How scientists are using drones to lower the risk of catastrophic flooding from large glacial lake

Author: Rodrigo Narro Pérez, PhD Candidate, School of Earth, Environment and Society, McMaster University

Early in the morning on Dec. 13, 1941, the citizens of Huaraz, Peru, heard a terrifying rumble echo across the valley. Within minutes, a torrent of water, ice and rocks had poured over the city, destroying a third of it and killing at least 2,000 people.

The natural dam of rocks and loose sediment that had held back Lake Palcacocha had failed. Eighty years later, its collapse remains one of Peru’s most tragic natural disasters.

This type of catastrophic event is known as a “glacial lake outburst flood.” Glacial lakes, such as those found throughout the Cordillera Blanca in the Andean mountain range, are often dammed by glacial moraines that can reach heights of over 100 metres. They are impressive, but they are often unstable.

Heavy rainfall and rock, snow or ice avalanches can raise water levels in moraine-dammed glacial lakes, generating waves that overtop the moraine dam or cause it to collapse, releasing huge amounts of water. These natural disasters are only expected to become more common in Peru — and around the world as climate warming melts glaciers at historically unprecedented rates.

Predicting future floods

This dark history has spurred international research into the stability of the moraines damming Peru’s glacial lakes. The Cordillera Blanca in northern Peru contains the highest concentration of tropical glaciers in the world. Predicting when these outburst floods will occur — and how destructive they will be — is of enormous concern to the over 320,000 people who live downstream.

Geological engineering models use variables such as the size and volume of the lake, height, width and slope of the moraine dam, and channel and valley dimensions to estimate the stability of the moraine dam and the risk of flood. Unfortunately, these models don’t include much information about the composition of the moraine dam, which can vary signifcantly depending on on its location and mode of formation.

My research, part of a collaboration between McMaster University and Peru’s National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems (INAIGEM), focuses on establishing the origin of these moraine dams and the physical characteristics of the dams and the lakes they hold back. These features can have considerable influence on the stability of the dam and its potential for failure.

Using UAV to understand the structure of moraine dams

Glaciers create moraines by transporting, depositing and pushing boulders, sands and fine-grained silts and clays along the valley floor and adjacent valley walls, often forming a barrier. But one moraine may be much more stable than another, depending on the materials it contains and how it is formed.

Water may leak through weak points in the moraine’s stacked layers, taking sediment with it, or loose rocks may fall after a disturbance such as an earthquake. These weak points make a complete collapse of the moraine dam more likely. Locating these weak points is an important step in predicting the stability of the lake dams and can allow geoscientists and engineers to design more effective remediation strategies.

My colleagues and I are analyzing the architecture of large lateral moraines, which form along the sides of glaciers, in southern Iceland using un-crewed aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) to collect high-resolution images. We use these images to identify and classify areas of coarse- and fine-grained sediment that may form zones of water leakage and sediment removal and cause the dam to fail. We’ve planned similar high resolution UAV surveys of moraine dams in the Cordillera Blanca for early 2022.

The research will enhance the reliability of predictive models to identify potential glacial lake flood hazards. It will also identify areas where remediation work, such as the building of additional outlet channels or armoured barriers, is most needed to strengthen the moraine.

This will be particularly important as glaciers melt more quickly, the volume of water held by these natural moraine dams builds, and the destructive power of floods also continues to increase. A recent study by researchers at the University of Calgary showed that the volume of water in glacial lakes has increased by 50 per cent globally since 1990.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, an estimated 165 moraine-dammed glacial lake outburst floods have occurred. In addition, approximately 12,000 deaths worldwide can be attributed directly to glacier floods.

Our research in Peru will provide new insights into moraine dam stability that can be applied to other regions, such as Bolivia, the Himalayas and the Canadian Rockies, which are also experiencing an increased risk of glacial lake outburst floods as climate warming continues to melt glaciers.

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This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article:

https://theconversation.com/how-scientists-are-using-drones-to-lower-the-risk-of-catastrophic-flooding-from-large-glacial-lakes-158689

Rodrigo Narro Pérez, PhD Candidate, School of Earth, Environment and Society, McMaster University, The Conversation

Rodrigo Naro Perez receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in the form of a SGS D scholarship.

Why agriculture, not AI, will secure Canada's place in the post-pandemic world order

Kevin Carmichael 
POSTMEDIA

JUNE 7,2021


Canada could yet breed a stable of unicorns that shows the wild success of Shopify Inc. isn’t a fluke, but a smart bettor wouldn’t put money on it. There’s too much risk, history argues against it and the landscape is already dominated by better players. It would be like a wager on the Toronto Maple Leafs getting past the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs (smirk).

© Provided by Financial Post Agriculture is perhaps the one industry in which Canada will have obvious comparative advantages in the future.

But if not in digital technology, where might Canada make a mark in a post-pandemic world full of angst over the climate and the ability of the United States and China to get along? Answer: Food. Artificial intelligence gets all the press, but agriculture holds more promise, since it is perhaps the one industry in which Canada will have obvious comparative advantages in the future.


For one thing, Canada’s growing season will get longer as climate change makes agriculture in some parts of the world impossible. Our reputation for being nice might finally become an advantage in global business, because who buys dinner from someone they distrust?

Becoming one of the world’s primary sources of food might even be enough to give us a say on how the world is run. China controls about nine per cent of the world’s arable land, but has to feed about 20 per cent of the population. It is going to need some help and it might have to take seriously those countries responsible for an outsized share of the world’s nutrition.

Food is the new oil, even if most of the world — including, remarkably, Canada — hasn’t realized it yet.

“Canada’s agri-food system has a significant comparative advantage, but it is not being leveraged to maximize outcomes,” a report last month by the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute (CAPI), an Ottawa-based research group, concluded . “Strategies need to be developed to leverage the assets the agri-food system has today and the advantages it will have in 20-30 years.”

Christopher Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., offered a similar assessment of Canada on May 11 at a virtual conference hosted by CAPI. He was enthusiastic about the country’s potential as an agri-food power, but observed it comes up short, in part, because it has been content to grow raw ingredients and ship them elsewhere for processing, which is where most of the value is created. It’s like choosing to be poor.

