Folks in the Boston, MA area and who receive water from the MWRA (Massachusetts Water Resource Authority) are under a "Boil Water" alert after a water pipe suffered a catastrophic failure.

31 surrounding communities and towns are affected:

For more information:

Mass. declares state of emergency after aqueduct break; 'boil-water' order issued for 1 million

Hat-tip memfromsomerville of DailyKos.

Reprinted with permission; original post here. -- GH

by Robert Gillis, who really has too much time on his hands.

10/2009

Lunar officials declared war on Earth early Friday morning after NASA launched a preemptive strike on Cabeus Crater, home to thousands of Moonies, Moonites, and Moon-Units.

CNN had reported that NASA engineers crashed a rocket and a satellite into the moon's surface on Friday morning in a $79 million mission, to supposedly "kick up enough dust to find whether there is any water in the moon's soil."

Gas has been found in at least three water wells in Pennsylvania and state regulators are trying to determine if gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale is to blame.

Did you ever see Thank You for Smoking?

Plot
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is the Vice President of and the chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a tobacco lobby whose stated purpose is to research the links between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, the group, funded by cigarette companies, does not find any link between the two.

This is the most important blog post I've ever written. It's cross posted at Daily Kos. Please recommend over there.

H.R. 7231 to Close the Hydraulic Fracturing Loophole That Is Fracing Up America's Water.

Hydraulic fracturing (fracing) is a drilling technique that was developed by Halliburton. Millions of gallons of fresh water, along with sand, and cancer-causing and toxic chemicals are injected under high pressure miles down the drilling hole to fracture the limestone shale and release the oil and gas trapped within.

In 2005, at the urging of Dick Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, Congress exempt fracing from the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In 2001, Cheney's energy task force report "touted" benefits and ignored consequences. His office was "involved in discussions about how fracturing should be portrayed in the [EPA] report." Halliburton earns about $1.5 BILLION annually from hydraulic fracturing. (Ibid)

-- originally posted 2008-02-17 05:09:16 - bumped

On January 12, 2008, I posted a piece titled Smarter Parts: Improving Efficient Energy Use and Demand? that touched upon an experimental program sponsored out of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The essence of the program was to create a home energy system that could respond to changing prices and peak demand loads by dialing back energy consumption. The system would be accessible via the internet so homeowners could make changes in absentia. An update to the story included another article indicating that in 2009, California regulators may have direct access to homeowner thermostats via radio-controlled devices in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages -- a plan cooked up by the California Energy Commission (CEC).

I opened a discussion thread for the piece in a few places, including several Delphi forums. In one thread,¹ some energy and water efficiency ideas came up. One in particular spawned the short poll that you're about to see. Please read on, and take the poll; results will be published at the end of next week and included in another piece that I will cross-post in all areas where this appears.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: News report Friday suggest that Indiana is ready to join a regional, eight-state compact designed to prevent water-challenged states like Georgia or Alabama or others from siphoning off fresh water from the Great Lakes, which waterphiles say hold about 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water.

When the well is dry we learn the worth of water. ~~Benjamin Franklin

[Learning the worth of water]
The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth international assessment released earlier this year predicted that "drought-affected areas will likely increase"