir management, for example, the decision variables may involve water releases from storage for irrigation or power generation during specific time intervals. The linear programming problem in such an example assumes that water will be available either for irrigation purposes or for power generation or for some combination of these activities that will benefit the most people. A classic analysis of this problem, for the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, was conducted by Thomas and Revelle.31 Their study suggested that the pattern of monthly releases is independent of the actual volume of water impounded but is more related to the value of water.32 Perhaps one of the most successful application of a linear programming model is the resolution of a water supply problem for the Washington, DC, metropolitan area.33 Nonlinear mathematical programming includes several different techniques, the most important of which is “dynamic programming.” Dynamic programming is used to solve sequential decision problems when a system can be broken down into many subsystems. Recursive sets of equations are structured for successive solution, with the solution at each stage being optimal. Dynamic programming is advantageous over other mathematical techniques because it can handle continuous, discrete, integer, and zero-one variables. A good example of dynamic programming in water resources analysis is the determination of salinization resulting from the recharge/release cycle of a reservoir downstream from another reservoir. Naturally, the release cannot exceed the amount in storage and the recharge is limited by the capacities of the groundwater recharge system pumping into the reservoir from a storage aquifer and by the capacities of the aqueduct carrying the primary supply from upstream. This system may be further constrained by pumping costs, spills (seepage), or profit considerations concerning the use of the water for specific crop irrigations. The model is nonlinear because of the relationships between salinity and agricultural profits. Generally, nonlinear mathematical programming techniques reflect the complex relationships between the decision elements and the objective function and incur significant computational difficulties depending on the level of nonlinearity.

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Nonlinear iterative programming, another computation-intensive method, is accomplished by evaluating successively smaller “steps”—either forward (toward the best solution) or backward (away from the worst solution)—through the response surface until an optimal solution is reached. This solution is achieved through a series of partial derivatives of the problem or by continual rejection of the worst-design vector to find the optimum. The basic idea is to obtain a series of points that follow the steepest ascent along a path to the maximum point or, conversely, the steepest descent to the minimum solution. Search Techniques The search technique, an important component of optimization, is a procedure that draws on sampling theory for its various approaches. The search methods determine the direction in which to proceed and the increment of the next step in the trial. Each optimization results in a description of the system’s response to the operating parameters. Once an objective function is defined, the model becomes prescriptive by combining the function with search techniques to seek the optimal solution.34 The uniform-grid sampling approach requires analysis of uniformly spaced values of decision variables. Typical water resources models have many decision variables. For example, in a groundwater model, the decision variables may be for flowrates and include withdrawal or injection rates. Therefore, a model evaluation using this type of sampling approach requires many iterations and is very inefficient except for the simplest applications. The random-sampling approach consists of randomly chosen feasible values of the decision variables. Combinations are tested to find an optimum, which is then subjected to statistical tests. The nature of the results of each iteration is an important indicator of how many additional trials to take. Fortunately, most responses in water resources iterations are reasonably uniform, which allows the result to approach convergence near the optimum. Neither uniform-grid nor random-sampling search techniques use results from previous analyses to evaluate subsequent trials. Sequential search procedures use this information to calculate adjustments in the decision variables that would improve the model’s ability to simulate the system. The most frequently used sequential search procedure is trial and error. This approach utilizes the user’s previous knowledge of the water resource system to determine which way to move in order to incur the greatest possible change in the performance of the model. Another sequential search method uses the partial derivatives of the objective function to indicate the path of steepest ascent in selecting subsequent values to maximize the increase in the objective.35 Each of the various search techniques has its own advantages, and often a combination of methods is used. A more general technique, hybrid sampling,



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ranks the outcomes of an initial, random sample in order to characterize the derivatives of the decision variables with the most impact on the objective function. The key to all of these techniques is the analyst—working in collaboration with the planner—who must be able to determine when a sufficient search has been made. Statistical Techniques There is a large body of statistical techniques that are applicable to water resources models that are especially useful in describing hydrologic processes associated with runoff problems. Multivariate techniques provide efficient methods for describing statistical relationships among system models. Multivariate techniques include principal component analysis, factor analysis, canonical analysis, discriminant analysis, multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), and regression analysis. These and other statistical techniques are presented in detail in numerous texts on statistics. Multivariate analysis is used to define relationships between variables and to determine the individual effects of interrelated data. For example, multivariate analysis deals with more than two variables, such as water quality parameters (N) observed at several gauging stations along a waterway. If the different observations are plotted, the resulting graph resembles an n-dimensional cloud of points. Ideally, these variables should be “independent”; but in practice, the effects of one parameter may be highly correlated with another, as in streamflow versus suspended solids, for example. The strength of multivariate analysis is its ability to determine the individual effects of the variables on the system under study. As such, these techniques are used more for generating functional descriptions of the system than as an integral part of any model. Principal component analysis creates a new variable or index that is a composite of the observed variables that are interrelated. The method reduces the number of variables to those that are important to the system and develops a rank order to reduce the complexity of the situation. For example, rather than having many different measures of water quality, a new variate is generated that corresponds to the maximal variance within the observed system; that is, a number of variables used to measure water quality are statistically combined into a single variable by maximizing their variance.36 Factor analysis is similar to principal component analysis, but instead of generating composite variates, a model is assumed and the data are analyzed to estimate pertinent parameters. Observed variables are expressed as a linear combination of factors. This technique is helpful when extracting fundamental cause-and-effect relationships from the independent variables.37 Canonical analysis attempts to determine interrelationships between two sets of variables simultaneously. Specifically, canonical analysis finds linear

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combinations of variables in each set with maximum correlation to those in the other set. Water resources planners may find canonical analysis to be difficult to interpret, but it has much potential for determining correlational relationships for environmental impact studies or in management decisions.38 Regression Models Regression analysis is a common statistical technique that is frequently employed to investigate cause-and-effect relationships between variables. The simplest type, bivariate linear regression, assumes that a linear trend exists between two variables (i.e., that for each independent value of x, there exists a different value of the dependent variable y). Multiple regression will generate an equation that shows a dependent variable as some function of a set of several independent variables. The coefficients in any regression model are determined through using the set of empirical observations on the different variables to estimate the equation that provides the “best fit” for the dataset. A simple example of multiple regression analysis is the estimation of pollutant concentrations in surface waters after a storm as a function of drainage basin land use (e.g., developed, paved land; streets) and time since previous storm event. This situation is common in dealing with pollution from stormwater runoff. Formulation of such a model might be: C = a + b1L1 + b2L2 + b3t + e where: C = pollutant concentration (mg/l) L1, 2 = land use types 1 and 2 (sq. km) t = time (days) a,b = statistically estimated parameters e = error term In order to estimate the numerical values of the parameters (a, b1, b2, b3), observations would be taken on a number of different storm events at this basin, or on storm events at a number of different basins similar to this one. These two approaches to data collection are considered time series data and crosssection data, respectively. The error term is introduced in statistical modeling because the data rarely provide a perfect fit, and so this allowance is made for data residuals or errors. Using the collected data, the equation resulting using the method of least squares provides an estimated equation for a line that minimizes the sum of squared deviations between the line representing the equation and the set of data points.



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Several books are available on regression analysis and other statistical methods; these are important sources of information. Although the above example appears relatively straightforward, there are many places for possible difficulty and errors in calibrating the model. Statistical methods provide a powerful set of tools for the water resources planner, but it is important to remember to use them carefully and judiciously, for statistical methods can be easily misused and abused. Decision Support Systems/Collaborative Decision-Making Models Interest in mathematical modeling and the systems approach to water resources planning has grown exponentially, especially with the widespread adoption of computers and supporting software. These advances have led to greater use of software in many applications and a host of collaborative decision-making programs, such as decision support systems (DSS), which involve the stakeholders and decision-makers in graphical and visually presented frameworks. Spreadsheet programs, such as Excel, have built-in linear and nonlinear optimization packages, making it relatively easy to incorporate such techniques into undergraduate education as well as in graduate studies. Software for water resources applications are readily available at modest prices or free, if obtained via open access or open-sourced locations. Journal ads announcing, “Watershed Modeling Made Easy,” new journals such as Environmental Software, and new books on water resources modeling and computational methods in water resources are indicators of the continuing interest in and development of this aspect of water resources planning and management. Professional societies (e.g., American Society of Civil Engineers, American Water Resources Association, Water Environment Federation) and federal agencies provide information, short courses, conference sessions, model codes, references, and more, about applied water resource systems analysis. Major advances have come in this regard over the past few years with the continuing development of hardware and software, real-time acquisition of operations data, and substantially improved graphical user interfaces. The combination of earlier systems analysis techniques and the development of DSS (described below) have left us with a powerful set of tools for addressing water resources problems. As described in chapter 2, the concept of integrated water resources management (IWRM) has taken hold of the water resources planning and management field: Its manifestations can be found in all aspects of current planning both in the United States and abroad.39 Terminology such as One Water; total water management; holistic water management; comprehensive water policy planning; systems or watershed, basin, or problem shed approaches; conjunctive water use; silo busting; and many more are employed to convey the interrelationships between

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FIGURE 12.1 IWRM: Interrelationships between Environmental, Socioeconomic, and Governance Systems as Related to Water Resources.

the human uses of water and the socioeconomic, governance and environmental systems in which they lie (see figure 12.1). Water resources planning has increasingly utilized stakeholder involvement both passive and active. Driven by the need for less government, increased accountability, less overall funding, and less government control and regulations, this (generally) bottom-up approach is now the vanguard of the water resources planning profession. This approach aims to achieve a common, or shared, vision toward which the planning process should strive. Some of the earliest ventures in this regard were performed by the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) as collaborative mechanisms to integrate planning, modeling, and public participation. Commonly known as shared vision planning, these efforts have continued, multiplied, and are now used in a variety of applications including computer-aided conflict resolution (CADRe).40 The USACE’s website provides references, case studies, tools, techniques, models, and more. These collaborative models provide technical modeling as the vehicle for decision making and conflict resolution through employment of technical modeling, often including the use of visual, computer-assisted displays (or dashboards) that highlight key performance indicators. The interactions between the modelers and the decision-makers has been enhanced through the development of DSS or combined integrated assessment (IA) and integrated modeling (IM) techniques. A DSS, defined above, is an integrative and collaborative modeling and participatory process that uses



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an interactive software system comprising data, models, and logic to provide decision-makers with useful information to support their choices. The Global Water Partnership describes modeling and DSS as complementary, as they both utilize data of all varieties (from primary to model outputs, or expert or local knowledge).41 Grigg explains that to modelers, a DSS is distinguished from the former by having its components come from computer-assisted sources. A DSS can incorporate a wide array of components, internally linked (see figure 12.2). The pivotal feature is the interactive interface that allows for easy data input and display as well as control of the operations of the model(s).

FIGURE 12.2 Common Components of Many Decision Support Systems.

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Many journals and textbooks enumerate and elaborate on the use of these tools. The reader is referred to them for further details.42 For the water resources planner, the objective is to assist the decision-makers to reach decisions that will result in a plan that reaps positive outcomes. The interdisciplinary connections and interconnections existing in most planning processes is represented by the IWRM concept. The IWRM process can be implemented through a range of scales: a simple functional component such as how to deliver water to a newly annexed portion of a town; to a highly complex regional water system such as the Everglades restoration initiative, which required input, coordination, and collaboration of all systems—governance, environmental, and socioeconomic. The DSS attempts to assist the entire process by providing decision-makers the information they need in an understandable, credible, and timely fashion. Model Selection It would be convenient for water resources planners if decisions could be evaluated based on goals that are economically or technically comparable; however, such is not the case. Water is a precious resource for every living thing, and its allocation and life-sustaining qualities evoke complex social and political interactions. The introduction of societal goals often complicates the issues further and creates dichotomies in the decision-making process. The water resources planner can alleviate some of the confusion by using the tools of mathematical modeling in a way that reduces trade-offs and subjectivity. Models can be thought of as answer-generating devices to be used by decision-makers to help solve complex problems. Essentially, they are simply another advisor on the subject. The model should provide specific management recommendations for long-term planning as well as provide planners with additional insight into the water system processes. Also, the results of the study should be used to improve the internal mechanics of the model and expand the experience of the analyst.43 Two approaches to model selection may be termed a priori (deductive) and a posteriori (inductive). It is important to properly articulate the objectives to be evaluated by the model(s) as well as to review the theories about the water resources system(s) on which the model is based. Developing a conceptual model based on general observations or theory is a key step toward formulating a mathematical model. For instance, it may be important to know the spatial dimensions of the water body and how the fauna and flora partitioned throughout are affected by the temporal influxes of water through the system. The main objective of model formulation is to deduce causal relationships in the process inputs that may affect the outputs of the system. After a design is selected to model the



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system, the model(s) must be verified, validated, and applied to the system. Ultimately, the model guides the collection of data and even the type of data needed. When uncertainty exists concerning the values of model variables, a sensitivity analysis can be performed by substituting a range of values for each variable. Sensitivity analysis can be used to improve or simplify the model by indicating those parameters that are the most significant. A priori sensitivity analysis establishes the relative magnitude of change in the model input parameter values; a posteriori sensitivity analysis examines the distribution of model output responses that are possible with a given distribution of estimated parameter values. Lindholm provided a good example of sensitivity analysis performed on the input variables affecting the cost of a storm sewer network,44 while Loucks and van Beek describe extensive methodological techniques for improving model precision.45 A Note on Data Before delving into some specific applications in the following section, it must be stated that the quality of data can make or break the legitimacy of any or all analytical assessments underlying the water resources planning process. Data integrity is paramount. Data in water resources can span the governance, environmental, and socioeconomic spectrums, encompassing the hydrologic, atmospheric, and ecological systems as well as public health data, demographic, land use data, and water use data, and institutional information such as policy, funding, or collaboration potential. To avoid “garbage in, garbage out” results, data need to be reliable, verifiable, and available. The data may need to be manipulated or standardized to fit a particular time frame or modeling constraint. Data can range from nominal to ordinal to cardinal. Many of the sources of hydrologic data were highlighted in chapter 3. In the planning process, however, it is instructive to look at data as the foundation of decision making. Figure 12.3 depicts the process that enables data to be transformed into information, to knowledge, and then to decisions, with rapidly increasing value as one moves upward. As an iterative process, planning involves a continuous set of movements between these strata, with models utilized in all strata, or layers. Models are used in the base stratum to provide a mechanism for collecting and synthesizing diverse datasets; in the information stratum they identify relationships among the data and varying components of the planning process; and in the knowledge stratum they provide key indicators of success, estimates of benefits and costs, or impacts resulting from the evaluation of different planning alternatives. Even at the highest stratum, decisions can be facilitated by additional or comprehensive models such as DSS. One of the most accessible and easy ways to use DSS is the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) software, an open access program provided by the Stockholm Environment

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FIGURE 12.3 Data-Decision Tree.

(http://www.weap21.org/). This DSS includes such attributes as integrated approach, stakeholder process, water balance, simulation-based, policy scenarios, user-friendly interface, and model integration. It has been used all over the world, including in the United States. Applications Figures 12.2 and 12.3 provide a framework for understanding the roles that models perform and how they relate to each other and the decision-making pro-



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cess. They depict the level at which data and models can be classified and utilized in an overall systems approach. The following sections provide a selected set of summaries pertaining to water resources–related models frequently used in water resources planning. The summaries are intended as a starting point for researchers and potential users. Avid readers are encouraged to pursue additional resources.46 Water Quality Models Water quality is a subjective issue, with perception often playing an important role in water quality. Even though water may look good, it may be contaminated and vice versa. Water quality is especially important in developing nations, where there is either a shortage of water or severe contamination that can lead to increasing morbidity and mortality rates. The United Nations (UN) reports that as of 2015 at least 1.8 billion people in the world use a source of water that is contaminated and that each day, nearly one thousand children die due to preventable water and sanitation-related diarrheal diseases.47 Water quality modeling has an important role in helping to address this problem. A number of water quality models were introduced in the mid-1960s for defining and evaluating water quality management programs, but the use of water quality models grew more rapidly under the impetus of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. One of the largest and most comprehensive models for simulating sewer systems, treatment facilities, and impacts on receiving waters is the previously mentioned EPA SWMM, described above under “Simulation Models.” SWMM is one of the most widely used models because of its reliability and widespread availability. Many local governments and regional water resources agencies use SWMM daily. Other important water quality models are mentioned below and can be found at various websites.48 Groundwater Models Groundwater is important to water resources planning and management because it provides a significant portion of water supply in many parts of the world and because that supply is easily contaminated by pollutants. In response, an extensive network of agencies and organizations has evolved whose primary focus is groundwater. Of particular note are the USGS, the EPA, and the International Ground Water Modeling Center (IGWMC) at the Colorado School of Mines. The IGWMC maintains an extensive array of groundwater models and provides a telephone advisory service at modest cost (303-273-3105) for supporting software distributed by IGWMC and for advising on generic modeling questions and site-specific applications (http://igwmc.mines.edu/). The center has resolved many technical questions and can be a cost-effective alternative for dealing with groundwater modeling issues.

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EPA’s Ground Water Modeling Research website contains links to a wide variety of models and technical support. For example, the model “BIOCHLOR” is described as “a screening model that simulates remediation by natural attenuation of dissolved solvents at chlorinated solvent release sites.”49 Models such as BIOCHLOR may be relevant when considering spills involving dry cleaning fluids, many of which comprise chlorinated solvents, categorized as Dense NonAqueous Phase Liquids. The site is a ready reference for and access to and assistance with the following: • Quick-response technical assistance to remedial project managers and other decision-makers in various program areas, such as the Superfund, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Brownfields, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), and ecosystem restoration, on problems that are site-specific • Consultation and performance of treatability studies focused on the natural and enhanced remediation of subsurface contaminants • Support for models and model reviews for site-specific applications • Conducting workshops, seminars, and conferences on state-of-the-science issues • Specialized training courses • Development of Superfund, RCRA, and Brownfields issue papers, briefing documents, and summary papers • Dissemination of publications and technology-focused information packets50 The USGS has been extensively involved in developing groundwater models. It has developed and made available a number of models of groundwater and related hydrologic and geochemical processes. Several models and software are also available from the USACE’s Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC).51 MODFLOW, a model of the USGS, is considered an international standard for simulating and predicting groundwater conditions and groundwater/surface-water interactions. It was first published in 1984, and since then it has added simulation capabilities that include coupled groundwater/surfacewater systems, solute transport, variable-density flow (including saltwater), aquifer-system compaction and land subsidence, parameter estimation, and groundwater management.52 MODFLOW has been used extensively in South Florida, including aspects of the Everglades restoration effort. The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) has utilized MODFLOW to simulate the groundwater flow in a threedimensional medium53 in its Lower East Coast Water supply planning efforts. MODFLOW was adopted because the SFWMM, that was originally developed, contained grid sizes that were too large. A higher resolution was needed to evaluate potential positive or negative changes to the water management system. The SFWMD has also utilized MODFLOW with several of its add-on packages



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to address water restrictions, wetland hydroperiods, and flow diversions. By using MODFLOW and subsequent adaptations, water managers were able to deal with one large model rather than having to model water aspects of interest county by county.54 Stormwater and Watershed Models Among the major water runoff models, the Stanford Watershed Model (SWM) is perhaps the oldest, and it provided the basis for some of the more widely used models today.55 It used hourly precipitation and potential evapotranspiration as input data. Inflow to channels was determined by simulation of interception, surface retention, infiltration, overland flow, interflow, groundwater flow, and soil-moisture storage. SWM was followed by several refined versions, and a variety of other models were based on the SWM structure. Other important runoff models are HEC-1 and HEC-RAS, devised by the HEC. HEC-3 and HEC-5 are other USACE models for multipurpose planning and operation of reservoir systems for flood control, hydropower, and water supply. The USACE continues to develop its series of HEC models. One model from the HEC, an open source software model called HEC-HMS, simulates precipitation and runoff processes in watersheds. It is applicable to large river basins and small, natural watershed runoff applications, including water supply and flood hydrology, in a wide variety of geographic areas. The sub-basins in the model can also utilize a GIS environment, helping the analyst to visualize watershed characteristics. The model includes hydrological, meteorological, and control specification manager components. An extensive review of the model and its specific application in the Rafina basin in eastern Attica, Greece, can be found in Mimikou et al.56 Stormwater runoff is one of the major water resources planning issues in the United States today, as the Clean Water Act is aimed at dealing with quality and quantity of aspects of runoff. Several reviews of urban stormwater models are worth noting in this regard. Zoppou summarized the features, functionality, accessibility, quality, and quantity components as well as their temporal and spatial scales of twelve urban stormwater models.57 The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality reviewed EPA’s BASINS and SWMM models, both of which are finding major use in stormwater management, and in applications in other watershed models as part of the TMDL program.58 As noted previously, one of the most popular stormwater models is the SWMM. It is distributed by EPA’s CEAM. Some other important stormwater or watershed programs include:59 Watershed runoff models (BASINS, GLEAMS, AGNPS, SWAT, SPARROW, SSARR, TR-20) Natural Resources Models (PHABSIM, CROP-W, CROP-2, CRiSP) Terrestrial and aquatic models (PHABSIM, NSM)

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Optimization Models Optimization models are widely used to address water allocation problems, especially in cases of severe resource constraints. Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement to date in the application of water resources optimization modeling is the cooperative set of agreements reached in 1982 for water supply in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. This project proved to be a landmark case, particularly with regard to systems analysis and the USACE. After three decades of uncertainty regarding the area’s water supply, water resources modeling and management techniques were adopted to optimize water supplies for years to come with only moderate capital expenditures ($30 million). Through use of shared vision planning and additional modeling tools, the USACE recommended largely nonstructural measures to solve water supply problems to the year 2010. Considering the fact that eight separate agreements were reached among federal, state, and local agencies and that the alternatives studied over many years ranged from $200 million to more than $1 billion, and that the adopted solution is based primarily on low-cost and improved operation of existing facilities using systems analysis techniques, the Washington Metropolitan Water Supply project has brought water resources modeling a major step forward. It has demonstrated that nonstructural engineering alternatives using the techniques of water resources modeling can solve complex “sociopolitical problems and achieve substantial cost savings.”60 The capabilities of water resource models vary significantly among applications, but many usable techniques exist for both quantity and quality. Their continued development, and the rapidly increasing availability of computer technology, should make models an important element of water resources planning. Additional discussions regarding the use of the optimization models and subsequent collaborative techniques emerging after this effort (such as Systems Thinking, Experiential Learning Laboratory, with Animation [STELLA] described below) are detailed in Hagen.61 DSS/Collaborative Decision-Making Models As described above, the advent of collaborative decision-making techniques, coupled with dynamic computer graphic visual interfaces, has become engrained in water resources planning and management. Numerous applications and references have been provided above. A few selected examples are provided here. The STELLA model, based on finite difference equations, has gained popularity and implementation. STELLA (and its numerous revisions such as STELLA II, etc.) is a general-purpose, object-oriented, system simulation modeling package applicable to a broad range of applications in education, science, business, engineering, and other professional fields.



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A model of a system is developed using STELLA by combining four types of icons or objects: stocks, flows, converters, and connectors. Stocks accumulate flows and are used as state variables to reflect time-varying (dynamic) characteristics of the system. Numerical integration methods are used to solve the mass (volume) balance at each stock. The value or amount associated with a stock can change in each time period in response to flows into and out of the stock. For example, if a reservoir system is being modeled, stocks can represent reservoir storage, which is a time-varying function of STELLA flow objects representing stream inflows, water supply diversions, reservoir releases, and evaporation. Converters are used to store mathematical expressions and data. Connectors provide a mechanism to indicate the linkages between stocks, flows, and converters. A system representation may consist of any number of stocks, flows, converters, and connectors. STELLA provides a number of built-in functions, which are used in developing the logic and mathematics for the particular application. The STELLA system simulation environment emphasizes use of icons and graphical diagrams to capture the interrelationships of system components. The distinguishing characteristic of this program as compared to spreadsheets is its capability for graphical object-oriented representation of the interrelationships of the components of real-world systems. Two DSS examples have been provided from the US Southwest. One takes place in the Middle Rio Grande and was developed by Sandia National Labs in collaboration with the University of Arizona. The other takes place in the Upper San Pedro, where water withdrawals threatened a natural conservation area. Competition for water was exacerbated because of Fort Huachuca, a military base. A DSS was developed by the University of Arizona in conjunction with stakeholders and agencies involved with the basin. The model allowed users to select different packages of water conservation measures, with variations in scenarios, time, and space. Coupled with socioeconomic information, water budget data, groundwater levels, and costs, the model was able to represent resultant groundwater and riparian impacts. The process included a groundwater model of the basin, and a detailed physical model with higher spatial resolution which was included in the DSS for computational efficiency.62 Another DSS example is described in Grigg, for the Nile Basin Initiative.63 Features of that model include a data/information management system (time series analysis toolkit, basic GIS, integrated database, and ensemble generator for probabilistic analysis); a modeling system (water balance and allocation model, rainfall-runoff modeling tools, hydrodynamic modeling, soil erosion process model, and model linking/nesting tool); and decision-making/analysis tools (scenario management, multiobjective optimization, economic analysis tools, and a multicriteria analysis tool).

