(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Battling a Water Crisis: Bottles, Barges and Maybe a Quarter Billion-Dollar Pipe [1]
['Jacey Fortin']
Date: 2023-09-29
People in New Orleans are used to preparing for hurricanes and floods. So when they learned of a new threat — an infusion of salty water creeping slowly up the Mississippi River, threatening municipal drinking water supplies — they did what comes naturally: strip bottled water from grocery store shelves.
But this is a crisis with even more lead time than a storm churning in the Gulf of Mexico: The worst of the saltwater intrusion isn’t expected to reach the city until late October. And the salty water could stick around for much longer, potentially corroding the city’s lead-lined pipes.
“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Tulane University.
The crisis is a result of drought conditions in the Midwest, which have sapped water levels in the Mississippi, allowing salty water from the Gulf to creep upstream beneath a freshwater layer.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/us/new-orleans-saltwater-intrusion.html
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
