UNESCO Water Conference at USF Emphasizes Sustainability
A group of researchers is coming up with ways to make sure that people in the Tampa Bay area and throughout the world continue to have enough usable water. During an international research institute conference at USF this week [May 23-25], water experts mulled ways to keep water from becoming a scarce commodity.
Tampa Bay Water’s water quality assurance officer Christine Owen said the region’s water deficit until 2009 was more than 70 million gallons. Now they are implementing ways of getting more water from more places.
“We’ve developed alternative supplies – is a step in that process.”
Those alternatives include a desalination plant to tap into the salt water that surrounds Pinellas County and state of the art surface water treatment facility. The director of the School of Global Sustainability at USF, Kalanithy Vairavamoorthy, said an ideal water system would only treat water to the level consistent with its use.
Continued...