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Water Models Although not models in the normal sense of the word, geographic information systems (GIS) are rapidly growing and evolving, computer-based technologies that are finding substantial applications in water resources planning and management. GISs are designed to store information on the location, topography, and attributes of spatially referenced objects such as lakes, rivers, wetlands, roads, and political boundaries. GISs can provide spatial analysis of properties such as dimensions and area, and they can store information tied to these properties such as ownership, land use, and soil type. The evaluation of multiple environmental issues can be significantly improved by combining scientific data and watershed characteristics into a GIS. In 2007, the Office for Coastal Management of NOAA established a website called Digital Coast.64 The website is a collaborative effort between NOAA, the American Planning Association (APA), as well as eight other state and local agencies engaged in coastal management issues. The interactive package includes elevation, land cover, hazards and climate, imagery, and economic data. It is linked to numerous and extensive ongoing and completed programs and projects. Much of this can be accessed via a data access viewer. Sediment contaminant and toxicity and tissue data, natural resources, and potential habitat restoration projects can be overlaid on a watershed’s features and land uses and displayed on maps at flexible spatial scales. NOAA and others have used this approach in several watersheds throughout coastal regions affected by contaminant releases from Superfund sites and other sources, including Massachusetts Bay, Newark Bay, San Francisco Bay, Christina River, Sheboygan River, Alcoa/Lavaca Bay, Puget Sound, and Calcasieu Estuary. Together with GIS, global positioning systems (GPS) are increasingly found in water resources planning. GPSs are a set of satellite-based navigation, positioning, and timing systems that allow the user with appropriate GPS receivers to identify any point (latitude and longitude) and elevation (altitude) on the earth’s surface. The GPS provides accurate position information that aid users of GIS by such means as georeferencing photogrammetric or digital map data, ground-checking satellite imagery data, and creating or updating GIS databases. The GIS applications have been enhanced further through the use of spatial data processing, analysis, and visualization into a Web-based architecture, and the use of cloud computing. GIS Examples Several examples illustrate the applicability of GIS to water resources planning. Among the many potential applications, these examples include wetlands



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analysis, urban hydrologic models, nonpoint pollutant source identification, and environmental impact assessment. In a case involving wetlands, a system was developed to integrate the geographic distribution of wetland types that have depth variations associated with peat quality and character.65 Included is a hierarchy of (1) vegetation, (2) soil type, (3) hydrology, (4) geology, and (5) peat characteristics. One advantage of GIS for wetland analysis is that wetlands often cover large areas that are not readily accessible for field surveys. Thus, remote sensing data utilized with GIS can provide a valuable means for identification and analysis of this resource. Hydrologic models for urban areas must incorporate numerous variables related to urban land use characteristics. A GIS can provide a digital representation of the watershed characteristics used in hydrologic modeling. For example, general land characteristics that are typically associated with runoff include imperviousness, natural ground cover, and delineation of watersheds and stream networks. These can all be incorporated readily into a GIS for such end uses as floodplain management and flood forecasting, erosion prediction and control, and storm drainage utility implementation.66 An example of extensive data that can be used for hydrologic modeling is provided by Broward County, Florida, where GIS has become an important planning tool for protection and development of natural resources, including groundwater and surface water.67 The system incorporates eighteen layers of data and uses five computer programs, including one that can be used to create documentation fields for each data layer and four that can be used to create data layers from files not already in GIS format. Data layers that have been created for artificial features include municipal boundaries, major roads, public land survey grid, land use, and underground storage tank facilities. The data layer with topographic features contains surveyed point land-survey elevations. The data layers for hydrologic features include surface water and rainfall data collection stations, surface water bodies, water control district boundaries, and water management basins. Data for hydrogeologic features include soil associations, hydrogeologic unit depths, transmissivity polygons, and a finite-difference model grid. Each data layer is documented with regard to the extent of relevant features, scale, data sources, and description of attribute tables. A nonpoint pollutant source (NPS) example used a GIS to identify and rank NPS areas on a regional basis by combining the GIS with a pollutant generation and transport model.68 A screening model was used to rank the agricultural pollution potential of 104 Pennsylvania watersheds. Included among GIS parameters were watershed boundaries, topography, soils, land cover, animal density, precipitation, and rainfall-runoff factors. Ranking of the watersheds allowed identification of critical NPS-contributing watersheds in the state. Environmental impact assessment (EIA) in water resources planning generally requires massive data collection and analysis. Thus, the use of GIS can be

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helpful in preparing EIAs. A new computer-based wetlands delineation system was used by the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company to provide EIA packages for a proposed gas pipeline project that complies with regulatory requirements and focuses on environmental concerns.69 Traditional field investigations and literature searches were combined with GIS software to compile and analyze environmental data. GPS data were used to provide precise earth coordinates for surveying and mapping, thereby eliminating much individual surveying fieldwork. Output from this system provided (1) topography for pipeline corridors, (2) parcel delineation, (3) route profiles from computer terrain modeling, (4) computer-based hydraulic models, and (5) accurate identification of wetland areas. The effect of this analysis was to derive a set of best management practices, as follows: • Excavated material to be removed in layers and replaced in the same sequence • Existing seed bank to be preserved • Construction equipment to be kept outside wetlands boundaries to the maximum extent practicable • Stabilization mats to be placed over wetlands where construction equipment must enter • Wetland areas to be returned to preconstruction grade Groundwater flow provides an excellent opportunity to use GIS capabilities to track an array of information. As an example, the Coastal Plain physiographic province of Virginia is underlain by a seaward-sloping wedge that lies on consolidated bedrock and consists of unconsolidated clastic sediments. These sediments form a layered system of aquifers and confining units that supply groundwater to users throughout the area. As demands for these groundwater resources increase, management tools (e.g., groundwater flow models) become crucial in helping to guide groundwater management divisions. Development and use of these management tools are more efficient if digital information from previous studies is retained and updated. The above examples are just some of the many possibilities offered by GISs, and it is reasonable to assume that GIS applications to water resources planning and management will continue to increase. Conclusion Many water resources models have become standard tools of the water resources planner. The body of literature continues to grow rapidly, as mentioned above, in providing overviews and evaluations of water resources models. This chapter provides a broad overview of the evolution of models over time. There are sev-



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eral websites, journals, and other publications especially dedicated to modeling in general and water resources modeling that can help planners to improve this field, which has seen exponential growth over the past few decades. As artificial intelligence, the internet, and other aspects of data science evolve, balancing this growth with rising cybersecurity concerns associated with data and intellectual property protection will become key. Even as we look ahead, lessons from some federal publications may still resonate. For example, Friedman et al. provide a thorough review of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) publication and present these important findings: • Mathematical models have significantly expanded the nation’s ability to understand and manage its water resources. • Models have the potential to provide even greater benefits for water resources decision making in the future. • Water resources models vary greatly in their capabilities and limitations and must be carefully selected and used by knowledgeable professionals. • Models are not explicitly required in any federal water resources legislation, but they are often the method of choice to meet the requirements of legislation. • Development and use of models are complex undertakings, requiring personnel with highly developed technical capabilities as well as adequate budgetary support for computer facilities, collecting and processing data, and numerous additional support services. • Virtually all federal modeling activities are currently managed on an agency-by-agency basis, and little coordination of efforts occurs between agencies. • Most federal agencies have no overall strategy for developing and using models; consequently, many legislative requirements and decision-makers’ needs for information are not being met. • Successful modeling requires adequate resources for support services, such as user assistance, as well as for development. Presently, model development has outstripped corresponding support for models. • State governments frequently use water resources models, although many wish to use them more extensively than is currently possible.70 A discussion of issues and experiences with water resources modeling, explored by Loucks, Stedinger, and Shamir in 1985, may still be relevant.71 Often providing a historical perspective on water resources modeling, they discussed the types of problems addressed in modeling applications: • Conflict resolution involving water quantity and quality use and regulation • Multiple-purpose regional or basin development and water management

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• Interbasin transfer of water supplies and wastewater effluents • Surface and groundwater quality protection and management • Design and operation of water distribution systems • Wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal • Irrigation water supply design and operation • Hydropower development and operation • Flood control and floodplain development and regulation • Reservoir operation for multiple purposes • Environmental protection Of particular interest in their review were the overall outcome of applications, and the factors affecting the success or failure of modeling applications, including: • Institutional or political context within which the application is performing • Commitment to establishing plans, procedures, and policies • Relationships between clients and analysis and the quality and frequency of communication between them • Extent of on-site training and model implementation by those within the institution desiring the study • Resistance to new approaches or technology • Availability of data and the appropriateness of the model, given that data • Scope and complexity of the problems being addressed • Extent and duration of the study and whether or not there is any follow-up by those primarily responsible for model development and use, once modeling tools or model results are available Finally, the authors discussed a number of water resources problems that appeared to be widespread and of immediate concern to policymakers and that might be addressed with the aid of systems analysis tools. Thus, a look at these past reviews juxtaposed against the current advancements in the field suggests that models have continued to be effective tools to engage communities in conversations that influence the decision-making process, as well as to develop the technical framework to connect systems, evaluate multiple strategies, and simulate and predict for future events. Planners will benefit from a strong understanding and utilization of this field. Study Questions 1. Describe a specific water resources systems optimization problem and identify a possible objective function and constraints for it. What are some appropriate variables for this problem?



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 2. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a systems analysis approach to the above problem.  3. Do a literature or web search to find a water resources problem that used mathematical modeling as part of the solution. Provide a summary and evaluation.  4. A community is planning for future water supply and wastewater disposal. Explain how systems modeling might be used to assist the planning effort.  5. Develop a statistical approach you could use to forecast water demand for a region twenty years into the future. What are some of the variables you might use? How would you obtain the necessary data?  6. What are the pros and cons of using mathematical models to assist in water resources planning? What are some of the limitations and cautions that should be recognized?  7. How does IWRM relate to mathematical modeling?  8. What is a DSS and how does it relate, or not relate, to model development or applications?  9. What is the added value or benefit of having shared vision planning? What do you see as the pros and cons? 10. Go to the WEAP website at http://www.weap21.org/. Read “Why WEAP” and scroll through the “demonstration.” Describe your impressions about how useful this tool might be. Notes 1.  Maas, A., et al. (1962). The Design of Water Resource Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2.  Eckstein, O. (1958). Water Resource Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 3. Hufschmidt, M. M., and M. B. Fiering. (1966). Simulation Techniques for Design of Water Resource Systems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 4.  Hall, W. A., and J. A. Dracup. (1970). Water Resource Systems Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill. 5.  Hamilton, H. R. et al. (1969). Systems Simulation for Regional Analysis: An Application to River Basin Planning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 6.  AWWA. (2007). Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practices, M50. Denver: American Water Works Association; Loucks, D. P. (2008). Water Resource Management Models. The Bridge, 38(3), 24–30; Loucks, D. P., and D. H. Moreau. (2009). Environmental Issues and Options in Water Resources Planning and Decision Making. In The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making, edited by Clifford S. Russell and Duane D. Baumann. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 7.  Loucks, D. P., and E. van Beek. (2017). Water Resource Systems Planning and Management: An Introduction to Methods, Models, and Applications. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG.

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8.  Grigg, N. S. (2016). Integrated Water Resource Management: An Interdisciplinary Approach, p. 259. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 9.  Wurbs, R. A. (1994). Computer Models for Water Resources Planning and Management, p. 140. IWR Report 94-NDS-7. Alexandria, VA: USACE IWR. 10.  “Deterministic Model.” BusinessDictionary.com. Retrieved from http://www.business dictionary.com/definition/deterministic-model.html 11.  “Probabilistic Model.” BusinessDictionary.com. Retrieved from http://www.business dictionary.com/definition/probabilistic-model.html 12.  Bourget, L., Ed. (2011). Converging Waters: Integrating Collaborative Modeling with Participatory Processes to Make Water Resources Decisions, p. 191. Maass-White Series. Fort Belvoir, VA: USACE IWR. 13. Bourget, Converging Waters, p. 191. 14. Wurbs, Computer Models for Water Resources Planning and Management. 15.  EPA. (1974). Guidelines for Preparation of Water Quality Management Plans. Washington, DC: GPO. 16.  Biswas, A. K. (1975). Systems Approach to Water Management. In Systems Approach to Water Management, ed. A. K. Biswas. New York: McGraw-Hill; Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management. 17.  Giordano, M., and T. Shah. (2014). From IWRM Back to Integrated Water Resources Management. International Journal of Water Resources Development, 30(3), 364–376. 18. AWWA, Water Resources Planning. 19.  Ott, W. R., Ed. (1976). Environmental Modeling and Simulation. Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency; Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management. 20.  Meta Systems, Inc. (1975). Systems Analysis in Water Resources Planning. Port Washington, NY: Water Information Center, Inc. 21.  Kelly (Letcher), R. A., et al. (2013). Selecting among Five Common Modelling Approaches for Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. Environmental Modelling & Software, 47, 159–181. 22.  Kelly (Letcher) et al., Selecting among Five Common Modelling Approaches for Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. 23.  Goodman, A. S. (1983). Principles of Water Resources Planning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; Deeks, D. (1998). Introduction to Systems Analysis Techniques. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 24.  Hufschmidt and Fiering, Simulation Techniques. 25.  US EPA. (2018). Storm Water Management Model (SWMM). EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/water-research/storm-water-management-model-swmm 26. Loucks, Water Resource Management Models; SFWMD. (2018). South Florida Water Management Model (SFWMM). Retrieved from https://www.sfwmd.gov/science-data/ sfwmm-model 27.  Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management. 28.  Biswas, Systems Approach to Water Management. 29.  Loucks, D. P., J. R. Stedinger, and D. A. Haith. (1981). Water Resource Systems Planning and Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 30. Goodman, Principles of Water Resources Planning. 31.  Thomas, H., and R. ReVelle. (1966). On the Efficient Use of the High Aswan Dam for Hydropower and Irrigation. Management Science, 12(8), B296–B311.



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32.  Whittington, D., and G. Guariso. (1983). Water Management Models in Practice: A Case Study of the Aswan High Dam. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 33.  Hagen, E. (2011). New Approaches in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond—Pioneering Work in the Development of Shared Vision Planning. In Bourget, Ed., Converging Waters. 34. Goodman, Principles of Water Resources Planning. 35. Goodman, Principles of Water Resources Planning. 36.  Meta Systems, Systems Analysis in Water Resources. 37.  Meta Systems, Systems Analysis in Water Resources. 38.  Wanielista, M. P. (1978). Stormwater Management, Quantity and Quality. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Science. 39. Global Water Partnership. (2018). Welcome to the GWP IWRM ToolBox! Global Water Partnership. Retrieved from https://www.gwp.org/en/learn/iwrm-toolbox/About_ IWRM_ToolBox/; Federal Support Toolbox (website). (2018). Watertoolbox.us. Retrieved from http://watertoolbox.us/apex/f?p=689:1 40. Bourget, Converging Waters; Grigg, Integrated Water Resource Management; Cardwell, H., et al. (2009). The Shared Vision Planning Primer: How to Incorporate Computer-Aided Dispute Resolution in Water Resources Planning. IWR Report 08-R-02. Retrieved from http:// www.iwr.usace.army.mil/Missions/Collaboration-and-Conflict-Resolution/Shared-Vision -Planning/Resources/References/ 41. Global Water Partnership. (2017). Modelling and Decision-Making. Global Water Partnership. Retrieved from http://www.gwp.org/en/learn/iwrm-toolbox/ManagementInstruments/Modelling_and_decision_making/ 42. Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management; Grigg, Integrated Water Resource Management; and see articles in Decision Support Systems (journal website). (2018). Retrieved from https://www.journals.elsevier.com/decision-support -systems/; Jakeman, A. J., et al., Eds. (2008). Environmental Modelling, Software and Decision Support, Volume 3. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Retrieved from https://www.elsevier.com/books/ environmental-modelling-software-and-decision-support/jakeman/978-0-08-056886-7; Hamilton, S. H., et al. (2015). “Integrated Assessment and Modelling: Overview and Synthesis of Salient Dimensions.” Environmental Modelling and Software, 64, 215–229; McIntosh, B. S., et al. (2011). Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) Development: Challenges and Best Practices. Environmental Modelling and Software 26, 1389–1402. 43.  US EPA, Guidelines for Preparing Water Quality Management Plans. 44.  Lindholm, O. (1978). Modeling of Sewerage Systems. In Mathematical Models in Pollution Control, ed. A. James. New York: Wiley. 45.  Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management. 46.  Loucks and van Beek, Water Resource Systems Planning and Management; Grigg, Integrated Water Resource Management; articles in Decision Support Systems. 47.  UN. (2015). Sustainable Development Goals. UN. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/ sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation/ 48.  USGS. (2018): Water Resources Geochemical Software. Water Resources of the United States. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/software/lists/geochemical; EPA. (2018). Methods, Models, Tools, and Databases for Water Research. EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa .gov/water-research/methods-models-tools-and-databases-water-research 49.  EPA. (2016). BIOCHLOR. Ground Water Modeling Research. Retrieved from https:// www.epa.gov/land-research/ground-water-modeling-research 50.  US EPA, Ground Water Modeling Research.

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51.  USGS. (2018) Water Resources Groundwater Software. Water Resources of the United States. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/software/lists/groundwater/; USACE. (2018). Hydrologic Engineering Center. USACE. Retrieved from http://www.hec.usace.army.mil/ 52.  USGS. (2018). MODFLOW and Related Programs. USGS Groundwater Information. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/modflow/ 53. SFWMD. (2018). Groundwater Modeling. SFWMD. Retrieved from https://www .sfwmd.gov/science-data/gw-modeling 54. SFWMD. (2006). Draft Lower East Coast SubRegional (LECsR) MODFLOW Model Documentation. West Palm Beach, FL: SFWMD 55.  Crawford, N. H., and S. J. Burges. (2004). History of the Stanford Watershed Model. Water Resources Impact, 6(2), 3–5. 56.  Mimikou, M. A. et al. (2016). Hydrology and Water Resource Systems Analysis. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 57.  Zoppou, C. (2000). Computer Models and Softwares. Chapter 17 of Urban Stormwater Management Manual for Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Agrolink Malaysia. Retrieved from http:// agrolink.moa.my/did/river/stormwater/index.html 58.  Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. (2001). Oregon DEQ TMDL Modeling Review. Portland: Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. 59.  The acronyms refer to models that were believed to be current at the time of this writing. For further information, the reader is encouraged to perform an internet search on the acronyms. 60.  Sheer, D., and K. Flynn. (1983, June). Water Supply. Civil Engineering 53(6), 50–53. 61.  Hagen, New Approaches in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond. 62.  Serrat-Capdevila, A., et al. (2011). Decision Support Systems in Water Resources Planning and Management: Stakeholder Participation and the Sustainable Path to Science-Based Decision Making. In Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future, edited by Chiang Jao. Rijeka, Croatia: TechOpen. Retrieved from https://www .intechopen.com/books/efficient-decision-support-systems-practice-and-challenges-from -current-to-future/decision-support-systems-in-water-resources-planning-and-management -stakeholder-participation-and-th 63. Grigg, Integrated Water Resource Management. 64. NOAA. (2018). Digital Coast. NOAA. Retrieved from https://coast.noaa.gov/digital coast/; NOAA. (2018). Office for Coastal Management. NOAA. Retrieved from https://coast .noaa.gov/# 65.  Cameron, C. C., and D. A. Emery. (1992). Classifying and Mapping Wetlands and Peat. In Geographic Information Systems and Mapping: Practices and Standards. Philadelphia: American Society for Testing and Materials. 66.  DeVantier, B. A., and A. D. Feldman. (1993). Review of GIS Applications in Hydrologic Modeling. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, 119(2), 246–261. 67.  Sonenshein, R. S. (1992). Documentation of a Digital Data Base for Hydrologic Investigation, Broward County, Florida. USGS Water Resources Investigations Report 92-4061. 68.  Hamlet, J. M., and G. W. Petersen. (1992). Geographic Information Systems for NonPoint Pollution Ranking of Watersheds. Water Resources Update, 87, 21–25. 69.  Bowers, K. (1992). Better Wetlands Data Improves Pipeline Proposals. Water Environment and Technology, 4, p. 11. 70.  Friedmann, R. et al. (1984). The Use of Models for Water Resources Management, Planning, and Policy. Water Resources Research, 20(7), 793–802. 71.  Loucks, D. P., J. R. Stedinger, and U. Shamir. (1985). Modeling Water Resource Systems: Issues and Experiences. Civil Engineering Systems, 2, 223–231.

13 Other Planning Issues

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lthough this text has covered the major functional aspects of water resources planning and management in previous chapters, a number of other water resources issues and methodologies are important elements of water resources planning. The issues covered in this chapter include fish and wildlife, wetlands, navigation, recreation, hydroelectric power, and environmental impacts. Although these concerns are not the only remaining areas in water resources planning, they do round out the list of the more salient concerns of water resources planning. Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resources planners but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used with regard to other planning issues are the following. Wetland An area of shallow standing water that contain hydric plants. Constructed wetlands An artificial wetland; a designed complex of saturated substrates, emergent and submerged vegetation, animal life, and water that simulates natural wetlands for human use and benefits, usually to clean municipal, industrial wastewater or stormwater runoff. Capacity coefficient The number of visitors at a recreation site that can be accommodated per unit of area without crowding to the point of decline.

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User day Measures the recreational experiences of a single person at a recreation site. Visitor day Comprises the recreational activities of an individual over a twelvehour period at a recreation site. Fish and Wildlife Water resources are of paramount importance to many species of fish and other wildlife. Sport and commercial fishing are multibillion-dollar industries employing hundreds of thousands of people and providing recreational opportunities for millions. Likewise, birds, mammals, and other wildlife not only provide enjoyment but also perform ecological functions in the environment. Fish and wildlife must often compete for water resources with agricultural, industrial, and municipal uses. The water resources planner must recognize the needs of living resources and ensure that they receive an adequate allocation of water-related habitat. No living species can exist without water in some form. The water needs of both plant and animal species must be carefully weighed against the development of water resources. All species are adversely affected by dramatic changes in the environment to which they are adapted. Changing a habitat by channelization, impoundment, diversion, or draining of water resources will lead to changes in species composition and population levels in and around the water body. Likewise, climate change impacts upon water resources are showing profound effects on fish and wildlife in diverse areas of the earth. As conditions change, some species find the environment more hostile, whereas other species find the new habitat suitable and they flourish. For instance, impoundments may create a new habitat for warm-water fish while destroying the fast-moving water habitat characteristic of cold-water fish. Likewise, impoundments may flood the land inhabited by quail but may open up additional areas for ducks. Thus, trade-offs in species composition will take place whenever the existing habitat is changed. The water resources planner must consider these trade-offs when evaluating the effects of a water use project, as well as changes in the natural environment from climate change. Historically, it has been difficult to accommodate species to new environments. For example, the dams built on the Columbia River in the nineteenth century provided electric power and water for irrigation but blocked the annual spawning return of several species of anadromous fish (most notably the salmon), which then constituted a major part of the fishing industry in the Northwest. Fish ladders were constructed to allow the salmon to bypass the dams on their way upstream. However, large numbers of fish were too weak to traverse the ladders or were not lucky enough to find them. Of the newly hatched



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young salmon en route to the sea, many were diverted into irrigation canals or were killed when they passed through the turbines of the hydroelectric plants.1 In addition, spawning grounds were lost when they were flooded by the reservoirs, a process that changed the siltation patterns, temperatures, and oxygen conditions of the river. The presence of certain species can be good indicators of environmental quality. For example, fish are often repelled by adverse habitat factors before they are physically harmed.2 Each animal species has specific environmental requirements. For instance, for freshwater fish these requirements may include the amount of dissolved oxygen, the hydrogen-ion concentration, turbidity, and specific electrical conductance. Also, creatures that occupy higher trophic levels (at a higher level in the food chain) may be adversely affected by contaminants that have accumulated in their food. The toll on species is often insidious in that reproductive ability is adversely affected. A well-known example of this problem was the population decline of the brown pelican due to the dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) levels in fish. The DDT caused the pelicans to lay eggs with thinner shells, which broke as the parents incubated them. The pollution impacts of massive urban, agricultural, and industrial projects have led to the disappearance of substantial natural wet habitat acreage. More fish and wildlife habitat are lost each year owing to pollution and siltation created by projects funded by public agencies.3 This loss of critical habitat has in turn led to the extinction or near-extinction of many species. Federal law now requires that the impacts of water projects on fish and wildlife resources be evaluated before approval is granted. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 (http://www.fws.gov/endangered/lawspolicies/) requires federal agencies to modify policy objectives to “ensure” that their activities do not jeopardize the survival of endangered species or adversely affect habitat “critical” to those species. For an interesting history of the ESA, the Thoreau Institute provides a good chronology (http://www.ti.org/ESATofC. html). This act was seen to be a threat to future development; three-fourths of the cases brought to the courts involved water resources development projects.4 The federal agencies with primary responsibility for fish and wildlife are the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The ESA requires federal agencies consulting with the FWS and/or the NOAA Fisheries Service to ensure that actions they authorize, fund, or administer will not be likely to jeopardize the continuing existence of any listed species or result in destruction or adverse modification of the designated critical habitat of these species. The ESA modified existing protection legislation of the FWS in several ways. First, the legislation prohibited direct actions against endangered species, such as harassment, hurting, collecting, trapping, capturing, wounding, or killing. The Secretary of the Interior was given full regulatory authority

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to protect endangered species and, when necessary, the attributes of their habitat essential for their existence. Second, the act defined categories for “endangered” and “threatened” species and established criteria for inclusion in a list of endangered and threatened species. Third, the regulation of all activities of federal agencies to protect endangered species ensured that the basic needs of species, usually associated with a particular critical habitat, would not be jeopardized by lack of coordination. This aspect of the act required a consultation with experts in the FWS and the issuance of a “biological opinion” concerning the possible effects of an activity on a particular species. Finally, the ESA provides for civil suits to be filed by any citizen to enjoin the federal government from violating the act. The act was criticized because it subordinated all other objectives of an action to the goal of endangered species protection. It required that impacts on endangered species be avoided and that projects be altered or halted to prevent damage to critical habitat. The issuance of a biological opinion concerning the endangered species visà-vis the proposed action can be time-consuming and quite costly. The consultation process often leads to expensive project alterations, especially where the activity could modify the critical habitat of the species. The act provided a means to interfere with the normal progress of an action until these biological studies were completed. This provision proved to be very costly and disruptive to several large water resources projects in the act’s early years. The ESA was amended by Congress in 1978 to allow exemptions to this noninterference concept under special circumstances. The exemption process is also time-consuming. If the biological opinion concludes that a project will jeopardize an endangered species or its critical habitat, an exemption may be sought by the federal agency or by the governor of the state in which the action is proposed. The project is first reviewed by a three-member review board, which passes the application on to a seven-member review board, which passes the application on to a seven-member Endangered Species Committee if it is determined that a conflict exists. If, based on the second review board’s findings, five members of the committee vote to allow exemption, the project may proceed. Whatever the outcome of the vote, the committee decision may be reviewed by the US Court of Appeals. The Tellico Dam controversy in Tennessee (TVA v. Hill, 8 ELR at 20517, 1978) is a classic example of the continuance of a water project deemed to adversely affect an endangered species of fish, the snail darter. Summaries of the Tellico controversy and of the US Supreme Court’s decision may be found through an internet search. In addition to the 1978 amendments, Congress enacted important amendments in 1982, 1988, and 2004 but left the overall structure of the original 1973 act essentially unchanged. Furthermore, many states also recognize endangered or threatened species and provide additional protection under state laws.