“Without food security, you don’t have anything,” Ted Bilyea, a former Maple Leaf Foods Inc. executive and CAPI’s chief strategy officer, said in an interview. “The Canadian government needs to be more strategic. No one wants to look at agriculture like a system.”

Strategic thinking means breaking down silos. Multiple cabinet ministers should be involved, not just the agriculture minister. The various farm lobbies need to get over their jealousies and try harder to work together. The same applies to the processors, grocers and transportation companies. Universities and colleges must be present, because research and development is the engine of innovation.

The effort might be anchored on the goal of neutralizing carbon pollution. Agriculture is responsible for about 10 per cent of global emissions, but Canada’s farmers and processors are greener than many of their peers, since they account for about eight per cent of Canadian emissions, according to Bilyea. That suggests they could be part of the solution to climate change, giving the industry a comparative advantage as the world’s biggest economies strive to meet net-zero goals.

Of course, the various agriculture ministers, farmers and processors would be unable to take full advantage of that opportunity without help. Importantly, they need the support of a trade minister who backs open commerce, not tit-for-tat protectionism. If the connection to the environment isn’t obvious, consider what would happen if a trade war between China and the G7 powers led the former to purchase all its grain from Brazil, a country that has had little difficulty razing the Amazon rainforest to make room for more farmland. Global commodity markets stuffed with Canadian cereals are good for the environment.

Farmers would need to be at the cutting edge of innovation, so they would need easy access to the newest research and technology. That means governments should reinvest in extension services that were decimated by the deep budget cuts of the 1990s. The final piece would be figuring out why Canada has created so few globally significant food companies, because, ultimately, it is the processors that generate most of the value and wield much of the clout.

“Processing gives you leverage,” Bilyea said.

It all makes so much sense, and yet there is little evidence the agricultural establishment is even close to getting its act together. Consider the dairy industry. It suffered consecutive blows in recent years, as the federal government was forced to make space for more dairy imports to gain admittance to important trade agreements with the European Union and 10 Asian nations, and to keep former U.S. president Donald Trump from wrecking the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The beating appeared to persuade the public servants, lobbyists and politicians who set the parameters for Canada’s highly regulated dairy industry that the time had come to take a hard look at the system. Lawrence MacAulay, who was agriculture minister when the North American trade pact was signed, promised at the time to set up a “working group” that would “chart a path forward to help the dairy sector innovate and remain an important source of jobs and growth for future generations.” The group was put together, but, more than two years later, “no recommendations have been made,” an Agriculture Canada spokesperson said by email.

Participants blame circumstances. Pierre Lampron, president of the Dairy Farmers of Canada, said talks were first interrupted by the 2019 election, and then by the pandemic. He said the delays haven’t stopped his group from coming up with a “blueprint” of its own, and he hopes that work will accelerate the process once the group resumes meeting. “We have come to acknowledge that these processes sometimes require patience,” said Mathieu Frigon, president of the Dairy Processors Association of Canada.

Hopefully, patience doesn’t lead to more inertia. Canada’s agriculture industry has been handed a rare opportunity. We will all be better off if seizes it.

• Email: kcarmichael@postmedia.com | Twitter: CarmichaelKevin

Canadian barley growers exploiting Australia’s troubles expose vulnerability in any alliance against Beijing

Kevin Carmichael: Don’t fear the robots, people

Like Hockey Canada in the late ’90s, our industrial policy needs to refocus on the fundamentals

Carbon dioxide levels hit 50% higher than preindustrial time

The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began.

Provided by The Canadian Press

And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists reported Monday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans.

Carbon dioxide levels peak every May just before plant life in the Northern Hemisphere blossoms, sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere and into flowers, leaves, seeds and stems. The reprieve is temporary, though, because emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas for transportation and electricity far exceed what plants can take in, pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.

“Reaching 50% higher carbon dioxide than preindustrial is really setting a new benchmark and not in a good way,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the research. “If we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we need to work much harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and right away.”

Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather — storms, wildfires, floods and droughts — worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen. In 2015, countries signed the Paris agreement to try to keep climate change to below what's considered dangerous levels.

The one-year jump in carbon dioxide was not a record, mainly because of a La Nina weather pattern, when parts of the Pacific temporarily cool, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling. Keeling’s father started the monitoring of carbon dioxide on top of the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Loa in 1958, and he has continued the work of charting the now famous Keeling Curve.

Scripps, which calculates the numbers slightly differently based on time and averaging, said the peak in May was 418.9.

Also, pandemic lockdowns slowed transportation, travel and other activity by about 7%, earlier studies show. But that was too small to make a significant difference. Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 1,000 years or more, so year-to-year changes in emissions don’t register much.

The 10-year average rate of increase also set a record, now up to 2.4 parts per million per year.

“Carbon dioxide going up in a few decades like that is extremely unusual,” Tans said. “For example, when the Earth climbed out of the last ice age, carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million and it took the Earth system, the natural system, 6,000 years. We have a much larger increase in the last few decades.”

By comparison, it has taken only 42 years, from 1979 to 2021, to increase carbon dioxide by that same amount.

“The world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research.

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Read stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at https://apnews.com/hub/climate.

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WHERE THERE IS SMOKE THERE IS WORK 

Highest in more than 4 million years: Earth's carbon dioxide levels soar to record high despite pandemic

Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

The COVID-19 pandemic barely registered as a blip as humanity continued to spew carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere over the past year to levels not seen in more than 4 million years, scientists announced Monday.

© Kevin Frayer Smoke billows from a large steel plant on November 4, 2016 in Inner Mongolia, China. Over the industrial era, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 40%, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2), the chief human-caused greenhouse gas, averaged 419 parts per million at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, for May, when carbon levels in the air peak, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than in May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million.

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Overall, NOAA said, "there was no discernible signal in the data from the global economic disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic."

"We are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year," said Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. "That is a mountain of carbon that we dig up out of the Earth, burn and release into the atmosphere as CO2 – year after year.

"If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date."

Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather – storms, wildfires, floods and droughts – worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen.

