WaterWired

Great Lakes Water to the West and South? No Way!

Good friend Michael Dale, who toils for an unnamed Federal agency, sent me this article, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on 28 October 2007. Governor Bill Richardson has backed off his "Wisconsin is awash in water" comment but the damage has been done.

I am really surprised Richardson made the remark. He's a Westerner, and God knows that a Westerner should know that anytime he/she makes a comment that event hints of coveting someone else's water, even a neighbor's, them's fightin' words.

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Great Lakes Key Front in Water Wars

by Tim Jones, Chicago Tribune

While the West burns and the Southeast bakes, there is little to suggest a large-scale, climatological catastrophe playing out any time soon in the Midwest. In fact, farmers in Iowa and Minnesota had trouble last week harvesting their corn and soybean crops because there had been too much rain.

But potentially huge battles over water are looming in the Great Lakes region as cities, towns and states near and far fight for access to the world's largest body of fresh surface water, all of it residing in the five Great Lakes.

Call them water wars, with the Great Lakes states hunkering down to protect what they see as theirs.

Water for the West

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic candidate for president, gave voice to his water lust early this month by suggesting that water from the Great Lakes could be piped to the rapidly growing -- and increasingly dry -- Southwestern states.

"States like Wisconsin are awash in water," Richardson told the Las Vegas Sun.

Richardson soon backed off after swift protests from the Midwest, including a resounding "No" from Michigan's Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

That won't be the end of it. The fires in Southern California, the prolonged drought in the Southeast and the shrinking flow of the Colorado River, which feeds seven Western states, have underscored the importance of water supplies in rapidly developing regions and the determination of a handful of states to hold on to a resource they see as key to their economic future.

With fresh water supplies dwindling in the West and South, the Great Lakes are the natural-resource equivalent of the fat pension fund, and some politicians are eager to raid it. The lakes contain nearly 20 percent of the world's surface fresh water.

"You're going to see increasing pressure to gain access to this [water] supply," said Aaron Packman, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University. "Clearly it's a case of different regional interests competing for this water."

Eight Great Lakes-area states, from Minnesota to New York, and two Canadian provinces have proposed a regional water compact that would, among other things, strengthen an existing ban on major water diversions outside the Great Lakes Basin, home to 40 million Americans and Canadians. That proposal still has to work its way through several legislatures, and then it must go to Congress, where the political balance of power has been tilting west and south for decades.

Coveting Great Lakes water is not a recent development. In the past two decades, governors have effectively resisted attempts to divert water outside the Great Lakes Basin. For instance, they joined forces with Canada in 1988 to block an effort by then-Illinois Gov. James Thompson to tap into the Great Lakes to help free up drought-stalled barge traffic in the Mississippi River.

Those are the loud fights, conjuring images of enormously expensive pipelines delivering billions of gallons of water daily to distant, parched lands.

But there also are smaller but no less significant frictions among the states trying to protect the water, notably in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, which wants to pipe Lake Michigan water into its community because its drinking water wells show high levels of cancer-causing radium. The Waukesha conflict stems from the city's being outside the vast Great Lakes Basin, which means the Lake Michigan water it would use would not be returned to the lake; it would be lost, draining into the Fox River and ultimately down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico.

Waukesha is a small but important example of the potential precedent-setting nature of diverting water to a city or state outside the Great Lakes Basin.

"There's a concern that the thirsty in the Great Lakes region will set the precedent locally, even though they may be 5 or 10 miles outside the basin. But 20, 30 or 50 years from now, that precedent could be used to send water to far-flung reaches of the continent," said Peter Annin, author of "The Great Lakes Water Wars."

"If you make the exception at 15 miles, what about 30 or 50 or 500 miles? That's the fear," Annin said.

Chicago River precedent

Of course, a glaring precedent was set a century ago when Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River. The Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the legality of the Chicago diversion and, in 1967, opened the door to Chicago suburbs to receive Lake Michigan water, even though those communities are outside the Great Lakes Basin.

But in an age of water wars, Waukesha may be the most visible line drawn in the sand.

Water levels of the Great Lakes are down substantially, and while that may be part of the historic cycle of ups and downs, water managers argue the region must jealously guard what is here. At the same time, more communities are discovering contamination of their drinking-water supplies, which already has increased the pressure to obtain Great Lakes water. A recent report forecast water shortages in northeast Illinois by 2020.

"We are the water belt of the nation, and we have a real opportunity to not only do the right thing environmentally but also have a sustainable management policy that makes tremendous economic sense for the region," said Todd Ambs, water division administrator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

"I wouldn't say we are awash in water, but there's certainly enough [water] to have a strong economic driver," Ambs said, to lure back businesses that left the region.

