For the people in California who are now in the third year of bone-dry drought, the scarcity of pure clean water has become a serious problem. A man in Willits showers only every other day, and collects the water for his tomato plants. He replaced his grass lawn with artificial stuff. Many people are doing their part to conserve, but the wineries continue to drill and tap the dwindling water table. Of course, California bureaucrats are slow to respond to the crisis, which become reality in the first place with their mismanagement of natural resources. Unlike other states, California does not issue well construction permits; and agriculture has no limits on the number of wells they can drill, or how much water they can take. The state water board says a few things about groundwater: Californian’s use about 15 billion gallons of groundwater – per day! Californians use more groundwater than any other state. Californians use approximately 20% of all the groundwater consumed in the United States. Californians use twice as much groundwater as the next highest state (Texas). Most of the groundwater used in California is for agricultural crop irrigation. One major consequence of the drought is an intense fire-fighting season across in California. The California OES (Office of Emergency Services) Chief, Kim Zagaris, said he has seen the worst fire behavior in his 37-year career, and is concerned about getting enough water for the rest of the fire season. That means there is little or no water in the creeks and streams in the forest areas for helicopters to scoop up and drop on fires from the air. For people dependent on lakes for their water, the man-made reservoirs around Northern California have been drained almost to their very bottoms. Natural lakes are at historically low levels and are suffering algae blooms in the summer's heat. Thick mats of rotting algae float to the surface from the cooler depths as the lake warms. Local breezes carry the stench for miles. Getting pure, clean water is becoming a problem everywhere, in the USA and worldwide. In this country we are seeing more and more contamination from industrial sources. Many say the EPA is not doing its job regulating, and certainly not inspecting these many thousands of facilities that pollute our home. The chemical spill in the Elk River, West Virginia is an example, with as many as 300,000 people in many surrounding counties affected by the badly managed manufacturing of chemicals used in the fracking process. The Elk River chemical spill occurred on January 9, 2014 when crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) was released from a Freedom Industries facility into the Elk River, a tributary of the Kanawha River, in Charleston in the U.S. state of West Virginia. ~Wikipedia Thinking about this led me to research how much water is actually available to use, and how much is in the oceans. Two and a half percent of the planet's water is 'freshwater'. And 98% of that is locked in polar ice (admittedly dwindling) and groundwater. The vast underground reservoirs of the planet have been severely tapped in the last century of rampant over-population and wasteful agricultural practices. The diagram below shows how the planet recycles water from the oceans to the land and back, when it is not over-used and diverted by pesky human interference. Just 0.003% of the planet's freshwater is contained within living organisms and products humans manufacture. A similar tiny amount (just 0.3% ) is found in lakes, rivers, and the atmosphere. Humans use 70% of the available freshwater to grow food. The rest is necessary to sustain life, and is already in short supply around the world. Water companies scramble to find and fix leaks in their aging systems, while the larger companies buy out the smaller ones and water becomes a bigger industry than you realize. In our capitalistic Western society water is a valuable commodity. Huge bottling plants have been churning out literally billions of bottles of pure clean water, draining the aquifers in once remote locations like Northern California's Lake Oroville (photo below). The people that live in California have woken up to reality and are conserving water. Some places have reduced their consumption by half, and overall the state cut back 7.5% in July of this year. Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board said that the “water saved was enough to for 1.7 billion people to each take a five-minute shower.” There are other hilarious statistical comparisons to make us feel good about it. As the aquifers get drained in our mad rush to grow enough food to feed the over-populated planet, we are using up something irreplaceable. What will we do next? Click here to view the article
