NATION/RECORDS/OBITUARY
B3
Too wacky? Moving water from flood to drought Roswell Daily Record
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the soggy East tries to dry out from flooding and Texas prays for rain that doesn’t come, you might ask: Isn’t there some way to ship all that water from here to there? It’s an idea that has tempted some, but reality gets in the way. A Texas oilman once envisioned long pipelines carrying water to drought-stricken Texas cities, just one of several untested fantasies of moving water vast distances. Parched Las Vegas still wants to indirectly siphon off excess water from the overflowing Mississippi River. French engineers have simulated hauling an iceberg to barren Africa. There are even megatrash bags to move heavy loads of water. There’s certainly plenty of rainwater available. Tropical Storm Lee dumped enough on the already saturated Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and Gulf Coast to bring 9.6 inches of rain across the entire state of Texas, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and The Associated Press. “One man’s flood control is another man’s water supply,” said Patricia Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “Doesn’t it make you want to think about a larger distribution that helps both? That’s the crazy part of this. It’s a win-win. There’s no loser.” But moving vast quantities of water is not simple or cheap, and thus not realistic, experts say. Mostly, it’s too costly and political. However, these dreamed-up concepts show that a quiet water crisis is getting more desperate. “We will go to any lengths to avoid confronting the reality of water shortages,” said University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon, author of the book “Unquenchable.” “What all those zany ideas sug-
gest are the traditional beliefs that we can control nature and there must be some oasis out there where we can go to, to import water.” But those are mirages, he said — tempting, but not realistic. Mike Halpert, deputy director of the NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, knows the temptation. He’s about to fly from Washington, which has had 7 inches since Monday, to Houston, which got about that amount of rain for the entire spring and summer. All that D.C. rain would be enough water for every person in Houston for 10 days. He jested that he would love to carry water in his suitcases. He said colleagues have been “joking that we’ll send Texas our water. Will they send us their oil? But I don’t think that’s going to fly.” The trouble with water is “there’s enough quantity but it is not always in the right places,” said G. Tracy Mehan, who was chief water regulator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Administration during the George W. Bush Administration. So how about moving it? “The short answer ... is that it costs too much. It’s not a technical problem,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Studies Institute and a MacArthur genius grant recipient for his work on water. Las Vegas’ grand proposal is to take water from the mighty Mississippi in a series of smaller pipeline-like exchanges among states just west of the Mississippi to refill the overused Colorado River. There are no official cost estimates, but it likely would be in the hundreds of billions dollars. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens abandoned his plans for a massive water pipeline stretching across Texas to just moving water around the Texas Panhandle.
10 years later, Maine’s flag ladies still waving
Saturday, September 10, 2011
In this Aug. 30, 2011 photo, farmer's fields are still flooded in this aerial view of Rutland, Vt.
Water weighs a lot — about 8.3 pounds per gallon — so moving massive amounts, often up mountains, costs a lot, Glennon said. Gleick notes that conservation and efficiency are cheaper. Building a pipeline to pump water from flooded areas is foolish because each year it is somewhere different that gets drenched, so you can’t build something permanent based on a couple of years’ unusual rainy weather, NOAA’s Halpert said. For purely moving water, Gleick likes a smaller-scale concept: the trash bag. A California firm has designed Spragg Bags “with the world’s strongest zippers” that haul millions of gallons of drinking water from one place to another over the ocean, said inventor Terry Spragg. It’s been used in Greece. When asked the cost to haul excess water by bag from the flooded Northeast to Texas, Spragg declined to say. “It just wouldn’t be practical. It’s just too distant... Forget about taking it from New Jersey or Pennsylvania, there are
sources that are closer.” If you want to go high-tech for water, desalination — taking salt out of ocean water — and reusing wastewater for drinking water are cheaper and more realistic, said Gleick, author of the book “Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.” In Big Spring, Texas, they are looking at reusing wastewater by treating it and then adding it to the fresh water supply. Orange County, Calif., has a state-of-theart water recycling program. And on the International Space Station astronauts use a system that turns their urine into drinkable water. Tampa has a new $158 million water desalination plant that can produce as much as 25 million gallons of water a day from the sea. While those who need more water say the challenge is just a matter of balancing out too much and too little, other experts say there is a bigger problem: 1 billion people on Earth don’t have clean drinking water.
