Environmental News
Environmental News from Boulder, Colorado
Update: City of Boulder water is good; Left Hand water not so much
Sep 14th
The City of Boulder is urging increased water conservation by city water customers for several reasons as a result of the recent flooding. Water customers are asked to turn off all irrigation systems. Turf, plants and trees do not need supplemental water at this time. Run only run full loads in the clothes and dishwashers. Don’t let taps run or flush toilets unnecessarily.
The city’s Betasso Water Treatment Facility is operational and continues to deliver safe drinking water to city residents. However, due to high levels of turbidity in the Boulder Reservoir, the Boulder Reservoir Water Treatment Facility is not able to treat drinking water at this time and was not brought back online as the city had planned. While the Betasso facility has the ability to deliver water to all city customers, the city does not have redundancy in water treatment with the Boulder Reservoir Water facility offline. The city is urging water customers to use water conservatively until the Boulder Reservoir facility is operational again. This will allow the city to conserve and extend water treatment resources at the Betasso facility.
Additionally, the city’s wastewater treatment facility is experiencing unprecedented flows and system anomalies. A reduction in water use will help alleviate the pressure on the wastewater collection system.
Update on the wastewater pipeline breach
Yesterday, the city announced a breach in the main wastewater pipeline that carries 90 percent of the city’s wastewater to the treatment facility. However, today’s assessment indicated that there was not a breach in the suspected location. While good news, the condition of the wastewater currently arriving at the treatment facility does indicate that there are other issues throughout the collection system. City staff continues to assess and resolve these collection system deficiencies.
Many Boulder residents have been reporting that water or sewage is backing up into their homes. In most cases, this is groundwater and floodwater, not untreated wastewater (sewage). Excess stormwater in the drainage system and saturated soils are causing groundwater and floodwater to back up into private residences. However, if residents see or smell solid waste, they should call the Emergency Call Center at 303-413-7730 and ask that the issue be reported to Public Works crews. These backups could still be the result of issues on private property, but the city would like to gather the information to determine if it indicates a system failure.
Residents with isolated groundwater and floodwater backups may stay in their homes. However, if the water is wastewater, residents should use their own discretion to determine whether or not their homes are safe to stay in. These incidents are expected to decrease as the floodwaters recede.
Note about calls from Left Hand Water District
Some City of Boulder water customers received a phone call from the Left Hand Water District announcing a boil water order. If you are a City of Boulder water customer, you do not need to boil your water. The phone call was sent to a geographic area, but there are City of Boulder water customers in that area too and some got the call inadvertently. Check your water bill to determine who your water provider is. If you are in an HOA or a multifamily or rental unit and your water bill is paid by the HOA or your landlord, ask them to confirm who provides your water.
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- Boulder water treatment plant
Boulder: Let the sun shine on city’s energy future
Sep 10th
Boulder to reach out to solar industry, customers
The City of Boulder announced today that it will create a working group of solar industry specialists and customers – both current and future – to explore motivators and barriers to implementing more solar throughout the community. The focus of the group’s work will be on defining the next-generation of incentives as well as providing guidance about how to handle solar contracts between now and the time when the city decides whether it will create a local electric utility.
“Supporting and increasing renewable sources of energy is a core value, and we see this discussion as an important next step in our effort to create the electric utility of the future,” said Heather Bailey, executive director of Energy Strategy and Electric Utility Development.
Bailey said the city has a unique opportunity to benefit from local experts to design programs that will encourage more local energy production. Expertise from the university and federal labs, as well as the numerous companies and entrepreneurs developing leading-edge energy technologies, has already helped Boulder achieve one of the highest levels of solar per-capita in the US, with close to 14 megawatts installed in the city.
The City of Boulder has also played a significant role in supporting local energy generation, particularly solar. This has included streamlining the permitting process to offering a local solar rebate and grant program. The concept of Solar Gardens was originally conceived in Boulder, and city staff members were on the drafting team of legislation that allowed this. The solar gardens law was signed by then-Governor Bill Ritter overlooking the Flatirons from a parking lot rooftop along the Pearl Street Mall.
“We don’t want to simply continue this tradition; we want to make it even stronger by working with stakeholders to identify ways to encourage even more locally generated clean energy sources. This is fundamental to achieving our community’s goals, whether we create our own electric utility or strike a new agreement with our current provider, Xcel Energy,” Bailey said.
One of the questions the city would like to resolve is how to encourage continued participation in solar installations during the ongoing deliberation about – and possible transition to – a local electric utility. Xcel Energy recently sent the city a letter requesting that the city agree to take over contracts it has with customers if Boulder forms an electric retail utility.
The City of Boulder is committed to protecting those who have made investments in solar energy in our community from any adverse impact related to the creation of a municipal utility. The city is also interested in working with Xcel on this important issue, not only to protect those who have already made investments, but to encourage growth in this area of renewable energy.
