Host a Water Sunday?

Last Fall, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon at Water Missions' office tucked away behind a strip mall in Charleston, SC.  I had heard tales about this Christian engineering relief organization, but what I didn't know was that they had a real story to share.

Our group spent the afternoon putting together essentially a rugged, self-contained miniature, water treatment plant that can treat about 10 gallons (38 liters) of water per minute from raw water sources. Much like an operating system for your computer, they have continued to perfect this innovative design.

Witnessing the passion of volunteers and leadership was impressive. Unimpressive was witnessing my lack of skills as an electrician. I was assigned to help with the wiring of the solar panels. Thank goodness they have quality control folks there.

Yesterday, Water Missions rolled out a new initiative for congregations around the world focused on the global water crisis.  Basically, they are looking for 50 churches to commit to hosting a Water Sunday in March.

What is a Water Sunday? This would be one Sunday where your church dedicates its service to educating your congregation about the lack access to safe drinking water around the world. They have put together all the materials to make your Sunday a success (video, print materials, etc). They have already received interest from churches around the US. They even had a Canadian church interested in joining, eh.

I predict two things. They will have no problem reaching their goal of signing up 50 churches and this initiative could grow larger in the next few years. This initiative will light a fire with water and change lives!

For more information: 

online: Water Missions's Water Sunday
Follow them on Twitter here. 

contact: Kevin Herr | Church Engagement Coordinator | Water Missions International KHerr@watermissions.org | 843-769-7395

If I fail, the blog dies: A public challenge

Happy New Year!  I am a sucker for new beginnings and fresh starts.  You can see where this is going, right?

I have not written anything here since August. While it's easy to stop writing, my ideas on posts keep percolating. A curse I suppose.

So why did I stop?  I could blame the standard excuse of not enough time or dedicating more time to work off an extra ten pounds, but I think really it was writer's block. Once I discovered more folks that were reading my stuff, the harder it was for me to write and balance my consulting career. Weird, huh.

Blogging with frequency has been rewarding to me personally and professionally. In engineering and in writing one can constantly tweak a memo or a design, but "pressing print" is therapeutic.  Putting a period to an idea is powerful.

I thought about putting a period today on this blog and retiring this blog. However, it really seems like I would be admitting defeat to my own writers block.

So, here is my public 90 day challenge to myself to see if I can break through this wall. If I fail, the blog dies.

Write at least one post a week.

Everything is fair game. With a name like watercrunch I always felt like I needed to talk about water scarcity issues especially here in the Southeast. While interesting, it's sometimes a bit constraining. All of life's goodness is now fair game! Yes, this means not all posts will be about water.

I am turning off blog comments.  I am going to violating the cardinal rule one of any blog which is try to generate comments and discussion. Forget this. I will focus on my writing.  I really hate getting spam comments or reading the occasional lunatic commenters. This does nothing for me.

Consume less media. Have you seen Goodnight ipad?  This is what my house has become. Funny & sad.

So there it is. Yikes, now it is time to publish this post.

Drought's Doppler Radar: the Drought Monitor Uncovered.

8:00 AM today, just like every Thursday morning since 1999, a map is posted online. This is no ordinary map. This map is the everyman's doppler radar for droughts; helping to show the complex nature of drought and its impacts in a simple way. This map is the Drought Monitor.

Drought Monitor's origins can be traced to The National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) which was founded in the mid 1990s at the University of Nebraska by Dr. Don Wilhite. NDMC approached NOAA with the idea of a regular product that would monitor drought for the United States. After some initial testing and collaboration, the Drought Monitor was officially born in August of 1999.

One of the biggest misconceptions with the Drought Monitor is that they have some Google like deck of servers crunching an immense set of climate algorithms to produce these drought maps on a weekly basis. This is not the case. No Staples Easy button here to push.

The process begins with one of the eleven primary authors of the Drought Monitor. Each author is in charge for a two week interval before relinquishing responsibility to the next author. The primary author releases a first draft of the map every Monday to over 300 local experts for input. After receiving input and impact information, the author adjusts, if needed, the map and releases subsequent drafts. The map is finalized for publishing every Thursday morning.