“Absolutely there’s a water crisis, but it means different things in different places,” Gleick said. “In Africa, it’s people dying because they don’t have safe drinking water. In Texas, it means people at risk and property being damaged because there’s a natural drought. In some places, it might mean not enough water to make semiconductors and grow food. “Nature always distributes water unevenly — that’s just the way it goes,” Gleick said. In the 20th century in the United States, the answer to water shortages was to drill another well, tap another aquifer, build more dams, divert more rivers and build pipelines, Gleick said. But now “we’re running into limits.” University of Colorado natural hazards professor Kathleen Tierney put it more bluntly: “As we say in Colorado, whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.”
Have waved the American flag every Tuesday morning since 9/11 to support U.S. troops in the war against terrorism.
FREEPORT, Maine (AP) — Three days after 9/11, Elaine Greene held an American flag above her on a busy street corner in this small Maine town. Since then, she and two other women have waved the flag on the same corner for an hour every Tuesday in honor of America’s service personnel and to show that the American spirit is alive and kicking. Changed forever by the 2001 terror attacks, Greene, JoAnn Miller and Carmen Footer have devoted their lives to inspiring others through the flag. Dressed in stars-and-stripes shirts, they are a familiar sight, proudly holding their 3-foot-by-5-foot flags on poles as motorists honk their horns and shout words of encouragement. To mark the 10th anniversary of the attacks, the Freeport Flag Ladies, as they are known, have organized three days of vigils, concerts, a laser light show, a parade and other events. For two hours Sunday morning, they will be in their usual place, holding flags while flanked by Maine’s two U.S. senators, a U.S. representative, the governor and the head of the Maine National Guard. Before 9/11, the three weren’t particularly patriotic. But they’ve come to see the good that can come from even a seemingly small gesture like proudly holding the U.S. flag. Greene wasn’t even sure if picking up a flag was the right thing to do on Sept. 14, 2001, when President George W. Bush asked Americans to hold candlelight vigils. But when she did, she saw the strain on people’s faces melt away as they drove by, beeped their horns and yelled out “God Bless America.” “You knew then that you could do something,” Greene said this week in the house she
OBITUARY
Dr. Bob Nine
Dr. Bob Floyd Nine, 73, of Roswell, New Mexico, passed away Sept. 8, 2011, at Roswell Regional Hospital in Roswell. Services will be held Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011, at 4 p.m. at Grace Community Church in Roswell. A graveside service will be held Monday, Sept. 12, 2011, at 11 a.m. in South Park Cemetery in Roswell. Nine was born June 11,
In this Tuesday, Aug. 23, photo, the Freeport Flag Ladies, wave to cars in Freeport, Maine. shares with Miller and Footer. “You knew then that the American people realized within their own spirit that we’re going to be OK, we’re going to get through this and that the American spirit wasn’t dead. It just got injured a little bit.” Since then, the women have showed up every Tuesday — the attacks took place on a Tuesday — at the corner of Main and School streets with flags in hand. They haven’t missed a day, braving hot summer sun, blizzards, nor’easters and thunderstorms with lightning. Greene once checked herself out of a hospital following surgery against a doctor’s orders so she’d be there, even if it was in a wheelchair. The doctor wanted her stay at the hospital for six days, but she left after three. “I didn’t have six days. Tuesday was coming up,” she said. Over the years, they’ve also shown up at Bangor International Airport and New Hampshire’s Pease International in support of troops going to and from Afghanistan and Iraq. For their efforts, service personnel have sent
