Do you have a sustainable water supply? What is it and how do you know?
In a recent article entitled Developing a Sustainable Water Supply for the Customers of Lookout Mountain Water District, I noted several concepts about sustainable water supplies which are applicable to water systems around the world. These ideas give a sense of the complexity of the question about how sustainable your water supply is. Before we can look at the sustainability of your water supply, we need some background about drought and water in general.
Many areas of the world are subject to drought, and nowhere is immune. One of the driest locations in the world is Antarctica, which is counter intuitive because of the snow and ice. Large areas of the Middle East, northern Africa and the Western United States are also drought prone. There are an increasing number of articles about fresh water supply and drought around the world. Northern and central Africa is especially hard hit by the lack of fresh water supplies, particularly if you include wastewater sanitation.
The current drought in the western United States and California is of concern because of the severity and length. The current California drought, which is into its fourth year, is definitely emphasizing the validity of recent drought studies.
In reference to the Western United States, a February 2015 paper entitled Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains by Benjamin I. Cook,1,2* Toby R. Ault,3 Jason E. Smerdon2, in Climatology Journal discusses historic droughts in North America.
“In the Southwest and Central Plains of Western North America, climate change is expected to increase drought severity in the coming decades. These regions nevertheless experienced extended Medieval-era droughts that were more persistent than any historical event, providing crucial targets in the paleoclimate record for benchmarking the severity of future drought risks. We use an empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models to show that these models project significantly drier conditions in the later half of the 21st century compared to the 20th century and earlier paleoclimatic intervals.
This desiccation is consistent across most of the models and moisture balance variables, indicating a coherent and robust drying response to warming despite the diversity of models and metrics analyzed. Notably, future drought risk will likely exceed even the driest centuries of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (1100–1300 CE) in both moderate (RCP 4.5) and high (RCP 8.5) future emissions scenarios, leading to unprecedented drought conditions during the last millennium.”
Tree ring studies (dendrochronology), ice cores and paleo climatic studies are tools which provide a glimpse of past climates. Current data points to the fact that the above findings are typical of droughts in the entire western United States. The typical drought in the western United States during the 20th century has been relatively short, which corresponds with the rapid increase in human population and infrastructure development during that period of time.
“Dendrochronology (from δένδρον, dendron, "tree limb"; χρόνος, khronos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) or tree-ring dating, is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree rings, also known as growth rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year.” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
Just like in the rest of the western United States, there have been numerous droughts of varying severity in Colorado along the Front Range (an area east of the Rocky Mountains which includes Fort Collins to the north, through Denver, down to Pueblo to the south). This has been and continues to be the center of population in the state.
The following paper by Thomas B. McKee, Nolan J. Doesken, and John Kleist, entitled A History of Drought in Colorado, Lessons Learned and What Lies Ahead, February, 2000 gives a good overview on historical drought in our state – (Source: http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/pdfs/ahistoryofdrought.pdf).
The following table shows Dry and Wet Periods for Colorado from the Fraction of Observing Sites – Precipitation for 24 month SPI
| Date | Dry | Duration | Date
| Wet | Duration |
| 1893-1905 | X | 12 years | 1905-1931 | X | 26 years |
| 1931-1941 | X | 10 years | 1941-1951 | X | 10 years |
| 1951-1957 | X | 6 years | 1957-1959 | X | 2 years |
| 1963-1965 | X | 2 years | 1965-1975 | X | 10 years |
| 1975-1987 | X | 3 years | 1979-1996 | X | 17 years |
It should be noted that this paper also states that:
“The most common droughts are short duration (6 months or less). They may be quite localized (especially during the growing season) or more widespread (especially during the fall, winter, and early spring). Depending on where and when they occur, they may have little or no impact on our lives. More widespread droughts do not necessarily have a tendency to become more long lasting.”
“Multi-year droughts occur infrequently.
