After a fire, before a flood: NASA's Landsat directs restoration to at-risk areas

NASA: While the 138,000-acre Silver Fire still smoldered, forest restoration specialists were on the job. They analyzed maps created using Landsat satellite data to determine where the burn destroyed vegetation and exposed soil – and where to focus emergency restoration efforts. "The map looked like a big red blob," said Penny Luehring, the U.S. Forest Service's Burned Area Emergency Response and watershed improvement program leader, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

The "before" image (left) is a false-color Landsat 8 image acquired May 28, 2013. The "during" image was acquired, June 13, 2013, while the New Mexico Silver Fire was still growing. (The white puffs with black shadows in the right image are clouds.)

Red means high-severity fire, she explained – and the red areas were concentrated in a watershed drainage that fed communities west of Las Cruces, N.M. So crews got to work. The Burned Area Emergency Response, or BAER, teams are designed to go in as soon as the flames die down to help protect reservoirs, watersheds and infrastructure from post-fire floods and erosion. And Landsat satellites, built by NASA and operated by the U.S. Geological Survey, help direct the crews to those forest areas needing attention.

As a wildfire starts to die down, fire managers like Luehring can contact the Forest Service's Remote Sensing Applications Center in Salt Lake City to request maps that identify the high, moderate and low severity burns. When that call comes in, remote sensing specialist Carl Albury finds satellite imagery of the burned forest both pre- and post-fire. In Landsat images, he looks at two of the 11 spectral bands – the near-infrared band and a short-wave infrared band.

"The near infrared reflects well from healthy vegetation, and the short-wave infrared bands reflect well from exposed ground," Albury said. "By comparing the normalized ratio of the near- and shortwave-infrared bands in the pre-fire image to the post-fire image, we can estimate the burn severity."

Before and after images of the New Mexico Silver Fire, from NASA

Papaya-clay combo could cut cost of water purification in developing countries

American Chemical Society: An inexpensive new material made of clay and papaya seeds removes harmful metals from water and could lower the cost of providing clean water to millions of people in the developing world, scientists are reporting. Their study on this “hybrid clay” appears in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Emmanuel Unuabonah and colleagues explain that almost 1 billion people in developing countries lack access to reliable supplies of clean water for drinking, cooking and other key uses. One health problem resulting from that shortage involves exposure to heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury, released from industrial sources into the water. Technology exists for removing those metals from drinking water, but often is too costly in developing countries. So these scientists looked for a more affordable and sustainable water treatment adsorbent.

They turned to two materials readily available in some developing countries. One was kaolinite clay, used to make ceramics, paint, paper and other products. The other: seeds of the Carica papaya fruit. Both had been used separately in water purification in the past, but until now, they had not been combined in what the scientists term “hybrid clay.” Their documentation of the clay’s effectiveness established that the material “has a strong potential for replacing commercial activated carbon in treatment of wastewater in the developing world.”...

Drainage ditches can help clean up field runoff

Ann Perry in USDA News: Vegetated drainage ditches can help capture pesticide and nutrient loads in field runoff, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists report. These ditches—as common in the country as the fields they drain—give farmers a low-cost alternative for managing agricultural pollutants and protecting natural resources.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) ecologist Matt Moore at the agency's National Sedimentation Laboratory in Oxford, Miss., and his colleagues conducted the research. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency.

Until recently, the primary function of many edge-of-field ditches was to provide a passage for channeling excess water from crop fields. Many farmers controlled ditch vegetation with trimming or dredging to eliminate plant barriers that could impede the flow of runoff.

But in one of Moore's first studies, he evaluated the transport and capture of the herbicide atrazine and the insecticide lambda-cyhalothrin for 28 days in a 160-foot section of a vegetated agricultural drainage ditch in Mississippi. One hour after he started a simulated runoff event, 61 percent of the atrazine and 87 percent of the lambda-cyhalothrin had transferred from the water to the ditch vegetation. At the end of the ditch, runoff pesticide concentrations had decreased to levels that were generally non-toxic to downstream aquatic fauna....

USDA photo: ARS ecologist Matt Moore has found that vegetated drainage ditches can be a low cost way for farmers to capture pesticides and excess nutrients in runoff from fields.

Earthworms soak up heavy metal

EurekAlert: Earthworms could be used to extract toxic heavy metals, including cadmium and lead, from solid waste from domestic refuse collection and waste from vegetable and flower markets, according to researchers writing in the International Journal of Environment and Waste Management.

Swati Pattnaik and M. Vikram Reddy of the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, at Pondicherry University, in Puducherry, India, explain how three species of earthworm, Eudrilus eugeniae, Eisenia fetida and Perionyx excavates can be used to assist in the composting of urban waste and to extract heavy metals, cadmium, copper, lead, manganese, zinc, prior to subsequent processing.

With rapid increases in urban populations particularly in the developing world, there is a growing problem of how to manage organic waste and to find alternatives to landfill disposal particularly for domestic food waste and that from vegetable markets. According to the research team, it is an unfortunate fact of life that much of this waste is currently dumped on the outskirts of many towns and cities and is causing serious pollution, disease risk and general ecological harm. It also represents a considerable wasted resource, whereas the organic matter might be exploited usefully in growing food crops.

The process of vermicomposting in this way allows such waste materials to be remediated and the compost used subsequently for use in growing human food without the risk of accumulating heavy metals in crops. The team says that up to about three-quarters of the various heavy metals can be removed by the worms from solid waste. The E. eugeniae species was the most effective worm at remediating solid waste and producing rich compost. The team's tests on vermicomposting reveal that the heavy metal content of such waste can be reduced to levels significantly below the permissible safe limits....