Unbelievably, there is no allocated federal budget to produce the weekly Drought Monitor. The Drought Monitor continues to post–thanks only to "in kind" contributions from the NDMC, USDA, and NOAA. Even with limited funding they are investigating new technologies including the use of higher resolution data sources to better represent the Drought Monitor map at the county level.

I am not sure they realize it, but the Drought Monitor owns Google search on the word drought.  Don't believe me, type in the word drought into Google. Basically, anyone from a congressman, to a farmer, to an engineer, or to a landscaper, that is interested in drought will go to the Drought Monitor.

Would it be blasphemy to think about online ads on the Drought Monitor to fund improvements? Any other suggestions for the great folks that produce the Drought Monitor.

Special Thanks to Brian A. Fuchs, Climatologist, with National Drought Mitigation Center for answering my questions about the Drought Monitor.

Drought's Perfect Metaphor

Droughts are like economic recessions. Right? They are both difficult to know when they both start and end. However, I think the economic metrics for defining a recession are more universally accepted than those used for drought. So, maybe this is not the perfect metaphor.

I called our last major drought in the southeast a dreadnought, but a comparison to a dreadnought is so early 20th-century. I am pretty sure those battleships have become obsolete with anti-ship missiles skimming across the sea.

So what is a better metaphor? Alex Prud'Homme, author of “The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century”, exclaimed in a recent New York Times opinion that "the python of drought is already wrapped tightly around us, and in weeks — and years — to come it will squeeze us dangerously dry". This is not a bad metaphor. Yes, a python is a big scary snake. Yes, it does squeeze its victims to death. But unlike a drought, a python can be easily defined even as it is squeezing you. Droughts are ill defined.

Lets see, so what are the characteristics of droughts?

• Unlike a tornado, the onset of droughts can be slow.
• Impacts are difficult to measure in many sectors of the economy. In fact, a drought can be felt outside region, even globally.
• No universally accepted definition.
• A drought has a unique DNA. No two droughts are the same. No watershed responds exactly to the same drought. 
• Exposes vulnerability in a watershed at that moment in time
• Fundamentally a recurring phenomena.

So what is a better metaphor? Here is my list.

A drought is like a stress test on a bank.
A drought is when your tread on your tire gets thin.
A drought is being asked to dance when you can't dance.
A drought is when a gambler's lost turns to an addiction.
A drought is like being too hot while your spouse is too cold.
A drought is when you dance with the devil and lose.
A drought is keeping your blog in an indefinite pause.

OK, I give up. Help?

This Story Sucks! The Unknown Story of World's First Hydraulic Suction Dredge

Prior to the first shots over Fort Sumter, South Carolina had over 120,000 acres of hydraulic water wonder land filled with ditches, pumps, and small diversion dams. Believe it or not, this land led in North American rice production from the 1600s through 1880s. If it wasn't for the millions of mosquitos, I am sure it would have been a sight to see. Out of this environment, came a radical invention that revolutionized the Port of Charleston and soon, other ports around the world.

Shifting sands formed a shallow barrier to the Port of Charleston. In fact, the allowable draft on ships was reduced from 13 feet in 1780 to 10.7 feet in 1851. Without a port deep enough for shipping, the Charleston port was going to get shoaled out of existence and commerce would find another port (sound familiar?). An experiment to use a big bucket ( aka clam hopper) to scoop out the sand failed in the 1850s.

Enter Nathaniel Lebby.

He had toiled in the rice plantations working on pumps that were used to flood the fields with river water and to drain them for harvest. He thought he had a better idea. He noticed his centrifugal pumps often passed rocks and all sorts of debris while working in the rice plantations. I suppose he may have thought, "If you can't scoop it out, why not suck!"

With a vision and financing, the ship named General Moultrie was forged. The ship had a pump that sucked up sands from the area under the dredge and discharged the slurry into a hopper. Water poured over the top of the hopper leaving the dredge material in the hopper. When the material began to run out the top, pumping was stopped and the ship moved to the dump site. Results were impressive, however, progress was cut short, because of the outbreak of the Civil War.

Soon the first hydraulic suction dredge, General Moultrie, faced an unglamorous end as a blockade runner. One night, carrying 163 bales of cotton, she slipped out of Charleston undetected. No one knows exactly what happened to her after that night. A Nassau paper reported that it had been sold in 1866. Too bad.