The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) Water Quality Control Division 2017 Drinking Water and Wastewater Eligibility Surveys are now available. This survey is conducted on an annual basis by the CDPHE Water Quality Control Division for the purpose of identifying water and sewer infrastructure improvement projects eligible for funding through the State Revolving Fund grant and loan programs. All municipalities, counties, water and sanitation districts, not-for-profit water systems and other special districts that own or operate public water systems, sewer/sanitation systems, or stormwater systems in the State of Colorado are encouraged to participate. The survey will remain open from June 15, 2016 through July 30, 2016. The July 30th deadline is the last day CDPHE will be able to accept surveys identifying your water and wastewater improvement needs and for inclusion on the 2017 Project Eligibility Lists. The survey format and processes tend to change from year to year and they ask that you review the instructions provided on the first page of the survey and familiarize yourself with the process. Due to past complications with completing the PDF forms online utilizing an internet browser, this year they ask that you simply download the necessary survey and complete it directly from your PC. A blank version of this
survey is available for download from the following website: https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/cdphe/wq-eligibility-survey. Complete survey instruction are provided on the first page of the survey.
The next Water Availability Task Force meeting will be held on Wednesday, June 22, 2016 from 1:00 pm - 3:00pm at the Colorado Parks & Wildlife Headquarters, 6060 Broadway, Denver in the Red Fox Room. An agenda will be posted at the CWCB website.
Cotter Corporation NSL (Cotter) has agreed to pay the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency $957,604 in past costs for overseeing an investigation of contamination from the company’s uranium mill at the Lincoln Park Superfund site near Cañon City, Colorado. The administrative settlement agreement will be subject to a 30-day public comment period. For more on the Lincoln Park site visit: www.epa.gov/superfund/lincoln-park.
Water Alternatives, an interdiciplinary journal on water, politics and development has announced a Call for Papers: The (Re)turn to Infrastructure for Water Management. With a few obvious exceptions, including the construction of the world’s largest dam in China, water management around the world in the 1990s and 2000s seemed largely focused on the demand-side. More recently, however, we have begun to see a significant number of large inter-basin water transfer projects, massive dams, desalination plants, sea walls, tidal barriers and other constructions under development in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. Taken together, the resurgence of these types of concrete-heavy forms of water management suggest a turn back to the high-modernist reliance on big infrastructure as a strategy for addressing a range of water-related issues, including regional scarcity, sea-level rise, and flooding. The papers in this special issue will explore the questions of whether and why we are seeing a return to a 20th century water management paradigm centered on big infrastructure and, often, supply-side management principles, and what this (re)turn to big infrastructure tells us about the political-economic forces driving water management today. Deadline for submission of abstracts is July 20th, 2016. For more information go to www.water-alternatives.org.
Abstracts are being accepted for two sessions in the upcoming Geological Society of America Meeting, held September 25-28 in Denver. Abstracts are due on July 12th, 2016. Authors can submit up to 2 abstracts as first author, provided one presentation is a poster. The goal for the first session (T28) is to integrate different approaches to evaluating potential mining impacts using tools that can include remote sensing, human health, hydrology, ecological assessments, microbial assays, sedimentation, or geochemistry. The second session (T70) has a focus on the Animas River area, including the Gold King Mine incident of 2015. This session will include both science and policy perspectives on abandoned mine lands. For further information go to www.geosociety.org.