Precipitation time series for weather stations across Colorado show that periods of two or more consecutive years with much below average precipitation (less than 80% of average) have occurred a few times during the 20th Century at most Colorado stations. Below average precipitation lasting three years in a row, however, is quite rare. Many locations have never had three consecutive very dry years, particularly over the northern half of Colorado. The only examples of four or more consecutive years with less than 80% of the long term average falling each year were found over southwestern Colorado near the turn of the last century (1899-1902), in southeastern Colorado during the dustbowl years (1933-1937), and over isolated areas of eastern Colorado 1952-1956. Based on SPI analyses, four droughts with a duration of at least four years (48 months) have occurred during the past century ….”
For most of the period between 1945 and the present, the “mini-droughts” tend to be short term. Because the major population increase and infrastructure development took place during this period, water suppliers prepared for what the historical water records and stream data depicted, which were these short term droughts. However, new data such as the information presented in the referenced paper show longer term droughts do occur.
As population increases in a region, pressure on the existing water supply goes up, often dramatically. It has been only recently that hard data regarding drought has been available due to the dramatic increase in computing and environmental sensing technology. Still, in reviewing articles and papers regarding drought which I have in my archive from the late 1960s, I note that experts have been warning about longer term droughts throughout that period. They warned, without having specific data, that water suppliers in Colorado (a drought prone state) should be prepared for longer droughts. Taking this a step further, I believe water suppliers worldwide should be required to think of drought as a district possibility and plan for it, especially with the emerging climate change data.
Not preparing for long term drought and maximizing existing water resources is, in my opinion, like living along the coast of California and not preparing for an earthquake, or living along the Gulf of Mexico coast and not preparing for a hurricane. No reasonable person would do such a thing. Even though most of California’s population has never been through a major quake, all the data suggests there have been major quakes in the past.
Speaking of California, look at the current drought they are having and project it on the water supplies of most of the cities and towns across the western United States. Clearly, a four year drought (so far) is very possible in the western United States. How would these water suppliers cope with a four year (and counting drought)?
Historically, due to the lack of human and financial resources, many smaller water suppliers had no choice but to concentrate on the “urgency of supplying water on a daily basis”. Just building a water supply infrastructure in arid regions is a major undertaking. Often, water needed to be stored in reservoirs and piped long distances for distribution to customers. As in the case of our small district, the original system was built over 100 years ago, by others, and was not maintained adequately during the period before it was taken over by our district. This is typical of many areas of our country and the world, where water and wastewater infrastructure is the last to be adequately maintained because of our “out of sight, out of mind mentality.”
It was only the drought of 2002 in Colorado which changed the focus of our small district, as well as that of most other water providers in the State to a large degree. Our district, as well as, suppliers across the entire state were required to take a longer term view of developing a sustainable water supply which went much beyond just the “day to day” physical supply and treatment of potable water. This included in depth water right regulation and administration, physical water metering and monitoring, and short term water storage administration. The State of Colorado also got much more involved in the regulatory process, via the State Engineer’s office. The Colorado State Engineer has the responsibility of managing and regulating the state’s complex code of water rights and decrees, as well as, water structures such as dams, pipelines and irrigation ditches. Other western states have similar regulatory agencies.
During the initial stages of a drought, the “ordinary” water consumer tends to think of the drought as a “nuisance” during which their lawn turns brown and they can’t wash their cars. However, water providers regard them as a major challenge. This is the reason large amounts of money (millions of dollars) are spent annually on water resource development and planning in Colorado and the western United States.
From the above referenced study, multi-year droughts are deemed as the worst scenario.
“Our study of past droughts has shown that the worst droughts are multi-year droughts. Vegetation dries up, soils blow, stored water reserves are gradually depleted, and wells go dry. What begins as a minor inconvenience can, for many people, end in the loss of revenues, property, and livelihoods.”
As water suppliers in California are discovering, not planning for a multi-year drought creates a situation where residents living in the state may end up with no water to drink. Industry and agriculture are suffering as well. Ground water from wells is being drawn out at a frantic pace, which traditionally has been the source of “last resort” and the “long term water bank. What happens when it is no longer available?
History shows that many water suppliers may be hard pressed to adequately guarantee a sustainable water supply for consecutive dry years with current water resources. There is no guarantee of the length of a drought. Only so much water can be stored, and mega projects like Lake Powell, and Lake Mead constructed in the 1930s by the Federal Government can run into problems if the drought is long enough.
