Water shortage national problem

Wide areas facing dryness previously limited to West

Excerpts from New York Times article (August 12, 2001)

With water shortages appearing in places that have never doubted the future of their supply, many parts of the country are discovering that water may be a commodity more precious than oil.

 The problem, which used to be limited to the arid West, has dominated community concerns in some of the most unlikely places.   One of those is South Elgin, Ill., where people have noticed that the water that has sustained a little pocket of life - beavers, muskrats, frogs and cattails - has disappeared, and the land around it looks puckered, despite a wet spring.

A dried-up wetland in a township that gets as much rain as Seattle every year, in a region where floods are a fact of life and the summer humidity can make it seem like being inside the mouth of a dog, was odd enough.

But it could foretell something bigger, even more out of character, according to a study that has stunned people in the Chicago metropolitan area.

Parts of six counties in a region that borders one of the world's largest freshwater sources, Lake Michigan, could be in for serious water shortages within 20 years, the report by a regional planning commission said. And while the June report surprised people who live near a lake system that contains one-fifth of the world's surface fresh water, it did not surprise a handful of corporations that have been saying that water will be for this century what oil was for the last.

In Florida, reservoirs below and above ground are badly depleted and becoming briny with saltwater seepage. The water shortage is so bad in parts of the state, despite a recent tropical storm, that people have been hauled into court and fined for violating strict water rationing standards.

In Kentucky, more than half of the state's 120 counties ran short of water or were near shortages this year before heavy rains brought relief.  In the Pacific Northwest, where water is the master architect of a lush land, too little water has been promised to too many people, leaving farms and wildlife to wither in places like the Methow Valley in Washington or Klamath Falls, Ore. - precursors of coming water clashes, according to many experts.  And a report released Thursday found that even in the suburbs around Seattle, on the wet side of the Cascade Mountains, demand for water is outstripping supply, raising the prospect of shortages within 20 years.

Some major cities in the Southwest, including El Paso, San Antonio and Albuquerque, could go dry in 10 to 20 years. But a number of towns in New England and the well-watered half of the Midwest are also facing the prospect of running out of water in a generation's time.  In the Great Lakes region, a fourth year in a row of declining water levels has caused millions of dollars in losses for shipping companies, marinas and other businesses and prompted further restrictions on future water withdrawals for expanding suburbs.

"A lot of people just can't believe that we may be running out of water, living this close to the Great Lakes," said Sarah Nerenberg, a water engineer with the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which conducted the study on shortages.

It was the prospect of these growing national water scarcities, combined with a global problem in which nearly a billion people do not have access to clean drinking water

Water is different than oil - it's so much more emotional," said Deborah Coy, a water market expert at Schwab Capital Markets. "Look what's happening: You've got shortages all over the world."

Pickens plans to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and pipe it to cities in Texas. In Southern California, a private company, Cadiz, is negotiating with the agency that provides water for 17 million people to store water from the Colorado River in a Mojave Desert aquifer and then sell it back in dry years.

Some of the other big rivers that have long sustained American communities, from the Ipswich in Massachusetts to the Rio Grande in the Southwest, are running thin. Global warming, which has been blamed for increased evaporation rates of surface water and low mountain snowpack that feeds major rivers, is cited as the biggest single culprit in some of the emerging water shortages.  Sprawl is coming in for its share of blame as well. In the Chicago area, hydrologists say land that would normally soak in water and replenish aquifers has been paved over, blocking water needed to refill the underground basins.