A mudslide in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, recently blocked access to a wastewater treatment plant, as a result of heavy snowpack and a rapid temperature increase creating an abnormal runoff season. 

The slide caused no injuries and city officials are coordinating with Union Pacific Railroad and Xcel Energy for cleanup operations, while also consulting geotechnical experts for infrastructure resilience planning.

Alligator Discovered in Pennsylvania Treatment Plant

A worker at the Kline's Island Wastewater Treatment Plant in Pennsylvania recently discovered an American alligator, which had managed to survive a journey to the plant's filtration system. The reptile, possibly flushed down a toilet, was found entangled in a large mass of grease, diapers and rags.

After being cleaned up by wastewater plant employees, the alligator was transported to the Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation & Education Center, where it received further care, including a mouth cleaning and an antibiotic bath.

Study Reveals AI's Hidden Water Footprint

A recent study by the University of California-Riverside has uncovered the significant water footprint of running artificial intelligence queries. Data processing centers, responsible for the cloud computations of AI queries, consume large volumes of water for cooling purposes. In 2021, Google's U.S. data centers alone used an estimated 12.7 billion liters of water.

The study highlights the growing impact of AI on water consumption, as the sector continues to expand rapidly. For instance, two weeks of training the GPT-3 AI program in Microsoft's state-of-the-art U.S. data centers required around 700,000 liters of water.