One May 17, 2015 article, entitled America’s second largest reservoir – Lake Powell – is disappearing:
“As water levels plummet to 45% in America’s second-largest reservoir, new islands appear – and fears grow for a waterway that serves 40 million people.”
The immediate cause is the longest drought in a century.
“This 15-year drought that we’re in is the worst drought in the last 100 years,” said Davis. “But we also have tree-ring studies going back to the year 1075 and this is the fourth-worst drought since 1075. So the drought and weather cycles have a natural variability to them but we’ve got data on warmer temperatures and climate change making a difference” Source - http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/americas-second-largest-reservoir-lake-powell-is-disappearing/
Yet, even if water supplies can be “stretched” to provide for residential use, what about industrial and agricultural use? How long will people stay in an area where there are no jobs, i.e. where the economy is non-existent? What happens when industry is forced to move to regions where they can operate? What happens when an area such as the Imperial Valley in California, which produces more than 60% of the United States’ winter time vegetables, can no longer irrigate crops?
These questions may be answered if the current drought in California continues for a few more years. But, what happens if the current California drought expands to include much of the western United States? As noted above with regard to Lake Powell, there is not a water supply system in the western United States that has been designed to withstand a 30 to 60 year drought, especially at current population levels.
Droughts also have a public safety aspect. Without an adequate water supply, fire protection for both residential use and wildfire mitigation is limited to non-existent. In longer term droughts, animals and humans can die due to lack of water. There is also the increased risk of water borne diseases as water supplies dwindle and become increasingly contaminated.
So is there a solution to making areas prone to drought, drought-proof? Why can’t water be “taken” from areas of “plenty” and delivered to areas of drought? After all, floods occur periodically throughout the eastern United States and along the Mississippi River, so these should be areas of “plenty.”
Getting water from areas of “plenty” is not necessarily as easy a solution for arid and drought prone regions as it might seem. There are several reasons for this, which are not completely intuitive.
A good example is the Great Lakes. These lakes hold an estimated 21% of the fresh water in the world (source www.epa.gov/glnpo/basicinfo.html). They should be able to supply much needed water to the western United States via pumping and pipeline, right?
This sounds like a simple technical solution, because we transport oil through pipelines around the world. It is certainly possible to do with fresh water. However, there are more complex issues behind the scenes.
The Great Lakes, however, have two major issues which prevent them from supplying water to drought prone areas. They both involve the way the Lakes are used. The first is that the Great Lakes are a major source of water for drinking, industry, shipping and agriculture for eight states and two countries. Because of the shipping potential of the Great Lakes, the area surrounding the Lakes is a major industrial hub in both the United States and Canada. The Great Lakes are connected to the St. Lawrence River, Erie Canal and Atlantic Ocean. This is a shipping and industrial corridor for the Northeastern United States, as noted on the following website:
“There are 15 major international ports and some 50 smaller, regional ports on the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system.” – Source http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/business/ship/ship_4.html
A large percentage of the population of the United States and Canada rely on these lakes for drinking water, jobs, recreation and food.
The second issue is the diversion from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River.
“The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, historically known as the Chicago Drainage Canal, is the only shipping link between the Great Lakes Waterway (specifically Lake Michigan by way of either the Chicago River or the Calumet-Saganashkee (Cal-Sag) Channel) and the Mississippi River system, by way of the Illinois and Des Plaines Rivers.
The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal is 28 miles (45 kilometers) long, 202 feet (62 m) wide, and 24 feet (7.3 m) deep. Prior to its construction, the shallower and narrower Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848) connected the same waterways for navigable shipping over the Chicago Portage.