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As more information becomes known about the ecological needs of different species, it becomes possible to project the probable species mix after changes are made to the habitat. As a corollary, it also becomes feasible to create habitats especially suited for certain species. A new habitat is often developed as a form of compensation for habitat that is lost to water projects. For example, the San Jacinto Wildlife Area near Riverside, California, was created to restore habitat lost through the California Water Project. This project brought freshwater from the mountains of California to supply the needs of urbanized Southern California. Development of the aqueduct systems to transport the water destroyed thousands of acres of riparian and other wetland habitats. The state decided that new habitats would be developed at the aqueduct terminus (San Jacinto Reservoir) to mitigate the adverse effects of the project. Further information by a San Jacinto grassroots organization can be found at http:// www.northfriends.org/sjwa.html. Often the costs of mitigation may exceed the original benefits derived from the fish and wildlife resource, and mitigative measures are not always totally successful. For example, in the case of the aforementioned Pacific salmon population on the Columbia River, more than forty hatcheries were built to compensate for the loss of naturally occurring spawning habitat, but the total salmon production of the river has decreased significantly and is estimated to be much below the production levels of the early decades of the twentieth century.5 Wetlands It is well known that wetlands play a vital role in the natural environment. Wetlands furnish the essential habitat for many species of waterfowl, mammals, fish, and other wildlife. In the upper Midwest these wetlands constitute the major breeding and resting areas for ducks, geese, and swans in North America. Frequently, wetlands serve as natural barriers to fire, erosion, and flooding. They serve as convenient natural “laboratories” for scientists and students, and they also improve local water quality by acting as a natural filtration system for various pollutants. In addition, they provide excellent opportunities for fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and timber production. Wetlands serve as a transition zone from an aquatic environment to a landbased environment and they are an important economic resource. Equally, or perhaps even more importantly, wetlands serve a significant role in maintaining water quality by providing an effective, free treatment for many types of water pollutants. They can remove pollutants (organic matter, suspended solids, metals, and excess nutrients) from both point and nonpoint sources. A good overview of America’s wetlands is provided by the EPA at http://www.epa.gov/ wetlands. The site includes substantial information on wetlands protection and

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restoration, science and technology, laws and regulations, plus much more material on wetlands and related topics. Wetlands occur in many forms, such as swamps, bogs, marshes, shallow lakes, potholes, estuaries, ponds, salt flats, sloughs, and floodplains. In addition to these natural wetlands, there are a growing number of restored, created or artificial, and constructed wetlands. Restored wetlands are those that existed as wetlands previously but have been restored to their original condition as nearly as possible. Created or artificial wetlands are those that are built in previously dry areas to emulate natural wetlands. They are sometimes built as mitigation wetlands, wetlands that had to be created to replace natural wetlands that may have been damaged or destroyed by development activity. Finally, constructed wetlands are artificial; they are usually designed and built for the specific purpose of serving as a water treatment system using wetland processes. Constructed wetlands are discussed in more detail below. Wetland types vary in depth and area and are often seasonally temporal. Some have surface water only after rainstorms, while others may be perennial lakes with depths of less than ten feet. In the past, these areas were regarded as wasted space and were frequently drained to create new agricultural or urban lands. The allocation of wetlands between agricultural and wildlife sectors has become a classic example of limited resource distribution. It is estimated that the United States originally had as many as 220 million acres of wetlands in the lower forty-eight states. By 2009, this number had been reduced to just over 110 million acres, an area about the size of California. (Detailed information on national wetlands inventories can be found at http://www. fws.gov/wetlands/status-and-trends/index.html). It is estimated that Alaska has 170–200 million acres of wetland, slightly more than half of the state, while Hawaii has about 52,000 acres. Other than Alaska, states with the most wetland area are Florida, with more than 11 million acres, followed by Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas, with about 8 million each. Coastal wetlands are also threatened by sea level rise. The Association of State Wetland Managers provides an extensive list of current research and reports. It reports that scientists predict that the rapid rate of sea level rise will outpace adaptive capacity of local flora and fauna.6 Research at the global level reports that a one-meter rise in sea level would affect seventy-six developing countries and territories and that the large majority of impacts would be experienced in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as the Middle East and North Africa. Estimates of economic loss from such inundation is estimated to be $630 million per year.7 Land use changes and development trends, if not curtailed, will exacerbate this condition. The issue is global, national, and local. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and other federal, state, and local agencies are exploring and implementing mitigation measures.8 The extensive losses of the original wetlands occurred because they were drained and converted to other uses, such as industrial, residential, and mu-



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nicipal use, drainage for pest control (mosquitoes), and site beautification. Highways are often routed through wetland areas because the land is usually flat and inexpensive. Highway construction is particularly destructive to wetlands because the highways often serve as barriers to movement by fish as natural water flows are rerouted. Informed construction methods can preserve or even improve fish and wildlife production by providing access to important spawning and feeding areas and utilizing natural habitat attributes as much as possible. Although the rate of wetland loss has declined substantially in recent decades,9 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates of trends on nonfederal lands show loss rates continuing to be significant. A detailed breakdown of the status and recent trends of wetlands in the United States is provided by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).10 Goldstein noted that wetlands are often perceived by farmers as a costly nuisance.11 Planting costs more in wetlands because of the irregular patterns of wet spots and because damage may occur to agricultural machinery when it becomes mired in the mud. In addition, migrating waterfowl attracted to the wetlands often maraud farmers’ crops, effectively reducing profits. By draining and cultivating a wetland area a farmer can recoup some of his or her lost revenue. Also, government subsidies can make drainage an economically feasible alternative. However, the eventual loss of these wetlands areas is expected to have dire consequences on waterfowl and environmental quality in general. Wetlands preservation is currently being undertaken by many levels of government and private individuals as its importance and value become more widely recognized. Under the Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, Section 404 gave the USACE authority to control wetlands alteration. It was not until 1977 that the federal government started a comprehensive program to protect wetlands. Section 404 establishes a program regulating discharge of dredged and fill material into waters of the United States, including wetlands. Activities in waters that are regulated under this program include fill for development, water resource projects (e.g., dams, levees), infrastructure development (e.g., highways, airports), and conversion of wetlands to uplands for farming and forestry. The program works under the premise that no dredged or fill material can be permitted to be discharged if there is a practicable alternative that is less damaging to the aquatic environment or if US waters would be significantly degraded. To apply for a permit, one must show that • Steps have been taken to avoid wetland impacts where practicable • Potential impacts to wetlands have been minimized • Compensation for any remaining, unavoidable impacts have been provided through activities to restore or create wetlands

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Responsibilities for the 404 program are shared by the EPA and the USACE, with responsibilities divided as follows: USACE responsibilities: • Administers the day-to-day program, including individual and general permit decisions • Conducts or verifies jurisdictional determinations • Develops policy and guidance • Enforces Section 404 provisions EPA responsibilities: • Develops and interprets policy, guidance, and environmental criteria used in evaluating permit applications • Determines scope of geographic jurisdiction and applicability exemptions • Approves and oversees state and tribal assumption • Identifies activities that are exempt • Reviews and comments on individual permit applications • Has authority to permit, deny, or restrict the use of any defined area as a disposal site (Section 404 [c]) • Can elevate specific cases (Section 404[q]); • Enforces Section 404 provisions. FWS and NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service responsibilities: • Evaluates impacts on fish and wildlife of all new federal projects and federally permitted projects, including projects subject to the requirements of Section 404 (pursuant to the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act) • Elevates specific cases or policy issues pursuant to Section 404(q) The interpretation of Section 404 by the courts has been broad and has directly affected the private development of many wetlands areas, and the USACE has generally taken a conservative posture on wetlands development. To further the work of wetlands preservation, the North American Wetlands Conservation Act of 1989 provides matching grants to private or public organizations or individuals who have developed partnerships to carry out wetlands conservation projects in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Over the last two decades, this act has funded more than 2,600 projects totaling $1.4 billion in grants, and more than 5,600 partners have given an additional $3 billion in matching funds to affect 33.4 million acres of habitat.12



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In addition to wetlands preservation, the creation of artificial wetlands has become an increasingly important activity. Constructed wetland systems are promising alternatives for some of the costly wastewater treatment facilities that are traditionally used for wastewater treatment. The use of constructed wetlands has grown substantially over the past decades as a low-cost, energy-efficient, and easy-maintenance alternative to typical advanced wastewater technologies. Numerous websites besides the EPA’s give information on a variety of constructed wetland designs and applications. Depending on the need, constructed wetlands can be used for storage and treatment of different types of wastewater: from municipal wastewater to acid mine drainage, industrial process water, agricultural nonpoint discharges, stormwater treatment, and simple storage of stormwater. The number of constructed wetlands continues to grow as their applications become better understood and more widely accepted. Generally, constructed wetlands are designed to simulate natural wetlands, but they are usually intended for direct use as a wastewater treatment process. When properly designed and constructed, they will operate as water purification systems, just as natural wetlands do. Constructed wetlands can be defined as a designed complex of saturated substrates, emergent and submerged vegetation, animal life, and water that simulates natural wetlands for human use and benefits. These artificial wetlands are designed specifically for use in treatment of wastewater and other contaminated water. The transport and transformation of pollutants through the wetland ecosystem involves a number of interrelated physical, chemical, and biological processes. Typically, a constructed wetland mimics the behavior of natural wetlands in its design and functioning. Water entering the system experiences settling as the primary physical process. Chemical action takes place as water contaminants react with soils, while the principal action occurs biologically as wetland plants and soils, together with bacteria, further decompose and neutralize the contaminants. Constructed wetlands are divided into two major types: (1) free water surface wetlands and (2) subsurface flow wetlands. Free water surface wetlands usually have soil bottoms, emergent vegetation, and water exposed to the atmosphere. The vegetation is planted in shallow basins or channels, with relatively low water depth. Subsurface flow wetlands are designed to maintain the water (or wastewater) level below the surface of the media (rocks, gravel), with no free opening to the atmosphere.13 Aquatic plants used in constructed wetlands vary widely, depending upon climate and soils, but the most common emergent plants are reeds, cattails, rushes, bulrushes, and sedges. The emergent plants have the ability to absorb oxygen and other needed gases from the atmosphere through their leaves and stems above water and conduct those gases to the roots. Thus, the soil zone in imme-

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diate contact with the roots can be in aerobic and anaerobic environments. Although the plants can uptake nutrients and other constituents, perhaps the most important plant function in constructed wetlands are the submerged portions that serve as the substrate for attached microbial growth. The microorganisms in constructed wetlands can help to reduce high levels of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), suspended solids, nitrogen, and significant levels of metals, trace organics, and pathogens. Constructed wetlands are becoming increasingly important as a technology for improving water quality. Constructed wetlands can help facilities meet more stringent water quality standards at a reasonable cost and can help to reduce some of the damage accumulated from years of pollutant discharges throughout the country. Although constructed wetlands are typically small, low-flow operations, they can be extremely large, as in the current design of a system associated with the Everglades. A problem of restoring the Everglades is tied to operations of the sugar industry in South Florida. It has major sugar cane crops and processing plants between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades largely because of rich soils, tropical climate, and the presence of a canal conveyance system. Water management agencies have determined, however, that high concentrations of phosphorus in water that flows into the Everglades were causing serious degradation in certain areas. It was determined that protection of the Everglades system would require installation and use of stormwater treatment areas (STAs) (constructed wetlands). Known as the Everglades Construction Project (ECP), the project forms part of the foundation for the largest ecosystem restoration program in the history of Florida and perhaps the nation. For some details on the project, see the USGS website: https://sofia.usgs.gov/ sfrsf/plw/ecp.html. The ECP consists of twelve interrelated construction projects. The primary components of the ECP are six constructed wetlands (STAs), covering about forty-three thousand acres. Construction of the six STAs was completed in 2003 with a construction budget of $320 million (for more details, see http://www.burnsmcd.com/projects/everglades-construction-project). The STAs are using natural biological processes to reduce levels of phosphorus entering the Everglades, to a goal of fifty parts per billion (ppb). The prototype STA has been effectively reducing phosphorus levels below twenty-five ppb. For additional detailed information on the STA program consult the SFWMD at https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/wq-stas. In spite of considerable improvement in water quality over the past decades, large portions of the nation’s waters are still contaminated by stormwater runoff from various land uses and from numerous point-source water pollution sources. The application of constructed wetlands provides an excellent opportunity for the beneficial use of this comparatively low-cost technology.14



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Navigation Some of the earliest water resources planning efforts in the United States dealt with improving riverine transportation to the sea. Canals brought resources and commodities from the interior of the country to the primary centers of trade, usually located at a port. For many years, US navigable waters have been under the jurisdiction of the USACE. In addition, the USACE has primary responsibility for construction and maintenance of the nation’s harbors, ports, and waterways. For the USACE’s role in US navigation, see www.usace.army.mil/ Missions/Civil-Works/Navigation/. The nation’s domestic waterway system now totals more than twenty-five thousand miles of navigable waters, of which 80 percent have been improved by the federal government. The full cost of improvements and maintenance of waterways was funded by the federal government while private, state, and other organizations provided the land needed for dredged material, expansion, terminals, and transfer facilities. Navigation planning requires knowledge of many aspects of water transport: shipping technology, terminal facilities, channel width and depth, navigation aids and facilities, climatic influence, seasonal variations, currents, and tidal influences. The vast array of shipping needs, physical situations, and alternative solutions lends itself to water resources planning techniques and analysis. A specialized subarea of concern to the water resources planner is commercial navigation, which uses large vessels to transport passengers and commodities. Navigation might be viewed as an aspect of transportation planning, but the requirements for developing and maintaining channels, turning basins, locks and dams, and protective structures, such as jetties, are within the purview of the water resources planner. Oceangoing navigation is indirectly related to water resources projects, although the planner is usually involved with inland waterways such as lakes, rivers, and canals. Navigation on inland waterways may involve oceangoing vessels traveling to inland ports or passenger travel on smaller pleasure craft. Several methods for improving waterway navigation require planning studies that address the feasibility of waterway expansion projects and port development and consider the needs of shipping with the availability of water resources. Open channel methods attempt to improve or maintain existing channels for navigation, primarily through dredging. Harbor and port planning methods develop areas for seaborne commerce. Lock-and-dam methods require dams to create a series of water pools through which vessels can move with locks to lift or lower vessels from one pool to the next. Canalization methods provide new channels by artificial means to connect two navigable waterways.15 The goal of navigation planning is to improve a waterway or harbor in order to maximize the net benefits to a community. The need for a commercial port

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arises when a commodity or product is being developed for which there is no available or economical mode of transportation. Therefore, the decision to build a port and the choice of its location are determined by economic factors, the projected volume of commerce, and the availability of communications networks to both land and water. The design criteria must consider the physical limitations of a harbor or waterway to accommodate a number of vessels of a certain size as constrained by the ultimate costs of the initial improvement and the maintenance costs. The capacity of a waterway or port is governed by the minimum capacity, often expressed as “bottlenecks.” Harbors and Ports Harbors include areas protected from wind and waves by the natural configuration of the land or by jetties and breakwaters; entrance channels and interior channels necessary for movement to anchorage areas, mooring sites, or turning basins; and support facilities to refuel and repair vessels and transfer cargoes. Ocean ports are usually located in natural harbors in bays, estuaries, and river mouths but may also be located hundreds of miles up rivers or lakes. For instance, the St. Lawrence Seaway created ocean ports out of Great Lakes ports such as Buffalo, Cleveland, and Chicago. Inland waterway ports are found on navigable rivers, canals, and lakes and may serve as a point of transportation change for cargo to and from ocean ports. A terminal is that part of a port or harbor which provides docking, cargo handling, and storage facilities. Harbor and port planning methods determine the best location or positioning of facilities to support large seagoing vessels. General requirements of the port with respect to size and type of vessels and their cargo are examined in light of the available harbor sites. Prospective harbor sites are studied to determine the most protected location involving the least amount of preparation (e.g., dredging, breakwaters) and with favorable bottom conditions and convenience to onshore transportation and communication facilities. Waterways Open channel methods are used to improve a natural river channel but may also be applied to harbors in some instances. Harbor channels can be broken down into approach channels, entrance channels protected from winds and waves by breakwaters, and interior channels leading to docks or other anchorage. Channel obstructions above and below the water, such as snags, stumps, and rock outcrops, can pose a hazard to vessels and must be removed. Seasonal obstructions include ice jams or low water flows resulting from drought. Sediment must be dredged regularly to prevent buildups that would restrict traffic flow. Contraction works (jetties, dikes) are used to concentrate flow along a channel



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and to remove sediment through a scouring action. The sediment is deposited as the water velocity decreases, which helps to stabilize banks. Excessive meandering of rivers can cause navigation problems that can be overcome by digging a cutoff channel, which in effect straightens out the river. Locks and dams provide access for travel along normally unnavigable stretches of rivers by creating a stair-stepped sequence of lakes. Locks comprise an expensive method by which to raise or lower vessels from one level to the next. For an overview, examples, and demonstrations, see the websites of USACE’s districts, which can be located through the USACE’s Headquarters at http://www.usace .army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Navigation/. The costs of locks and dams are not only monetary but also can be measured in terms of loss of water quality and the loss of land that is flooded by the lakes. Canalization methods include siting, excavation of a channel (canal), and stabilization of the banks. Many of the earliest US water resources planning projects dealt with building canals to expedite commercial transportation into the heartland or to connect two navigable bodies of water. Canals often parallel rivers or coastlines and involve lower costs than rivers because they are less susceptible to drought, flooding, and other interferences. The depth and width of a canal can significantly affect costs in terms of upstream travel time and fuel requirements. Straighter alignment shortens the distance traveled, reduces the width of the canal, makes navigation safer, and improves maneuverability by eliminating curves. Navigation planning requires the in-depth analysis of many factors to determine the best location of channels, harbors, and canals. Basically, there are two aspects to navigation planning: the physical environment and the ship’s environment. The physical environment consists of water movements (currents, waves); the bottom; the approach channel; the size, shape, and depth of the harbor and turning basin; the type and location of breakwaters; the location and width of harbor entrances; and the number and location of shore facilities. The ship’s environment includes the turning radius, tonnage, draft, and cargo. In reality, one aspect cannot be completely considered without basic information about the other, as the size and number of vessels eventually determine the success of the waterway translated into economic terms. Waterway and harbor design is highly dependent on prevailing climatic and water conditions. Information on water currents or tides can be obtained through direct observations or through tide schedules for the vicinity. For large bodies of water, wave action depends on the prevailing winds in a region; therefore, meteorological data can be used to determine what precautions may be necessary. The bottom conditions are of major importance to the construction of facilities, breakwaters, and docks. A hydrographic survey showing the relief of the bottom should be conducted over an area larger than the proposed harbor

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or waterway. Rocky bottoms are prohibitively expensive to excavate, and deep layers of soft mud or silt provide poor foundation conditions. The water in the approach channel and the harbor must be deep enough during the lowest water level to permit adequate navigation when the ship is fully loaded. This depth must allow for ship “surge” due to wave action (approximately one-half the wave height) and should provide at least a two- to four-foot keel clearance above the bottom. If the vessels enter the harbor empty but leave loaded (e.g., ore shipping), entrance channels need not be as deep as departure channels. Sometimes excessive dredging is avoided by scheduling arrivals and departures on the high tide. The number and size of vessels using a waterway and harbor determine the optimum size and shape of the harbor. The direction of the prevailing wind and the prevailing wave action also affect the positioning of breakwaters, harbor entrances, and turning basins. If the harbor is too large, local waves might be generated on the surface by winds. These effects could be minimized by the construction of an inner harbor to protect the dock facilities. Breakwaters can be devised to control wave action within a harbor and should be positioned to counteract the effects of the prevailing wave action. Another way to reduce wave height within a harbor is to restrict the entrance size to just large enough to safely accommodate the ships passing through. Bigger waterways and harbors can accommodate more vessels, which enables a lower cost per ton-mile of freight. Deep and wide bodies of water reduce fluid friction on the vessels and thus reduce the operating costs. However, maintaining deep harbors or widening canals incurs costs that must be balanced against the prospective benefits. The optimum choice of a waterway to process a certain level of traffic will minimize the total waterway and vessel costs. Simulation studies of typical vessel traffic patterns can help determine the optimum size of a waterway or harbor for meeting those needs while keeping costs for upkeep and vessel operation at a minimum. Starting from a desired freight volume to be moved from one point to another, and given a proposed waterway size, the maximum dimensions of vessels moving through the system can be established. From this, the total number of vessels to move the freight can be derived and then compared to the climatic, streamflow, or other physical constraints. Several iterations of this process will show the optimum facility size for a given freight volume. One of the most important developments in the design of waterways has been the simulation of effects with hydraulic models. Historically, the hydraulic laboratory of the USACE’s Waterways Experiment Station at Vicksburg, Mississippi, has significantly contributed to the planning and engineering of navigation facilities. It is now a major component of the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), which helps solve the nation’s most challenging problems in civil engineering, geospatial sciences, water resources, and environmental sciences for the Army, Department of Defense, civilian agencies, and the



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nation’s public good. One of its main goals is to become the world’s premier public engineering and environmental sciences research and development organization.16 As one of the most diverse engineering and scientific research organizations in the world, the ERDC conducts research and development for the USACE military and civil works missions, as well as for other federal agencies, state and municipal authorities, and with US industries, through innovative work agreements. In addition to the Vicksburg lab, there are six other labs located in four states with more than 2,100 employees, with research programs exceeding $1 billion annually. A significant navigation issue that has grown dramatically in the 2010s or earlier is the size of ships and their impacts on harbors, ports, canals, and related facilities. Oceangoing tankers, container ships, and cruise lines now exceed the capacity of most coastal facilities without major expenditures on enlarging or building new facilities. An excellent example of the profound effect of the dramatic growth in the size of ships is provided by the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal, having served international shipping for about a century, has been overtaken in size by a newly revised canal. In 2006, a referendum was approved to expand the Panama Canal and double its capacity to allow much larger ships to cross between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Construction started in 2007 to increase the size of Gatun Lake and to build two sets of locks that could handle freighters with as many as fourteen thousand containers. In order to handle ships essentially triple in size, sixteen giant steel gates were built in Italy for installation in the new Panama locks. After eight years and costs over $5 billion, the expansion was completed in 2016. It is obvious that the growth in the size of ships has had and will continue to affect the design, operation, and maintenance of shipping lanes, ports, harbors, and other related equipment and facilities related to the large ships. Recreation The importance of water-based recreation has increased dramatically in recent years and is now an important component of water resources planning. As an example of the scope of outdoor recreation, the Bureau of Reclamation, in the US Department of the Interior, has 187 developed recreation areas on about 6.5 million acres of land and water that provide more than 24 million visitors a year with water-based recreation (http://www.usbr.gov/recreation/). Historically, waterbodies have been used for recreation such as swimming, fishing, boating, sailing, and ice skating. Water-oriented recreation does not always require physical contact; just the proximity of water enhances recreational pursuits such

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as picnicking along the shoreline or birdwatching in a marsh. As a general rule, summer visitors tend to participate in many activities, whereas winter visitors tend to be sightseers. The water resources planner is interested in the direct relation between many types of water resources projects and recreational benefits. The projects may range from improvement of water quality and reclamation of recreational opportunities in areas subject to water pollution to direct development of water projects that provide new recreational opportunities. Reservoirs are particularly notable as examples of the latter situation. Virtually every dam and reservoir that is built is soon followed by a substantial amount of boating, fishing, and swimming in the newly created lake. Participation in water-based recreation has continued to increase as the overall economy expands. The demand for water-based recreation is largely the result of a greater population, shorter average work week, and a larger discretionary income. In addition, improved transportation has made recreation at many distant sites a reality. Recreational improvements were not specifically incorporated into early water resources projects, so there is a tendency for limited recreational resources in some areas of the country to be overused. As the value of recreational activities became more apparent to water resources planners, these benefits were included in project justification and formulation. Recreation is usually a by-product of a water resources plan, but it serves as an important one that must be evaluated as a benefit (or a cost if recreational opportunities are lost). In some cases, recreation may be cited as one of the objectives of a plan. Outdoor recreation is, for the most part, produced, and maintained as a public good. Recreational facilities should be designed to provide the desired level of relaxation and enjoyment. The key aspect of water recreation is the body of water, usually an impoundment, such as a lake. Reservoirs require a large capital investment but usually have low operation and maintenance costs. The advantage of reservoirs as recreation sites is the relatively constant level of undisturbed water. The attractiveness of a reservoir for a particular recreational activity depends on the total number of users participating in that activity at any point in time. The site desirability is proportional to the amount of crowding and its psychological or physical effects. The psychological aspects of crowding often exert more influence on visitation than do physical limitations. Several factors directly influence visitation of water recreational facilities: • Site accessibility (travel distance, travel time, road conditions) is a primary determinant of recreation demand. • Population recreational habits (function of socioeconomic status, cultural backgrounds, age, and sex factors) relate to recreational demand. • Recreational attractiveness of a particular site is often related to the proximity of similar facilities, how well the facilities are maintained, and other amenities that may enhance the recreational experience.



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• Site beauty, wildlife, climate, and terrain may offer a unique recreational experience. The use of a recreation site by a community tends to be proportional to the ease of traveling to the facility if all other factors are equal. The attractiveness of a recreational site partly depends on its relative uniqueness and its proximity to large centers of population. If the recreation site is close to a population center, then daily use patterns are preferred. If the recreation area is far away, camping and overnight activities (e.g., backpacking) are more desired. The number of visitors to a body of water varies dramatically with time of year and location. It is important for the planner to understand what factors may affect the time distribution of reservoir visitation. The recreational desires of visitors could run the full gamut of activities from swimming in the summer to ice fishing in the winter. It is necessary to analyze the annual, weekly, and daily variation in reservoir utilization in order to better project the seasonal capacity requirements of a reservoir and related recreational facilities. To fully understand the patterns of recreational water use, basic data on the typical visitor schedules are required. Once data are collected describing the periodic visitation variation, a peak hourly visitation index may be estimated to describe the proportion of visitors present at any specific time period in a particular year. The index represents the product of the fraction of the daily visitors present during the peak hour, the fraction of annual visitors present during the peak month, and the fraction of visitors in a peak month present in a peak day. Multiplying the proportional use rates yields a composite value of the likelihood of visitation for that reservoir for a peak hour in a particular year. Similar rates can be developed for the various recreational categories present at the reservoir. A reservoir has a finite capacity related to the recreational activity occurring at a particular time of year; that is, more ice fishers can be packed onto a lake than sailboats can be. Sometimes there are more people visiting a reservoir at one time than can be comfortably accommodated by the facilities. At other times, people may go to a reservoir but then leave because of crowding or decide not to go because they feel there is a chance they will find the recreational facilities overcrowded. Studies show that a psychological feeling of overcrowding at heavily used recreational facilities may reduce visitation more than actual capacity limitations.17 Recreation is a composite activity experience to which the planner must assign values based on a particular market for those experiences. To analyze the relative worth of recreation to other aspects of the design, the water resources planner must equate recreation to other project purposes in commensurate terms. A common way to do this is to measure the value of a particular recreational activity as reflected by the local market. For instance, is the recreational

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experience of higher quality if access is limited, or is free access more important to the user than quality of experience? Questionnaires are beneficial in this respect and correctly place the responsibility for value assignment on the users. Recreational benefits might also be estimated from increases in land value around the recreational site, but it is often difficult to discern what increases are actually due to other causes. Benefits from public expenditures for outdoor recreation are often estimated through evaluating the incremental costs of travel, food, lodging, clothing, and other equipment required to participate in a particular recreational activity. Occasionally, it becomes necessary to limit visitation so that demand will not exceed capacity. If recreational facilities (assuming accessibility) are provided without charge, use will eventually exceed capacity. The capability of a reservoir to provide recreational activities is expressed as the number of visitors that can use the facilities simultaneously. The capacity coefficient is the number of visitors that can be accommodated per unit of area without crowding to the point of decline. Generally, measures of visitation are related to area or periods of time. A user day measures the recreational experiences of a single person. A visitor day comprises the recreational activities of an individual over a twelve-hour period. An “activity day,” or “recreation day,” is associated with a particular activity (e.g., boating, hiking, fishing) that a person spends a significant part of the day doing. Generally, there are six major recreational activities for reservoirs that compete for visitors’ use: camping, picnicking, boating, swimming, fishing, and sightseeing.18 In theory, the cost of developing a specific recreational activity can be weighed against the benefits accrued (in visitor use). However, it is difficult to apply optimization models to determine the combination of activities that a particular reservoir can support, because the demand for one recreational category depends on the availability of other activities; thus, the data are not independent. For instance, the capacity of a reservoir to support camping, which is constrained by the quantity of available campsites, can also be a function of the availability of swimming and boating facilities. Many bodies of water have become polluted by urban and agricultural runoff, municipal wastewater, industrial discharges, and thermal release from power plants and other industries. Frequently, these bodies of water are no longer healthy sites for recreational activity. In addition, the continuing drainage of many existing lakes, ponds, bogs, and swamps has substantially eliminated other potential recreational sites. These are common problems associated with development and an increase in population and standard of living. It is therefore important for planners at all levels of government and in the private sector to consider the impact of proposed development on existing or potential waterbased recreational opportunities.



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Hydroelectric Power Hydroelectric generating plants mechanically convert the kinetic energy of flowing water into electricity. The first hydroelectric power plant was developed in Wisconsin in 1882, only one year after electricity was generated (by steam) on a commercial scale in New York City. The first half of the twentieth century saw a rapid development of sites for hydroelectric generation due to improvements in the efficiency of transmitting high voltages over long distances and to the development of fuel shortages during wartime. Steam-generated electricity was used primarily as a backup to the hydroelectric plants and augmented the supply during peak demands. In recent years, this role has reversed. Today, electricity is generated from many sources other than falling water: nuclear, wind, tidal, chemical, geothermal, and solar. The Federal Power Commission was created by the Federal Water Power Act of 1920 to develop water power on public lands and to develop navigation along the affected watercourses. Many hydroelectric projects were combined with flood management tasks. The commission coordinated electric power development and the interconnection of different power systems. In 1977, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) was created through the Department of Energy Organization Act. At that time, the commission’s predecessor, the Federal Power Commission (FPC), was abolished, and FERC inherited most of the FPC’s responsibilities. Hydroelectric plants are usually predominant wherever there is sufficient falling water. Hydroelectric plants are classified as run-of-river, storage, or pumped storage. Run-of-river plants use the sustained flow of a stream or river to turn the turbines for electricity generation. This type usually has limited storage capacity and provides a continuous output of electricity. A storage plant uses a reservoir of sufficient size to increase the amount of water available for power generation and to carry over through dry periods. A pumped storage plant uses power generated during low periods of demand to move water back up the systems to a headwater pond for use during peak demand periods. This recycling of water represents an economic efficiency between peak and off-peak demand requirements. The capacity of a hydroelectric generating plant is the maximum rate at which the plant can produce electricity. The amount of electricity produced is directly related to the volume of water that flows through the turbines. The “head” is the difference between the elevation of the water surface at the point that it enters the system and the water surface level at which it leaves after being used for power. The specific site location determines what type of plant is suitable. A concentrated-fall hydroelectric plant is most common in low-head situations where the powerhouse is located near a dam. A divided-fall plant uses canals, tunnels, or pipes to carry the water a considerable distance to the powerhouse.