Boulder has no way, however, of evaluating the estimates that Xcel has made about these costs.
“Before we can agree to any arrangement, we need more information from Xcel Energy,” City Attorney Tom Carr said. “The company so far has declined most of the requests for data the city has made. Without detailed information about these contracts, we have no way of verifying Xcel’s assertions and perhaps more importantly, of making sure we are doing the right thing to protect our forward-thinking customers and other ratepayers.”
The city’s Energy Future team anticipates holding the first meeting of the solar working group shortly after the Nov. 5 election. Members of the community and industry who are interested in participating are encouraged to contact Heather Bailey at 33-441-1923 or baileyh@bouldercolorado.gov.
More information about the Energy Future project is available at www.BoulderEnergyFuture.com.
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Boulder, the country and the world mourn the death of population advocate professor Al Bartlett
Sep 9th
Albert Allen Bartlett, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, was remembered today as a revered teacher who had a major impact on his students, the university, Boulder and far beyond.
Bartlett died on Sept. 7 at the age of 90.
“Al Bartlett was a man of many legacies,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “His commitment to students was evidenced by the fact that he continued to teach for years after his retirement. His timeless, internationally revered lecture on the impacts of world population growth will live beyond his passing, a distinction few professors can claim. And we can all be thankful for his vision and foresight in making the Boulder community what it is today.”
Paul Beale, chair of the CU-Boulder Department of Physics, said “Al Bartlett was a treasured friend, mentor, teacher, scholar and public servant. He was an influential leader in the Department of Physics, the university, the Boulder community and the global environmental movement. Generations of students were proud to have called him ‘Professor.’ ”
Bartlett started teaching at CU-Boulder in 1950 and retired in 1988 but continued to teach CU students for many years afterward. He is a former president of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
When Bartlett first delivered his internationally celebrated lecture on “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” to a group of CU students on Sept. 19, 1969, the world population was about 3.7 billion. He proceeded to give it another 1,741 times in 49 states and seven other countries to corporations, government agencies, professional groups and students from junior high school through college.
His talk warned of the consequences of “ordinary, steady growth” of population and the connection between population growth and energy consumption. Understanding the mathematical consequences of population growth and energy consumption can help clarify the best course for humanity to follow, he said.
The talk contained his most celebrated statement: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” A video of his lecture posted on YouTube has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
This year, the world population is about 7.1 billion and the CU Environmental Center announced a program this summer in which 50 student and community volunteers received training in exchange for a commitment to give Bartlett’s talk at least three times in 2013-14.
Bartlett was a dedicated teacher who reveled in finding better ways to reach his students, whether it was the use of 1-inch diameter railroad chalk that could more easily be seen on a blackboard or the design of a new physics lecture hall. He served on the Boulder Campus Planning Commission for 25 years and chaired the faculty committee responsible for designing the building currently housing the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.
He and Professor Frank C. Walz designed physics lecture halls for the Duane Physical Laboratories Complex that included the innovation of rotating stages. The stages allowed scientific demonstrations to be in use during one class while they were being set up for the next — a process that might take three times as long as the 10 minute period between classes.
In addition to his university work, Bartlett also was a prominent and influential member of the Boulder community. He was an initiator of the effort to preserve Boulder’s open space and also the “Blue Line” amendment that kept houses from being built farther up Boulder’s foothills by restricting the city water supply to a maximum elevation.
As the Daily Camera newspaper wrote when Bartlett received its Pacesetter Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006, “Albert Bartlett’s influence is unmistakable in the foothills surrounding Boulder. With few exceptions, one sees trees, grasses and rock.”
Throughout his decades as a Boulder resident he also was a prodigious writer of op-ed pieces and letters to the editor on a variety of civic and scientific issues.
Bartlett was born on March 21, 1923, in Shanghai, China. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Colgate University and spent two years as an experimental physicist at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project before earning his graduate degrees in physics at Harvard. He then started his teaching career at CU-Boulder.
He won the American Association of Physics Teachers’ Distinguished Service Citation, the Robert A. Millikan Award and the Melba Newell Phillips Award, and served as the society’s national president in 1978. Teaching and service awards from the University of Colorado include Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Awards, the Robert L. Stearns Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Colorado Centennial Medallion, the President’s University Service Award, the University Heritage Center Award and the Presidential Citation.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Eleanor, and is survived by their four daughters — Carol, Jane, Lois and Nancy.
A memorial service was being planned to be held in Boulder in October.
The Albert A. Bartlett Scholarship was established in 2010 to aid CU-Boulder physics students who plan to pursue careers teaching high school science. Before his death, Bartlett requested that any memorial gifts be made to the University of Colorado Foundation Albert A. Bartlett Scholarship Fund, in care of the Department of Physics, 390 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, 80309.
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