Recognizing the importance of community involvement in the protection of Canada’s fisheries resources, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has set up a website to help Canadians form and operate community and stewardship groups.
The Centre for Sustainable Watersheds, a registered charity, is developing a web-based information sharing resource that will help foster better communication between Canada’s water stakeholders. It is hoped that “Water Connections” will help the country’s various jurisdictions and other stakeholders make sound decisions concerning water management and protection.
Ground water is one of British Columbia’s most precious natural resources. More than 750,000 British Columbians get their drinking water from wells, and about 75 percent of the ground water extracted in the province is used to support the B.C. economy. Demand continues to grow, and in recent years ground water has even been increasingly used as a viable source of low-temperature geothermal energy for heating and/or cooling. Despite its importance, the ground water resource has, in the past, lacked adequate legal protection.
With help from West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL), a two-year effort to protect the Sunshine Coast’s Hotel Lake from harmful water withdrawals is successful. The Environmental Appeal Board has limited the amount of water that can be withdrawn from Hotel Lake until studies demonstrate that increased water use will not harm the lake.
All utilities at one time or another find it necessary to upgrade facilities and expand capacity, especially as water and wastewater service needs continue to increase with the demands of growing populations. As utilities undertake such projects, engineers and operators enter a world of old records, manuals, and drawings—often stored in a confusing disarray—looking for information to help make a project more efficient and therefore more cost-effective.
The Southwest Florida Water Management District, the agency responsible for managing water resources in a 16-county area in west-central Florida, provides a free program to hotels and motels to help conserve water. The district launched the Water Conservation Hotel and Motel Program (Water CHAMP) in 2002 to help decrease the impact vacationers place on Florida’s most precious resource—water.
An up-to-date customer information system (CIS) is an essential component of an effective water utility business. These systems are responsible for a wide range of key business activities including billing, managing credit and collections, tracking water consumption, and responding to customers' needs.
Increasingly, attention is being paid to the fact that many people are stretched thin, having to divide their attention among many activities including family, relationships, and of course, work. Not only do individuals have more things to do in general but many people are also finding that in the workplace they are expected to fulfill the traditional demands of their job, as well as many additional tasks. Engineers are no exception to this trend.
Over the centuries, judges have recognized that the public has rights not to be exposed to toxins, and to have clean water and air: that’s the conclusion of a recently published paper written by West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL) staff counsel, Andrew Gage. Re-establishing these rights has the potential to significantly shift how governments make decisions that affect people’s health and environment.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have published an interesting study that sheds light on the fate of a familiar pharmaceutical as it enters the waste stream. In work initially described last year, NIST chemists investigated probable chemical reactions involving acetaminophen when the drug is subjected to typical wastewater processing.