Carbon levels in the air were higher in the distant past before humans came on the scene. But levels probably haven't been this high in millions of years.

In fact, not only is CO2 at its highest levels in human history, but you would have to go all the way back beyond the beginning of human history – to the Pliocene Epoch, 4.1 million to 4.5 million years ago – to find a time when Earth's atmosphere held a similar amount of carbon, Axios reported.

During that time, sea level was about 78 feet higher than today, the average temperature was 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in pre-industrial times, and studies indicate large forests occupied areas of the Arctic that are now tundra, NOAA reported.

'Wake-up call': Climate change could edge Earth's annual temperature past Paris agreement limits in 5 years

There are natural ups and downs of greenhouse gas, which before the Industrial Revolution would come only from volcanoes and decomposing plants and animals. Carbon dioxide is called a greenhouse gas because of its ability to trap solar radiation and keep it confined to the atmosphere.

It is invisible, odorless and colorless, yet it is responsible for 63% of the warming attributable to all greenhouse gases, according to NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.

Carbon dioxide pollution is generated by emissions from carbon-based fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal that are used for transportation and electrical generation, cement manufacturing, deforestation, agriculture and many other practices, NOAA said.

Along with other greenhouse gases such as methane, CO2 traps heat from the planet’s surface that would otherwise escape into space, causing the planet’s atmosphere to warm steadily.

"The ultimate control knob on atmospheric CO2 is fossil-fuel emissions,” said Ralph Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which oversees the Mauna Loa CO2 measuring station. “But we still have a long way to go to halt the rise as each year more CO2 piles up in the atmosphere. We ultimately need cuts that are much larger and sustained longer than the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020."

In February, the U.S. officially rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change, an international treaty signed by 196 countries that have committed to limiting global warming and avoiding its potentially destabilizing effects.

But “the world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of Monday's report.

Contributing: The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Highest in more than 4 million years: Earth's carbon dioxide levels soar to record high despite pandemic

COMRADES!
'Hold the sand': The battle to tame China's deserts

After a hard morning planting fresh shoots in the dunes on the edge of the Gobi Desert, 78-year-old farmer Wang Tianchang retrieves a three-stringed lute from his shed, sits down beneath the fiery midday sun, and starts to play.

"If you want to fight the desert, there's no need to be afraid," sings Wang, a veteran of China's decades-long state campaign to "open up the wilderness," as he strums the instrument, called a "sanxian."

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Tianchang, 78, waters a tree planted on the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 15, 2021.

Tree-planting has been at the heart of China's environmental efforts for decades as the country seeks to turn barren deserts and marshes near its borders into farmland and screen the capital Beijing from sands blowing in from the Gobi, a 500,000 square-mile expanse stretching from Mongolia to northwest China, which would coat Tiananmen Square in dust nearly every spring

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© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

But in March, heavy sandstorms hit Beijing for the first time in six years, putting the country's reforestation efforts under scrutiny, with land increasingly scarce and trees no longer able to offset the impact of climate change.

Now a local institution in northwest China's Gansu province, Wang and his family lead busloads of young volunteers from the provincial capital of Lanzhou into the desert each year to plant and irrigate new trees and bushes.

Their painstaking work to rehabilitate marginal land has been promoted as an inspiration for the rest of the country, and they are the subject of government propaganda posters celebrating their role in holding back the sand.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Yinji plows the ground before planting straw to prevent sand movement on the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 16, 2021.

Over the last four decades, the Three-North Shelter Forest Programme, a tree-planting scheme known colloquially as the "Great Green Wall," has helped raise total forest coverage to nearly a quarter of China's total area, up from less than 10% in 1949.

In the remote northwest, though, tree planting is not merely about meeting state reforestation targets or protecting Beijing. When it comes to making a living from the most marginal farmland, every tree, bush and blade of grass counts -- especially as climate change drives up temperatures and puts water supplies under further pressure.

"The more the forest expands, the more it eats into the sands, the better it is for us," said Wang's son, Wang Yinji, 53, who has taken over much of the backbreaking farming and planting while his father recovers from illness.

Holding down the sand

In a battered jeep loaded with a water tank and flying a large Chinese national flag, the Wang family have been planting the spindly "huabang" in the rolling dunes.

The flowering bush known as the sweetvetch has an 80% success rate even in harsh desert conditions and has become a key part of efforts to "hold down the sand," a term used locally for planting bushes and grasses in even squares across the desert slopes to stop sand drifting into nearby farmland.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters A worker shovels soil next to irrigation channels and recently planted shoots of Xinjiang poplar at the Yangguan state-backed forest farm, on the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Dunhuang, China, April 13, 2021.

The Wangs have been fighting desertification since they settled on barren land near the village of Hongshui in Wuwei, a city in Gansu close to the border with Inner Mongolia, in 1980.

Their home is now surrounded by patches of rhubarb and rows of pines and blue spruces. Twenty bleating goats are locked in a wooden paddock nearby to stop them devouring the precious vegetation.

The family's four acres of farmland are protected on one side by a forest planted about a decade ago, and on the other by a long sandy cliff.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters A tree is lifted with a crane before being placed on a truck at Toudunying state-owned commercial forest estate in a village near the edge of the Gobi desert, on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 16, 2021.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wheel loaders move soil to prepare a field for tree planting, at one of the sections of the Yangguan state-backed forest farm, on the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Dunhuang, China, April 13, 2021.

Trees have become a major part of the local economy. Hongshui is dominated by a large state-owned commercial forest estate called Toudunying.

"After 1999, when the tree-planting sped up, things got much better," Wang Yinji said, referring to the state-led reforestation initiative. "Our corn grew taller. The sand that used to blow in from the east and northeast was stopped."

Experts say China's reforestation work has become more sophisticated over the years, the government benefiting from decades of experience and able to mobilize thousands of volunteers to plant trees, emulating front-line pioneers like the Wangs.

But the fight is far from over, they add, with climate change set to worsen conditions for farmers living in the arid north.

"They have been living in similar conditions for generations," said Ma Lichao, China country director for the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit organization promoting sustainable forest management. "But it is very important to say that climate change is something very new."