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The design and construction of a hydroelectric plant is exceedingly complex and easily may take more than a decade from the drawing board to the actual generation of electricity. The water resources planner must consider many different effects of impounding water to use for power generation. Recreational benefits could come from hydroelectric development (e.g., sailing), but other benefits may be lost when the stream is dammed (e.g., kayaking). Moreover, the environmental impacts must be considered upstream and downstream from the proposed project. Trade-offs in water use brought about by hydroelectric projects may affect the basic economy of a region. State laws may also affect the diversion of water to a hydroelectric project. For example, eastern states (riparian rights) and western states (prior appropriation) differ with respect to diversions for hydroelectric generation. Environmental concerns have been an impetus to dismantle uneconomic or underperforming facilities, so that fish passage or other environmental benefits can be rectified or restored. American Rivers maintains a website depicting progress in dam removal (1916–2017) in the United States (some of which may be hydroelectric power generation–related). They report that eightysix dams, a record number, were removed in 2017.19 The versatility of electricity ensures that it will continue to be in demand by homes, businesses, industry, and agriculture. The FERC projects demand for these uses for specific regions and for the country as a whole. As might be expected, electrical demand for each category varies from one region to another and reflects patterns of use in each region. Future development of hydroelectric power is based on the established use patterns and the projected population increases in the region. These uses may show seasonal or other cyclical trends that must be considered when estimating demand. It is important that current demands be met before additional users are served. As a region becomes industrialized, its electric energy requirements usually outstrip its hydroelectric resources.20 When that occurs, hydroelectric generation must complement other electrical generation systems. More hydroelectric capacity is not needed as much as the integration of the hydroelectric system with the other electricity generation sources to meet the peak demands. Environmental Impacts As discussed in chapter 6, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 has had a major effect upon how the nation’s business is conducted. In short, the act requires that any major federal action must have an environmental analysis prepared as part of the planning and decision-making process. Whereas prior water resources planning focused on the benefit-cost criterion, NEPA quickly forced agencies at all levels to give adequate consideration to

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the environmental effects of plans, policies, regulations, and projects. The US Water Resources Council, as the primary coordinating agency for water resources planning and management at the federal level, developed the “Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources” in 1973; they were replaced ten years later by “Principles and Guidelines.” They were replaced again in 2013 by the “Principles, Requirements and Guidelines” (see chapters 2 and 9). Of particular significance in NEPA is Section 102(2)(c) which requires all federal agencies to prepare a “detailed statement” of environmental impacts for “major federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.” NEPA requires that an environmental impact statement (EIS) include the following items: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Environmental impacts of the proposed action Adverse effects that cannot be avoided if the action is implemented Alternatives to the proposed action The relationship between local, short-term uses of the human environment and the maintenance and enhancement of long-term productivity 5. Any irreversible and irretrievable commitments of resources that would be involved if the proposed action were carried out Over the years, the courts have played a strong role in defining and specifying requirements under the act. The heart of NEPA is that the EIS is a full disclosure document that encourages broad public participation and interaction among governmental agencies. Numerous publications provide information on a wide array of environmental impact assessment (EIA) issues. Therefore, this section does not attempt to give detailed information on the subject. A brief review, however, is appropriate because EIA has become a standard part of the water resources planning process. Underlying the analysis is the preparation of an EIS as required under NEPA and under various state laws. The general steps in preparing an EIS typically follow a logical sequence. As applied to water resources planning, a simplified procedure might be as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Identify the proposed action. Obtain data on the physical setting. Estimate future conditions without the action. Estimate future conditions with the action.

Specific details on how to conduct the impact assessment vary widely. Many techniques have been developed that forecast how human actions affect water resources, in terms of both quantity and quality. The basis for the techniques

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is the hydrologic cycle, which helps to provide an understanding of how water quantity and quality are interrelated. The above procedure is but a broad generalization of the activities that might be undertaken in response to NEPA. Rather than prepare a complete EIS, an agency may first prepare an EIA, which may be used to determine if a full EIS is needed; or the EIA may result in a finding of no significant impact (FONSI). At a minimum, the NEPA has brought about a different view toward water resources planning to include a substantially broader view of environmental effects, environmental costs, and environmental benefits. It has also brought substantial public participation into the planning process and has considerably broadened inputs into water resources planning and management. The literature on EIA in water resources planning is rather substantial, and the reader is referred to that literature for details on specific aspects. Although a number of books have been written on environmental impact assessment, one of the more useful general publications is one of the earliest published, Rau and Wooten’s Environmental Impact Analysis Handbook, which covers numerous aspects of impact assessment.21 The chapter on water resources by York and Speakman gives an overview of procedures for water quality impact analysis with the following suggested steps: 1. Perform a preliminary review of the existing environment and proposed project. 2. Select environmental indicators to be used for describing the environment and gauging the effects of the project. 3. Describe the existing environment by providing quantitative descriptions of each indicator, using existing data sources. 4. Conduct field sampling programs to complete the description of the environmental setting. 5. Make predictions of the effects of the proposed project on the environment (impact assessment). 6. Propose modifications that could minimize adverse impacts resulting from the project. 7. Prepare the appropriate sections dealing with water quality for the environmental impact statement or report.22 The authors go on to give detailed procedures for conducting various aspects of the analysis and then discuss water quality impacts by project type. Among the information given is a detailed list of environmental indicators with respect to water quality, and a discussion of sources of information. Modeling procedures for some of the more common types of water quality indicators are given, together with examples. Although the information is far from thorough, the



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methods discussed for doing EIA provide the basic background for being able to conduct a more thorough investigation. Other books on EIA similarly provide information on the fundamental aspects of water resources impact analysis, and there is general consistency in the procedures set forth. Whereas the Rau and Wooten handbook emphasizes methodologies for impact analysis, Jain et al.’s Environmental Assessment focuses more on the procedural aspects of impact assessment.23 Since the lead author had experience with the USACE, the book tends to be particularly applicable to water resources planning. A more recent publication that provides a good summary and overview of NEPA is The Citizen’s Guide to the National Environmental Policy Act, a useful forty-five-page guide for those not familiar with NEPA or the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) regulations. Published in 2007, it describes the NEPA process and gives helpful information on how citizens can get involved in the NEPA process.24 A long-standing, scholarly journal is the Environmental Impact Assessment Review, or (EIAReview),25 published semimonthly to provide information for environmental planners, engineers, scientists, lawyers, negotiators, and administrators involved in the practice of environmental impact assessment. It is a journal that can be helpful in giving examples of innovative impact assessment procedures related to water resources. More importantly, it gives summaries of new techniques, research summaries, and reflections on current approaches to impact assessment. It is a valuable resource for current information on environmental impact analysis. The materials presented above are but a limited summary of environmental impact analysis material. Anyone having to work with EIAs and EISs is encouraged to review the extensive literature for details on assessing environmental impacts. Among the environmental impact assessment publications in the past several years are those listed in the notes at the end of this chapter.26 Study Questions 1. What is the relative importance of navigation and hydropower in your state? Discuss the effects of either on the state’s economy. 2. Plot the growth of hydroelectric generating capacity in the United States over the past fifty years. What is the likely future trend? 3. Describe the role of water-based recreation in your area. What is the primary form of recreation at this location? Is it important to the local economy? 4. What are the effects of water quality and water quantity on recreational opportunities? Cite examples of negative effects.

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 5. A shopping center is proposed to be built on a filled wetland that is a habitat for a bald eagle. What is the likelihood that the project will be undertaken? Explain.  6. Considering the variety of possible uses of surface water, make a table that shows the compatibility and conflict between different uses.  7. Which of the six major headings in this chapter have had the greatest impact in the past ten years?  8. Why are wetlands and estuaries important in the ecological balance of aquatic systems?  9. Describe the difference between natural wetlands and artificial wetlands. Are any located in your community? Are they important? Why or why not? 10. What are some ways that wetlands can be “saved” from sea level rise? What land use methods can be employed to allow them to stay viable? Notes 1.  Mather, J. R. (1984). Water Resources: Distribution, Use, and Management. New York: Wiley. 2.  James, L. D., and R. R. Lee. (1971). Economics of Water Resources Planning. New York: McGraw-Hill. 3. Mather, Water Resources. 4.  Harrington, W. (1979). Endangered Species Protection and Water Resource Development. In Utilizing Scientific Information in Environmental Quality Planning, edited by W. J. Grenny. Minneapolis: American Water Resources Association. 5. Mather, Water Resources. 6. Association of State Wetland Managers. (2018). Wetlands & Sea Level Rise. Association of State Wetland Managers. Retrieved from https://www.aswm.org/wetland-science/ wetlands-and-climate-change/sea-level-rise 7. Blankespoor, B., S. Dasgupta, and B. Laplante. (2012). Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Wetlands: Impacts and Costs. Policy Research Paper Working Paper, 6277. The World Bank, Development Research Group, Computational Tools & Environment and Energy Teams. Retrieved from https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/16383/wps6277 .pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y 8.  USACE. (2014). Procedures to Evaluate Sea Level Change: Impacts, Responses and Adaptations. Technical Letter No. 1100-2-1. USACE. Retrieved from http://www.publications. usace.army.mil/Portals/76/Publications/EngineerTechnicalLetters/ETL_1100-2-1.pdf; USGS. (2016). Coastal Changes Due to Sea-Level Rise. USGS Water Science School. Retrieved from https://water.usgs.gov/edu/sealevel-coasts.html 9.  EPA. (2016). National Wetland Assessment 2011: A Collaborative Survey of the Nation’s Wetlands. EPA 843-R-15-005. Washington, DC: EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/ sites/production/files/2016-05/documents/nwca_2011_public_report_20160510.pdf 10.  Sucik, M. T., and E. Marks. (2014). The Status and Recent Trends of Wetlands in the United States. 2010 National Resources Inventory. USDA Natural Resources Conser-



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vation Service. Retrieved from https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/ stelprdb1262239.pdf 11.  Goldstein, J. H. (1971). Competition for Wetlands in the Midwest: An Economic Analysis. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, Inc. 12.  US FWS. (2017). North American Wetlands Conservation Act. Migratory Bird Program. Retrieved from https://www.fws.gov/birds/grants/north-american-wetland-conserva tion-act.php 13.  Hammer, D. A. (1989). Constructed Wetlands for Wastewater Treatment, Municipal, Industrial, and Agricultural. Chelsea, MI: Lewis Publishers. 14.  For more information, see Leszczynska, D., and A. Dzurik. (1992). Tertiary Wastewater Treatment through Constructed Wetland Ecosystems. Environment Protection Engineering, 18(1–2); Moos, S. (1993, Aug.). More Than Just Sewage Treatment. Technology Review; and Reed, S. C., et al. (1988). Natural Systems for Waste Management and Treatment. New York: McGraw-Hill. 15.  US Water Resources Council. (1979). A Unified National Program for Flood Plain Management. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. 16.  ERDC. (n.d.). ERDC. USACE. Retrieved from http://www.erdc.usace.army.mil/ 17.  James and Lee, Economics of Water Resources Planning. 18.  James and Lee, Economics of Water Resources Planning. 19.  American Rivers. (2017). Map of US Dams Removed Since 1916. American Rivers. Retrieved from https://www.americanrivers.org/threats-solutions/restoring-damaged-rivers/ dam-removal-map/; American Rivers. (2018). Record Year for Removing Dams to Restore Rivers in 2017. American Rivers. Retrieved from https://www.americanrivers.org/conserva tion-resource/record-year-removing-dams-restore-rivers-2017/ 20.  Fredrich, A. J., and L. R. Beard. (1975). Complementary Use of Hydro and Thermal Power. In Water Management by the Electric Power Industry, edited by E. F. Gloyna, H. H. Woodson, and H. R. Drew. Water Resources Symposium No. 8. Austin: University of Texas. 21.  Rau, J. G., and D. C. Wooten, Eds. (1980). Environmental Impact Analysis Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill. 22.  York, D., and J. Speakman. Water Quality Impact Analysis. In Rau and Wooten, Eds., Environmental Impact Analysis Handbook. 23.  Jain, R., et al. (1993). Environmental Assessment. New York: McGraw-Hill. 24.  CEQ. (2007). The Citizen’s Guide to NEPA. CEQ. Retrieved from https://ceq.doe.gov/ get-involved/citizens_guide_to_nepa.html or https://ceq.doe.gov 25.  Environmental Impact Assessment Review. (2001?– ). Edited by Alan Bond. Elsevier. Retrieved from https://www.journals.elsevier.com/environmental-impact-assessment-review 26. Noble, B. F. (2016). Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessment: A Guide to Principles and Practice. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press; Maughan, J. T. (2013). Environmental Impact Analysis: Process and Methods, New York: CRC Press; Morris, P., and R. Therevil. (2009). Methods of Environmental Impact Assessment in Natural and Built Environmental Series. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge; and Eccleston, C. H. (2011). Environmental Impact Assessment: A Guide to Best Professional Practices. New York: CRC Press.

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Reflections

T

he previous thirteen chapters have attempted to provide an in-depth overview of the central elements of water resources planning and the methodologies used in the planning process. Beginning with an overview and history of US water resources management and an introduction to the planning process and basic hydrologic principles, the reader has been introduced to water supply (sources), water use, and forecasting; water law; institutional mechanisms and examples (federal and state); economic evaluation; and water resource models. Additionally, water quality, floodplain and stormwater management, and navigation, hydroelectric power, wetlands, recreation, and other topics have been covered. As noted in the book’s introduction, this is a textbook that recognizes the paramount importance of water on this planet to sustain all living things, both present and future. Toward that end, the reader has been introduced to a myriad of water-related issues whose problems and outlooks are lessened or resolved through the lens of planning. This book, far from being all-inclusive, depicts water resources planning in a broad field that necessarily requires knowledge in many areas and the contributions of many professions. The basic planning and management requirements are to understand fundamental characteristics and processes of the resource, understand the intended uses of water and the intended users, and to know the laws, policies, and institutions dealing with the resource. One must know not only that the functional aspects deal basically with water quantity and quality but that there are many components to each and that the two aspects are interre— 386 —



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lated. Finally, it is necessary to have knowledge of methods of analysis by way of economics, mathematical modeling, and other analytical tools and collaborative methods that help to generate and evaluate solutions to various types of water problems both short- and long-term. In previous chapters, we learned that our planet has enough water overall but that in places there is either too much, not enough, its quality is unacceptable, or obtaining it is too expensive or time consuming. The planet is not running out of water, but competition exists for obtaining the cheapest, easiest, and cleanest sources. These quandaries are not static; the dynamic nature of our changing climate and the hydrologic cycle coupled with land use changes and population increases and demands ensures that these problems will persist spatially, temporally, and variably. The chapters have portrayed what we know, what we don’t know, what we have learned and are still learning about, and what we expect in the future. And as all scientists acknowledge, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more there is to know. Water resources planning has a pivotal role in all these aspects and will continue to do so. The profession has grown and matured, yet it faces challenges and obstacles in the years to come. These challenges and obstacles will occur on local, regional, national, international, and global scales, and they will be embedded with social, economic, and environmental sectors that may or may not be willing to be cooperative. The integrated water resources management (IWRM), or One Water, framework embraced by the water resources planning profession sets a rational, systematic, and methodological basis from which to continue to identify and solve problems. The remainder of this chapter describes the challenges and opportunities that are expected to play a significant role in water resources planning in the future. Armed with new tools, methods, and science, water resources planning has a bright future from which to address these new challenges, known and unknown. This final chapter calls attention to current and emerging issues in water resources planning and management, particularly with respect to public policy and future directions. Key Terms Below are terms used in this chapter that are particularly important to water resources planners but less likely to appear in other chapters. A complete list of definitions can be found in the glossary. Among the most commonly used terms in this chapter, are the following. Water security The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socioeconomic development, for ensuring protection

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against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.1 Water refugee Water insecurity–induced migration of individuals or populations. Water-energy-food nexus Water security, energy security, and food security are inextricably linked: activity in one area affects one or the other or both. The concept is central to sustainable development. Storm Clouds (Future Challenges) Global Scale Previously we learned that one of the main drivers of water management challenges is the continued rise in global population, bringing with it land use changes, increased urbanization, and increased competition and demand for the available water supplies, accompanied by subsequent growth in the agricultural sector. These changes threaten the short- and long-term water supplies and are almost always accompanied by detrimental impacts to water quality and the natural systems. Globally, water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increases over the last century. There is no global water shortage, but an increasing number of regions are experiencing water scarcity. The plentiful freshwater of the planet is distributed unevenly and too much of it is wasted, polluted, and unsustainably managed.2 Meanwhile, populations exposed to water pollution are expected to rise rapidly over the next decades, mainly in low- and middle-income countries due to economic growth and population increases.3 Furthermore these nations are routinely exposed to floods and droughts. These global issues of water scarcity, pollution, and natural hazards are compounded by additional challenges of governance, economic scarcity, environmental justice, and legacy water infrastructure needs whose care and maintenance has been ignored or neglected. These trends will continue to occur. What are the future challenges and issues that can modulate their trajectory? Climate Change Numerous reports have discussed and documented global warming and climate change. Their conclusions, absent a radical change in carbon emissions, point toward continued increases in the earth’s surface temperature, resulting in sea level rise (including melting glaciers) and increased frequency, intensity, volatility, and divergent geographic exposures to extreme weather patterns.4 This poses immediate threats of extreme weather and flooding events as well as the introduction of a new nonstationarity in how water resources planning and management are performed. These threats will spawn water refugees5 and require

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new forms of human adaptation to hazards, as well as resilience buffers to add stability and certainty to populations at risk. Health implications of migrating populations as well as receiving populations must also be considered.6 Fundamental to this will be the need for greater data collection, analysis, and research. Decision-makers will need to better understand the effects that climate change will pose both near- and long-term. Responses will need to be proactive as well as responsive. As the climate changes, water issues will become more important as the direct and indirect implications of these changes become manifest. Water Security The World Economic Forum ranked “water crises” fifth in its 2018 list of top ten global risks, in terms of impact, and “extreme weather events,” “natural disasters,” and “failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation” as the first, second, and fifth greatest risks (out of ten), in terms of likelihood.7 It is anticipated that by 2030, a third of the world population will be exposed to intense water insecurity and stress, challenging the economic and social development of the regions they live in. More than two billion people in the world are affected by water stress,8 and nearly 783 million people do not have access to an improved drinking water source.9 In 2015, 2.3 billion people did not have access to improved sanitation facilities; almost 892 million people who did not have access to sanitation facilities had to resort to open defecation.10 One study attributed more than 502,000 deaths to inadequate drinking water, while 280,000 deaths were caused by inadequate sanitation.11 These are staggering statistics. The United Nations (UN) has been bringing attention to these water and sanitation issues, through initiatives such as the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (1981– 1990), the UN Decade for Water 2005–2015, and the International Decade for Action—Water for Sustainable Development (2018–2028).12,13 However, improving water quality is very complicated and expensive, and greater efforts are needed in studying causes, effects, trends, and how to ameliorate them. One researcher notes, while discussing needed water quality improvements in the United States, “that if we are to make the politically and economically difficult decisions to fix these issues, we would need a higher level of scientific certainty about the causes of the impairment and the predictive power to make meaningful statements of how our costly action, if taken today, will affect ecological outcomes tomorrow.”14 All these issues relate to water security, defined above as the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socioeconomic development; for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters; and for preserving ecosystems in a climate

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of peace and political stability. Unfortunately, climate change will exacerbate these issues, whose effects will differ regionally depending on such factors as geographic location, conditions of water availability and utilization, demography, institutional management and allocation measures, legal framework, governance, and resilience of the ecosystems.15 Fortunately, a wide range of sectors has recognized the impact of water insecurity in their areas. Cook and Bakker reviewed more than four hundred peerreviewed sources from multiple disciplines to define water security and better understand various disciplinary approaches to address concerns related to the subject.16 They discuss the parallels of framing water security with the IWRM framework and how the challenges in implementing IWRM will also impact water security issues. Of all the sectors that will be most impacted by water security concerns, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) lists three areas where the water crisis will create compounding effects. The first is agriculture: as noted in chapter 4, approximately 70 percent of available water is primarily used for agriculture. Limited clean water supplies will impair agricultural production, leading to global food shortages and increase in commodity prices, and affecting trade with emerging economies. The second is energy security: development of low-carbon energy alternatives will slow down. The third is manufacturing: water-intense manufacturing operations will become more expensive and limited.17 Water conflicts are also part of water (in)security. The Pacific Institute provides a chronological list of water conflicts in the world, from 3000 BCE to 2017. In the first few months of 2017 (through May), for example, eight additional conflicts over water had been added.18 Of significance is the “basis of conflict,” which is increasingly seen to be “military target.” The World Water Council describes more than 260 river basins that are shared by two or more countries, without adequate legal or institutional arrangements.19 This has the potential for conflict and insecurity expanding beyond the regions in the world currently experiencing war, bringing with them mass migration, refugees, and an unstable and uncertain future. Thus, water resources will not only serve as the catalyst for more conflicts in the future but it will also challenge the security of nations in several ways. As the world comes closer and closer together through advances in transportation, communication, and media, international problems can no longer be seen in isolation. In the One Water spectrum, it is all connected and interrelated, and water resources planners have a daunting task ahead of them. The Water-Energy-Food Nexus The water-energy-food nexus is the concept that water security, energy security, and food security are inextricably linked and that activity in one area



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affects one other or both. The concept is central to sustainable development. The IWRM framework sets the stage as water is seen as the connector between the different water-dependent sectors. Best said by Grigg, “The nexus concept requires water governance to be inter-sectoral to address its multiple purposes and require integrative work among sectors.”20 As with any finite resource, efficiency is paramount. Finding greater efficiencies within sectors or an individual industry is increasingly important, and doing so is growing more popular. Use of internal audits allows users to achieve greater efficiencies and cost saving. One example is the physical and chemical value “carried” in water, including heat and other chemicals. Through this carrier-based approach, large companies have achieved water saving of up to 45 percent, and operational cost savings of 2.5 percent, without any additional capital expenditures.21 The water-energy-food nexus is receiving great scrutiny as water planners and managers explore options for greater efficiencies.22 Whether in the United States or abroad, food production, including irrigation, will increase to help satisfy the needs of a growing population. Referring to US agriculture, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) notes that accurately predicting water use within agriculture can be difficult because of challenges with modeling various factors that affect use, such as land prices, irrigation methods, crop types and yields, energy prices, subsidies, and others. Water demands for irrigation may compete for water also needed for the production of energy, given specifics of location, water availability, and demand. A model example of a successful water-energy-food nexus comes from Israel. With five major desalination plants, and approximately six hundred million cubic meters (158.5 billion gallons) of water being produced each year, as of 2016, Israel is reported to have a water surplus.23 In fact, its water-tech exports were reported to have reached $2.2 billion in 2013, thanks to significantly lower energy production costs, as compared to fifteen years ago. As for the “food” aspect of the nexus, technologies such as drip irrigation, leak detection to prevent conveyance loss, and the ability to use 85 percent of treated sewage in irrigation have created a flourishing agricultural sector.24 In the United States, the GAO notes that thermoelectric power relies on water for cooling and that US electricity generation will increase by approximately 28 percent between 2013 through 2040 (give or take, accounting for changes in technology).25 Supplying this need may be problematic for areas that are watershort or for those who wish to allocate the water for other purposes. The energy sector affects water resources by various means, some of which are hydraulic fracturing, resource extraction, refining and processing, generation, storage, and transportation. Given that power generation and irrigation are the two largest users of water globally and in the United States, intensive work should be dedicated to making smarter and more efficient and equitable decisions.

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Water Pricing, Privatization, and Globalization The economics of water were discussed in chapter 9. However, moving forward, it is important to reiterate that the current trends of increasing use of water charges and user fees, expensive water resource investments, and projects will continue. Institutions such as the World Bank have developed policies on water privatization and full-cost water pricing.26 Privatization in the water industry gained attention late in the twentieth century, and the trend seems to be growing as private water and wastewater firms offer alternative economic structures to typical municipal systems provided by local governments. For an overview of privatization and analysis of its risks and benefits, there are a number of analyses and documents by the Pacific Institute and other similar organizations. For example, Gleick’s 2011 presentation on world water, at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, is in volume seven of The World’s Water along with a video presentation, at http://www2.worldwater.org/ index.html. Although the number of publicly traded US water companies is relatively small, the companies operate many water and wastewater systems and are increasing their ownership through buying smaller private and public systems. Privatization of water is a challenging and exciting idea for some but a troubling concept for others, both domestically and on a global scale. It has been the subject of ongoing and sometimes intense debate. Globalization can be defined as “the process of integrating and opening markets across national borders.”27 This process is controversial as it increasingly extends to water and to proposals that encourage extensive trading of water across international borders. Among the most controversial water issues of the twenty-first century are questions of how and whether to implement international trading and sales of water. Water is now a billion-dollar global business, but privatized water accounts for only 10 percent of the world’s water utilities. However, companies such as France’s Suez have rushed to privatize water, betting that water will be the twenty-first century’s version of what oil was in the twentieth century.28 The World Water Commission argues that only private firms can provide the enormous capital, which it estimates at US $180 billion a year, needed to fix the world’s water problems. This entails eliminating generalized subsidies for water and replacing them with prices that offer an attractive return on investment.29 Critical counterpoints to water pricing and approaches laid out by institutions such as the World Bank exist.30 Although water pricing may be theoretically appropriate from an economics viewpoint, from a humanistic and political view, pricing of water as a commodity is a financial burden that many of the world’s people can ill afford. The idea that what has always been treated as a free commodity when flowing in streams or sitting in lakes and under the ground may

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one day become another marketable commodity with a price tag attached in much of the world, is controversial and continues to evolve. Clearly water pricing, privatization, and globalization are central concepts in the thinking on use and management of the world’s water resources. It remains to be seen how these issues will be played out, but it is important that water resources planners and policy makers follow them closely. National Scale (United States) Infrastructure Legacy The GAO reports that in its survey of state water managers, infrastructure challenges were a great or a very great concern in looking forward ten years, more so than any other factor. With the existing infrastructure scoring a D or below overall (includes dams and drinking water infrastructure), there is almost no way to go but forward, toward improvement. The United States needs to invest $150 billion in its water and wastewater infrastructure but has only provided $45 billion, leaving a huge gap.31 These gaping discrepancies will need to be reconciled and planners will need to be enlisted to assist the decision-makers in where, how, and when to do so. Data Challenges One of the most important aspects of water resources planning is having decent data. The old saying, “If you don’t know where you are, how will you know where you are going?” is pertinent here. Without rigorous, standardized, time series data, it is impossible to measure progress or to even set reasonable goals, measurable objectives, or performance measures. In previous chapters, there has been some mention of the importance of data, be it utility level, city, regional, statewide, national, or international. Although many US agencies have and do provide data, it is not always done so in a systematic way, given the vagaries of politics and funding. Often funding is reduced, delayed, or cut all together, and the agencies and their work products that rely on the data suffer as a consequence. The GAO reports that since 1978, there has been no comprehensive assessment of water availability and use in the United States. The report states the need for more data as well as research into groundwater resources and hydrological processes, such as aquifer recharge rates. Precipitation data, together with improved data accuracy and timeliness, is also in need. This dearth of data has been chronicled over the decades and continues to fall short in terms of needed funding to rectify the problem. As an exemplary graphic, figure 14.1 depicts the

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FIGURE 14.1 Cumulative Number of Discontinued Stream Gages with Thirty-Plus Years of Data: 1900–2012. Source: US Government Accountability Office (GAO). (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning, p. 54. GAO-14-430. Retrieved from https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-430.

cumulative number of the US Geological Survey (USGS) stream gages discontinued from 1900 through 2012, which held at least thirty years of streamflow data when they were discontinued. As a science-based discipline, water resources planning can ill afford the continuation of such trends. Conserving and Protecting Water Resources As the United States joins the world in re-envisioning the management of water resources, agencies such as the USACE are assessing their role and future mandate. In a report assessing the national water resources challenges faced by USACE, a National Academy of Science report states, “The thrust of hydrologic engineering activities across the nation has moved from an earlier era of building civil infrastructure to a greater emphasis today on infrastructure maintenance and on restoring aquatic ecosystem functions and services in significantly altered hydro-systems.” In addition to its newer mission of ecosystem restoration, a small sampling of the challenges that the USACE is grappling with include: • Integrating floodplain and risk management, public safety, and ecosystem values • Aging water infrastructure at ports and inland navigation facilities • Urban stormwater management and water supply, including mitigation of nonpoint sources of pollution • Integrating social and cultural values into technical project considerations and decisions • Population and economic growth, increasing water demands, and diminishing funding

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• Planning for extreme climate events and changing climate conditions • Protection of endangered species, and quantifying and leveraging ecosystem services32 What these challenges reveal is that agencies such as USACE that are at the front lines of these concerns will need to have well-staffed planning, design, engineering, and construction teams that are flexible and knowledgeable to quickly adapt to the changing ground realities and implement appropriate solutions. This poses a problem, given budget cuts and lack of appropriations to agencies such as the USACE that can make significant contributions to our changing world. Cybersecurity As briefly alluded to in chapter 8, water systems and facilities are considered as critical infrastructure. In addition to ensuring their physical and operational continuity and safety, a newer concern that is bound to take center stage in the future is the threat to cybersecurity. A number of water control systems are especially vulnerable to such threats, including unsecured and neglected computers and devices; unencrypted and unreliable connectivity, with little redundancy; and the many engineering and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that control day-to-day plant operations and unit processes.33 Such threats may range from disrupting operations by opening and closing valves, overriding alarms, or disabling pumps or other equipment to stealing customers’ personal data or credit card information from the utility’s billing system.34 In February 2013, President Obama signed an executive order on “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.”35 In 2014, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a cybersecurity framework in response to the executive order, which called for a set of industry standards and best practices to help organizations manage cybersecurity risks.36 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established a “Critical Infrastructure Cyber Community (C3) Voluntary Program”37 as a public-private partnership to increase awareness and use of NIST’s cybersecurity framework. As the primary agency responsible for oversight of the water and wastewater infrastructure in the United States, the EPA has partnered with DHS and other collaborators to offer training and guidance on this important topic.38 In addition, organizations such as the American Water Works Association (AWWA) have developed water sector–specific guidance documents.39 Sunny Skies In the age of the internet, replete with podcasts, newscasts, blogs, videos, ebooks, e-music, and social media, it is important to take note of its presence.

