As residents of Toledo, Ohio, and the surrounding region recover from a weekend without access to usable tap water — the fault of a toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie — the crisis has set off new calls for stricter rules on the use the fertilizers that help contribute to the blooms. The algae bloom set off alarms on Saturday, causing authorities to impose a ban on the use of the city’s tap water, which comes from Lake Erie, affecting more than 400,000 people in Toledo... — Al Jazeera

Sprinkling city parks with recycled water may create a breeding ground for hard-to-treat microbes [...] Even after the recycled water is treated in a sewage plant, it may carry microbes, drug-resistance genes and antibiotics that had washed down the drain. Sprayed into the environment, that water can spread microbes that could cause difficult-to-treat infections, the researchers say. — Science News

The world will face “insurmountable” water crises in less than three decades, researchers said Tuesday, if it does not move away from water-intensive power production.

A clash of competing necessities — drinking water and energy demand — will cause widespread drought unless action is taken soon [...]

“There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we’re doing today,” researcher Benjamin Sovacool, director of the Center for Energy Technology at Aarhus University said... Tuesday. — Al Jazeera

The rupture of the 90-year-old main sent a geyser shooting 30 feet in the air and deluged Sunset Boulevard and UCLA with 8 million to 10 million gallons of water before it was shut off more than three hours after the pipe burst, city officials said.

The huge break blanketed parts of the campus with water and mud, leaving school officials with a daunting cleanup task. City officials said they had not determined what caused the 30-inch-diameter pipe to burst. — LA Times

Forty-seven miles of the 400-mile California Aqueduct could have their flow reversed this summer to bring water to dry Central California districts with dangerously low supplies, reports KQED. As this megadrought's persisted and worsened, it's come to light that many water districts, especially the smaller ones, haven't had the chance (read: the money) to stockpile water as we do here in SoCal. — la.curbed.com

Dutch water-management experts have done such a good job of protecting their country that they rarely get to practice with water crises — whereas America was facing something monumental that as a culture it didn’t yet grasp. When Donovan arrived back in the U.S., he opened an email from Ovink that said, in effect, “I hope this isn’t too forward, but could I come work with you?” — nytimes.com

Designed for the Atlantic resort Ocean City on the coast of Maryland, "OCEAN+CITY" by Will Belcher, Joey Hays, Chris Landau, and Henry Moll is an entry the team submitted to this year's ONE Prize: Stormproof competition.

Participants in the international competition had to propose smartly designed resilient cities ready to face the challenges of severe climate conditions. — bustler.net

The Freedom Ship would be home to 50,000 people and have its own airport, casinos and shopping centers. The Florida-based company behind the city of the sea says it is hopeful it can raise the $1 billion needed to begin construction on the massive vessel. — nydailynews.com

Daniel (Zhicheng) Xu, an undergraduate at Purdue University, recently won the ASLA 2013 Student Awards - Award of Excellence in the Analysis and Planning Category for his project "Natural Water as Cultural Water / A 30 Year Plan for Wabash River Corridor in Lafayette."

The project is a stormwater management plan to achieve ecological and cultural resilience for the poor landscape conditions of the Wabash River in Lafayette, Indiana. — bustler.net

[...] officials viewed a tunnel plug under development by ILC Dover, a Department of Homeland Security vendor and supplier to NASA, to protect subway portals where grade level tracks transition to underground subways.

If successfully tested, the MTA hopes the technology could be applied to portals and stairwell locations throughout the system. The tunnel plug demonstrated inside the station is not designed for use inside the subway system, Cuomo's office said. — silive.com

The harbor-front project "Kalvebod Waves" officially opened on Aug. 30 at the Kalvebod Pier [...] in Copenhagen. The design by Julien de Smedt Architects and KLAR with support from Sloth Møller and Niras Engineers won first prize in a competition from December 2008. Not far from the popular Islands Brygge Park in the city, Kalvebod Waves is the latest phase of a long-term plan that aims to revive a formerly desolate section of the pier into a welcoming hub for urban and water activities. — bustler.net

How does one apply 21st century green design to a city with sites and structures dating from the 17th to 19th centuries? That was exactly the challenge for teams in the Infill Philadelphia: Soak It Up design competition, and on March 7, 2013, nine finalist teams presented proposals to address the need for affordable green design within Philadelphia at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. — bustler.net

Winning projects in three categories have been announced in Gowanus by Design's latest competition, WATER_WORKS. The brief called for solutions specific to Brooklyn's Gowanus area that simultaneously explored the role of water in recreation, quotidian uses, and in contaminated urban environments, and demonstrated how a redesigned community center and retention facility represent a more progressive view of the city's infrastructure. — bustler.net

A brand new green building project is set to become one of the world’s most sustainable commercial office builds not for the new and innovative technology it has implemented but for the unique approach to green building the developers have taken. — DesignBuild Source