A worm in salt marsh

Dam removal in New Jersey

Environment News Service: New Jersey has negotiated removal of three dams on the Raritan River as compensation to the public for harm to natural resources from pollution at a refinery and three polymer plants operated by or affiliated with the Houston-based El Paso Corporation. Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin announced today that El Paso will finance and carry out removal of the dams under a settlement agreement between the state and the company.

The dam removals will open a 10-mile stretch of the river to fish migrations for the first time in more than a century and expand recreational opportunities along the river. None of the dams were built for flood control. "This unique and unprecedented settlement will make valuable habitat in the Raritan River available for fish spawning while improving overall environmental conditions in the river system," Commissioner Martin said.

"In addition, dam removal will make it easier for kayakers, canoeists, and other lovers of the outdoors to enjoy a river system that has been undergoing a steady and impressive ecological comeback over the years," Martin said.

Dam removal will open up a stretch of the river that winds through a diverse residential, commercial and agricultural portion of Somerset County that includes Bridgewater, Bound Brook, Somerville and Manville. It will also open up about 17 miles of Raritan tributaries to spawning….

The Raritan River in Clinton, New Jersey. It's unclear whether the dam in this photo is one of those slated for removal. Shot by Ekem, who released it into the public domain

A technical solution for Hungary's toxic spill

Terra Daily: Hungary's toxic sludge spill is being called one of Europe's top three environmental disasters of the past few decades. On October 4, an enormous chemical-filled reservoir maintained by an Alumina plant in Ajka, western Hungary, ruptured, inundating several villages with nearly 200 million gallons of toxic sludge. Immediately upon hearing of the spill, CBI Polymers, a Hawaii-based company that specializes in a unique decontamination product called DeconGel, began coordinating with US Department of Commerce representatives and the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, to assist with the disaster relief efforts.

Within hours of the toxic spill, the surge had killed four people, injured dozens more and left thousands homeless. In its wake remains a poisonous path of caustic alkali that can burn skin on contact, damage the lungs when inhaled, and can damage the digestive system, or be fatal if ingested. When news of the disaster reached CBI Polymers President Larry Stack, he responded immediately.

"As a company committed to environmental protection and humanitarian assistance, it was important for us to help with the Hungarian disaster," Stack said. "DeconGel was made specifically for this type of crisis and it was critical for us to be on the ground to assess the situation quickly." CBI Polymers' Vice President Robert Harrison was promptly dispatched to the affected regions.

…CBI's DeconGel, a high-tech decontamination solution that requires no water to use, has been shown to remove 99.7% of Alumina from bare concrete as determined by Inductively Coupled Plasma - Optical Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-OES) in laboratory analysis. DeconGel is also effective on contaminants such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury and chromium-all hazardous elements found in the sludge. Harrison and Papp met with the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Devecser, who approved a test-application of DeconGel. After the gel dried, the group returned to the test site and began the process of decontamination….

An aerial view of the sludge spill, from the Hungarian government

Can Hungary's red sludge be made less toxic with carbon?

Indiana University News: The red, metal-laden sludge that escaped a containment pond in Hungary last week could be made less toxic with the help of carbon sequestration, says an Indiana University Bloomington geologist who has a patent pending on the technique.

The bauxite residue now covers 40 square kilometers south of the Danube River, and has caused the deaths of eight Hungarians and injured at least 150. The residue also has caused the extinction of life in a local river and as yet unknown environmental damage elsewhere. While human deaths in the wake of the disaster may have been strictly a result of the containment failure, injuries have mostly been attributed to the chemical properties of the sludge, whose high pH (between 11 and 13) can quickly damage and kill living cells. Bauxite residue is between 10,000 and 1,000,000 times more basic than pure water, which has a pH around 7.

"We propose one way to reduce the pH of bauxite residue is to mix it with another kind of industrial waste -- oil-field brine, which is a by-product of oil and gas production -- and then carbon dioxide," said IU Bloomington geologist Chen Zhu, who submitted a U.S. Department of Energy patent application in 2007 describing the technique.

The water-based brine provides the medium for carbon dioxide to dissolve. Once dissolved, the carbon dioxide can chemically react with water to form carbonic acid. The carbonic acid counteracts some of the red mud's alkalinity, and what's left -- the negatively charged carbonate -- can serve as a partner for positively charged metal ions, such as iron, calcium and magnesium. Some of these salts spontaneously precipitate out of solution, which is a good thing, since the metals in these salts will longer will be free to interact with, say, living matter….

A NASA image of the area surrounding the toxic sludge spill in Hungary. The alumina plant appears along the right edge of the image and incorporates both bright blue and brick red reservoirs.

Regenerating contaminated land without heavy machinery

Edie.net: A unique method for cleaning contaminated land was explained in detail at BEX part of Sustainabilitylive! Jeremy Birnstingl, managing director of Regenesis Ltd, said at his seminar 'Applying the principles of environmental good practice to remediation product design' how contamination can be quickly and easily cleaned.

His company, a Bristol based off-shoot of a much larger American parent company, manufactures the HRC, HRC-X abd HRC-Primer products used for cleaning contamination from land near to buildings or even from directly underneath them. The products can be used for cleaning a number of contaminates but are most often used and are most effective at cleaning chlorinated organics….

Collecting drainage in the Iron Mountain Mine, Redding California