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Piled tree shoots lay on the ground waiting to be planted, at the Yangguan state-backed forest farm, on the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Dunhuang, China, April 13, 2021.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wheel loaders move soil to prepare a field for tree planting, at one of the sections of the Yangguan state-backed forest farm, on the edge of the Gobi desert, on the outskirts of Dunhuang, China, April 13, 2021.

Completing land use

China plans to increase total forest coverage from 23% last year to 24.1% by 2025, but the constant expansion has masked many underlying problems.

"There's been relatively low survival of trees in some regions, and discussions about the depletion of underground water tables," said Hua Fangyuan, a conservation biologist who focuses on forests at China's Peking University.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Ding Yinhua, 69, shepherds her sheep and goats back home in the Gobi desert in Minqin county, Wuwei, China, April 18, 2021.

Struggling to find space for new trees, the government of an administrative division in Inner Mongolia was accused in 2019 of seizing farmland to meet forest coverage targets set by Beijing. Artificial monocultural plantations, such as rubber, have also been created at the expense of natural forest, according to some studies.

"This (competing land use pressure) is a problem not just for China but all over the world," said Hua. "We are talking about millions of hectares of targets. With the growing population, there is going to be competition and tension."

This competition for land has been reinforced by China's reliance on government-backed industrial-scale plantations to meet targets, though it is gradually shifting to a more nature-based approach to reforestation.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Li Lanying plants a shoot of Huabang, a yellow flowering bush known as the "sweetvetch", while her son Wang Yinji holds a bucket of water on the edge of the Gobi desert, on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 15, 2021.

One such state-backed forest farm designed to repair the region's overworked ecosystem is the 4,200-acre Yangguan project, on the outskirts of the city of Dunhuang, which has proven controversial.

Leaseholders eager to plant lucrative but water-intensive grapes levelled large sections of forest in 2017. In March, a government investigation team found Yangguan had violated regulations by allowing vineyards to be planted in protected forest. Villagers were also accused of illegally felling trees, and authorities were ordered to reclaim the illegally occupied land.

Officials on the estate said hundreds of staff from government agencies in Dunhuang would arrive soon with the aim of planting 31,000 trees on 93 acres of land in just four days. Gradually the surviving vineyards would be replaced with trees, a manager said, a move that would affect hundreds of farmers.

"The government and the farmers should work together to find a way to make money and ensure the water levels are sustainable at the same time," said Ma of the Forest Stewardship Council

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© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Yinji, 53, cleans the backyard of his house in a village near the edge of the Gobi desert, on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 14, 2021.

There are signs that China has learned from past mistakes, when trees were planted -- often by scattering seeds from military aircraft -- with no consideration for existing ecosystems or weather conditions, meaning many failed to take root.

The government is now more careful in which species it selects to plant, and more inclined to make room for natural forests to expand, rather than create artificial plantations.

The forestry commission also plans to rethink its strategy in northwest China to reflect concerns that new plantations have put water resources under more strain, experts said.

But with local governments under pressure to grow the economy and guarantee food supplies, China's tree-planting may also be reaching a point of diminishing returns.

"It's getting more and more difficult to really increase the forest coverage rate simply because there aren't so many places left for big reforestation projects," said Ma.

Changing Climate

Ma said the sandstorms that hit Beijing in March did not mean planting trees had failed, but showed it would no longer be enough to offset the impact of climate change.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Yinji, 53, carries a bowl of noodles in his kitchen at his home in a village near the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 14, 2021.

"To be honest, I don't think the trees can help the situation," he said.

At a briefing last week, Li Jianjun of the China National Environmental Monitoring Centre said temperatures in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia have been 2-6 degrees Celsius higher than normal since February, with the melting snow exposing more sand to the wind.

Some of the farmers in Wuwei have begun to lose hope after decades trying to subdue the deserts.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Ding Yinhua, 69, a shepherd, opens the gate of a pen for sheep and goats at her house in the Gobi desert in Minqin county, Wuwei, China, April 18, 2021.

Ding Yinhua, a 69-year-old shepherd, told Reuters the sandstorms were so severe that sometimes she didn't dare open her eyes.

Despite the tree-planting, pastures have deteriorated in recent years as a result of declining rainfall in the spring and summer, she added.

"It's just no good without rain. We don't have land so there's no other way: we just herd sheep. In 2015 and 2016, there was rain but since then there's been nothing, and you now have to wait until September," she said.

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Yinji sits in front of posters while smoking at his house in a village near the edge of the Gobi desert on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 14, 2021.

Her husband, Li Youfu, 71, said he thought tree-planting had made no difference at all.

"The sand is still moving. This can't be controlled," he said. "When the wind comes, it's usually really strong. No one can stop it."

© Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters Wang Tianchang, 78, a veteran of China's decades-long state campaign to "open up the wilderness", prepares to light up his pipe at his house on the edge of the Gobi desert, on the outskirts of Wuwei, China, April 15, 2021.

Reporting by David Stanway for Reuters

Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

BOULDER CITY, Nev. – Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam.© Mark Henle/The Republic A high-water mark or "bathtub ring" is visible on the shoreline of Lake Mead at Hoover Dam.

In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men grip a boat’s wheel, harvest an armful of wheat, stand beside cascading water and lift a heavy weight overhead. Words encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER.


Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. The rules for managing the river and dividing up its water – which were laid down nearly a century ago in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and repeatedly tweaked – face the greatest strains since the dam was built.

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The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are striking along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes.

Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled.

One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks.

Tech: Twitter will promote credible information with new climate change topic after criticism over misinformation
Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer

Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the USA and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce.

Bernardo’s team sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will probably change over the next 24 months.

Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers.

Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk because of extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow.

“Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.”

That will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system.

The warm, dry conditions over the past two years have baked the watershed’s soils to such an extent, Bernardo says, that “when the snowmelt starts to run off, it just gets sucked up into the ground like a sponge.”

The demands for water downstream from Hoover Dam continue. The Southwest’s farmlands' peak irrigation season lasts through June, Bernardo says, so Lake Mead’s surface drops about 1 foot each week.

