Virginia doesn’t have a megadrought like some parts of the United States, but it has water problems all the same: Homes and businesses in the Hampton Roads region, in the southeastern corner of the state, are drawing groundwater faster than it can be replenished. The situation has gotten so bad that the earth is sinking in some places.
Officials, though, think they might have found a solution in the sewers. Every day, the region’s sanitation system takes a million gallons of treated wastewater and pumps it back into the Potomac Aquifer, a major source of drinking water for the area. And there are plans to increase that to 100 million gallons.
Around the country, cities and towns are increasingly turning to treated wastewater to augment their supplies of drinking water. The number of drinking-water reuse projects has quadrupled according to data collected by the National Alliance for Water Innovation, a research program funded by the United States Department of Energy.
“It is now necessary for us to consider options that would, in previous generations, be considered unthinkable,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/climate/treated-sewage-virginia-aquifer.html
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