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Although not always used for the most altruistic of purposes, the internet and what it provides as a popular medium of communication cannot be overlooked. For the scientist who can communicate, retrieve, analyze, and retrieve data and literature at the touch of a button, it is literally indispensable. It is likely the most powerful tool of our generation and generations to come. From a social or popular standpoint, the internet has also become indispensable. It is frequented more than any other media device, such as television or radio. Because of its wide accessibility and easy maneuverability, literature or other media related to water resources is easily found, both past and present. The ability of the internet to convey truths and dispel myths is up to those who use it or those who publish and disseminate information. To this end, it is fitting that we provide the reader with a short sampling of recent works that relate to water resources planning and management. The selected samples below represent the range of global to national (United States), and they cover a range of subjects found globally and in the United States. To begin with, for a good overview reference on global water data and water issues, see Peter Gleick’s books on The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources.40 The books are up-to-date, comprehensive references on global freshwater resources and the economic, political, scientific, and technological issues related to them. In recent years, videos on water have been produced that add to our understanding of water resources. An interesting and informative set of movies was generated in 2008 by the Norwegian Agency for Development, in cooperation with the University of Bergen and co-directed by Terje Tvedt.41 Tvedt has published extensively on water-related topics and presented three successful and award-winning television documentaries on the history and future of water, shown in 150 countries worldwide.42 His books include The River Nile in the Age of the British (shortlisted by BRISMES as one of the best books on the Middle East) and A Journey in the Future of Water, and he is the series editor of the pioneering nine-volume series, History of Water. He has published many books and articles about the history of the Nile basin, especially focusing on the modern period from the British Nile Empire until today. He has also published books based on his award-winning TV documentaries on water, which are translated into a number of languages. His movie, The Future of Water, gives a fifty-minute look at issues such as water for the poor. It juxtaposes the fact that more than a billion people worldwide are facing a death rate of more than six thousand people per day due to lack of water, while other communities in the world have ready access to both natural and bottled water. He raises the question of who should pay, and at what price, for this basic right to water. The same movie goes on to present water conflicts in South Africa, focusing especially on this question of price and control. African water conflicts are further explored in Lesotho, a small country with a large water supply that has a water agreement with South



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Africa, but struggles are in store for water control with eight other surrounding nations in southern Africa. The movie continues with a look at the northern end of Africa, particularly the nations in the Nile River basin, the world’s largest. Sudan and Egypt at opposite ends of the Nile have agreements on water use, but there remain eight other nations that do not. Another recent book on water shortages is provided by David Zetland, author of Living with Water Scarcity (2014),43 in which he gives an economics-based solution for water problems in different countries, ranging from rich to poor. He demonstrates that communities can learn to live with water scarcity if water is managed as a valuable resource. The book gives a clear and human look at many significant policy issues regarding water and offers economically sound and practical proposals on how water problems might be addressed in a variety of countries, rich and poor. The book addresses water scarcity, its origins, and its costs, and it provides recommendations on how to deal with these issues with fair and pragmatic policies. Zetland advocates a “rebalancing and matching of costs and benefits” to rectify the harms of past policies by going through the following stages. These steps, according to Zetland, “would reduce national involvement in water management.” 1. Consider rights, references, and expectations of those in water sending and receiving areas through a broad political consultation. 2. Allocate costs proportional to private and social benefits, with a mechanism for changing costs if benefits change over time. 3. Require public and private participation in financing infrastructure. 4. Repossess, shut down, or sell projects failing to repay public benefits or repay loans. 5. Manage water projects, benefits, and costs within river basins or watersheds. In the United States, looking at major contributions to the water resources literature, an excellent understanding of the nature of past water resources development and management in the western region of the country, is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert,44 published in 1993. A corresponding video was produced and shown shortly afterward on public television. This popular and welldocumented book and video are vivid accounts of how the scarce water resources of the nation’s western states have been used and abused. Again, looking at the American West, many authors have raised the call to be mindful of how we manage our water resources. In his 2016 book, Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West, journalist John Fleck questions the doomsday mentality about the availability of water (or lack thereof) in the Colorado River basin.45 Fleck points to recent successes and a

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bright future that includes greater water efficiencies and less water use in the Colorado River basin. He highlights the talks and negotiations of a working group, which ultimately resulted in releasing the river flows back into the Colorado River delta. The book is a good example of collaborative solutions that can transcend national, political, and ideological boundaries. This book started with Carl Sagan’s description of earth as a “pale blue dot,” inspired by a photo taken by Voyager I, the “blue” underscoring the value of water on Earth. The potential of water existing in a distant planet, galaxy, or moon has typically stirred up thoughts about the possibility of life elsewhere. However, as water crises emerge around the globe, finding water in various parts of our solar system and beyond has generated excitement in the scientific community. Scientists have determined that the source of water on Earth was likely the asteroids and comets from the Jupiter-Saturn region and later the comets from the Uranus-Neptune region and the Kuiper Belt.46 From Mars missions to using the Hubble telescope, Cassini, or the “Z-Spec,” a thirty-three-foot telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, used to study quasars,47 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other space agencies have found several possible sources of water across our solar system, making both the possibility of life and similar conversations relevant. These discoveries are covered in several mainstream publications, including Popular Mechanics,48 National Geographic,49 and Scientific American,50 among others. Setting Sail: The Water Resources Planner As noted in the beginning of this chapter, the issues involving water resources have always been around. Their nature may have changed over the years, but humanity has always been concerned with too much, or too little, often contaminated, water and the impacts these considerations have had on our lives. Planners have a responsibility in being strong advocates for water stewardship, in educating as necessary, and in designing and implementing strategies that help address current and future challenges in a collaborative and productive manner. The American Planning Association (APA) emphasizes “the importance of water as a  central and essential organizing element  in healthy environments along with the importance of planning to ensure that land use, environmental and infrastructure planning for water will increase resilience to extreme events and climate change.” It also acknowledges that “new mechanisms for interdisciplinary efforts are critical to effective water management and the protection of the water environment.” Thus, the APA promotes “planning practices that employ an integrated, systems-oriented, comprehensive approach to water management” among others that are laid out in its policy guide on water.51



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For all practical purposes, the amount of water on Earth has neither decreased nor increased over time; it is a relatively fixed commodity that we must learn to manage more carefully. We are not really consumers of land and water, but rather we are users of these precious resources, found only (as far as we are concerned) on our planet Earth. Responsible use requires an understanding of the nature of water resources, including their limitations and inter-relationships, together with careful planning to ensure that society’s needs are met in an effective and sustainable way. The planet Earth deserves nothing less. Study Questions 1. Are worldwide water problems likely to increase or decrease in the coming decade? Explain your reasons. 2. Do you think the world will run out of water in the next fifty years? Five hundred years? Why or why not? 3. What is One Water, and why is it such an important concept? 4. Of all the water crises or challenges the world is facing, which one(s) do you consider the most critical, and why? 5. How is it that increasing per capita water use can occur, even though overall water use withdrawals are decreasing? Provide an example. 6. Describe some of the most viable alternative water sources in use today. What alternative water sources have we still yet to “tap”? 7. What new directions should the nation and international organizations take with regard to water policy and institutions? 8. What do you see as the most urgent water resource issues in your region in the next twenty-five years? In the next fifty years? 9. What is the importance of the water-energy-food nexus? Notes 1.  UN-Water. (2013). Water Security and the Global Water Agenda: A UN-Water Analytical Brief. UN-Water. Retrieved from http://www.unwater.org/publications/water-security -global-water-agenda/ 2.  UN. (2014). International Decade for Action: Water for Life, 2005–2015. UN. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml 3.  International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and VEOLIA. (2015). The Murky Future of Global Water Quality: New Global Study Projects Rapid Deterioration in Water Quality. Washington, DC, and Chicago: International Food Policy Research Institute and Veolia Water North America. Retrieved from http://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/ p15738coll2/id/129349

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4. IPCC. (2015). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by the Core Writing Team, R. K. Pachauri, and L. A. Meyer. Geneva: IPCC; Union of Concerned Scientists. (2011). Water Use, Climate Hot Map: Global Warming Effects around the World. Climate Hot Map. Retrieved from http://www.climatehotmap.org/globalwarming-effects/water-supply.html 5.  Methmann, C., and A. Oels. (2015). From “Fearing” to “Empowering” Climate Refugees: Governing Climate-Induced Migration in the Name of Resilience. Security Dialogue, 46(1), 51–68. 6.  McMichael, C., J. Barnett, and A. J. McMichael. (2012). An Ill Wind? Climate Change, Migration, and Health. Environmental Health Perspectives, 120(5), 646–654. 7.  World Economic Forum. (2018). The Global Risks Report 2018. Figure 1, 13th ed. World Economic Forum, Retrieved from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GRR18_Report.pdf 8.  UN. (2016). Sustainable Development Goal 6. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg6 9.  UN-Water, Water Security and the Global Water Agenda. 10.  World Health Organization (WHO). (2017). Sanitation. WHO. Retrieved from http:// www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs392/en/ 11.  Prüss-Ustün, A., et al. (2014). Burden of Disease from Inadequate Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Low- and Middle-Income Settings: A Retrospective Analysis of Data from 145 Countries. Tropical Medicine & International Health, 19, 894–905. doi:10.1111/tmi.12329 12.  UN. (2015). We’re Finally at the End of the UN Decade for Water (2005–2015)—It Is Time to Say Goodbye. International Decade for Action “Water for Life” (2005–2015). Retrieved from http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/ 13.  UN-Water. (2017). New Decade for Water. UN-Water. Retrieved from http://www .unwater.org/new-decade-water/ 14.  Hirsch, R. M. (2012). The Science, Information, and Engineering Needed to Manage Water Availability and Quality in 2050, p. 221. In Toward a Sustainable Water Future: Visions for 2050, edited by Walter M. Grayman et al. Reston, VA: ASCE. 15.  UN-Water, Water Security and the Global Water Agenda. 16.  Cook, C., and K. Bakker. (2012). Water Security: Debating an Emerging Paradigm, p, 96. Global Environmental Change, 22. 17.  Moss, J. (n.d.). Water and Economic Crisis, Back to Basics. OECD Observer, Retrieved from http://oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/2845/Water_and_the_economic_crisis .html 18.  Pacific Institute. (2017). Water Conflict Chronology List. Pacific Institute, Retrieved from http://www2.worldwater.org/conflict/list/ 19.  Smith, D. M., and S. Barchiesi. (2009). Environment as Infrastructure: Resilience to Climate Change Impacts on Water through Investments in Nature. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), World Water Council. Retrieved from http://www.world watercouncil.org/fileadmin/world_water_council/documents_old/Library/Publications_ and_reports/Climate_Change/PersPap_02._Environment_as_Infrastructure.pdf 20.  Grigg, N. S. (2016). Integrated Water Resource Management, p. 9. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 21.  Grobbel, M., K. Henderson, K. Somers, and M. Stuchtey. (2013). Taking A Fresh Look at Water. McKinsey&Company. Retrieved from http://www.mckinsey.com/practice-clients/ operations/taking-a-fresh-look-at-water



Future Directions

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22.  Cosgrove, W. J., and D. P. Loucks. (2015). Water Management: Current and Future Challenges and Research Directions. Water Resources Research, 51, 4823–4839; UN-Water, Water Security and the Global Water Agenda; Maxwell, Steve. (2012). Four Critical Trends in the Future of Water. Journal-American Water Works Association, 104(1), 20–24; Bizikova, L., D. Roy, D. Swanson, H. D. Venema, and M. McCandless. (2013). The Water–Energy– Food Security Nexus: Towards a Practical Planning and Decision-Support Framework for Landscape Investment and Risk Management. The International Institute for Sustainable Development. Retrieved from http://empoderamiento.info/biblioteca/files/original/8e66ac68 6bf713f8c49a55d85db1e8fa.pdf 23.  Jeffay, N. (2016). A Solution to the Water Crisis? Times of Israel. Retrieved from http:// jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/a-solution-to-the-water-crisis/ 24.  Hazony, D. (2015). How Israel Is Solving the Global Water Crisis. The Tower. Retrieved from http://www.thetower.org/article/how-israel-is-solving-the-global-water-crisis/ 25. GAO. (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning. GAO-14-430. 26.  World Bank. (1993). Water Resources Management: A World Bank Policy Paper. Washington, DC: World Bank. 27.  UN-Water, Water Security and the Global Water Agenda. 28.  Cook and Bakker, Water Security: Debating an Emerging Paradigm, 96. 29.  Bryce, S. (2001). The Privatisation of Water. Nexus Magazine. Retrieved from http:// cruinthe.tripod.com/nexus/articles/waterprivat.html 30.  Bryce, The Privatisation of Water. 31. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). (2017). Infrastructure Report Card. ASCE. Retrieved from http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org 32.  National Research Council; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Water Science and Technology Board; Engineering and Planning Committee on US Army Corps of Engineers Water Resources Science. (2011). National Water Resources Challenges Facing the US Army Corps of Engineers, p. 9. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13136/national-water-resources-challenges-facing-the -us-army-corps-of-engineers 33.  Slywka, D. (2014). Water Cybersecurity: Top 6 Vulnerabilities in a Water Infrastructure Industrial Control System (ICS). Water Online. Retrieved from https://www.wateron line.com/doc/water-cybersecurity-top-vulnerabilities-in-a-water-infrastructure-industrial -control-system-ics-0001 34.  EPA. (2016). Water Sector Cybersecurity Brief for States. Association of State Drinking Water Administrators. Retrieved from https://www.asdwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ Cybersecurity-Guide-for-States_Final.pdf 35. The White House. (2013). Executive Order—Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. The White House Office of the Press Secretary. Retrieved from https://obama whitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/executive-order-improving-critical -infrastructure-cybersecurity 36.  NIST. (2014). Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity. Version 1. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/sites/ default/files/documents/cyberframework/cybersecurity-framework-021214.pdf 37.  DHS. (2017). Critical Infrastructure Cyber Community C3 Voluntary Program. DHS. Retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/ccubedvp

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38.  Stoner, N. (2014). Reducing Cybersecurity Risks in the Private Sector: A Voluntary Partnership Approach. The EPA Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.epa.gov/blog/2014/02/ reducing-cybersecurity-risks-in-the-water-sector-a-voluntary-partnership-approach/ 39.  American Water Works Association (AWWA). (2017). Process Control System Security Guidance for the Water Sector. AWWA. Retrieved from https://www.awwa.org/Por tals/0/files/legreg/documents/AWWACybersecurityguide.pdf 40.  Gleick, P. H., Ed. (2018). The World’s Water, vol. 9. The Pacific Institute. Retrieved from https://www.worldwater.org/book-details/ 41.  Tvedt, T. (n.d.). Category: Documentary Films. Retrieved from https://terjetvedt.w.uib .no/film-and-documentaries/ 42.  Tvedt, T. (n.d.). The Ultimate Water Journeys. Retrieved from http://watervideo.b.uib .no/ 43.  Zetland, D. (2014). Living with Water Scarcity. Retrieved from http://livingwithwaters carcity.com/LwWS_Free.pdf 44.  Reisner, M. (1993). Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Retrieved from http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/323685/cadillac-desert-by -marc-reisner/9780140178241/ 45.  Fleck, J. (2016). Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West. Retrieved from https://islandpress.org/book/water-is-for-fighting-over 46.  Morbidelli, A., J. Chambers, J. I. Lunine, J. M. Petit, F. Robert, G. B. Valsecchi, and K. E. Cyr. (2000). Source Regions and Timescales for the Delivery of Water to the Earth. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, 35, 1309–1320. doi:10.1111/j.1945-5100.2000.tb01518.x 47.  Calvin, W., and A. Buis. (2011). Astronomers Find Largest, Most Distant Reservoir of Water. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Retrieved from https://www.nasa .gov/topics/universe/features/universe20110722.html 48.  Wenz, J. (2015). 23 Places We’ve Found Water in Our Solar System. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved from http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a14555/water-worlds-in-our -solar-system/ 49.  Jaggard, V. (2010). In Space, There’s Water Water Everywhere. National Geographic. Retrieved from http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2010/03/22/in_space_theres_water_ water_ev/ 50.  Liberman, B. (2009). Water Lust: Why All the Excitement When H2O Is Found in Space? Scientific American. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ water-lust-why-all-the-ex/ 51.  APA. (2016). APA Policy Guide on Water. APA. Retrieved from https://www.planning .org/policy/guides/adopted/water/

Appendix A Federal Information Sources

Introduction

A

wealth of information on water resources exists that is relevant to water use and public policy. At the local level, the primary source of information is from water utility companies, which typically keep records of monthly use and charges for each customer as well as summary data. Depending on the structure of utility charges, many may also have information on sewer charges that are based on water use. State-level information varies but usually includes data on water resources (quantity and quality) within the state and is kept within a department of natural resources or environmental protection or a similar type of agency. Some states have substate or regional authorities that have information on water issues relevant to their jurisdiction. For example, Florida has five water management districts that manage groundwater and surface water based on hydrologic boundaries. Combined, they cover the entire state. The federal government is the primary repository for water resources information, particularly through the Department of the Interior’s US Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS has been collecting water data for the United States since 1888, and today it maintains a national network of stream-gaging stations, groundwater observation wells, and water quality sampling sites for both surface water and groundwater. The US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) maintains substantial data on surface water and groundwater quality. Relatively current information on water resource issues and policies can be obtained from the U.S. Water News, a monthly newspaper that started publication — 403 —

Appendix A

404

in 1984. This privately published newspaper was initiated because there was no single publication handling water news across the nation. It can be found online at www.uswaternews.com. Federal Involvement in Water Management Water resource information can be categorized a number of ways. One way is to characterize the information by the functions being performed by the agency(ies) involved. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) summarizes five categories of activities performed by federal agencies related to water resources.1 Agencies involved in these activities are listed under the respective subheading. Water resource information or data regarding these various activities can be obtained through contacting the respective agencies or visiting their websites. Please be aware: website addresses and content are subject to change. Data Collection and Forecasting The USGS, the Department of Commerce (National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA]), the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Water Management Agreements The Bureau of Reclamation, the USACE, the International Boundary and Water Commission, and the US Forest Service. Water Storage and Conveyance Facilities (Dams, Reservoirs and Water Distribution Systems) The USACE, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the US Forest Service. Water Rights (Holding Rights to Lands They Manage or as Trustees for Tribal Water Rights) The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service.



Federal Information Sources

405

Environmental Protection (Implementing Laws Such as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, or the Safe Drinking Water Act) The EPA, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the USACE, and the US Forest Service. Water Quantity–Related Data Given the broad array of federal agencies involved in water resources management to one degree or another, federal water resource data can generally be characterized as quantity-related or quality-related, although the two are highly interrelated. Of the water quantity-related agencies, the USGS and the USACE tend to be two of the largest sources of information and data. The 2014 GAO report breaks water resource data collection and forecasting into the first three categories listed below. Specific data/information programs are described within these categories. Streamflow and Groundwater Data • USGS Generic surface water information portal: https://water.usgs.gov/ osw/data.html • USGS Streamflow Information Program: surface water availability data obtained from the National Stream-Gage Network. Found at https://pubs .usgs.gov/gip/70/ or mapped at https://maps.waterdata.usgs.gov/mapper/ • USGS National Water Information System (NWIS): continuous monitoring of groundwater levels (and well levels) and surface waters in coordination with state and local agencies. Found at https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis • USGS Groundwater and Streamflow Information Program (GWSIP): the principal program for monitoring flows, including floods, and droughts at the regional to national scale. Found at: https://www.usgs.gov/water-re sources/groundwater-and-streamflow-information?qt-programs_l2_land ing_page=0#qt-programs_l2_landing_page • USGS National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN): found at https://cida.usgs.gov/ngwmn/index.jsp • USGS Groundwater Resources Program: found at https://water.usgs.gov/ ogw/gwrp/ • USGS Groundwater information portal: https://water.usgs.gov/ogw/. This portal lists data sources such as: Groundwater Watch, National Water Information System (mentioned above), Water Data Mobile Notifications, National Ground-Water Monitoring Network, and several sites/links relating to aquifers, groundwater models, water use, and water quality.

406

Appendix A

Precipitation Data • NRCS Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL): collects/monitors snow depth in the western United States and throughout the country via its Snow Course network. • National Weather Service: collects snowfall and snowpack information and estimates rainfall and weather and climate forecasts through collaborative efforts with other federal, state, local, and tribal governments. Water Use Trend Data and Other Water Resource Data • USGS National Water Use Information Program: collects and publishes national water use data in five-year increments. Data reported include total water use, surface water and groundwater use, and trends in water use from 1950 to the present. Found at https://water.usgs.gov/watuse/ • USGS Cooperative Water Program: states and other entities collect and share groundwater or surface water data. • NOAA and NASA: collect data via satellite programs. NOAA operates geostationary satellites that collect and distribute water data from USGS networks, the US Forest Service, the National Weather Service, and other state and federal agencies. • NASA performs modeling and research related to the hydrologic water cycle by using its MODIS project and GRACE satellites. • Agency-specific information (data collected in support of specific agency missions): National Park Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Reclamation, USACE, USDA Agricultural Research Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture. USACE Institute for Water Resources The USACE has a number of missions (https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/), including civil works, environment, emergency operations, research and development, and sustainability. Many of the water resources–related activities can be found within the civil works or environmental missions. The USACE’s Institute for Water Resources (IWR; https://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/), created in 1969, provides a unique synergy of water resources expertise that blends engineering and social sciences, scholarship and practical concepts, and innovative ideas and technical data to develop and apply water resources planning, policy, and engineering methods and information in support of the USACE and the nation. The IWR provides:



Federal Information Sources

407

• Analysis of emerging water resources trends and issues • State-of-the-art planning and hydrologic engineering methods, models and training • National data management of results-oriented program and project information across its Civil Works program NOAA–Digital Coast Partnership Found at https:/coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/, a partnership between NOAA and the American Planning Association (APA), the Association of State Floodplain Managers, Coastal States Organizations, National Association of Counties, National Estuarine Research Reserve Association, National States Geographic Information Council, The Nature Conservancy, and the Urban Land Institute. Partnerships provide place-based information resources to coastal communities. Water Quality–Related Data The major programs for water protection (water quality) existing in the United States are based primarily on the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and the Oil Pollution Act. The EPA does allow delegation of some of these programs to the states, which remain under supervision. EPA CWA-Related Data Sources • National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program (including stormwater): home page found at https://www.epa.gov/npdes • Combined Sewer Overflows Program: found at https://www.epa.gov/ npdes/combined-sewer-overflows-csos • Impaired waters and total maximum daily loads (TMDLs): found at https:// www.epa.gov/tmdl • Nonpoint-source program: found at https://www.epa.gov/nps • Estuaries and the National Estuary Program: found at https://www.epa .gov/nep • Oceans, coasts, and coastal wetlands: found at https://www.epa.gov/oceans -and-coasts • Watershed protection: found at https://www.epa.gov/hwp • Wetlands Protection and Restoration: found at https://www.epa.gov/wetlands • Oil Spill Program: found at https://www.epa.gov/oil-spills-prevention-and -preparedness-regulations

408

Appendix A

EPA’s Water Research/Data Portal Listed on this portal (https://www.epa.gov/waterdata) are the following topics and links: • Integrated water analysis • Ambient water quality • Drinking water • Water restoration • Water quality models • Community financing Each topic provides additional links to numerous water-related subjects, modeling, regulations, tools, etc. EPA SDWA-Related Data Sources EPA SDWA Portal: https://www.epa.gov/sdwa. Specific programs listed at this website include: • Regulatory programs: public water supply safety (which involves setting drinking water standards and regulating, evaluating, and monitoring contaminants), found at https://www.epa.gov/dwstandardsregulations, and underground injection control • Other programs: sole source aquifer program, source water protection, and others USGS Water Quality Information Water Quality Portal: https://water.usgs.gov/owq/. Listed at this website are: • USGS programs, including the National Water-Quality Assessment Project (NAWQA): https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/. This program began in 1991. Between 1991–2001, the program conducted interdisciplinary assessments and established a baseline understanding of water-quality conditions in fifty-one of the nation’s river basins and aquifers, referred to as Study Units (https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/studies/study_units.html). Descriptions of water-quality conditions in streams and groundwater were developed in more than a thousand reports (https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/bib/). Between 2001–2012, the program focused on national and regional assessments, all of which build on continued monitoring and assessments in forty-two of the fifty-one Study Units completed in the first cycle (https://



Federal Information Sources

409

pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-071-01/images/cycle2mod.gif). Since 2012, the USGS has continued to publish reports related to water quality of both surface water and groundwater. • The National Water Quality Network (NWQN) for Rivers and Streams includes 113 surface-water river and stream sites monitored by the USGS National Water-Quality Program (NWQP). The NWQN includes twentytwo large river coastal sites, forty-one large river inland sites, thirty wadable stream reference sites, ten wadable stream urban sites, and ten wadable stream agricultural sites. • The USGS also hosts a portal into a variety of water quality data websites, found at https://water.usgs.gov/owq/data.html. A list of data/links at the website includes the Water Quality portal (mentioned above); a cooperative program sponsored by USGS, EPA, and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council that integrates publicly available water-quality data from the USGS National Water Information System (NWIS) database, and the EPA STOrage and RETrieval (STORET) data warehouse. It can be found at: https://www.waterqualitydata.us/. As of July 2015, more than 265 million results from more than 2.2 million monitoring locations are currently accessible through the portal. Additional links on the portal include (but are not limited to): • Water Quality Watch • USGS Water-Quality Data • BioData: Aquatic Bioassessment Data • Water Quality of Rivers and Streams • USGS Data Mobile Notifications • National Water-Quality Assessment • Hydrologic Benchmark Network • National Atmospheric Deposition Program • Others: Water Data Discovery, Water Quality by State, Suspended-Sediment database, USGS Water Data Web Services and XML, and Water Resources Maps and GIS Information. Note 1.  GAO. (2014). Freshwater: Supply Concerns Continue and Uncertainties Complicate Planning. GAO-14-430.