Today, diversions from the Great Lakes system are regulated by an international treaty with Canada[citation needed], through the International Joint Commission, and by governors of the Great Lakes states.” Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sanitary_and_Ship_Canal
There have been suggestions about increasing diversion of water from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi headwaters to aid shipping down the Mississippi. But this issue is contentious. The Great Lakes Treaty passed in 2009 has strict controls on how much water the Great Lakes can supply to the Mississippi River flows. Some of the legal arguments are as follows:
“On December 21, 2009, Michigan State Attorney General Mike Cox filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking the immediate closure of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan. The state of Illinois and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which constructed the Canal, are co-defendants in the lawsuit.[19]
In response to the Michigan lawsuit, on January 5, 2010, Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed a counter-suit with the U.S. Supreme Court requesting that it reject Michigan’s claims. Siding with the State of Illinois, both the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and The American Waterways Operators have filed affidavits, arguing that closing the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal would upset the movement of millions of tons of vital shipments of iron ore, coal, grain and other cargo, totaling more than $1.5 billion a year, and contribute to the loss of hundreds, perhaps thousands of jobs.[20] However, Michigan along with several other Great Lakes states argue that the sport and commercial fishery and tourism associated with the fishery of the entire Great Lakes region is estimated at $7 billion a year, and impacts the economies of all Great Lakes states and Canada.” Source - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sanitary_and_Ship_Canal
This treaty, entitled Great Lakes – St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact of 2008, was passed in part to stop various plans to export Great Lakes water to Utah, California or other drought prone areas via pipeline. There was even a proposal to pump Great Lakes water to Vancouver, Canada via pipeline and put it on transport ships for delivery to rivers in China.
“The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact is a legally binding interstate compact among the U.S. states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The compact details how the states manage the use of the Great Lakes Basin's water supply and builds on the 1985 Great Lakes Charter and its 2001 Annex. The compact is the means by which the states implement the governors' commitments under the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement that also includes the Premiers of Ontario and Quebec.” - Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
While not an inter-state or international concern, the small water district I have been working with discovered this lack of intra-state water cooperation first hand. Many people do not understand that during a drought, water rights owners/suppliers do not want to and in many cases will not sell water to other entities, especially on an intra-state basis. Simply put, there is no guarantee that the drought won’t spread. During the 2012, the basin which supplied water to our small district was in severe drought while basins to the north had normal to above average river flows. Our small district did get some much needed relief from other, larger water suppliers but it was on a very short term basis, which did not impact the water supplies of the larger entities in any way.
There can be some intra-state cooperation during drought, water suppliers tend to be very cautious once a drought seems to be looming. As a result of past droughts, many water suppliers, states and countries are changing the way water is regulated. What may have worked, have been appropriate and legal before the drought might now be not possible or illegal.
But there is an additional issue that goes beyond drought and beyond the immediate urgency of the daily water, even beyond the issue of drought. That is increasing global population.
For example, in my home state of Colorado, the city of Golden and all of the other water suppliers along the Front Range, including Denver, realize that drought is not the only threat to existing water supplies. Increasing population is also a major issue with water suppliers from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs. If projections are correct, the population in the Front Range, according to the Denver Water Board, is estimated to increase by 50% (to over 5 million) by 2025. In addition, populations are projected to double on the western slope as well, which is currently the main source of water for the Front Range.
Even without the threat of drought, the projected population increase makes it imperative that water suppliers continue to develop their water resources and continue to improve its physical and legal supply of water. Clearly, more people using the same amount of water around the world, especially in drought prone areas, can’t benefit limited water supplies.
A November 9, 2004 article in the Rocky Mountain News makes this very real. Entitled “West warned of longer drought.” The following is noted.
“The governors’ association is pushing for adoption of the National Drought Preparedness Act, which failed to make it through Congress in 2002 and last year. The bill would name a lead federal agency for drought response. It would create and advanced system of national drought monitoring and forecasting.”
The above is noteworthy because it shows that even during an emergency drought situation our elected leaders, also known as the “R”s and “D”s, are unwilling to do what they were elected to do – lead. You can debate the usefulness of a bill such as the National Drought Preparedness Act, or even, if it is the best solution, however, you can’t debate that fact that our leaders do very little more than draw huge income streams from the public trough in return for headline making, public discussions about very trivial issues (for the most part). When is the last time you remember issues of energy or water being discussed in a meaningful way on a national level by any of our national elected “R”s or “D”s?