'Something we directly cause': Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths© Mark Henle/The Republic "Due to how dry things have been, what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping,” says Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation at Hoover Dam.

The reservoir has declined more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to fall about 9 feet more by the end of this year.

The latest projections show that by the end of 2021, Lake Mead will decline below an elevation of 1,066 feet, far below the threshold – 1,075 feet – for the federal government to declare a shortage. That’s likely to happen in August, triggering the largest water cuts to date next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.

Even larger cutbacks could come in 2023 if the reservoir declines as projected over the next year into a more severe “Tier 2” shortage.

Lake Mead's downward spiral is driven largely by the dire situation upstream at Lake Powell, which has declined to 34% of full capacity.

“We need three to four consecutive years of above-average inflow, snowpack runoff and inflow into Lake Powell to refill these reservoirs,” Bernardo says. “So that's what we're hoping for.”

The Colorado River naturally cycles through wet and dry periods, but over the past 22 years, the watershed has had 17 dry years, Bernardo says, and only five years with above-average or wet conditions.

Hotter temperatures have evaporated more moisture off the landscape, leaving less flowing in the river and its tributaries. Scientists describe it as a “megadrought” and one that, unlike the long droughts of the past, is amplified by carbon pollution and the heating of the planet.

One of the unknowns facing the officials who manage Colorado River water is how severely the reservoirs could be affected by climate-driven “aridification” in the years to come. Some scientists have estimated the river could lose roughly one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures rise, and that for each additional 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the average flow is likely to drop by about 9%.

“With the warmer temperatures,” Bernardo says, “not only do we see things melt off quicker but you have that rising snow line, which creates less inflow.”© Mark Henle/The Republic The Lake Mead reservoir has declined since 2000.

The declines in the reservoirs have accelerated over the past two years.

In 2019, representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California agreed under a deal called the Drought Contingency Plan to share in water reductions through 2026 to reduce the risks of Lake Mead falling to critically low levels. The agreement calls for progressively larger cutbacks if Lake Mead drops below lower trigger points in the coming years.

If the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet, California would start to take cuts. Mexico contributes by leaving some water in Lake Mead.

“These mechanisms have been put into place to protect these reservoir elevations,” Bernardo says.

Though the latest agreement is intended as a stopgap measure, officials from the seven states that depend on the river are preparing to negotiate rules for managing shortages after 2026, and those talks promise to be tougher.

Bernardo says the bureau's responsibilities in managing the dams and water deliveries remain the same, and they include incorporating the latest science and models and providing up-to-date information to representatives of the states, water districts, tribes and other entities along the river “to communicate what's going on and what we're seeing, so everyone can act proactively.”

“When you have a river system like this, a complex reservoir and river system especially, that is experiencing the hydrology that we've been seeing, and such a quick decline in the Upper Basin over these last two years, transparency and communication is key,” Bernardo says.

Harris tackles migration in high-profile visit to Guatemala and Mexico: Here’s what’s on the agenda© Mark Henle/The Republic Patti Aaron with the Bureau of Reclamation explains how Hoover Dam works.
Iconic dam holds less and less

Bernardo, 35, has worked for the Bureau of Reclamation for nearly a decade, including the past two years as river operations manager. A mechanical engineer who grew up in New Jersey, he usually works with his staff at the agency’s office in Boulder City, Nevada, but he regularly drives out to visit the dam, sometimes to lead special tours.

Whenever he rounds the curve in the canyon and sees the dam, Bernardo says, he feels awestruck, and “the hair still sticks up on my arms.”

“It never gets old,” he says. “I’m wowed by the engineering marvel.”

Part of that comes from knowing the history of all that went into the dam’s design and construction during the Great Depression, from the hand-drawn blueprints to the blasting with dynamite, the railroad that carried supplies and the massive amounts of concrete poured in, creating a dam that is 660 feet thick at its base – nearly as thick between the reservoir and the downstream side as it is tall. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 4 feet wide around the entire Earth at the equator.)

Bernardo says the dam's historical significance is inescapable: how it controlled the Colorado’s floods, opened arid lands for farming and fed the rise of cities across the Southwest. As he describes it, the dam “helped nourish our nation” and helped the West thrive.

“We like to show it off,” he says.

Hoover Dam's normal capacity is 2,074 megawatts, Bernardo says, generating enough power per year to supply approximately 450,000 average households. At today’s lake level, the dam’s capacity has decreased about 25% to 1,567 megawatts, generating enough power for roughly 350,000 homes.

With every foot the lake declines, about 6 megawatts of power-generating capacity is lost.

The lowest level at which Hoover could produce power is about 950 feet, with an expected capacity of 650 megawatts. If the lake fell below that point – a scenario the rules are geared toward avoiding – the dam would no longer be able to generate power.© Mark Henle/The Republic As water levels drop, Hoover Dam is less able to generate power.

As the reservoir declines, releasing the same amount of water yields a bigger drop in lake level.

“That's one of the concerning pieces,” Bernardo says. “The reservoir is shaped, we call it a teacup, but more like a martini glass. And the lower the elevation goes, the faster the rate of decline.”

That dynamic affects how much the planned water cuts could help Mead’s level. Under a first-tier shortage next year, for example, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico are preparing for cuts totaling 613,000 acre-feet, which Bernardo says is equivalent to 7-8 feet of elevation in Lake Mead.

If the reservoir dropped below 1,025 feet, the total cuts among the three states and Mexico would add up to more than 1.3 million acre-feet. That amount, Bernardo says, would equal nearly 20 feet conserved in Lake Mead at those low levels.

When representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada negotiated the deal, they decided on 1,025 feet as a threshold to avoid, one they thought the lake would be unlikely to reach. The agreement includes a backup provision. If the two-year projections show Mead is likely to decline below 1,030 feet, the agreement says, the states and the interior secretary “shall consult and determine what additional measures will be taken.”

The government’s latest five-year projections, using an approach that considers the river’s lower flows over the past three decades, estimates a 25% chance of Lake Mead declining below 1,025 feet in 2025.

Much could change if there's a snowy winter in the mountains.