1938, in Shattuck, Okla., to Floyd and Rhea Nine. He married his wife Judith, Aug. 2, 1959, in Shattuck. He received his doctorate degree in podiatry. Nine lived in Roswell for the past 40 years and opened the Roswell Foot Clinic. He served as the past president of the New Mexico Podiatry Association and was a Free Mason. He is preceded in death by parents Floyd and Rhea
Nine, and grandson Mathew Lance Nine. Those left to cherish his memory are his wife Judith Nine, of Roswell; brothers, Lonnie Nine, of Monett, Mo., and Arthur and Linda Nine, of Gage, Okla.; sons, Jef f Nine, of Lockhart, Texas, and Mark and Cyndi Nine, of Carrollton, Texas; daughters, Amanda and David Turner, of Rockwall, Texas, and Bobetta and Shawn Jackson, of Col-
AP Photo
them flags flown on missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. One flag that flew on the bottom side of helicopter in Iraq has a bullet hole from enemy combatants who fired at it. Sen. Susan Collins sent them flags flown in their honor over ground zero, over the Pentagon and over the field in Pennsylvania where one of the four planes crashed on 9/11. Sen. Olympia Snowe sent them flags flown over the Capitol in their honor. Greene is 65, Miller is 74 and Footer is 69. Each is retired, but being part of the Freeport Flag Ladies keeps them busy. Their website gets 250,000 to 1 million hits a month. They send out an email message with inspirational words every Tuesday that goes to 3,600 people. In the corner of one room in their home stands an artificial Christmas tree, holding scores of patriotic ornaments sent to them from people around the country. They have vowed to not take down the tree until the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over. When that happens, they all agree it will be a good day.
orado Springs, Colo.; grandchildren, Justin and Sarah Nine, of Lubbock, Texas, Joshua Nine, of Ada, Okla., Brandon, Brent and Brooke Nine, of Carrollton, Meghan, Rachel and Merrin Turner, of Rockwall, and Erin and Austin Jackson, of Colorado Springs. Serving as pallbearers are Justin Nine, Josh Nine, Brandon Nine, Brent Nine, Austin Jackson, Shawn Jackson and David Turner.
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Honorary pallbearers are Charlie McVay, Roy Stovall, Howard Jones, Dr. Darlo VanderWilt, Dr. Coyle DeMoss and Mark McClellan. Please take a moment to share your thoughts and memories in the online register book at andersonbethany.com. Arrangements are under the direction of Anderson Bethany Funeral Home and Crematory.
Eatery sues over ‘Animal Carcass’ listing
HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana restaurant listed in the phone book under “Animal Carcass Removal” became the butt of a Jay Leno joke earlier this year, but it’s no laughing matter to the owner now suing the publishing company over the business he’s lost. Hunter Lacey says in his lawsuit that business at his Bar 3 Bar-B-Q restaurants in Bozeman and nearby Belgrade has dropped off since the Dex Media Inc. listing and that his brand and reputation have gone down the tubes. The listing first appeared in 2009 in the yellow pages of Dex’s telephone book under the “Animal Carcass Removal” section. Lacey said he first found out about it when the calls started coming into the restaurants. “It was a series of phone calls for several weeks where it was either people in ear nest asking us to come and remove carcasses or prank calls,” Lacey said.
PUBLIC RECORDS
Marriage Licenses
September 7 Edward Avitia, 40, and Mia F. Ramon, 34, both of Roswell. William A. Ragsdale, 24, and Jennifer M. Thompson, 24, both of Roswell. September 8 Antonio Robert Martinez, 27, and Fuf fy Nicole Riggan, 28, both of Midland. Luis Jurado, 45, and Delma Lee Luna, 43, both of Dexter. Eric Allan Watson, 26, and Delfina M. Miller, 22, both of Artesia. Abraham Balderrama Her nandez, 23, and Yoshimi Nannette Mata, 16, both of Roswell.