There's been an ongoing legal dispute in Iowa between the Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) and drainage districts in three Iowa counties to decide who should pay the price to clean up polluted water. It's an interesting case for those of us who are involved in stormwater regulation and water treatment. And it is one…
Category: Public Works
Gamifying and Crowdsourcing ADA Inspections
The Makeability Lab at the University of Maryland is on a mission to "collect street-level accessibility information from every street in the world and enable design and development of a novel set of location-based technologies for accessibility." In order to achieve this goal, they set up an interactive website where people can inspect, identify, and…
Preparing Yourself and Your Organization for the Future!
Staying competitive in this time of rapidly changing technology is starting to look more challenging every year. Driverless cars, rapid-fire communications, drones, laser scanning, virtual and augmented reality, 3D visualizations – all just a spattering of the onslaught of technological advances our field has seen implemented over the last few years. And if we are to believe Moore's Law,…
Do you have a permit for that Pokemon?
About five years ago I wrote a blog post about augmented reality and the concerns a city might have over its potential impacts to a community (see Adding Augmented Reality to Your Zoning Ordinance). But I had not noticed the types of issues discussed in that post actually occuring until this week after the release of the incredibly popular Pokemon Go game….
Water Unleaded Launch
Having worked for many years in the water industry, I've closely followed the recent events related to the lead controversy in Flint, Michigan. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've also probably seen the articles my partner and I posted about the topic. As we continued to discuss the topic over the last…
Lead Paint and Elevated Water Tanks
Recently I read that the USEPA is considering revising the Lead and Copper regulations because of public concern over the drinking water issue in Flint, Michigan, and lead poisoning in general. And it got me wondering if the USEPA is going to develop a more comprehensive approach to addressing lead and copper in our water systems, will they…
Flint Water Testing Update & One Quick Easy Fix
One more week has gone by and there have been an additional 2,133 tests completed for lead and copper in Flint, Michigan. This brings the total number tested to date to almost one third of the 31,000 total users (number of total users from the city of Flint website). I've updated the pie chart showing little change…
Water Source Poster
I've been working on a project and needed some graphics related to drinking water. Because the easiest way to get pictures is to see if any are available online, I searched for any in the public domain or any that might be available without copyright. The USEPA has some nice graphics that are not copyright restricted,…
Is the Lead in Flint Really in the Drinking Water?
I'm following up on the Flint water issue because the more I thought about it, I'm becoming much more convinced my original suspicion is true – the elevated lead levels in the kids there are not really related to the drinking water. As I mentioned in my last blog post about this, the leading cause of…
We are all Flint Michigan
There are so many articles out there by now about the Flint, Michigan, water issue, I debated adding mine to the list. But I noticed there are some interesting aspects about what has happened that I've not seen discussed elsewhere. So I decided to go ahead and throw my voice in with the others. Also,…