“We hope and we feel very strongly that the measures that have been put into place should slow down the decline,” Bernardo says. “Now, if it's enough to make it recover, your guess is as good as mine, because the hydrology has been so bad.”

If the river basin gets a wet year with average flows, Bernardo says, the cutbacks in the plan “will buy us time to get to the next year, in hopes to get a better water year.”

“And I think that's what the system is designed to do,” he says.
An ‘Era of Limits’

The outlook for the Colorado River has grown increasingly dire over the past several years. In one study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was due to unprecedented warming.

Other researchers warned in a report this year that an “incremental approach to adaptation” is unlikely to be enough. They pointed out that flows from 2000 through 2018 were about 18% less than the 20th century average and said the downward trend will probably continue as temperatures rise with climate change.

Worries about overusing the Colorado river predate the current dry spell. Some early warnings came before the legal framework that divided the Colorado among the seven states and Mexico.

John Wesley Powell voiced concerns in 1893, 24 years after his expedition down the river in the Grand Canyon, when he told attendees at the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles, “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”

Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, the river has long been severely overallocated. As University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon put it, “there are more water rights than there is water.”

So much has been diverted that most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed decades ago into stretches of dry riverbed that wind through farmlands and desert in the Mexicali Valley. Only a smattering of natural wetlands remain.


A journey into the heart of a river forever changed by human hands



In his 1986 book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner wrote that Hoover Dam “rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food.”

Reisner wrote that from these hopeful beginnings, “the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness” and that people in the river basin – at that time 20 million – “will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe.”

“One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam,” Reisner wrote. “And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.”

Authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote in their 2019 book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River” that “even absent climate change, we would be in trouble” and that the current problems surrounding the river “are the inevitable result of critical decisions made by water managers and politicians who ignored the science” as early as the 1920s.

Scientific analyses in the 1920s found the Colorado River would be in deficit if dams and canals were built to meet the anticipated demand, Kuhn and Fleck wrote. The scientists’ warnings were ignored, and that “set in motion decades of decisions that would end in the overuse seen today.”


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They suggested that addressing the river’s deficit will require recognizing that the “over-allocation became embedded in basin rules in very specific ways that remain unresolved” and should be fixed.

Negotiating the post-2026 rules will be challenging for everyone involved, Kuhn and Fleck wrote, and some of the fundamental issues facing negotiators are similar to those a century ago, including questions of how much water the river will provide in the years ahead and how the system should be governed amid uncertainty.

The Colorado River Basin needs “a stable and effective governance of the use of the river’s waters under conditions where current demands already exceed the exiting supplies,” Kuhn and Fleck wrote. “Like one hundred years ago, the river’s future is not all dark. Innovation, cooperation, and an expanded reliance on science are now the foundation for basin-wide solutions.”

One effort to restore some of the wetlands and ecosystems in Mexico began last month, as water began flowing into the delta under an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The water releases in the delta, which will total 35,000 acre-feet from May to October, are intended to nourish vegetation and wildlife at habitat restoration sites where conservation groups planted cottonwoods and willows.

The influx of water is supposed to mimic a small portion of the floods that once swept across the delta toward the Sea of Cortez. This year’s releases amount to a smaller version of a planned flood that coursed through the delta in 2014. In that “pulse flow,” 105,000 acre-feet of water brought back a flowing river in areas that had been dry since floods in the late 1990s.

The releases in the delta this year, using water previously stored in Lake Mead, amount to just 5 inches of water in the reservoir. Much more of the water that passes through Hoover Dam is pumped to Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles and flows through canals to irrigate farmlands along the river from Parker to Yuma, and across the Coachella, Imperial and Mexicali valleys. © Mark Henle/The Republic Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border, is one of the great feats of engineering.
Low water levels bring risks

If the water declined about 125 feet from where it stands, below the elevation of 950 feet, Bernardo says, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

“That's what we call minimum power pool,” Bernardo says.

If Mead falls further, the dam could still release water down to a level of 895 feet.

“At 895 and below, Hoover Dam is unable to pass water by any conventional means. So you would essentially have to pump it out of Lake Mead. That's what we call dead pool,” Bernardo says. “And at dead pool, Lake Mead still has 2.5 million acre-feet in storage, but there's just no way to get it out.”

If the lake declines that much, only the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Las Vegas, has an intake deep enough to continue pumping water. © Mark Henle/The Republic A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.

The risks of Mead falling to such lows gave impetus to the last round of negotiations, which led to the signing of the Drought Contingency Plan in 2019 at Hoover Dam.

The river would have been in a shortage years ago if the states and Mexico hadn’t made concerted efforts to prop up Lake Mead’s levels, Bernardo says, and those steps included various conservation programs that have yielded 4 million acre-feet over the past 15 years, about 50 feet of water in the lake.

During the unrelenting dry years, he says, “we knew that we couldn't postpone a shortage forever.”© Mark Henle/The Republic Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation says that if the water level fell below the elevation of 950 feet, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

He reiterates that the shortage measures, including the mandatory cutbacks, were adopted to reduce risks.

“And although it's scary that this will be the first time we're using them, they were designed by very smart people throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Bernardo says. “And let's hope that they work the way that they were designed to work.”

If the situation worsens, he says, everyone involved in managing the river’s water will get together again, as stipulated in the 2019 agreements, to take steps to protect the reservoirs. About 40 million people rely on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, he says, and “all of us as water managers have a responsibility to all of those that are in the basin.”

By mid-June, Lake Mead is set to decline to its lowest levels on record. Hoover Dam will soon hold the smallest amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. The next few years may show how much water use needs to decrease to rebalance the river and reduce the risk that Hoover Dam might one day fall silent.

Follow reporter Ian James on Twitter: @ByIanJames.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.






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The power plant on the Arizona side of Hoover Dam on May 11, 2021.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

Levi's CEO says Amazon's '$20 an hour' wages are forcing the jeans maker to rethink worker pay amid the tight labor market

dreuter@insider.com (Dominick Reuter) 

Chip Bergh, President and CEO of Levi Strauss. Thomson Reuters

Levi's CEO Chip Bergh said Amazon is adding to his challenges in the labor market in 2021.
Bergh told the AP that he's "considering right now what we have to do with our wage rates."
Amazon hired more than 500,000 people in 2020, and the majority of workers earn over $16 per hour.

