Last week the Delta Stewardship Council released the first draft of its proposed plan to resolve safety concerns over California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, one of the state’s most critical pieces of infrastructure; the Delta accounts for 76 percent of the state’s fresh water supply; engineers, residents, and politicians fear that the aging levees along the Delta will break in the event of an earthquake; missing from the initial draft is a recommendation for a peripheral canal, a controversial proposal that has sparked fierce debate; more details will be added to the plan in subsequent drafts after public meetings are held to debate its contents; the final draft of the plan is scheduled to be completed and adopted in November 2011

238 of Bhutan’s 576 schools lack sufficient water supplies; water shortages disrupt education as children must spend time that could be spent learning fetching water from streams; children are also falling sick due to poor hygiene and sanitation as a result of limited access to water; unsafe drinking water is one the second leading cause of death in the world and poses a serious public health risk to these children; water sources in Bhutan are dwindling as glaciers recede making it difficult to provide schools with water

The Czech Republic is running low on its underground water supplies, with villages in the north and the south experiencing shortages; nearly 50 percent of Czech residents depend on underground water sources; experts believe that increasingly extreme weather patterns caused by climate change are to blame; long dry months followed by severe storms are causing massive floods and leave the ground less able to absorb water; extreme estimates predict that by 2050, the Czech Republic would not have enough water for its population’s basic needs

San Diego county has completed the San Vicente pipeline which will provide residents with fresh water in the event of a disruption; San Diego receives 90 percent of its water from distant sources thousands of miles away; the pipeline is part of a larger $1.5 billion project designed to provide San Diego county with water for up to six months if supplies are cut off by a major earthquake or natural disaster; these projects are becoming increasingly important as San Diego’s two primary sources of water, the Colorado River and the San Joaquin-Sacramento river delta begin to dry up

A new desalination technique could be a significantly cheaper and more energy efficient alternative to aqueducts and dams; Oasys Water has developed ground breaking new membranes and draw solutions that generate fresh water faster, more efficiently, and at lower temperatures than existing desalination methods

Inexpensive igloo-shaped, pollution-eating devices nicknamed Poo-Gloos can clean up sewage just as effectively as multimillion-dollar treatment facilities for towns outgrowing their waste-treatment lagoons, according to a new study

Aussie researchers show that storm water collected from the aquifer into which urban water flows, after undergoing treatment, had dramatically lower levels of all hazards and contaminants; further supplemental treatment was needed to remove some hazards, though the process shows potential if improvements are made

In the event of a major earthquake or flood and many levees failing simultaneously in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, as many as 515,000 residents and 520,000 acres of land would be in immediate danger; the long term effects could be even more widespread, as nearly 28 million residents depend on the Delta for water and irrigation; California lawmakers have increasingly turned their attention to securing the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta’s levees, but experts say that only little progress has been made

Pima County, Arizona, is moving to fingerprint more employees who work with kids and populations who need special assistance, who deal with sensitive data, or who have access to critical infrastructure facilities such as wastewater treatment plants; “We don’t want guys with criminal backgrounds knowing how our radio system is constructed. The same with wastewater, which could be compromised,” John Moffatt, the county’s director of Strategic Technology Planning, said