Appendix B Conversion Table

412

Appendix B

Multiply

by

To Obtain

Area acre acre acre

4,047 0.4047 0.001562

square meter(m2) hectare (ha) square mile (mi2)

Volume acre-foot (acre-ft) acre-foot (acre-ft) acre-foot (acre-ft) cubic foot (ft3) gallon (gal) gallon (gal) million gallons (Mgal) million gallons (Mgal)

1,233 325,851 43,560 7.48 3.785 3.785 3,785 3.07

cubic meter (m3) gallon (gal) cubic foot (ft3) gallon (gal) liter (L) cubic decimeter (dm3) cubic meter (m3) acre-foot (acre-ft)

Flow Rate acre-foot per year (acre-ft/yr) billion gallons per day (Bgal/d) gallons per day (gal/d) million gallons per day (Mgal/d) million gallons per day (Mgal/d) million gallons per day (Mgal/d) million gallons per day (Mgal/d) thousand acre-feet per year (acre-ft/yr)

1,233 1.3815 3.785 0.04381 1.547 1.121 1.3815 0.8921

cubic meter per year (m3/yr) billion cubic meters per year liter per day (L/d) cubic meter per second (m3/s) cubic foot per second (ft3/sec) thousand acre-feet per year (acre-ft/yr) million cubic meters per year million gallons per day (Mgal/d)

Energy gigawatt-hour (gWh) Kilowatt-hour (kWh)

3,600,000 3,600,000

megajoule (MJ) Joule (J)

Source: Maupin, M., J. F. Kenny, S. S. Hutson, J. K. Lovelace, N. L. Barber, and K. S. Linsey. (2014). Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2010, p. iv. USGS Circular No. 1405. US Department of the Interior.

Glossary

Alternative sources (alternative water supply) Water that has been reclaimed after one or more public supply, municipal, industrial, commercial, or agricultural uses; or a supply of stormwater, brackish water, or salt water that has been treated in accordance with applicable rules and standards sufficient to supply the intended use. It can also include sources from lesser quality water, water transfers, water marketing, aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), or waters derived from water conservation measures. Aquaculture water use Water use associated with the farming of organisms that live in water (such as finfish and shellfish) and offstream water use associated with fish hatcheries. Aqueduct A pipe, conduit, or channel designed to transport water from a remote source, usually by gravity. Aquifer  An underground bed of porous rock or soil that carries or holds water. Aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) Injecting freshwater into a confined aquifer during times of excess water and recovering it during times of water deficit. Artesian (aquifer or well)  Water held under pressure in porous rock or soil confined by impermeable geologic formations. An artesian well is freeflowing. Base flow Sustained flow of a stream without direct runoff, including natural and human-generated stream flows. BAT  Best available technology economically achievable (applies to nonconventional and toxic pollutants). BCT  Best conventional pollutant control technology (applies to conventional pollutants). — 413 —

414

Glossary

Benefit-cost analysis A method for comparing the value or benefit of an item or project with the cost of creating that item or project, to aid making decisions about proceeding. Benefit-cost ratio The ratio of present value of benefits to present value of costs. Best available technology See BAT Best management practices (BMPs) Activities or structural improvements that help reduce the quantity and improve the quality of stormwater runoff. BMPs include treatment requirements, operating procedures, and practices to control site runoff, spillage or leaks, sludge or waste disposal, or drainage from raw material storage. Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) The amount of oxygen consumed by microorganisms (mainly bacteria) and by chemical reactions in the biodegradation process. Brackish water Mixed freshwater and salt water; ranges between 1,000– 10,000 mgl. Capacity coefficient The number of visitors at a recreation site that can be accommodated per unit of area without crowding to the point of decline. Clean Water Act (CWA)  Legislation that provides statutory authority for the NPDES program; P.L. 92-500; 33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq. Also known as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Climate change A significant change of climate measures lasting for an extended period of time, including major changes in temperature, precipitation, or wind patterns that occur over several decades or more. Collaborate To work together, in partnership toward a common goal or set of objectives. Combined sewer system Single-pipe system that collects rainwater runoff, domestic sewage, and industrial wastewater and transports them to a sewage treatment plant. Confined aquifer An aquifer that is bounded by impervious formations above and below. Conjunctive use Integrating all supply resources in a manner to maximize yield. Often used in context with combined use of surface and groundwater. Conservation The beneficial reduction in water use or water losses. Constructed wetlands An artificial wetland; a designed complex of saturated substrates, emergent and submerged vegetation, animal life, and water that simulates natural wetlands for human use and benefit, usually to clean municipal, industrial, wastewater, or stormwater runoff. Consumptive use See Water consumption Correlative rights Riparian owners given a proportional share of the water based on land ownership. Culvert  A short, closed (covered) conduit that passes stormwater runoff under an embankment, usually a roadway. A rectangular or square concrete culvert is referred to as a box culvert.



Glossary

415

Decision Support System (DSS) An integrative and collaborative modeling and participatory process that uses an interactive software system comprising data, models, and logic to provide decision makers with useful information to support their choices. Demand and supply Two primary economic aspects of managing a commodity, in this case water. Demand is the amount desired of the item, whereas supply is the amount available. Demand management The actions, policies, and programs aimed at modifying consumers’ pattern of water use. Desalination The removal of salts from saline or brackish water to provide freshwater. Detention  A stormwater system that delays the downstream progress of stormwater runoff in a controlled manner, typically by using temporary storage areas and a metered outlet device. Deterministic model Mathematical model in which outcomes are precisely determined through known relationships among states and events, without any room for random variation. In such models, a given input will always produce the same output, such as in a known chemical reaction. In comparison, stochastic models use range of values for variables in the form of probability distributions. These fix the relationships among the elements of the system yielding results as the mean values of the different parameters. Such models are based on physical laws and empirical information. Discount rate Term used to compare monetary amounts over different time periods. The idea is that a dollar a year from now is not worth the same as it is now. Discounting techniques Methods used to make comparisons of value over time in order to consider the economic merits of different plans. Dissolved oxygen (DO)  A measure of water quality indicating free oxygen dissolved in water. Dissolved solids  Inorganic material contained in water or wastes. Excessive dissolved solids make water unsuitable for drinking or industrial uses. Distillation A method to create potable water from salt water by heating to produce steam and then condensing to produce water with low salt levels. Domestic use Water used for household purposes, such as drinking; food preparation; bathing; washing clothes, dishes, and dogs; flushing toilets; and watering lawns and gardens. Drainage basin  The area of land that drains water, sediment, and dissolved materials to a common outlet at some point along a stream channel. Drawdown The lowering of groundwater surface by pumping water. Drought (agricultural) Based on impacts to agriculture by factors such as deficits in soil moisture and rainfall, or reduced groundwater levels. Drought (hydrological) Usually dry conditions precipitated by low rainfall and high temperatures leading to low soil moisture and/or lowered levels of

416

Glossary

water such as streamflow, reservoir, and lake levels as well as groundwater level declines. Drought (meteorological) Based on the degree of dryness (rainfall deficit) and the length of the dry period. Drought (socioeconomic) Based on the impact of agricultural, hydrologic, and meteorological droughts on supply and demand of some economic goods, or on impacts to human health and welfare. Dynamic model When some parameters vary over time or when the effects of transient phenomena must be evaluated. Economic water scarcity A lack of investment in water infrastructure or insufficient human capacity to satisfy the demand of water in areas where the population cannot afford to use an adequate source of water. Effluent Any substance, particularly a liquid, that enters the environment from a point source. The term generally refers to wastewater from a sewage treatment or industrial plant. Environmental justice A 1994 presidential executive order requires all federal agencies to achieve in federal projects, through identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations. This specifically included Native American Tribes. Equity versus efficiency Often conflicting, efficiency is spending so that returns are greater than expenditures, while equity is concerned with social and political considerations such as who pays and who benefits. Estuary A place where freshwater and salt water mix, such as a bay, salt marsh, or where a river enters a gulf or an ocean. Eutrophic Having a large or excessive supply of plant nutrients (nitrates and phosphates). Evaporation  The process whereby water from land areas, bodies of water, and all other “moist” surfaces is absorbed into the atmosphere as a vapor. Evapotranspiration  The combined processes of evaporation and transpiration. It can be defined as the sum of water used by vegetation and water lost by evaporation. Federal reserved water rights Water rights associated with the water necessary to fulfill the purposes of federal reservations such as national parks, forests, monuments, and military bases. Flood  A temporary rise in flow or stage of any watercourse or stormwater conveyance system that results in stormwater runoff exceeding its normal flow boundaries and inundating adjacent, normally dry areas. Flood, 100-year A flood level with a 1 percent chance of being equaled or exceeded in any given year (not a flood occurring once every one hundred years).



Glossary

417

Flood control  The specific regulations and practices that reduce or prevent the damage caused by stormwater runoff. Flood hazard boundary map Official map, issued by FEMA, of a community where the boundaries of the flood, mudflow, and related erosion areas having special hazards are designated. Flood hazard zone A geographic area that has a 1 percent or greater chance of occurring in any given year (100-year flood). Flood hazards will include standing or slowly moving water, flow velocity, wave height, wave runup, and wave overtopping. Associated hazards include event-based erosion, overwash and sediment deposition, and flood-borne or wave-cast debris. Flood stage Elevation at which overflow of the natural banks of a stream or other water body begins in the reach or area in which the elevation is measured. Floodplain Strip of relatively flat and normally dry land aside a stream, river, or lake that is covered by water during a flood. Floodplain management The operation of an overall program of corrective and preventive measures for reducing flood damage, including but not limited to, emergency preparedness plans, flood-control works, and floodplain management regulations. Forecast A conditional prediction, a statement about the future that is expected to be accurate if the methods or the assumptions used to develop the prediction are correct. Use of the term implies explicit assumptions as well as a method or a model. Freshwater Water that contains less than 1,000 milligrams per liter (mg/L) of dissolved solids; generally, more than 500 mg/L of dissolved solids is undesirable for drinking and many industrial uses. Green infrastructure A cost-effective approach to managing wet weather impacts with many community benefits; it reduces and treats stormwater at its source with environmental, social, and economic benefits. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) A cost-effective, resilient approach that incorporates vegetation, soils, and natural processes to manage wet weather impacts, providing many community benefits. Groundwater Water that flows or seeps downward and saturates soil or rock, supplying springs and wells also as water stored underground in rock crevices and in the pores of geologic materials that make up the earth’s crust. Groundwater law Landowners’ right to absolute control of water beneath their property, either underground streams or percolating water. Groundwater mining The use of groundwater withdrawals that exceed replacement rates, often leading to a lowering of the water level. Groundwater recharge The inflow to a groundwater reservoir or aquifer. Hydrograph  A graph of the rate of runoff plotted against time for a point on a channel.

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Hydrologic cycle  Movement or exchange of water between the atmosphere and the earth. Hydrology  The study of the occurrence and distribution of the natural waters of the earth. Impermeable layer A layer of solid material, such as rock or clay, that does not allow water to pass through. Impervious surface  Hard ground cover, such as asphalt or concrete, that prevents or retards the entry of water into the soil and increases runoff. Impoundment A body of water, such as a pond, confined by a dam, dike, floodgate, or other barrier. It is used to collect and store water for future use. Infiltration The flow of water from the land surface into the subsurface or soils. Infiltration rate  Quantity of water (usually measured in inches) that will enter a particular soil per unit of time (usually one hour). Inflow Discharge of water into sewer pipes, usually from illegal connections with roof leaders or downspouts, or illegal cross-connections between sanitary and storm sewers. Injection wells Pipes extending several thousand feet into rocks bounded by impermeable layers having no contact with aquifers; commonly used to dispose of hazardous wastes. Instream use  Water uses that can be carried out without removing the water from its source, as in navigation or recreation. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) A process promoting coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources to maximize economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising sustainability of vital ecosystems. Also referred to as One Water. Irrigation Controlled application of water for agricultural purposes through human-devised systems to supply water requirements with insufficient rainfall. Irrigation water The application of water by an irrigation system to assist crop and pasture growth or to maintain vegetation on recreational lands such as parks and golf courses. Irrigation includes water that is applied for preirrigation, frost protection, chemical application, weed control, field preparation, crop cooling, harvesting, dust suppression, leaching of salts from the root zone, and conveyance losses. Lakes Generally large depressions on the earth’s surface that store water over long periods of time. Leachate Water that becomes contaminated by wastes in a landfill. Levee A natural or artificial earthen barrier along the edge of a stream, lake, or river, to protect land along rivers when they are flooding. Low-impact development (LID) Method that seeks to manage runoff using distributed and decentralized microscale controls. The goal is to mimic predevelopment hydrology through methods that utilize infiltration, filtering, stor-



Glossary

419

age, evaporation, and water detention. These are often applied in small-scale landscape practices and design approaches that preserve natural drainage features and patterns. Mitigation Efforts to reduce loss of life and property by lessening the impact of disasters. This risk reduction effort includes but is not limited to modifying existing structures and future construction, in the pre- and postdisaster environments, via regulations, local ordinances, land use, building practices, and other practices that reduce or eliminate long-term risk from hazards and their effects. Model A simplified representation of real-world phenomena, usually in the form of a mathematical expression. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Enacted in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider environmental consequences of their actions by requiring that an environmental impact statement (EIS) be prepared for proposals to undertake any major federal actions that significantly affect the quality of the human environment. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) A two-phased surface water quality program authorized by the US Congress as part of the 1987 Clean Water Act. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit A permit issued under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (of the EPA) for companies discharging pollutants directly into the waters of the United States. National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program A program authorized by the 1972 Clean Water Act and administered by the EPA to regulate point source pollution; it was amended in 1987 to also regulate nonpoint source pollution. Net present worth (net present value) The algebraic sum of the present values of benefits and costs. Nonpoint source pollution  Pollution from many diffuse sources. Any source of water pollution that does not meet the legal definition of “point source” in Section 501(14) of the Clean Water Act. Offstream storage Diversion or conveyance of available water into a valley or canyon with little or no aquatic ecosystem or recreational benefits and used as a reservoir. Offstream use  Water withdrawn from surface, groundwater, or other sources for use at a different location. One Water Also referred to as integrated water resource management (IWRM). Several water-focused organizations have working definitions of One Water, two of which are provided: (1) One Water is an integrated planning and implementation approach to managing finite water resources for long-term resilience and reliability, meeting both community and ecosystem needs;

420

Glossary

(2) the One Water approach considers the urban water cycle as a single integrated system in which all urban water flows are recognized as potential resources, and the interconnectedness of water supply, groundwater, stormwater, and wastewater is optimized; their combined impact on flooding, water quality, wetlands, watercourses, estuaries, and coastal waters is recognized. Optimal yield The optimal plan for the use of a groundwater supply. Such a plan maximizes economic objectives of groundwater development subject to physical, chemical, legal, and other constraints. Optimization A means of seeking solutions by defining specific desired criteria and then minimizing or maximizing them using weighted values that address the trade-offs between conflicting criteria; a means of searching for an “optimum” set of decision variable values. Pathogen  Microorganism that can cause disease. Peak flow In a wastewater treatment plant, the highest flow expected to be encountered under any operational conditions, including periods of high rainfall and prolonged periods of wet weather. Per capita water use The average amount of water used per person during a specified time period, generally gallons per day (gpd). Percolation  The slow seepage of water into and through the ground. Permeability  Generally used to refer to the capability of rock or soil to transmit water. pH  Numeric value that describes the intensity of the acid or basic (alkaline) conditions of a solution. The pH scale is from 0 to 14, with the neutral point at 7.0. Values lower than 7 indicate the presence of acids and greater than 7.0 the presence of alkalis (bases). Plan A detailed formulation of a program or action. Planning A structured approach to problem solving. The goal of planning is to maximize the health, safety, and economic well-being of residents in ways that reflect the unique needs, desires, and culture of those who live and work within the community. Point source Source of pollution that involves discharge of wastes from an identifiable point, such as a smokestack or sewage treatment plant. Point source pollution Pollution that involves discharge of wastes from a single, identifiable source, such as a factory, refinery, smokestack, or sewage treatment plant; also called single point source pollution. Porosity The space between geologic material that determines how much water the material can hold; is also called “pore space” or “void space.” Porosity is a way to determine how many pore spaces exist in the strata and is often expressed as the fraction of void space in a given amount of soil material. Highly porous materials such as sand are able to hold and transmit large amounts of water, especially if the pores are interconnected.



Glossary

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Potable water  Safe and satisfactory drinking water. Potentiometric surface  The level to which water will rise in cased wells or other cased excavations into aquifers, measured as feet above mean sea level. Price elasticity (of demand) The sensitivity of the quantity of water demanded to changes in price. Usually depicted as a negative relationship: as a ratio of % decrease in quantity demanded / % increase in price. Prior appropriation A doctrine of water law that allocates the right to use water on a first-come first-served basis. Privatization Action taken to claim ownership of a portion of water, whether by purchase or other means, giving the owner control over the use of that water. Probabilistic (stochastic) model Statistical analysis tool that estimates, on the basis of past (historical) data, the probability of an event occurring again. These rely on assumptions about the system and include some measure of uncertainty or randomness in developing variable relationships. Production function A depiction of the relationship of a commodity’s output to the various inputs needed to produce the commodity. Often appears as a mathematical equation. Public-private partnership The joint ownership and control over a body of water by a mix of public and private parties. Public supply water use Water withdrawn by public and private water suppliers that furnish water to at least twenty-five people or have a minimum of fifteen connections. Public suppliers provide water for a variety of uses, such as domestic, commercial, industrial, thermoelectric power, and public water use. Public water supply A system that provides water for human consumption through pipes or other constructed conveyances to at least fifteen service connections or serves an average of at least twenty-five people for at least sixty days a year. Rate-of-return A method that finds the discount rate where the present net worth of all benefits and costs of a project’s life-span is equal to zero as determined by trial and error. Reasonable use Ability of upstream riparian owners to use any amount of water desired as long as usage does not interfere with reasonable needs of lower riparian owners. Receiving waters A river, ocean, stream, or other watercourse into which wastewater or treated effluent is discharged. Recharge  Generally, the inflow to an aquifer and/or groundwater. Recharge area  Generally, a surface area that is connected with the underground aquifer(s) by a highly porous soil or rock layer. Water entering a recharge area may travel for miles underground. Recharge rate  The quantity of water per unit of time that replenishes or refills an aquifer.

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Glossary

Reclaimed water  Treated wastewater that is under the direct control of a treatment plant owner/operator and has been treated to a quality suitable for a beneficial use. Reservoir A natural or artificial pond, lake, or basin for storage, regulation, and control of water. Resilience The ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Restatement of torts Statement that specifies what constitutes unreasonable use of water. Riparian Relating to, living, or located on the bank of a natural watercourse (as a river) or sometimes a lake or a tidewater. Riparian rights  A doctrine of water law under which the right to use the water of lakes and streams rests with owners of riparian land, or land that borders on the surface water. River A natural stream of water of considerable volume, larger than a brook or creek. River basin  The drainage area of a river and its tributaries. Rivers and Harbors Act Federal act of 1899 that provides authority for the US Army Corps of Engineers to control all construction in the nation’s navigable waters. Runoff Generally defined as water moving over the surface of the ground, consisting of precipitation (rainfall or snowfall) minus infiltration and evapotranspiration. Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) Passed in 1974, this act seeks to ensure that public water supply systems meet national standards for protecting public health, such as requiring pipes and solder used in those systems to be free of lead and other contaminants. Safe yield  The amount of naturally occurring groundwater that can be withdrawn from an aquifer on a sustained basis, economically and legally, without impairing the native groundwater quality or creating an undesirable effect such as environmental damage. Saline water Water that contains significant amounts of dissolved solids compared to fresh water (less than 1,000 parts per million solids); slightly saline water has 1,000–3,000 ppm solids, moderately saline water has 3,000–10,000 ppm solids, and highly saline water has 10,000–35,000 ppm solids. Sanitary sewer A system of pipes that collects and transports domestic, commercial, and industrial wastewater and limited amounts of stormwater and infiltrated ground water to treatment facilities. Scoping An early and open process for determining the scope of issues to be addressed and for identifying the significant issues related to a proposed action. It is required by the Principles and Guidelines (P&G) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).



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Sediment Material in suspension in water or recently deposited from suspension in the waters of streams, lakes, or seas. Septic tank A tank used to detain domestic wastes to allow settling of solids before distribution to a leach field for soil absorption; used when a sewer line is not available to carry wastewater to a treatment plant. Settling pond An open lagoon into which wastewater contaminated with solid pollutants is placed and allowed to stand. Solid pollutants suspended in the water sink to the bottom of the lagoon, and the liquid is allowed to overflow out of the enclosure. Shared Vision Planning A particular application of computer-aided dispute resolution (CADRe) that integrates planning principles with systems modeling and collaboration to provide a practical forum for making water resources management decisions. Sheet flow  The portion of precipitation that moves initially as overland flow in very shallow depths before eventually reaching a stream channel. Simulation models These models predict system performance for a userspecified set of variable values. A simulation model is a representation of a system used to predict the behavior of the system under a given set of conditions. Alternative runs of a simulation model are made to analyze the performance of the system under varying conditions, such as for alternative operating policies. Static model Describes steady-state conditions in which the values of the variables do not change over time. Storm sewer A sewer that carries only surface runoff, street wash, and snowmelt from the land. In a separate sewer system, storm sewers are completely separate from those that carry domestic and commercial wastewater (sanitary sewers). Stormwater Rainwater or melted snow that runs off streets, lawns, and other sites and accumulates in natural or constructed stormwater storage systems during or immediately following a storm event. Stormwater management Functions associated with planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, financing, and regulating the facilities (both constructed and natural) that collect, store, control, and/or convey stormwater. Stormwater runoff Precipitation that does not percolate or evaporate from a storm event and which flows onto adjacent land or water areas and is routed into drain or sewer systems. Stream A general term for a body of flowing water; a natural watercourse containing water at least part of the year. In hydrology, applied to the water flowing in a natural channel, as distinct from a canal. Streamflow The water discharge that occurs in a natural channel. A more general term than runoff, streamflow may be applied to discharge whether or not affected by diversion or regulation.

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Subsidence The dropping of the land surface as a result of groundwater being pumped. This is almost always an irreversible process. Surface runoff  The portion of rainfall that moves over the ground toward a lower elevation and does not infiltrate the soil. Surface water  All water on the surface of the ground, including water in natural and artificial boundaries as well as diffused water. Water that flows in streams and rivers and in natural lakes, in wetlands, and in reservoirs constructed by humans. Total dissolved solids (TDS) The sum of all inorganic and organic particulate material. TDS is an indicator test used for wastewater analysis and is also a measure of the mineral content of bottled water and groundwater. Total maximum daily load (TMDL)  The maximum allowable loading of a pollutant that a designated water body can assimilate and still meet numeric and narrative water quality standards. TMDLs were established by the 1972 Clean Water Act. It is the sum of the individual waste load allocations (WLAs) for point sources and load allocations (LAs) for nonpoint sources. Transmissivity  The capability of an aquifer to transmit water. Transpiration  The process whereby water vapor is emitted or passed through plant leaf surfaces and diffused into the atmosphere. Tributary A smaller river or stream that flows into a larger river or stream. Usually, a number of smaller tributaries merge to form a river. Unconfined aquifer An aquifer that is bounded above by a free water surface and is connected with the atmosphere. The free surface is called the water table. Unit hydrograph  The hydrograph of one inch of storm runoff generated by a rainstorm of fairly uniform intensity within a specific period of time. Urban runoff  Stormwater from urban areas, which tends to contain heavy concentrations of pollutants from urban activities. US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) A part of the Department of the Army with both civil and military responsibilities. It is the nation’s oldest water agency that functions as a civil works agency (versus its various military activities), dealing mainly with water resources through planning and construction activities on the nation’s navigable waters. In civil works, the USACE has authority for approval of dredge and fill permits in navigable waters and related tributaries; it enforces wetlands regulations, and constructs and operates various water resources projects, mostly notably levees, dams, and locks. It has an important role in stormwater management and disaster reduction by providing federal flood protection while also supporting state and local agencies in addressing flood management. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) The USDA does water resources planning through the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS; formerly Soil Conservation Service), Forest Service, Agricultural Research Service, and Economic Research Service.



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US Department of the Interior (USDOI) The DOI is the main cabinet-level agency in charge of water resources, especially through the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Reclamation. US Geological Survey (USGS) Agency within DOI responsible for financing water resources research at universities, preparing technical reports on water management, and collecting data on the nation’s groundwater and surface water supplies. User day Measures the recreational experiences of a single person at a recreation site. Value and time The notion that time is money and money is time. A dollar or other monetary unit is often used in economics because of convenience. But then time enters through the simple idea that a dollar now does not have the same value as a future dollar. Visitor day Comprises the recreational activities of an individual over a twelvehour period at a recreation site. Water balance An accounting of the inflow to, outflow from, and storage in a hydrologic unit, such as a watershed, drainage basin, aquifer, soil zone, lake, reservoir, or irrigation project. Also called water budget. Water banking System that allows transfer of water without direct negotiation between buyers and sellers. Water budget  A summation of inputs, outputs, and net changes to a particular water resource system over a fixed period (also, water balance model). Water consumption The portion of water withdrawn that is evaporated, transpired by plants, incorporated into products or crops, lost in conveyance, consumed by humans or livestock, or otherwise removed from the immediate water environment. It is consumed only in the sense that it is removed from a particular subsystem for a period of time. It is also referred to as consumed water or, even more commonly, consumptive use. Water cycle Circuit of water movement from the oceans, to the atmosphere, to the earth, and back to the atmosphere through various stages such as precipitation, interception, runoff, infiltration, percolation, storage, evaporation, and transportation. Water demand Water use as a function of the price of water. The term is often used interchangeably with the term “water use,” without the consideration of price. Water-energy-food nexus Water security, energy security, and food security are inextricably linked: activity in one area affects one or the other or both. The concept is central to sustainable development. Water ownership Which person, persons, or organization claims to own a portion of water.

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Water pollution The introduction of concentrations of a particular substance into water for a long enough period of time to cause deleterious effects, or, more generally, a material or condition that renders water unfit for particular uses. Water Pollution Control Act The first environmental legislation enacted by Congress. It required states to determine which lakes and streams were polluted past tolerable levels. The act proved to be inefficient and was replaced by the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972. Water quality Those characteristics that are distinctive to a particular supply or body of water in relation to some use such as drinking, manufacturing, agriculture, recreation, or propagation of fish and wildlife. No single definition is satisfactory for all purposes. Water Quality Act The act reauthorized the CWA in 1987, focusing on control of nonpoint source pollution. It required states to do planning studies and make abatement plans for water degraded by nonpoint pollution. Water refugee Water insecurity–induced migration of individuals or populations. Water Resources Development Acts (WRDA) The current set of water-related omnibus acts authorized by the US Congress to deal with various aspects of water resources: environmental, structural, navigational, flood protection, hydrology, and so forth. Typically, the USACE administers the bulk of the act’s requirements. Water scarcity Water scarcity can mean scarcity in availability due to physical shortage, or scarcity in access due to the failure of institutions to ensure a regular supply or due to a lack of adequate infrastructure. When annual water supplies drop below 1,000 m3 per person, the population faces water scarcity, and below 500 cubic meters “absolute scarcity.” Water security The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socioeconomic development; for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters; and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability. Water stress When annual water supplies drop below 1,700 m3 per person. Water table  The water level (or surface) above an impermeable layer of soil or rock (through which water cannot move). This level can be very near the ground surface or far below it. Water use Water that is used for a specific purpose, such as for domestic use, irrigation, or industrial processing. Water use pertains to human’s interaction with and influence on the hydrologic cycle, and includes elements such as water withdrawal from surface and groundwater sources, water delivery to homes and businesses, consumptive use of water, water released from wastewater treatment plants, water returned to the environment, and instream uses, such as using water to produce hydroelectric power.