Levi Strauss and Co. has been selling jeans for 168 years, but 2021 is proving particularly difficult for the company to find workers, thanks in large part to Amazon.

"There's no question that labor is challenging right now," said CEO Chip Berg in an interview with the Associated Press.

Even as Berg calls the Levi's "aspirational company for a lot of people to work for," he says the company is starting to face some headwinds when it comes to staffing its retail stores and distribution centers in the current labor market.

"We are considering right now what we have to do with our wage rates going forward," he said. "Candidly, we have folks that are right around the corner from Amazon distribution centers and Amazon is not afraid to pay $20 an hour."

A spokesperson said the company has been successful in recruiting and retaining workers at distribution centers based on the total value the company offers, including working for "an iconic brand with strong values," health care and retirement benefits, a bonus program and more.

"We believe this package of compensation and benefits will continue to make us an employer of choice," the spokesperson said.

Berg's comments are the latest evidence that Amazon is establishing a new minimum wage in America.

Indeed, the Amazon effect on local labor markets has been measurable.

"One study showed that our pay raise resulted in a 4.7% increase in the average hourly wage among other employers in the same labor market," CEO Jeff Bezos said in Amazon's latest shareholders meeting, citing research from economists at UC Berkeley and Brandeis.

The actual federal minimum wage was last raised in 2009 and is still $7.25 per hour, while Amazon has had a $15 starting wage since 2018.

"When we set a $15 minimum wage we did so because we wanted to lead on wages and not just run with the pack," Bezos said.

The decision certainly helped propel Amazon's expansion, but the disruption from the pandemic kicked off an even more dramatic reshuffling of the labor market across industries from retail to food service.

Like Levi's, apparel-maker Under Armour specifically cited Amazon as a catalyst for the company's recent wage hike.

"The reality is from a competitive standpoint of hiring, we know that we compete not just within our industry for talent but also outside of the industry to places like Amazon," Stephanie Pugliese, the president of the Americas region at Under Armour, told Bloomberg.

In 2020 alone, Amazon reported hiring more than a half million workers, the majority of whom earn more than $16 per hour, in addition to an extremely competitive benefits package.

And in May, the company announced it is hiring another 75,000 workers in fulfillment and logistics network across the US and Canada with a starting wage of $17 per hour and hiring bonus of up to $1,000.

As Miami chef Phil Bryant told The Washington Post, "If I can make $17 per hour at an Amazon warehouse but only $14 per hour as a line cook, a notoriously hot, stressful, intense job, why would I do that?"
Read the original article on Business Insider

PRISON NATION USA
Jails emptied in the pandemic. Should they stay that way? YES!

© Provided by The Canadian Press

It wasn’t long after Matthew Reed shoplifted a $63 set of sheets from a Target in upstate New York that the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a standstill.

Instead of serving a jail sentence, he stayed at home, his case deferred more than a year, as courts closed and jails nationwide dramatically reduced their populations to stop the spread of COVID-19.

But the numbers have begun creeping up again as courts are back in session and the world begins returning to a modified version of normal. It’s worrying criminal justice reformers who argue that the past year proved there is no need to keep so many people locked up in the U.S.

By the middle of last year, the number of people in jails nationwide was at its lowest point in more than two decades, according to a new report published Monday by the Vera Institute of Justice, whose researchers collected population numbers from about half of the nation’s 3,300 jails to make national estimates.

According to the report, shared with The Marshall Project and The Associated Press, the number of people incarcerated in county jails across the country declined by roughly one-quarter, or 185,000, as counties aggressively worked to release people held on low-level charges, dramatically reduced arrest rates and suspended court operations.

But in most places, the decrease didn’t last long: From mid-2020 to March 2021, the number of people in jails awaiting trial or serving short sentences for minor offenses climbed back up again by more than 70,000, reaching nearly 650,000.

“Reducing the incarcerated population across the country is possible,” said Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice and author of the new report. “We saw decreases in big cities, small cities, rural counties and the suburbs, but the increase we see is troubling.”

In the Genesee County Jail in New York, where Reed recently began a six-month sentence for petit larceny, there were, for a time, only 35 people jailed, down from 90 before the pandemic, according to data compiled by the Vera Institute. Defendants had court dates pushed off, and judges went to extra lengths to allow people to wait at home rather than in jail. (New York’s bail reform law also went into effect in early 2020 and reduced jail populations even further.) By March, there were 54 people jailed in the county lockup.

For Reed, who said he has struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine, going to jail has meant losing his disability checks, his only source of income. Without income, he has no way to pay rent, and he fears that unless a family member can take him in, he will be homeless when he is released in September.

Reed doesn’t understand the point of sending him to jail now, only further destabilizing his life. “They could have at least offered me drug court or some type of rehab or something,” he said in an interview from the Genesee County Jail last week.

___

This story is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Marshall Project exploring the state of the prison system in the coronavirus pandemic. Camille Fassett of The Associated Press also contributed to this report.

___

No sooner had social distancing become the new normal than it became clear that such a thing was impossible in jails. Overcrowding, poor sanitation and subpar medical care amplified the threat. And unlike in prison, where people serve sentences of one year or more, the jail population is in constant churn as people are arrested, released on bond or take plea deals and leave.

More than 40 people have died of COVID-19 in jails since the start of the pandemic, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of nearly 1,000 jails. That is likely an undercount; the virus has killed more than 2,600 prisoners and 207 staff in U.S. prisons, where deaths are easier to track.

Raymonde Haney’s grandson Lee had been jailed on a domestic violence charge in Tarrant County, Texas, when he died of COVID-19 at 34 in December. While others were released as part of safety precautions, he didn’t qualify because of his domestic violence charge.

“They kept them in the jail like fish in a barrel,” Haney said.

But many officials across the country, from small towns to suburbs and big cities, realized the danger and worked to get people out of jail. Public defenders and prosecutors — typically on opposing sides — collaborated with judges, sheriffs and local police departments to identify those in jail who could safely be released, and to make plans to send fewer people to jail, according to interviews with officials in more than a dozen counties.

