BLOG
July 12th, 2008
Circle of Blue recently offered two interesting articles on the impending era of freshwater scarcity in the United States. The first noted that:
“…builders in the Southeast are confronting limits to planting gardens and lawns for new houses as a result of local water restrictions prompted by a continuing drought. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir beneath the Great Plains, is steadily being depleted. California experienced the driest spring on record this year.
And scientists forecast that within 13 years Lake Mead and Lake Powell along the Colorado River, the two largest reservoirs in the southwest United States, could become “dead pool” mud puddles….”
…While agriculture in the Colorado Basin faces shortages, farmers to the east in the high plains — tapping the Ogallala Aquifer — have progressively seen their wells dry up. The aquifer is the largest in the United States and sees a depletion rate of some 12 billion cubic meters a year, a quantity equivalent to 18 times the annual flow of the Colorado River. Since pumping started in the 1940s, Ogallala water levels have dropped by more than 100 feet (30 meters) in some areas
.…Declining water levels affect the Great Lakes, too. In a paper published late last year, scientists projected that over the next three decades or so, water levels in Lake Erie, which supplies drinking water to more than 11 million people, could fall three to six feet as a result of climate change.
The second article focused on Lake Mead and the conflict over Colorado River resources in particular:
“…With regard to water, it’s going to be a real cat fight because everybody has different water rights. For instance, the Metropolitan Water District has fourth water right off of the Colorado good for 550,000 acre feet of water, they also have fifth water right for 500,000; the problem is that that fifth water right was used to get all of “unused water.†There isn’t any unused water anymore. If you noticed this year, there are a number of avocado orchards that were cut down. They didn’t have the water to run them.
What I worry about is that we’re going to get into a tremendous litigation exercise that will drag through the courts for years to decades. All the time that’s going on, we’re getting less and less water.
…it’s going to be a continuing, festering thing that will get worse…
I think one of the things that is not appreciated is that you can’t just find the solution for this problem now. The example here is the Colorado River compact of 1922; it solved the problem. Now there is more demand and not as much water as there used to be, so the problem comes back again, and what climate change is going to do is make it even worse. You’re getting less and less water over the decades, so it’s going to be a continuing, festering thing that will get worse. It’s going to exacerbate if we keep building cities in the desert: Tucson, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas. Crazy. That’s desert, it never meant to have cities, and they all have one water supply, only one, the Colorado.”