So how do you know if you have a sustainable water supply? This is a challenging question. As you probably know, water issues in arid and drought prone areas are intertwined and complex. Often, water suppliers, particularity the larger ones, are not very transparent, in my opinion. There are many conflicting issues within these entities, many of which center around money and power. Smaller water supply entities are closer to their constituencies but still the issues can be clouded.
For example, according to an October 2009 article in WaterWorld entitled “Repositioning the Water Industry for the Water-Energy Nexus,” a Brookhaven National Laboratory study notes the following.
“…the typical US household expends – 100 gallons/person/day of water for household use, however, requires 465 gallons of water for energy production and 510 gallons for food consumed (irrigation/livestock).”
According to the article, Sandia National Laboratory, on its website in 2009, succinctly stated:
“These two critical resources [water and energy] are inextricably and reciprocally linked; the production of energy requires large volumes of water while the treatment and distribution of water is equally dependent upon readily available low-cost energy. The nation’s ability to continue providing both clean, affordable energy and water is being seriously challenged by a number of emerging issues.”
While moving water from areas of “plenty” to areas of drought may not be a long term solution, one possible solution may be pumping and piping desalinated water from the oceans to drought prone areas. Over 90% of the water used by Saudi Arabia is desalinated. While there are significant technical and economic issues, I believe that future generations will find it necessary to pay the price of creating, pumping and piping this very expensive water to areas where water is scarce. This will impact both coastal areas, because of the desalination plants, and pumping stations, as well as, the routes along the pipelines.
Education about water issues, even in non-drought prone areas, is critical to our future on this planet. Without this education, most of our population, follows and parrots what the “mainstream media” preaches. A good example is the fracking debate.
The amount of water used in the fracking process is staggering. It typically ranges from 1 to 5 millions gallons per well.
“Recently, however, a small number of deep, directionally-drilled, high-volume, hydraulically fractured wells have been completed in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. Those wells sometimes use several million gallons of water, and one Michigan well required more than 20 million gallons.” Source – Industrial WaterWorld, Sept/Oct 2013.
As a geologist, I am not against fracking. However, I am concerned that many millions of gallons of fresh water is being used and then injected back into the earth. Some is injected into drinking water aquifers which is clearly not helping maintain a sustainable fresh water supply.
However, much of the contaminated fracking water is injected into wells several thousands of feet deep. While that water probably does not impact the near surface freshwater supplies, it is removed from the hydrologic cycle, at least, in the immediate region. It is no longer available to immediate downstream users, which is normally the case. The story of fresh water use by humans is that it has normally remained in the hydrologic cycle. I believe that “short-term” profits have over-ridden the long term view in the case of fracking.
Clearly, I did not answer the question about a sustainable water supply. As global populations rise, the strain on existing fresh water supplies will increase dramatically. That is a given. Water suppliers in larger metropolitan areas may have larger budgets and more resources, but their systems are not necessarily any more sustainable than that of the small water district I am working with. A good example of this is the City of Las Vegas, which derives much of its long term supply from Lake Powell. The best answer regarding whether your water supply is sustainable, especially in drought prone areas, is educating yourself and becoming informed about issues and challenges.
I have numerous copies of articles from the past 20 years regarding global and regional water issues. Many of them are testimony to this lack of leadership on the national, state and local level. My book (now an EPub) entitled Understanding Water Rights and Conflicts, Second Edition, published by BurgYoung Publishing, references a significant number of articles such as those above in an attempt to make water an issue which can be understood by “non-technical” readers.
I recommend that water consumers and residents interface with their water suppliers, to learn about, discuss and clarify water challenges and issues. As you now realize, water is one of our most complex and precious resources, especially in drought prone areas, and probably one of the least understood by consumers. This makes public awareness an especially critical issue. The old adage about “if it is flowing from the tap, everything is OK” is clearly not sustainable in these times. The more aware the consumers, the more accountable the water suppliers, whether large metropolitan systems such as Denver or very small water districts like Lookout Mountain.
Sincerely:
H. Court Young
Author, publisher, speaker and geologist
Promoting awareness through the written word
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