“In the first few months, really almost all we did was releases,” said Florida Circuit Criminal Court Judge Nushin Sayfie in Miami-Dade County.

Bryan County, Georgia, reduced its jail population from 37 to 11, according to the Vera Institute. Sheriff Mark Crowe told police in the surrounding towns that he would only jail people charged with serious crimes like domestic violence. It was a challenge to persuade local law enforcement “to back off on some of the minor offenses you’d normally send to jail,” said jail administrator Larry Jacobs. “With traffic offenses, we told them, ‘Write them a ticket, give them a court date and wave goodbye.’”

In Wilbarger County, Texas, the sheriff made a similar decision. Paired with the local district attorney’s aggressive efforts to free anyone who wasn’t a safety risk, the move cut that jail’s population in half, to fewer than 20. Throughout the early days of the pandemic, the local district attorney’s office reviewed the felony arrests each day and made sure anyone accused of a nonviolent crime — and even some with violent crimes, on a case-by-case basis — was released to await trial at home rather than in the jail, said Staley Heatly, the district attorney there. “I’ve been DA here for almost 15 years. That is about the lowest jail population number we have ever had,” Heatly said.

___

For Patrick Fagan, it seemed at first like getting probation for his marijuana possession charge in Flowood, Mississippi, was a good deal. But as a server in a restaurant with late-night hours, he sometimes missed check-ins with his probation officer, which resulted in his probation getting extended. He landed in jail after being stopped for speeding, when the police looked up his license and discovered unpaid court fees. Finally, after he and his partner weighed the risks of COVID-19 with the toll probation was taking on their lives, they decided he should take a deal that would have him serve a weekend in jail in order to end his probation.

But when he got to the Lowndes County Jail to serve his time last August, he said, they turned him away. As a precaution against the virus, they were only accepting people charged with violent crimes. “I don’t know how to quantify how good it feels to not have to go to jail,” Fagan said.

The realities of the pandemic also kept jail populations down. Police officers tried to keep their distance from people on the street. Stores, bars and restaurants were closed, reducing calls for shoplifting, fights and related crimes. Roadways were quiet, which led to fewer traffic stops and the arrests that stem from them, like when police find drugs in a car or discover an outstanding warrant on the driver. Probation and parole departments across the country conducted far fewer check-ins, and most were by phone, which provided fewer opportunities to discover violations.

As courthouses closed, many defense attorneys, with none of the hearings and motions that usually fill their calendars, focused exclusively on getting clients out of jail. In Palm Beach County, Florida, the public defenders’ office set up a team “to keep reviewing and reviewing people in custody and coming up with creative arguments,” said Dan Eisinger, the county’s chief assistant public defender. If the judge denied bond the first time, the team went out to look for more information — additional evidence of preexisting conditions, new medical records or information from family — and tried again, three and even four times, Eisinger said.

And it worked. By June of last year, the Palm Beach County Jail had gone from about 1,750 people before the pandemic to 1,500, according to the data compiled by the Vera Institute.

“There was a real fear that people were going to get sick and die. Most judges did really factor that in,” Eisinger said.

___

The pandemic underscored what reform advocates have been saying for years: Cramped and filthy jails are the wrong place for most people who have been arrested. The pandemic forced a rapid departure from the status quo and became something of a proof of concept for alternatives to incarceration. “The pandemic has given prosecutors the chance to implement practices that have been discussed and floated for years now,” said Alissa Heydari, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is deputy director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

The moment comes as the nation is already reassessing the criminal justice system, decriminalizing some lower-level crimes and reforming bail laws. The killing of George Floyd accelerated the discussion around policing and the need for reform. Reformers are asking: Nothing catastrophic happened while people were not jailed, so why bother now? Why can’t the system work to keep defendants out, instead of in?

In many places, though, the push to clear out jails and rethink incarceration has been short-lived. Momentum for long-lasting change is wavering in the face of a rise in crime — including shootings and other violence — after several years at or near historic lows. Police leaders and union officials in places like New York City and Philadelphia have blamed policies freeing people from jail, though there is little evidence that people on release are behind the surge of new crimes. Some lockups were back at pre-pandemic levels even before vaccines were ready last winter.

While some violent crimes have been increasing, the number of people accused of shootings and homicides makes up a sliver of the jail population. The most common crimes, such as theft and drug crimes, decreased during the pandemic.

But for some officials, the push to clear the jails was simply a temporary precaution, nothing more.

“The wrong conclusion to draw is, somehow before the pandemic we were putting people in jail that didn’t need to be there, and we stopped the optional people,” said Jeff Langley, district attorney in Lumpkin County, Georgia.

In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner, elected as part of a wave of high-profile, progressive prosecutors, said the precautions brought on by the pandemic cannot solve the problems of the criminal justice system.

“I don’t think that there’s any way to take a completely anomalous moment — the most anomalous moment in criminal justice of the century — and say that this is the new model,” said Krasner, a Democrat. “But ... if the question is whether the most incarcerated country in the world should be less incarcerated, the answer is: Hell yes.”

Overall, jail populations are still lower than they were before the pandemic, which several sheriffs and judges attribute to making some of the changes permanent. “The ease of just writing them a citation and giving them a day in court,” rather than arresting people and bringing them to jail, “has become the preferred way of doing business,” said Sheriff Trace Hendricks of Bosque County, Texas.

Judges in multiple counties said they are now more likely to release people to await the resolution of their cases at home than in jail, and they are talking with others in the system to bolster electronic monitoring and other programs to keep an eye on people pretrial.

But it’s not clear if these changes will stick.

“It’s a slow progression back into what people know,” said Broward County, Florida, public defender Gordon Weekes. He’s watched his county’s jail numbers rise from below 3,000 at the start of the pandemic to over 3,400 at the end of March. “You can try to break those habits, but this system knows a particular approach, a particular way of doing business.”

Weihua Li And Beth Schwartzapfel Of The Marshall Project And Michael R. Sisak Of , The Associated Press