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427

Water well  An excavation where the intended use is for the location, acquisition, development, or artificial recharge of groundwater (excluding sandpoint wells). Watershed The land area that drains water to a particular stream, river, or lake. It is a land feature that can be identified by tracing a line along the highest elevations between two areas on a map, often a ridge. Large watersheds, like the Mississippi River basin, contain thousands of smaller watersheds. Wetland An area of shallow standing water that contains hydric plants. Withdrawal  The process and/or quantity of water taken from groundwater, surface water, or other source, and conveyed to a place for a particular type of use. WRDA See Water Resources Development Acts, above.

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Index

accelerated growth present-worth factor, 249 acidity, 198, 216 acid rain, 197 Acts, of legislation: Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, 289, 298; Central Valley Project Improvement Act, 143; CERCLA, 17, 163; Cradle-to-Grave Act, 162; ESA, 16, 161–62, 363; Federal Flood Control Act, 15; Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 156, 309; FIFRA, 164; FIRA, 287; Flood Insurance Act, 293; FWPA, 151–53, 379; Grand Canyon Protection Act, 142–43; Homeowners Flood Insurance Affordability Act, 288–89; NFIA, 284, 287, 289; NFIRA, 287; RCRA, 16–17, 162–63, 348; Reclamation Act, 151–52; Reclamation Extension Act, 152; Rivers and Harbors Act, 12–13, 148, 151; SARA, 163; SDWA, 17, 148, 159–60, 202; Toxic Substances Control Act, 163; 21st Century Flood Reform Act, 289; Water Pollution Control Act, 16–17, 28; Water Power Act, 13; Water Quality Act, 148, 158–59; Water Quality Assurance Act, 185; Water Resources Planning Act, 16, 180. See also Clean Water Act; National Environmental Policy Act; Water Resources Development Act

adaptive management, 46–48 ADR. See alternative dispute resolution advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), 114 advocacy planning, 41–42 AGNPS model, 349 agricultural pollution, 210–11, 215–18, 216 Alabama, US, 77, 111, 280 Alaska, US, 99 algae, 200, 204, 215 Allegheny River, 235 alternative dispute resolution (ADR), 44–46 alternative justifiable expenditure method, 256 alternative sources, of water, 90, 105, 105–6 Amazon river, 81 American Planning Association (APA), 28, 83, 315, 352, 398 American Society of Civil Engineers, 100, 341 American Water Works Association (AWWA), 83, 395 AMI. See advanced metering infrastructure AMR. See automatic meter reading Andrew, hurricane, 280 annual-cost method, 244, 255 Antarctic ice sheets, 279 Anthropocene, 4

— 459 —

460

Index

antibiotics, 213 APA. See American Planning Association Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Rivers, 111 aquaculture, 100–101 aquatic plants, 258, 321, 369 aquifer, 66, 73–79, 75, 84 aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), 90, 105 Areawide Water Quality Management Plan (AWQMP), 178–79 Arizona, US, 70; reclaimed water and, 107; University of, 351 Arizona v. California, 141 Army Corps of Engineers, US (USACE): benefit-cost analysis and, 253, 255; cost sharing and, 258, 258; ERDC of, 374–75; Everglades National Park and, 186; in federal legislation, 149–51, 154–58; future directions and, 394–95; headquarters of, 373; HEC of, 329, 348–49; National Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, 13; Planning Manual Part II of, 43; Planning Primer, 243; specific plan criteria of, 36–37; in water resources development, 7–8, 11–13, 15, 18; wetland responsibilities of, 366–68 ASR. See aquifer storage and recovery Association of State Wetland Managers, 289 Aswan High Dam, 337 Atlantic basin, 155, 167, 207, 271, 375 automatic meter reading (AMR), 114–15 AWQMP. See Areawide Water Quality Management Plan AWWA. See American Water Works Association bacterial contamination, 204–5 Baltimore, Maryland, 167, 325, 354 Baltimore Gas and Electric Company, 354 Bangladesh, 290 basin maintenance, 324–25 BASINS model, 349 Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP), 190 BaySaver, 323 BDCP. See Bay Delta Conservation Plan BEA. See Bureau of Economic Analysis

benefit-cost analysis, 15, 35–38; annual-cost method, 255; background on, 241–43; cash flow in, 244–46, 245; compoundinterest factors, 246–49, 247; discounting techniques, 243–44; hypothetical example, 249–51; present-worth method, 251–52; rate-of-return method, 252–53; ration method of, 253–55 best management practices (BMPs), 307; basin maintenance, 324–25; bioretention systems, 322–23; constructed wetlands, 321, 322; definitions in, 316–18; detention systems, 320, 320; filtration system, 322, 323; infiltration systems, 319; infiltration trench, 319–20; pervious pavement, 319; retention systems, 320– 21, 321; wells in, 319–20 Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act, 289, 298 biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), 199, 218, 370 BIOCHLOR, 348 biological opinion, 364 biological quality, 204–5 biological uptake, 318 bioretention systems, 322–23 BLS. See Bureau of Labor Statistics BMPs. See best management practices BOD. See biochemical oxygen demand Boland, John, J., 111, 242 Bolivia, 141 British Geological Survey, 4 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 4 Bureau of Budget, US, 14 Bureau of Economic Analysis, US (BEA), 31–32 Bureau of Labor Statistics, US (BLS), 31 Bureau of Land Management, US, 28 Bureau of Reclamation, US, 12–15, 134, 151–52, 375 Bush administration, 159 CaCO3. See calcium carbonate Cadillac Desert (Reisner), 397 CADR. See computer aided dispute resolution



Index

CAFO. See Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation calcium carbonate (CaCO3), 198–99 CALFED. See California Federal program California, US, 324; CALFED Bay-Delta Program, 48, 188–90; Delta Stewardship Council, 188–90; desalination and, 106; doctrine of, 135–36; drought and, 123– 24; hydrologic cycle in, 70, 80; irrigation in, 95–96, 96; legal system and, 135–36, 141–43; reclaimed water and, 107; San Jacinto Wildlife Area, 365; state agency and, 174–75 California Federal program (CALFED), 48, 188–90 California Water Plan, 174–75 Cambodia, 7 Canada, 3, 281, 368 canalization methods, 371, 373 canonical analysis, 339–40 capacity coefficient, 361, 378 Cape Town, South Africa, 3 capital-recovery factor, 248, 255, 262, 263–69 Cappaert v. US, 139 Carson, Rachel, 155 cash flow, 244–46, 245 CDS Technologies, 323 Census Bureau, US, 32 Central Valley Project Improvement Act, 143 CEQ. See Council on Environmental Quality CERCLA. See Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act CERP. See Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan challenges: climate change and, 388–89; communication networks in, 390, 396; in conservation, 394–95; cybersecurity and, 395; data and information in, 393–94, 394; globalization and, 392–93; global scale of, 388–93; introduction on, 386–87; key terms on, 387–88; literature and, 397–98; media and, 395–98; past reflections and, 386–87; planner and,

461

398–99; privatization and, 392–93; social media and, 395–96; study questions on, 399; US national scale and, 393–95, 394; water-energy-food nexus, 390–91; water pricing and, 392–93; water refugees and, 388–90; in water security, 389–90 channel alteration, 296 channel obstruction, 372 Charley, hurricane, 280 chemical industry, 18 chemical oxygen demand (COD), 198–99 Chesapeake Bay, 155, 166–68, 314; canal, 12; Restoration of, 186–88; watershed, 81, 82 Chile, 3, 281 China, 3, 11; flooding and, 281, 290 chlorinated solvent, 348 Circular A-47, 16 citizen participation, in rational planning, 42 The Citizen’s Guide to the National Environmental Policy Act, 383 civil engineering, 374–75 Clean Water Act (CWA), 16–17, 148, 156–57; in hydrologic cycle, 80; in state agencies, 178–79, 187; in stormwater planning, 308–10; water quality and, 194, 214, 218, 222, 224 climate: change, 388–89; IPCC, 4–5, 278–79, 290; record of, 2–5; related disasters of, 2–5, 3. See also National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Clinton administration, 17–18, 159, 279 Coastal Barrier Resources System, 153 Coastal Management, Office for, 352 COD. See chemical oxygen demand coliform bacteria, 204–5 collaboration, 313, 331. See also intergovernmental water projects collaborative governance, 48–49 Colorado, US: doctrine of, 135; School of Mines, 347; state agencies of, 175–77; Water Plan, 175–77 Colorado River, 103, 174, 176; Compact, 143–44; Floodway, 153; future directions, 397–98 Colorado Water Conservation Board, 176 Columbia, District of, 103, 167

462

Index

Columbia River basin, 47, 155, 362 combined sewer overflow (CSO), 312–13, 315, 324 combined sewer system (CSS), 311 communication networks, 4, 45, 372, 390, 396 community impact: flood management, 297–99 Community Ranking System (CRS), 298–99 community welfare function, 39 Compact Council, 165 compound-interest factors, 246–49, 247, 262, 263–69 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), 17, 163 Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), 186 comprehensive planning, 26–27, 40, 43; report, 224–26, 225–27 computer aided dispute resolution (CADR), 331, 342 Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), 348 confined aquifer, 66, 74 conflict assessment, 45 constructed wetlands, 321, 322, 361, 366, 369–70 consumptive use, 89–92, 96–98, 104, 182 contaminants: agricultural pollution, 210–11; chlorinated solvent, 348; DDT, 363; domestic pollution, 210; emerging impacts of, 211–21, 212, 216; of groundwater, 205–11, 206–7, 209; hydraulic fracturing and, 216–18; industrial pollution, 210; nanomaterials and, 213–14; PPCP and, 213; saltwater intrusion, 209, 209 Continuing Planning Process Plan (CPP), 178 conveyance loss, 90, 95–97, 104, 391 correlative rights, 132–33, 137–38 cost allocation, 255–57 cost-benefit analysis. See benefit-cost analysis cost sharing, 257–58, 258

Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), 17–18, 27–28, 33; planning and, 383; PR&G, 242–43; resource management and, 150, 161 CPP. See Continuing Planning Process Plan Cradle-to-Grave Act, 162 Crater Lake, Oregon, 80 CRiSP model, 349 crop residue, 215–16 CROP-W model, 349 CRS. See Community Ranking System CSO. See combined sewer overflow CSS. See combined sewer system cumulative net inflow, 120 Cuyahoga River, 155, 219 CWA. See Clean Water Act cybersecurity, 226, 355, 395 Dade County, Florida, 280 dams, 296 Danube River, 234 Darcy’s law, 76 data: collection and analysis, 29–32; future challenges, 393–94, 394; integrity, 345; LDC, 31; SCADA, 395; STORET, 30–31; WATSTORE, 30–31; WQD, 3 DDT. See dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane Death Valley Lake System, 139 decision-making tools, 351 decision support system (DSS), 331, 341–46, 350–51 deferred growth present-worth factor, 249 degradation, 166–67, 318, 321 DeGrove, John, 184 Delaware, US, 167, 187–88; sand filter, 322, 323 Delta Stewardship Council, 48, 188–90 demand forecasting, 107–8 Dennis, hurricane, 280 Dense Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids, 348 Department of Commerce, US, 31–32 Department of Defense, US (DoD): federal legislation and, 149; waterways and, 374–75 Department of Energy, US (DOE): FERC and, 379; Innovations for Existing Plants program of, 94



Index

Department of Homeland Security, US (DHS), 395 Department of Natural Resources, US (DNR), 178–79 desalination, 91, 106 The Design of Water Resource Systems, 328 detention systems, 320, 320 deterministic model, 330, 332 Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, 201 Devil’s Hole, Nevada, 139 DHS. See Department of Homeland Security diarrheal diseases, 347 dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), 363 Digital Coast website, 352 dikes, 296 direct benefits, 254 direct costs, 254 Disaster Relief Program, 286 discharge, of stormwater, 307–8, 308 discounting techniques, 234, 243–44, 246 discount rate, 233–34, 239, 243–44 dissolved oxygen (DO), 41, 198–99, 219, 363 dissolved solids, 65, 199–200 DNR. See Department of Natural Resources DO. See dissolved oxygen DoD. See Department of Defense DOE. See Department of Energy domestic pollution, 209–10 drainage basins, 30 dredge and fill permits, 157 drinking water, 200–208, 389, 393; standards, 8–9; stormwater management and, 305, 316 drought, 2–3, 7, 122–24, 123 Drought Contingency Plan, 124 Drought Monitor, US, 123 DSS. See decision support system Dutch river delta, 287 dynamic equilibrium, 272 dynamic model, 331–32 dynamic programming, 333, 337 Dynamic Water Budget Models, 124 earthquake, 189 easement, 294–95

463

economic analysis, 9, 37; alternative justifiable expenditure method, 256; annual-cost method, 244, 255; benefitcost analysis and, 241–55, 245, 247; cash flow, 244–46, 245; compound-interest factors, 246–49, 247; cost allocation, 255–57; cost sharing in, 257–58, 258; discount rate in, 233–34, 239, 243–44; equity versus efficiency, 233, 238–39; introduction to, 232–33; key terms on, 233–34; net present worth, 234, 251–53; O&M, 244, 250, 258, 258, 286; ownership in, 234–36; present-worth factor, 246–52; production function, 233, 236–37, 237; public investment analysis in, 236–40, 237; rate-of-return method, 234, 244, 252–53; SCRB method, 256; study questions on, 259–60; uniform annual value, 240, 244, 246–49, 252, 255; use-offacilities method, 256 Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies (P&G), 17–18, 26–27, 241–42 Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), 31 ECP. See Everglades Construction Project education, in stormwater management, 324 Edwards, Marc, 203 Egypt, 337 EIA. See environmental impact assessment EIAReview. See Environmental Impact Assessment Review EIS. See environmental impact statement Eiseley, Loren, 1 emergency preparedness, 271, 292–93 eminent domain, 294 Endangered Species Act (ESA), 16, 161–62, 363 Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), 374–75 English common law, 137 Environmental Assessment (Jain), 383 Environmental Impact Analysis Handbook (Rau and Wooten), 382–83 environmental impact assessment (EIA), 353–54, 381–83

464

Index

Environmental Impact Assessment Review (EIAReview), 383 environmental impacts, planning and, 380–83 environmental impact statement (EIS), 35 environmental justice, 233, 238–39 environmental legislation, 155; CERCLA, 163; CWA, 156–58; ESA, 161–62; Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 156; FIFRA, 164; NEPA, 161; RCRA, 162–63; SDWA, 159–60; Toxic Substances Control Act, 163; Water Quality Act, 158–59 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): creation of, 17; Ground Water Modeling Research, 348; Safe Drinking Water Information System of, 98; state agencies and, 173, 179, 187–90; stormwater planning and, 305, 308–11, 314, 317; in water resources planning, 33; wetlands and, 367–69 environmental quality (EQ), 17, 34, 241 environmental sciences, 374–75 EPA. See Environmental Protection Agency EQ. See environmental quality equity versus efficiency, 233, 238–39 ERDC. See Engineer Research and Development Center Erie Canal, US, 12 ESA. See Economics and Statistics Administration; Endangered Species Act EU. See European Union Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB), 54 European Union (EU), 3, 281; Water Framework Directive, 27 evaluation, of water resource plan, 35–37 evaporation, 68–70 evapotranspiration, 66–70, 72 Everglades Construction Project (ECP), 370 Everglades National Park, 180–81, 185–86 Everglades restoration project, 18, 149–50, 344 The Evolution of Water Resource Planning and Decision Making, 25 EWEB. See Eugene Water and Electric Board extreme climate events, 2–5

federal agencies: CERCLA, 163; Chesapeake Bay, 166–68; Clean Water Act, 156–59; environmental legislation and, 155–64; ESA, 161–62; Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 156; FIFRA, 164; Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin and, 164–66; intergovernmental activities, 164–68; introduction to, 147; key terms of, 147–48; legislation and, 151–55; NEPA, 161; NPDES in, 150, 157–59; organizational structure, 149–50; RCRA, 162–63; SDWA, 159–61; study questions on, 168–69; Toxic Substances Control Act, 163; Water Resources Development Legislation, 151–55 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 18, 33, 150; in flood management, 270, 273, 287–90, 298– 99; A Unified National Program for Floodplain Management, 273, 292 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), 153, 379–80 Federal Flood Control Act, 15 Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), 164 Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force, 292 Federal Power Commission (FPC), 13, 152–53, 379 federal reserved water rights, 138–41 Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 156, 309; amendments to, 33, 347 Federal Water Power Act (FWPA), 151–53, 379 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency FERC. See Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fertilizers, 10, 104, 167, 211, 215, 318 FIFRA. See Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act filtration, 318–19, 322–24, 323 finding of no significant impact (FONSI), 382 FIRA. See Flood Insurance Reform Act FIRM. See Flood Insurance Rate Map fish and wildlife, 362–65



Index

Fish and Wildlife Service, US (USFWS), 162, 363, 368; creation of, 15 Fleck, John, 397–98 Flint, Michigan, 154, 159–60, 201–3 flood control, 243–44, 245, 254–56, 271 Flood Control Act, 13–15, 32, 284 flood insurance, 298–99 Flood Insurance Act, 293 Flood Insurance Interagency Task Force, 153 Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs), 288 Flood Insurance Reform Act (FIRA), 287 floodplain management: community impact and, 297–99; conclusions on, 299–300; CRS, 298–99; damage reduction measures, 292–99; early history of, 282–83; easement in, 294–95; emergency preparedness, 271, 292–93; eminent domain in, 294; FEMA, 270, 273, 287–90, 298–99; flood events in, 279–82, 282; flooding and, 271–73, 296–97; GMSL and, 290; human susceptibility and, 292–93; hydrographs in, 273–78, 274–75; hyetographs in, 273, 274, 277; insurance in, 298–99; introduction to, 270; IPCC and, 278–79, 290; key terms on, 270–71; land use controls, 293–96; mitigation in, 271, 286, 289, 298; NFIA in, 284, 287, 289; NFIP and, 287–89; NOAA and, 280–82, 282, 290; policy and, 283–89, 285; recent floods in, 280– 81; reforms in, 289–91; resilience and, 271, 291–92; riverine, 271–72, 278, 292; streamflow analysis in, 273–79, 274–76; study questions on, 300; tax policy in, 295; TDR in, 295–96; tidal barriers in, 296–97; UH in, 276, 276–77; zoning in, 290–96 floodwall, 296 Florida, US, 3; aquifers in, 70, 77; Broward County, 353; desalination and, 106; Everglades restoration project, 18, 149– 50; hurricanes in, 280–81; irrigation in, 95–96, 96; IWR-MAIN and, 111; Lower East Coast Water, 348; reclaimed water and, 107; state agencies and, 180–85, 183; University of, 334; Water Management District of, 18; wetlands of, 366, 370

465

Florida’s Water: A Fragile Resource in a Vulnerable State (Swihart), 184 flotation, 288, 318 FONSI. See finding of no significant impact forecasting methodology, 107 forests, 139 FOSNI. See finding of no significant impact FPC. See Federal Power Commission fracking, hydraulic, 216–18 Frances, hurricane, 280 frequency analysis, 120, 277–79 freshwater, 64–66, 65, 73, 80 functional planning, 26 future challenges. See challenges The Future of Water (Tvedt), 396 FWPA. See Federal Water Power Act Gallatin, A., 12 game theory, 333 GAO. See Government Accountability Office Gatun Lake, Panama, 375 general stream adjudication, 142 geographic information system (GIS), 312–13; in resource planning, 322, 328, 349, 352–54 Georgia, US, 52–54, 111 geospatial sciences, 374–75 GI. See green infrastructure Giardia lamblia, 204 Gibbons v. Ogden, 12 Gila National Forest, 140 GIS. See geographic information system GLEAMS model, 349 Glen Canyon Dam, 142–43 globalization, 392–93 Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL), 290 global positioning systems (GPS), 352, 354 Global Water Partnership, 124, 343 GMSL. See Global Mean Sea Level Government Accountability Office (GAO), 84, 190; future directions and, 391, 393, 394; water use and, 101, 105 Governor’s Water Action Plan, 175 GPS. See global positioning systems gradient-series present-worth factor, 247, 248–49, 252, 262, 263–69

466

Index

Grand Canyon Protection Act, 142–43 gravel-filled trench, 319 Greater New Orleans Foundation, 49 Great Lakes, US, 155, 159; Commission, 26–27; ports of, 372; St. Lawrence River Basin, 164–66 Green Book, 16, 27 green infrastructure (GI), 307, 318–23, 320–23 Green Infrastructure Program, 292 Green Roof Tax Credit, 324 green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), 48–49, 279, 307, 316–17 Ground Water Modeling Research, 348 groundwater systems: beneficial attributes of, 73, 73; contaminants of, 205–11, 206–7, 209; flow in, 68, 70–71; law and, 136–38; mining and, 78, 90, 101, 104; NGWA, 70, 205; occurrence of, 73–75, 74–75; optimal yield of, 78–79; permeability, 76–78; planning models for, 347–49; porosity, 75–76; quality, 18, 79, 205–11, 206–7, 209; runoff and, 275; surface interactions and, 84 GSI. See green stormwater infrastructure Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund, 49 Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 140 harbors, 372 Harvard Water Program, 328 Harvey, hurricane, 2, 4, 281, 287 Hawaii, US, 2, 98–99; Mauna Kea, 398 HBN. See Hydrologic Benchmark Network HEC. See Hydrologic Engineering Center high-density development, 293 High Plains aquifer, 77–78, 103–4 Hiki, hurricane, 2 Homeowners Flood Insurance Affordability Act, 288–89 Horizon oil rig, 49 Hubble telescope, 398 hurricanes: Andrew, 280; Charley, 280; Dennis, 280; in Florida, 280–81; Frances, 280; Harvey, 2, 4, 281, 287; Hiki, 2; Ike, 281; Irma, 281; Isabel, 280; Ivan, 280; Jeanne, 280; Katrina, 153, 280–81; Maria, 281; Rita, 281; Saffir-Simpson Hurricane

Scale, 271; in Texas, 281, 287; Wilma, 281 Hydrasep®, 323 hydraulic fracturing, 216–18 hydrodynamic modeling, 351 hydroelectric power: generation, 118, 152, 379–80; planning and, 379–80 hydrograph, 273–78, 274–75, 373 Hydrologic Benchmark Network (HBN), 30 hydrologic cycle, 19; conclusion on, 84–85; evaporation in, 68–70; freshwater in, 64–66, 65, 73, 80; groundwater flow, 68, 70–71; groundwater system, 73–75, 73–79; infiltration, 68–69; introduction to, 64–66, 65; key terms in, 65–66; precipitation, 68–69; study questions on, 85; surface runoff, 68, 70; surface water in, 79–84, 82; transpiration, 68–70; USGS in, 64, 70, 80–81, 84; water budget and, 67, 67–73, 71; water quality and, 195–97, 196; watersheds in, 81–83, 82. See also stormwater Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC), 329, 348–49 hyetographs, 273, 274, 277 IA. See Integrated Assessment IEM. See Integrated environmental management IGWMC. See International Ground Water Modeling Center Ike, hurricane, 281 Illinois River, 155 IM. See Integrated Modeling The Immense Journey (Eiseley), 1 implementation: of Dam Safety Act, 154; of federal programs, 154, 166; P&G, 241; PR&G, 242; of state programs, 175, 184–85; of STELLA, 350; of stormwater control, 315–16, 353; of systems analysis, 122; of wastewater management, 224, 226; of water resource plan, 28, 37, 39 Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, 395 incrementalism, of rational planning, 40 India, 3, 281, 290 Indiana, US, 100



Index

indirect costs, 254 industrial pollution, 210 industrial wastewater, 219 industrial water use, 100 infiltration, 68–69 infiltration trench, 319–20 inflation, 239–40 infrastructure legacy, 393 Innovations for Existing Plants program, 94 Institute for Water Resources (IWR), 11, 19, 27–28; MAIN, 111–16, 112 instream use, 89–90, 140 insurance, flood, 298–99 Integrated Assessment (IA), 342–43 integrated environmental management (IEM), 50–52, 52 Integrated Modeling (IM), 342–43 integrated water resources management (IWRM), xix, 6, 26, 83; barriers to, 56; benefits of, 55–56; future directions and, 387, 390–91; IEM and, 50–52, 52; in McKenzie River basin, 54–55; in Savannah River basin, 52–54; in stormwater planning, 314–15; water use and, 105, 123–24 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 4–5, 278–79, 290 intergovernmental water projects: CALFED Bay-Delta Program, 188–90; Chesapeake Bay Restoration, 186–88; Delta Stewardship Council, 188–90; Everglades National Park, 185–86 International Commission for Protection of the Rhine, 27 International Ground Water Modeling Center (IGWMC), 347 International Water Association (IWA), 50–51 Iowa, US, 99 IPCC. See Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Irma, hurricane, 281 irrigation: agricultural pollution and, 210– 11; evolution of, 7, 9–13, 15; water use and, 95–98, 96–97 Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD), 143 Isabel, hurricane, 280

467

iterative technique, 335 Ivan, hurricane, 280 IWA. See International Water Association IWR. See Institute for Water Resources IWRM. See integrated water resources management Jain, R., 383 Japan, 281, 290 Jeanne, hurricane, 280 Jericho, 11 Johns Hopkins Residential Water Use Study, 111, 115 joint fact-finding, 45 A Journey in the Future of Water (Tvedt), 396 Karengnondi Water Authority (KWA), 201 Katrina, hurricane, 153, 280–81 Kissimmee River, Florida, 186 KWA. See Karengnondi Water Authority Lagrangian analysis, 333 Lake Tahoe, California, 80, 155 laminar flow, 76 land use controls, 293–96 land use impact, 214–21, 216 land-water interface, 220–21 law. see legal systems St. Lawrence Seaway, 372 LDC. See Legacy Data Center leadership, methodological, 329 Legacy Data Center (LDC), 31 legal systems: in California, 135–36, 141–43; correlative rights, 132–33, 137–38; federal legislation and, 151–55; federal reserved water rights, 138–41; floodplain management and, 283–89, 285; general stream adjudication, 142; groundwater law, 136–38; introduction to, 131–32; key terms of, 132; Native American water rights, 140–41; prior appropriation, 133–36; reasonable use, 131–33, 137–38, 180; recent issues in, 142–44; Restatement of Torts Rule, 138; riparian rights, 132–33, 136; state surface water law and, 142; study questions on,

