Sustainable and Equitable Water

This past spring, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) welcomed Renee Hoyos as director of the agency’s new environmental justice office. Ms Hoyos will direct efforts on the continued development – with community and stakeholder input – of the environmental justice program at DEQ. Recently, Ms Hoyos gave a Webinar “Water Equality: Sustainability and Access for All.” You can watch the recoding at Water Equity Sustainability and Accessibility for All - YouTube.

Our actions are making changes to our water environment and we need to consider the impact of our actions on all members of our communities. The minute you begin using a water resource you change its equilibrium and the local hydrology. Pumping groundwater often reduces discharge to streams and rivers.  Yet, historically water has been consumed in our region as an inexhaustible natural resource with little concern for costs, pollution, sustainability, purification , or transport of water. The availability of water is generally taken for granted, especially in our water-rich Commonwealth of Virginia. For generations water supply managers and local leaders have believed there is not a shortage of water, only a need to get the available water to where it is needed at low cost.

However, now, we have seen the results of the growth, irrigated agriculture, increasing population density, commercial and industrial development urban water sources have became the receptacles of sewage, urban and industrial runoff and wastes. Continued development is accompanied by increased waste discharges and more pollution from surface runoff. These are now threatening our Occoquan Reservoir and Potomac River. It all boils down to growing populations and economies lead to a continually increasing demand for what is after all a fixed resource: high quality water.

Environmental justice research documents disproportionate environmental burdens facing low-income communities and communities of color, ranging from landfills, industrial operations, to contaminated groundwater from agricultural activities due to shallow existing wells. Environmental justice contextualizes the environmental conditions that threaten the physical, social, economic, or environmental health and well-being of these communities within overall patterns of racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination. Water justice is one piece of the larger issue of environmental justice, but a foundation element of the problem.

Though, some communities feel environmental justice requires that water be free for low-income communities, but clean safe water is not free. First and most importantly the water utility imust maintain a source of water.  The  water can be supplied by surface water source such as a lake or river or from groundwater sources. These are precious resources, and without proper management of  surrounding and overlying land these water sources can be polluted. Water in its natural state can be unsafe for human consumption. It may contain naturally occurring bacteria, inorganic material and man-made contaminants such as pesticides and pollutants.

To make water safe for drinking, it must be treated. The water utility must filter and disinfect the water to remove impurities. Water treatment protects consumers from diseases like typhoid, hepatitis, and cholera, and remove harmful contaminants like nitrate, which can cause health problems. Finally, an adequate supply of water must reach homes and businesses via a water storage and distribution system. All this must be constantly maintained and improved. For those with access to public water supplies in Virginia we all have the same quality of water.

Lack of financial resources, however, often impacts private well and spring owners ability to provide clean, safe and reliable drinking water to their families. Just having the financial resources to maintain a safe drinking water from a private supply can be challenging. This is seen throughout Virginia. Residents in small rural communities after the surrounding areas develop find that their private wells and springs providing their drinking water supply experience diminished water quality and reliability. Cost to connect to the local water utility is often a problem with disadvantaged communities.  To plan and design a solution and identify funding options can be an insurmountable hurdle.  Planning to add low income housing to rural communities without public water and sewer connections simply piles challenges on theses residents that they do not have the financial resources to meet these challenges.

“Under natural conditions…previous to the development of wells, aquifers are in a state of approximate equilibrium. Discharge by wells is thus a new discharge superimposed over a previously stable system, and it must be balanced by and increase in recharge of the aquifer, or by a decrease in the old natural discharge, or by a loss of storage in the aquifer, or by a combination of these.”

C.V. Theis, “Source of Water Derived from Wells: Essential Factors Controlling the Response of an Aquifer to Development, “  Civil Engineering 10(5) (1940): 277-80.