CNN.com on December 11: “At least 36 states expect to face water shortages within the next five years, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. According to the National Drought Mitigation Center, several regions in particular have been hit hard: the Southeast, Southwest and the West. Texas, Georgia and South Carolina have suffered the worst droughts this year, the agency said.” While the battle rages over why – climate change as the possible accelerant is the venue for the contest – no one disputes that population growth and wasteful water-usage policies are primary drivers that threaten a return of the infamous “Dust Bowl” scenario to many regions in the U.S. – ironically the Dust Bowl also occurred during a major financial crisis as well – The Great Depression of the 1930s.
From Los Angeles’ CBS radio affiliate (KNX), October 30, 2008: “The [California] Department of Water Resources announced it will deliver just 15 percent of the amount that local water agencies throughout California request every year. That marks the second lowest projection since the first State Water Project deliveries were made in 1962… Farmers in the Central Valley say they'll be forced to fallow fields, while cities from the San Francisco Bay area to San Diego might have to impose mandatory water rationing.”
"The demand for water has gone up," noted John R. Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the above-noted CNN piece, "The demand has skyrocketed in places like California and New Mexico because they've tried to grow crops in deserts." Even where there has been sufficient rainfall has been sufficient, the complacency about the availability of “cheap water” has de-prioritized water storage, conservation and movement systems. But when a region runs out of that precious commodity, immediate solutions often result in desperate actions.
Here’s a little example with an historical twist. When a surveyor plotted the precise border between Tennessee and Georgia back 1818, he seems to have missed the Tennessee River (in Tennessee, of course) by a mile. They call it a “flawed survey,” but it didn’t seem to matter until Atlanta, in northern Georgia, began to run completely out of water. The Georgia State Legislature has often tried to fix this anomaly by legislative force, but the border is the border. Northern Georgia didn’t get a break even as to its own local reservoir: a federal appellate court ruled in February of 2008 that the state could not withdraw as much water as it had planned to from the reservoir that supplies the city. Seems that to fill northern Georgia’s reservoirs and to keep a good chunk of Florida out of recent droughts, they need lots of nasty tropical depressions and hurricanes, stuff that tends to kill folks and destroy property on the coast.
The above map and this little summary come from the University of Nebraska, Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology: “The Ogallala Aquifer underlies approximately 225,000 square miles in the Great Plains region, particularly in the High Plains of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska.” In short, if your farm isn’t on the Mississippi or Missouri Rivers (or one of their tributaries), and you are a farmer near this giant underwater lake (once the size of Lake Huron of the Great Lakes), this aquifer is your lifeline. When they didn’t have pumps modern enough to pull enough water out of this aquifer – and excessive grazing blended with a drought – the great depression era Dust Bowl was the result. We’re pumping a lot now, and there has been some heavy rain in the region, but...
But water expert Marc Reisner (who wrote a great book about water and American policy: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water) still thinks there’s pretty good chance the Ogallala Aquifer could run basically dry in a quarter of a century (or less). Today, we grow a lot of subsidized corn in the area served by that aquifer – to burn as ethanol – that sucks this water out of the ground like almost no other grain!
So what else is around that could supply water to America’s heartland? Maybe the Great Lakes? They provide 20% percent of the world's fresh surface water and supply eight states and two Canadian provinces – home to roughly 40 million people. On October 3, the President signed into law (the “Great Lakes Compact”) a federal statute that bans virtually any attempt to divert water from the Great Lakes to any outside region. Hmmm? We’ll just have to get it somewhere else. The oceans – minus the salt?
Moving water uphill – a necessity given America’s topography – is a very expensive solution (read: a huge energy requirement – just think how heavy a bucket of water is – although you can pick up some electricity from the downhill flow). That means even with cheap desalinization (it isn’t yet; still takes lots of energy to covert salt water into fresh water), just getting water to where it needs to be is not cheap or easy.
As a part of America’s going-forward rebuild of her infrastructure and focus on alternative energy, we also need to prioritize maximizing our water resources, conservation and new methods for pulling potable water out of the oceans and even thin air (yes, the technology exists!). Because if you think that a gasoline shortage would hurt this country, just think what life would be like with a major water shortage!
I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.
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