Flooding, coastal erosion, dissolving glaciers, contracting polar ice caps and water-laden tropical storms are bad enough, but the desertification of so much of the planet could cause so many of us, not to mention plants and animal life, to die from starvation or thirst. Cape Town, South Africa almost ran bone dry, saved only by a propitious rainfall. Mendocino, California faces not only the heavy smoke from some of the most massive wildfires in that state’s history but a litany of over 100 of the 400+ wells in the town are running bone dry. And since that is how most local residents get their water, it is an unmitigated disaster. Most businesses with dry wells are now having to buy water, trucked in on trips that are getting longer and longer, because everyone near Mendocino is also having water issues. Expensive and unsustainable.
The number one most basic resource, literally vaporizing before our eyes, in so much of the world is water. And so much of the planet, reflecting the undeniable (yet many do) impact of man-induced climate change, is facing long-term droughts that have forced millions to abandon homes and farms long since rendered fallow. It’s not really “drought” anymore (subject to cyclical correction). The correct term is desertification (a permanent change). Mankind needs to learn how to find water, even if extraction is problematic or very difficult.
In the Chilean desert and neighboring mountains, for example, it never rains. Yet somehow plants find the rolling fog provides the necessary water. What if water could be harvested for human use from that constant fog? It’s a pretty simple technology (pictured above): setting up nets to catch the fog, creating little rivulets of waters that trickle down the mesh to be captured in containers below. And it’s been around for decades as this archival excerpt (from the New York Times, July 4, 1992) does attest: “One moment, the air is clear, dry and sunny. Then the Pacific Ocean fog rolls in, thick, wet and cold. As it passes through huge sheets of plastic mesh set along the mountain ridge, a drop of water forms, then another and another.
“Suddenly, thousands are running down the mesh, filling a spiderweb of tubes that lead to the bottom of El Tofo and the fishing village of Chungungo, providing the tiny, poor community with the first clean drinking water it has had in years.
“At a time when the supply of fresh water to support the world's growing population has emerged as a major environmental issue, a team of Canadian and Chilean researchers, along with the Chilean Government, has produced a pilot project that could alleviate water shortages in many isolated towns in the underdeveloped world… It is not a technology that will provide water to millions. But for mountain villages like Chungungo, set in desert or semi-arid regions, where water brought in by truck tends to carry a high degree of contamination, harvesting the clouds could be a kind of salvation.” Underdeveloped world? How about Mendocino? Some already object that such nets would spoil the natural beauty of some many of the places these nets could be used. Might just have to learn to live with that.
Here in Los Angeles, it started with the 2018 ice hockey season: the Los Angeles Kings playing in the downtown Staples Center. It was an experiment that has since become permanent. Again, from the archives of the Los Angeles Times (July 5, 2018), comes this story: “BluEco Technology Group is so new that it doesn’t yet have a headquarters building and employs only four people. What it does have are machines, each the size of two refrigerators strapped together, that can pull large amounts of water from indoor air.
“The water is so pure it freezes clear, hard and dense — good enough to rival the best ice in the National Hockey League, said Staples Center and Kings executives, who began testing the devices in time for the Kings’ most recent season [2017/18].
“In addition to producing the kind of fast ice that hockey players love, the BluEco machines reduce reliance on city water supplies, clean the arena’s air and create a more comfortable environment for fans, the executives said. The system helps Staples Center’s air conditioning system run more efficiently and lowers the humidity inside so that the chillers don’t need to run as hard to keep the ice frozen… Staples Center will be able to reduce energy consumption by more than 8.2 million kilowatt-hours a year and water consumption by more than 500,000 gallons a year...”
But for businesses and communities that cannot function without clear access to water, there are other solutions to losing that resource, currently pretty pricey but likely to become more affordable as they are more widely deployed. Adele Peters, appropriately writing for FastCompany.com on Friday the 13th, provides one solution being tried in parched Mendocino: “[Local resident Gary Starr tells us that] ‘the town’s a little bit freaking out.’ Starr is now pushing for a new solution: technology that pulls water from the air.
Starr works with GoSun, a company that sells off-grid tech and now distributes machines from Tsunami, one of a handful of manufacturers that make air-to-water units. ‘The machine draws in fresh ambient air through a filter, and that filtered air passes through another compartment where we have a condenser coil to chill the air,’ says Ted Bowman, a product developer at Tsunami. In the same way that an air conditioner creates condensation, the system pulls drips of water out of the air, and then collects it in a basin to filter and purify it. ‘We’re basically doing the same thing in nature as a cloud does, but we’re trying to do it mechanically,’ Bowman says.
“A small machine can produce around 180 gallons of water a day—more than an average home needs—under optimal conditions of 80% humidity and 80 degree weather. Mendocino isn’t typically hot, but it is foggy, which can help the system work well. A machine can be set up outside someone’s house and connected to a storage tank; in Mendocino, homes already use storage tanks to collect well water.
“It’s not cheap, with a unit running around $30,000. But it’s less expensive than the millions that would be needed to build major new infrastructure like a desalination plant, which purifies seawater, or a water reclamation plant, which treats and recycles wastewater. The town is currently trying to get government funding for a permanent solution, Starr says. ‘But it will take years because government, unfortunately, doesn’t move fast,’ he adds. ‘So we’re trying to move faster and say, this technology is here.’ He’s now trying to raise funds to help residents buy the equipment.
“In the past, Tsunami has mainly targeted developing countries, but as long-term drought becomes more common in Western U.S. because of climate change, this type of technology may begin to make more sense here.” And it’s not as if desalinization isn’t free of issues. Even the most modern reverse osmosis plants consume a lot of electricity, and the extracted salt is toxic to sea life if released back to sea at the level of effluents that such plants produce. So disposing of that salt in a non-toxic distribution just adds to the costs, hard dollar and environmental, of that technology. But we are running out of answers. Water is life!
I’m Peter Dekom, and solving these desperate problems from climate change is that much more difficult when a major political party (the GOP) continues to deny the seriousness of the problem and authorize sufficient expenditures to begin to make a difference.
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