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WaterNews for May 28, 2003G. Tracy Mehan, III WaterNews is a weekly on-line publication that announces publications, policies, and activities of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water. Inside this week’s WaterNews
EPA Awards Water Security Training GrantsAs part of EPA’s initiative to help small drinking water utilities assess their vulnerabilities to terrorism, EPA Assistant Administrator for Water G. Tracy Mehan, III announced the awarding of $1.5 million in grants for Water Security Training and Assistance to five nonprofit training and technical assistance organizations. The program is authorized under the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002. The grant recipients are:
Grant funds, up to $300,000 per organization, will be used to support "Train-the-Trainer" efforts to build staff expertise in drinking water security and then provide no-cost training to state, tribal, or local agencies that assist drinking water systems. The ultimate goal of this program is to provide a resource pool of trained professionals and trainers who can deliver training and technical assistance to drinking water systems serving populations of less than 50,000 people. The training sites and dates will be announced. For more information on EPA’s water infrastructure security efforts go to http://www.epa.gov/safewater/security/ Low Impact Development Plans Move Forward at EPA HeadquartersEPA Headquarters in Washington, DC is moving forward with plans to "green-up" its newly consolidated home in the historic Federal Triangle Complex near the National Mall. Beginning on May 22, visitors and employees will notice new low maintenance plants such as native wildflowers and nitrogen-fixing groundcover (specifically, red and white clover) adorning portions of EPA’s Federal Triangle Complex. This is the first phase in a larger project to use this federal space to showcase low impact development (LID) practices such as green roofs, cisterns, bioretention cells, rain gardens, and permeable pavers. The project is also intended to demonstrate that sustainable design and LID can be utilized in high profile urban sites that must pass through rigorous aesthetic design reviews. EPA hopes that this project will also serve as a model for the federal community and will demonstrate many of the practices that can be used to lesson the effects of stormwater runoff and reduce sewage overflows into our nation’s waters. More information is available at www.epa.gov/owow/nps/lid/stormwater_hq. Multinational Delegation Visits EPAA group of nearly a dozen water program managers from various municipal, area and national program offices in Malawi, St. Lucia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Russia visited EPA’s Office of International Affairs on May 13. The visitors received an hour long presentation on the Safe Drinking Water Act programs and authorities, followed by a lively discussion session. For more information, please contact George Hoessel at 202-564-3816. More than 500 Local Students Attended the Anacostia River FestivalThe Office of Water participated in Washington D.C.'s annual Anacostia River Environmental Fair held on May 9. 2003. This marks the sixth year that EPA has participated The fair was an outdoors exhibition featuring a variety of hands-on water education and environmental activities for school children in grades five through twelve. The Office of Water helped students build an "aquifer in a cup" to learn how aquifers store water, how ground water becomes contaminated, and how contamination may end up in a drinking water source. For more information, please contact Harriet Hubbard at 202-564-4621. May is National Wetlands MonthVisit www.epa.gov homepage to read the Wetlands story "Ten Tips to Protect Wetlands." Assistant Administrator for Water Gives Keynote Address at National MeetingAssistant Administrator G.Tracy Mehan, III was a keynote speaker at the National Floodplain Managers convention in St. Louis, Mo. on May 15 at the Adams Mark Hotel. More than 900 engineers and experts in this field heard him speak. He was interviewed live on KMOX Radio and KTRS Radio in St. Louis as well NBC affiliate KSDK-TV Channel 5. Subscribe to WaterNewsPlease forward this message to your friends and colleagues who share an interest in water-related issues and would like to hear from EPA's Office of Water. To subscribe to the WaterNews listserve: Send an email message, leave the subject line blank, and address it to: In the body of the message write: Subscribe WaterNews firstname lastname (Please leave one blank space between each word, do not include any other message, and use A welcome message will appear in your email box once you are officially subscribed. Following your welcome message, you will begin to receive WaterNews once a week. If you encounter difficulties subscribing to this list server or if you would like to be taken off the WaterNews list server at any time, please send your E-mail address to Gloria Posey at Posey.Gloria@epa.gov. We welcome any comments that you may have.
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