468

Index

144–45; water banking, 143–44; water quality legislation, 221–24, 223 legislation. See Acts, of legislation Lehigh model, 334 levees, 296 LID. See low-impact development linear programming, 336–38 literature, 397–98 livestock, 100–101 Living with Water Scarcity (Zetland), 397 local agencies, 172–73. See also state agencies local stormwater ordinances, 217, 225, 319 Los Angeles, CA, 155, 316 Louisiana, US, 100, 280, 366 Lower East Coast Water, 348 low-impact development (LID), 307, 315– 16, 335 MAIN. See Municipal and Industrial model Maine, US, 99 Maria, hurricane, 281 Maryland, US, 167 Massachusetts, US, 99 mass diagram analysis, 119–20, 119–20 mathematical models. See planning models McCarran Amendment, 141 MCDA. See multicriteria decision analysis McKenzie River basin, 54–55 media, information from, 395–98 Miami-Dade County, Florida, 280 Michigan, US, 99 Middle East, 283, 289, 366, 396 Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, 143 military installations, 139 Milk River, Montana, 140–41 mining, water use in, 100–101 Minnesota, US, 366 Mississippi River, 3, 12–13, 81, 155, 234; Commission, 283; flooding and, 279 Missouri, US, 279 mitigation, in flood management, 271, 286, 289, 298 models: AGNPS, 349; BASINS, 349; CRiSP, 349; CROP-W, 349; deterministic, 330, 332; dynamic, 331–32; GLEAMS, 349; IM, 342–43; Lehigh, 334; MAIN, 111–16,

112; MODFLOW, 348–49; NSM, 349; optimization, 331–32, 333, 335–36; PHABSIM, 349; probabilistic, 330, 332, 333, 351; rational planning, 38–42; SFWMM, 335, 348; simulation, 330, 332– 35, 333, 347, 350; spatial dimensionality, 331–32; static, 331–32; SWM, 349; SWMM, 334–35, 347, 349; TR-20, 349; of water demand, 109–11, 110 MODFLOW model, 348–49 monitoring, of water resource plan, 37 Monongahela River, 235 Montana, US, 140–41 monuments, 139 MS4. See municipal separate storm sewer system multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), 339 multiple-coefficient method, 109–11, 110 multiple-objective approach, of rational planning, 41 multiple-trial technique, 335 multivariate analysis, 333, 339 Mumford, Lewis, 283 Municipal and Industrial model (MAIN), 111–16, 112 municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s), 309–10, 313 municipal water: pollution and, 311–16; use, 108–13, 112, 115; wastewater, 107, 309, 311, 369, 378 nanomaterials, 213–14 NASA. See National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASQAN. See National Stream Quality Accounting Network National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 398 National Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors, 13 National Drought Mitigation Center, 2 national economic development (NED) plan, 17, 34, 241 National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, 239 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), 16–17, 148; creation of CEQ of, 161; in



Index

economic analysis, 241; planning and, 26–27, 35–37, 380–81 National Flood Insurance Act (NFIA), 284, 287, 289 National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), 150, 153, 214, 287–89 National Flood Insurance Reform Act (NFIRA), 287 National Groundwater Association (NGWA), 70, 205 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2–3, 3, 30; Coastal Management Office, 352; floodplain management and, 280–82, 282, 290; in hydrologic cycle, 67; National Marine Fisheries Service of, 363–64; wetlands, 368 national parks, 139 National Planning Board (NPB), 14 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), 150, 157–58; permit of, 307, 309–13, 324 National Priorities List (NPL), 163 National Research Council, 291 National Resources Committee (NRC), 14 National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), 14–15, 38 National Stormwater Program (NSWP), 159 National Stream Quality Accounting Network (NASQAN), 30 National Water Information System (NWIS), 30, 103; web interface, 81 National Water Use Science Project, 91 National Weather Service, 122, 282 Native American water rights, 140–41 Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), 28, 69, 314 navigation, 371–72 Nebraska, US: irrigation in, 95–96, 96; water use in, 104 NED. See national economic development negotiation, 45. See also collaboration NEPA. See National Environmental Policy Act net present worth, 234, 251–53 Nevada, US, 70, 103, 139 New Jersey, US, 279

469

New Mexico, US, 143 New Orleans, Louisiana, 49, 153–54, 315 New York, US, 167; atypical weather in, 2–3; hydroelectric power and, 379; industrial waste in, 208 NFIA. See National Flood Insurance Act NFIP. See National Flood Insurance Program NFIRA. See National Flood Insurance Reform Act NGWA. See National Groundwater Association Niagara Falls, 155 Nile Basin Initiative, 351 Nile river, 81, 283, 397 Nixon administration, 16–17 NOAA. See National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration nonlinear programming, 336–38 nonpoint pollutant source (NPS), 353 nonpoint source, 305–7, 309–11; pollution, 195, 215–16, 218, 222–27 nonstructural best management practices, 324–25 nonuniform series factor, 252 North Africa, 289, 366 North American Wetlands Conservation, 368 North Carolina, US, 99, 154, 215, 280; desalination and, 106 NPB. See National Planning Board NPDES. See National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System NPL. See National Priorities List NPS. See nonpoint pollutant source NRC. See National Resources Committee NRCS. See Natural Resources Conservation Service NRPB. See National Resources Planning Board NSM model, 349 NSWP. See National Stormwater Program NWIS. See National Water Information System Obama administration, 187, 395 objective function, 41, 335–39

470

Index

occurrence, of groundwater systems, 73–75, 74–75 oceangoing navigation, 371 odor, 199–202, 319 OECD. See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office of Federal Sustainability (OFS), 161 Office of Management and Budget, US, 14 offstream use, 90, 97 OFS. See Office of Federal Sustainability Ogallala aquifer, 77–78, 104 Ohio River, 12, 234–35, 279 Okeechobee Lake, 185–86, 370 O&M. See operation and maintenance One Water, 6, 26, 50–51, 83; in DSS, 191, 341; future directions and, 387, 390 on-site detention, 297 Ontario, Canada, 27, 165–66 operation and maintenance (O&M), 244, 250, 258, 258, 286 optimal yield, 66; of groundwater systems, 78–79 optimization models, 331–32, 333, 335–36, 350; in rational planning, 40–41; of water forecasting, 121–22 Oregon, US, 313–16 Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, 349 organic wastewater contaminants (OWCs), 213 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 390 Oroville Dam spillway, 2 OWC. See organic wastewater contaminant ownership, 234–36 Pacific Institute, 390 Pacific salmon, 365 Pale Blue Dot (Sagan), 1, 398 Panama Canal, 375 parasitic worms, 204 Pennsylvania, US, 99, 167, 353; Department of Environmental Protection, 48; State Water Plan, 179–80 per capita water use, 89, 93, 108 percolation, 74, 210–11 perfluoroctane sulfonate (PFOS), 208

perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), 208 permeability, 66, 76–78 pervious pavement, 319 pesticides, 211, 215–16, 219, 307, 318 petroleum, 18, 100, 185, 210 pet waste, 211, 324 PFOA. See perfluorooctanoic acid PFOS. See perfluoroctane sulfonate P&G. See Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies PHABSIM model, 349 pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), 213 Philadelphia Green Roof Tax Credit, 324 Philadelphia Water Department, 48–49 Planners and Water, 25, 50 planning issues: civil engineering, 374–75; constructed wetland, 361, 366, 369–70; environmental impacts and, 380–83; fish and wildlife, 362–65; future water use and, 107–16, 110, 112–13; harbors, 372; hydroelectric power, 379–80; introduction on, 361; key terms on, 361– 62; navigation and, 371–72; ports, 372; recreation and, 375–78; study questions on, 383–84; swimming and, 375–78; waterways and, 372–75; wetlands, 365–70 Planning Manual Part II, 29, 43 planning models: APA and, 352; applications of, 346–51; BASINS, 349; BIOCHLOR, 348; conclusions on, 354–56; deterministic, 330, 332; DSS in, 331, 341–46, 350–51; EIA and, 353–54; GIS and, 322, 328, 349, 352–54; GPS in, 352, 354; of groundwater, 347–49; introduction to, 328–30, 329; key terms on, 330–31; linear programming in, 336–38; MODFLOW, 348–49; nonlinear programming in, 336–38; optimization, 331–32, 333, 335–36; probabilistic, 330, 332, 333, 351; regression analysis in, 340–41; research center for, 329, 329; search technique in, 338–39; selection of, 344–46, 346; shared vision, 331, 342,



Index

350; simulation, 330, 332–35, 333, 347, 350; statistical techniques in, 339–40; STELLA, 350–51; study questions on, 356–57; SWM, 349; SWMM, 334–35, 347, 349; SWMP, 312–16; types of, 331–44, 342–43; of water quality, 347; of watersheds, 349; WEAP, 345–46 Planning Primer, 243 podcasts, 396 point source: pollution, 195, 218, 224, 307; of stormwater, 305–7, 309–12 Policies, Standards, and Procedures in Formulation, Evaluation, and Review of Plans for Use and Development of Water and Related Land Resources, 16, 241 policy: in floodplain management, 283–89, 285; floodplain management and, 283–89, 285; SPAC, 313; tax policy, 295; Western Water Policy Review Commission, 152. See also Acts, of legislation; National Environmental Policy Act political adjustment, of rational planning, 41–42 pollution: agricultural, 210–11, 215–18, 216; chlorinated solvent, 348; DDT, 363; domestic, 209–10; Federal Water Pollution Control Act, 33, 156, 309, 347; industrial, 210; municipal, 311–16; nonpoint source, 195, 215–16, 218, 222– 27; NPDES, 150, 157–59; point source, 195, 218, 224, 307 porosity, 66, 75–76 Portland, Oregon, 313–16 ports, 372 postflood recovery, 297–98 Potomac River basin, US, 122 PPCP. See pharmaceuticals and personal care products precipitation, 68–69 present-worth factor, 246–52, 262, 263–69 present-worth method, 251–52 President’s Committee on Water Flow, 14 PR&G. See Principles, Requirements and Guidelines price elasticity, 90, 109–10 principal component analysis, 333, 339

471

Principles, Requirements and Guidelines (PR&G), 18, 27–28, 32–34, 242–43, 381 Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources (P&S), 17, 27, 34, 241 prior appropriation, 132–36 privatization, 233, 235, 392–93 probabilistic analysis, 111 probabilistic model, 330, 332, 333, 351 probability theory, 277 production function, 233, 236–37, 237 Program for Combined Sewer Overflow Control, 49 Proposed Practices for Economic Analysis of River Basin Projects, 16, 241 protozoa, 204 P&S. See Principles and Standards for Planning Water and Related Land Resources public investment analysis, 236–40, 237 public-private partnership, 233, 235, 395 public supply water use, 98–99 public utility acts, 173 Public Works Administration, 14 Puerto Rico, US, 3; hurricanes of, 281; public supply use of, 98; water use of, 103 Puget Sound, Washington, 155 Quebec, Canada, 27, 165–66 radical planning, 42 rainfall, 195–97, 210, 219; in flood management, 275–77; runoff modeling in, 351; in stormwater management, 305, 312, 315 random-sampling approach, 338 rate-of-return method, 234, 244, 252–53 rational decision-making, 232 rational planning model: adaptive management, 46–48; advocacy planning, 41–42; ARD in, 44–46; benefit-cost approach in, 38; collaborative governance, 48–49; problems with, 39; risk assessment, 43–44; social and political adjustments, 41–42; technical adjustments, 40–41. See also planning models

472

Index

rational runoff coefficient, 274 Rau, J. G., 382–83 RCRA. See Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Reagan administration, 17, 56, 150 reasonable use, 131–33, 137–38, 180 reclaimed water, 106–7. See also Bureau of Reclamation, US Reclamation Act, 151–52 Reclamation Extension Act, 152 recovery plans, 162, 298 recreational activity, 118, 375–78 recurrence interval, 120, 278 recycled wastewater, 174 recycling, 324 reforms, in floodplain management, 289–91 regression analysis, 340–41 regulatory framework, of stormwater management, 309–11. See also environmental legislation Reisner, Marc, 397 Report on Roads, Canals, Harbors and Rivers (Gallltin), 12 research centers, 329, 329 reservoirs, 118–19, 119, 296 resilience, 271, 291–92 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), 16–17, 162–63, 348 resources planning process: analysis of alternatives, 34–35; benefits of, 58–59; data collection and analysis, 29–32; evaluation and recommendations, 35–37; formulation of alternatives, 34; goals and objectives, 32–33; implementation of, 37; introduction to, 24–25; IWRM in, 50–56, 52; key terms of, 25–26; levels of, 26–27; obstacles to, 57–58; P&G of, 27–29; problem diagnosis, 34; problem identification, 29; rational planning model in, 38–42; scope of, 26; study questions on, 59–60; surveillance and monitoring, 37; trends in, 43–49. See also planning issues Restatement of Torts Rule, 138 retention systems, 320–21, 321 return period, 278, 324 Rhine River, 27, 219 Rio Grande, 351

Rio Mimbres, 139–40 riparian rights, 132–33, 136 risk, 240; assessment, 43–44 Rita, hurricane, 281 River Basin Commissions, 16 riverine flooding, 271–72, 278, 292 The River Nile in the Age of the British (Tvedt), 396 Rivers and Harbors Act, 12–13, 148, 151 runoff, 66–72, 71, 78; in flood management, 273–77, 274–76; of groundwater, 275 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), 17, 148, 159–60; Flint, Michigan, 202 Safe Drinking Water Information System, 98 safe yield, 66, 78–79 Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, 271 Sagan, Carl, 1, 398 saline water, 65, 80, 92, 105–6 Salton Sea, 155 saltwater intrusion, 209, 209 Sandia National Labs, 351 San Jacinto Wildlife Area, 365 SARA. See Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act Savannah River basin, 52–54 SCADA. See supervisory control and data acquisition scoping phase, 26, 29, 54–55, 238–39 SCRB. See separable costs-remaining benefits S-Curve, 277 SDWA. See Safe Drinking Water Act search technique, 338–39 Second National Assessment of Nation’s Water Resources, 101 sedimentation, 119, 167, 218, 318, 324 Senate Document 97, 16, 241 Senate Select Committee on Water Resources, 16 sensitivity analysis, 345 separable costs-remaining benefits (SCRB), 256 Separate Sanitary Sewer (SSS), 312 sequent-peak method, 121, 121 series compound-amount factor, 248 series present-worth factor, 248



Index

Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), 311–12 SFWMD. See South Florida Water Management District shared vision planning, 331, 342, 350 Sherman, L. K., 276 Silent Spring (Carson), 155 simulation models, 330, 332–35, 333, 347, 350 single-coefficient method, 108–9 single-payment present-worth factor, 246– 48, 247, 250 sinking-fund factor, 248, 262, 263–69 Small Watershed Grants Program, 167–68 SMART planning initiative, 7 social adjustment, of rational planning, 41–42 social media, 30, 395–96 Soil Conservation Service, 15 soil erosion process modeling, 351 source reduction, 318 South Africa, 3, 396 South Carolina, US, 52–54 South Dakota, US, 104 South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), 181, 183, 184–86 South Florida Water Management Model (SFWMM), 335, 348 SPAC. See Stormwater Policy Advisory Committee SPARROW model, 349 spatial dimensionality, of models, 331–32 SSARR model, 349 SSS. See Separate Sanitary Sewer STA. See stormwater treatment area Stanford Watershed Model (SWM), 349 state agencies: of California, 174–75; of Colorado, 175–77; conclusion on, 190–91, 191; of Florida, 180–85, 183; future water assessment, 190–91, 191; introduction to, 172; local agencies and, 173; of Pennsylvania, 179–80; SFWMD and, 181, 183, 184–86; study questions on, 191; of Texas, 177–78; of Wisconsin, 178–79 state surface water law, 142 State Water Resources Control Board, 107 State Wetland Managers, Association of, 289, 366

473

static model, 331–32 statistical techniques, 339–40 STELLA. See Systems Thinking, Experiential Learning Laboratory, with Animation St. Lawrence River Basin, 164–66 stochastic model. See probabilistic model Stockholm Environment, 345–46 Storage and Retrieval Database (STORET), 30–31 Stormceptor®, 323 StormFilter™, 322–23 StormTreat™ System, 323 stormwater: runoff, 150, 195, 214, 307–9; STA and, 370; in water quality, 195, 214–16, 218, 222 Stormwater Management Model (SWMM), 334–35, 347, 349 Stormwater Management Program (SWMP), 312–16 stormwater planning: basin maintenance, 324–25; bioretention systems, 322–23; BMPs, 316–25; conclusion on, 325; constructed wetlands, 321, 322; CSO and, 312–13, 315, 324; detention systems, 320, 320; discharge and, 307–8, 308; education in, 324; EPA and, 305, 308–11, 314, 317; filtration system, 322, 323; GIS and, 312–13; green infrastructure, 318–23, 320–23; infiltration trench, 319–20; introduction to, 305–6, 306; key terms on, 306–7; legal framework of, 309–11; MS4s in, 309–10, 313; municipal pollution and, 311–16; nonpoint source and, 305–7, 309–11; nonstructural BMPs, 324–25; pervious pavement, 319; point source and, 305–7, 309–12; retention systems, 320–21, 321; sedimentation and, 318, 324; study questions on, 325; SWMP, 312–16; TMDL in, 307, 311, 314; wells in, 319–20 Stormwater Policy Advisory Committee (SPAC), 313 stormwater treatment area (STA), 370. See also constructed wetland STP. See Sewage Treatment Plant streamflow analysis: frequency in, 277–79; runoff in, 273–77, 274–76 Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act (SARA), 163

474

Index

Superfund site, 17–18, 352 supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), 395 supply forecasting, 117–22, 118–21 Supreme Court, US, 12, 139–41, 151, 161, 176 surface water, 66; in flood management, 273; groundwater interactions, 84; occurrence of, 80–81; quality, 83; runoff, 68, 70; state law and, 142; watersheds and, 81–83, 82 surveillance, of water resource plan, 37 susceptibility, to flooding, 292–93 suspended solids, 199–200, 207, 319–21 swamps, 81, 133, 186, 200, 366 SWAT model, 349 Swihart, T., 184 swimming, 375–78 SWM. See Stanford Watershed Model SWMM. See Stormwater Management Model SWMP. See Stormwater Management Program Systems Thinking, Experiential Learning Laboratory, with Animation (STELLA), 350–51 Tampa Bay Water, 106 Task Committee on Water Conservation, 100 taste, 199–202, 210 tax, 18, 295, 324 TDR. See transferable development rights Tellico Dam, 162, 364 temperature, 199–200, 207, 219–20 Tennessee, US, 364 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 14, 33, 284 Texas, US, 3, 98–100, 177–78; desalination and, 106; hurricanes in, 281, 287; reclaimed water and, 107; wetlands of, 366 Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), 177–78 thermoelectric power, 93–94 tidal barriers, 296–97 time and value comparison, 239–40 time extrapolation, 108 titanium dioxide, 214

Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), 159, 179, 187–88; in stormwater management, 307, 311, 314; water quality and, 195, 224 total suspended solids (TSS), 218 toxic pollutants, 16–18. See also contaminants Toxic Substances Control Act, 163 TR-20 model, 349 transferable development rights (TDR), 295–96 transpiration, 68–70 tropical cyclone, 2. See also hurricanes Truckee River, 103 Truman, Harry S., 38 TSS. See total suspended solids turbidity, 199–200, 222, 363 TVA. See Tennessee Valley Authority Tvedt, Terje, 396 TWDB. See Texas Water Development Board 21st Century Flood Reform Act, 289 A Twenty-First Century US Water Policy, 25, 131–32 UH. See unit hydrograph UN. See United Nations unconfined aquifer, 66, 74 A Unified National Program for Floodplain Management, 273, 292 uniform annual value, 240, 244, 246–49, 252, 255 uniform-grid sampling, 338 uniform series factor, 247, 252 Union of Concerned Scientists, 299 United Nations (UN), 4, 122, 281, 347, 389 unit hydrograph (UH), 276, 276–77 Universal Soil Loss Equation, 334 urbanization, 308, 308, 325, 388 urban land use, 218–19 USACE. See Army Corps of Engineers, US US Department of Agriculture (USDA), 15, 28; in hydrologic cycle, 69; legislation and, 148–49; wetlands and, 367 US Department of Interior (USDOI), 15, 28, 148, 375 US Department of Labor, US, 31 USDOI. See US Department of Interior use-of-facilities method, 256



Index

user day, 362, 378 use-value assessment, 295 USFWS. See Fish and Wildlife Service, US US Geological Survey (USGS), 30–31; future directions and, 393–94; hydrologic cycle and, 64, 70, 80–81, 84; legislation and, 148–49; MODFLOW of, 348–49; water use and, 89–99, 103–4 US v. New Mexico, 139–40 Utah, US, 99 value and time, 233, 239 Vermont, US, 208 Viessman, Warren Jr., 11–12 Vietnam, 17, 290 Virginia, US, 99, 167, 187–88, 322 Virginia Tech Flint Water Study, 203 Virgin Islands, US, 99 visitor day, 362, 378 Vortechs™, 323 Voyager 1, 1, 398 Washington, DC, 122, 325, 337, 350 waste load allocation (WLA), 195, 224, 307, 311 wastewater planning, 224–27, 225–27 water balance, 66, 91, 321, 346, 351 water banking, 132, 143–44 water budget, hydrologic cycle and, 66–73, 67, 71 water conservation, 116–17 Water Data program, 30 Water Data Storage and Retrieval System (WATSTORE), 30–31 water demand model, 109–11, 110 water-energy-food nexus, 388, 390–91 Water Environment and Reuse Foundation (WE&RF), 50 Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP), 345–46 Water Flow, President’s Committee on, 14 Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West (Fleck), 25, 397–98 water management district (WMD) of Florida, 182–86, 183 water managers, 10, 84, 101

475

Water Pollution Control Act, 16–17, 28 Water Power Act, 13 water pricing, 392–93 water quality, 19; agricultural pollution, 210–11; biological characteristics of, 204– 5; BOD and, 199, 370; comprehensive planning report, 224–26, 225–27; conclusion on, 227; contaminants and, 211–21, 212, 216; CWA and, 194, 214, 218, 222, 224; DO and, 41, 198–99, 219, 363; fertilizers and, 10, 104, 167, 211, 215, 318; groundwater and, 79, 205–11, 206–7, 209; hydrologic cycle and, 195–97, 196; industrial land use, 219; introduction to, 194; key terms of, 195; land use impact and, 214–21, 216; nanomaterials and, 213–14; nature’s effects on, 197–205; nonpoint source pollution, 195, 215–16, 218, 222–27; PFOA in, 208; planning legislation, 221–24, 223; planning models for, 347; PPCP and, 213; saltwater intrusion, 209, 209; study questions on, 227–28; of surface water, 83; turbidity, 199–200, 222, 363; urban use and, 218–19; wastewater planning and, 224–27, 225–27; WLA and, 195, 224, 307, 311 Water Quality Act, 148, 158–59 Water Quality Assurance Act, 185 Water Quality Data (WQX), 31 water refugee, 388–90 Water Research Foundation (WRF), 50 Water Resources Council (WRC), 16–17, 27, 88; environmental impact and, 381; of Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Basin, 164–66; Management and Budget and, 150; P&S and, 241; Second National Assessment of Nation’s Water Resources, 101 Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), 18, 148; economic analysis and, 234, 242, 258; legislation and, 153–55 Water Resources Economics, 232 water resources planning: devolution of, 18; early regulation and, 7–9; economic considerations and, 14–15; emergence of, 12; environmental era, 16–18; evolution

476

Index

of, 11–18; historical perspectives on, 9–11; introduction to, 24–25; key terms of, 25–26; levels of, 26–27; multipurpose projects, 12–13; objectives of, 33; scope of, 26; seas in, 5–7; study questions on, 20–21; trouble of, 1–5; USACE in, 7–8, 11–13, 15, 18; water resources planning and, 9–18. See also planning models; resources planning process Water Resources Planning Act, 16, 180 Water Resources Planning: Manual of Water Supply Practices, 25 water scarcity, 90, 122, 388, 397 water security, 387–90 Watershed Modeling Made Easy, 341 watersheds, 81–83, 82; planning models of, 349 water stress, 25, 90, 218, 389 water supply: alternative sources of, 105, 105–6; conclusion on, 124–25; conservation and, 116–17; desalination and, 106; forecasting and, 117–22, 118–21; future use and, 107–16, 110, 112–13; introduction to, 88–89, 101–4, 102; key terms on, 89–91; problem of, 122–24, 123; reclaimed water and, 106–7; state assessment of, 190–91, 191; study questions on, 125–26 Water Supply Handbook: A Handbook on Water Supply Planning and Resource Management, 117 water use: aquaculture and, 100–101; by category, 93, 94; conclusion on, 124–25; conservation and, 116–17; consumptive, 89–92, 96–98, 104, 182; forecasting and, 117–22, 118–21; future planning, 107–16, 110, 112–13; industrial, 100; introduction to, 88–89; irrigation and, 95–98, 96–97; key terms on, 89–91; livestock and, 100–101; mass diagram analysis and, 119–20, 119–20; mining and, 100–101; municipal, 108–13, 112, 115; public supply, 98–99; sequentpeak method, 121, 121; study questions on, 125–26; supply reallocation and, 142–43; thermoelectric power and, 94; time extrapolation, 108; USGS in, 89–99,

103–4; US population and, 90–93, 92; withdrawal, 89–101, 92, 96, 103, 137–38. See also legal system waterway planning, 372–75 water withdrawal, 89–101, 92, 96, 103, 137–38 WATSTORE. See Water Data Storage and Retrieval System WEAP. See Water Evaluation and Planning wells, 319–20 WE&RF. See Water Environment and Reuse Foundation Western Water Policy Review Commission, 152 West Virginia, US, 167, 187–88 wetlands, 361; EPA and, 367–69; harbors and ports, 12–13, 148, 151, 372; hydrologic cycle and, 66, 73, 81–82; NOAA and, 368; USACE and, 366–68; USFWS and, 368 White, Gilbert F., 284 Willamette River, Oregon, 54–55 Wilma, hurricane, 281 Winters doctrine, 140–41, 144 Winters v. US, 140–41 Wisconsin, US, 178–79 WLA. See waste load allocation WMD. See water management district Wooten, D. C., 382–83 Works Progress Administration, 14 World Bank, 24–25, 392 World Economic Forum, 389 World Health Organization, 213 The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources (Gleick), 396 World Water Commission, 392 WQX. See Water Quality Data WRC. See Water Resources Council WRDA. See Water Resources Development Act WRF. See Water Research Foundation Wyoming, US, 104 Zetland, David, 397 zoning: in flood prevention, 290–96; in land-water interface, 220, 226 zooplankton, 204

About the Authors

Andrew A. Dzurik is professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, Florida State University. He has had a long and productive career, having worked as a civil engineer for three years after receiving the BSCE degree, followed by graduate studies, and then an academic career of thirty-six years at FSU in Tallahassee, Florida. He was first on the faculty of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at FSU for sixteen years, primarily in environmental planning and management. During that time, he served a year as resident scholar with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors in the Washington, DC, area. In his last few years in the planning department, he was much involved with establishing a new College of Engineering, a joint venture of FSU and Florida A&M University, also in Tallahassee. After the college was established, he transferred his academic position to the new Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering for twenty years, teaching, researching, and consulting in water resources planning as well as environmental and water resources engineering. In this period, he served as resident faculty of the Washington Interns for Students of Engineering program. He has published numerous papers, articles, books, and book chapters on water resources and environmental planning, engineering, and public policy. Tara Shenoy Kulkarni is associate professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the director of the Center for Global Resilience and Security at Norwich University. Her research interests are in green infrastructure, sustainable water resources management, and climate change–related disaster resilience through engineering innovation. She has previously worked — 477 —

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About the Authors

in engineering positions at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in the industrial wastewater, hazardous waste, and petroleum cleanup sections. She also worked as a research associate and sustainability manager for the Environmental Management Center in India, where she was involved in developing academic educational programs, corporate training, case studies, and corporate sustainability policies. She is involved in K–12 STEM outreach, community engagement in water and climate initiatives, and mentoring newer civil engineering faculty through the ExCEEd workshop series run by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Bonnie Kranzer Boland has taught water resources planning at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, since 2004. She is a certified planner. Prior to moving to Baltimore, she spent more than two decades performing water resource planning in Florida, working at the Northwest Florida Water Management District, the Florida Governor’s Office, the South Florida Water Management District, and as executive director of the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida. In addition to a planning career, she taught urban planning at Florida Atlantic University and has consulted on various projects related to the US Army Corps of Engineers.