In Michigan, Granholm fought with Nestle Waters North America over the company's pulling millions of gallons from Lake Michigan for its Ice Mountain bottled-water franchise. The state has negotiated limits on the amount the company can pump.


'We're going to be stealing it'

When he was House majority leader, then-U.S. Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) warned a gathering in Michigan that federal control of Great Lakes water would not be in the state's interest.

"We're not going to be buying it. We're going to be stealing it," Armey said in 2000. "You're going to have to protect your Great Lakes."

That's the incentive behind the proposed water compact. David Naftzger, executive director of the Council of Great Lakes Governors, said he is optimistic that the water compact will be adopted by the eight states and approved by Congress.

"It's our water, and there's an interest in ensuring that it is used sustainably," Naftzger said. "If we don't have a good framework in place, we'll start to see shortages and conflict."

Noah Hall, who specializes in environmental and water law at Wayne State University, said there is an urgency to get the compact to Congress before the next census, because the eight states involved could lose 10 to 15 seats in Congress.

Hall said Congress is inclined to approve regional water compacts, but noted there is "no way for the Great Lakes states to prevent the U.S. government from taking the water if the federal government wants to do so."

Northwestern's Packman said the issue that needs to be addressed is "how many people do you want living in those [water-short] areas and how much agriculture do you want to support?"

History suggests that question will be ignored in favor of scrambling for new sources of water.

"It doesn't make economic sense to send Great Lakes water to the High Plains or the Southwest," Annin said, "but we know the thirsty will be calling."

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Bill should take up pipe-smoking.

"A pipe stimulates thought in the mind of the philosopher and shuts the mouth of the fool." -- Anonymous

Surprise! Climate Change Means Less Water for New Mexico

The Associate Press published this five days ago. But I would not worry if  I lived in New Mexico - Governor Bill Richardson will get lots of water from Wisconsin and the Great Lakes.

Glad I moved to western Oregon.

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Climate Change Will Hurt NM Water Supply

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Researchers at New Mexico's two largest universities are painting a grim picture of New Mexico's economic and agricultural future with predictions that climate change will mean less water in the Rio Grande watershed.

New Mexico State University agricultural economics professor Brian Hurd and University of New Mexico civil engineering professor Julie Coonrod say a wide range of climate models predict warmer weather and a change in precipitation patterns in New Mexico.

The researchers said in a study released Tuesday that those changes could lead to a drop in the basin's water supply by as little as a few percent or as much as one-third. That, in turn, could result in direct and indirect losses ranging between $13 million and $115 million by 2030 and from $21 million to more than $300 million by 2080.

The researchers noted that water is used by people, plants and animals and it's used to grow food and provide economic and ecological benefits.

"Under current climate there is virtually no spare water in New Mexico," the study says. "Imagine a very plausible future ... of significantly less water and at the same time significantly more people."

Most at risk are rural communities and agriculture, said Hurd, who has studied climate change and its economic effects for more than a decade.

According to the study, warmer temperatures could create a shift in precipitation patterns, leading to more rain and less snow. Much of the state's surface water comes from snow melt.

Warmer temperatures also mean earlier snow melts, and the researchers said that means water that makes it to the state's reservoirs has more time to evaporate before the irrigation season.

Hurd and Coonrod said less water means crops will shrink and production will drop, which could irreversibly alter New Mexico's landscape and character.

"Irrigated lands support more than crops," Hurd said. "They provide habitat for wildlife, open space and scenic vistas for the backdrop to New Mexico's thriving art, tourist and recreation economies."

Hurd and Coonrod also said the effects warming and drying would have an impact on the state's forests, rangelands and water quality. Wildfires could happen more often and be more severe, and wildlife and livestock would have less forage.

Also, farmers might experience more pressure to lease or sell their water rights so communities can sustain their populations.

"This is something that has already been happening in the state," Hurd said. "Climate change will only hasten water transfers."

The study says New Mexico's social, economic and environmental systems are highly vulnerable to changes and disruptions to water supplies potentially caused by climate change.

"Thus, the need is highlighted for water users, communities, organizations and institutions in New Mexico at every level and in every sector to begin considering possible adaptive strategies for making better use of their water resources," the study says.

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"New Mexico is the only place where you climb for water and dig for wood." -- Mark Twain

Global Warming and Ground Water-Fed Streams of the High Cascades: Supplying Water for the West?

Colleague Patrick Griffiths, Water Resources Coordinator for the City of Bend (OR) sent me this article writen by Kate Ramsayer of the Bend Bulletin.

Her piece describes the work of Dr. Gordon Grant, a colleague who works for the U.S. Forest Service and is a courtesy professor at Oregon State University. Grant has long been intrigued with the "peculiar river", the Deschutes River of central Oregon, which rises in the High Casacades and flows north to the Columbia Rver.

The basin map is courtesy of the Deschutes River Conservancy (DRC).

Unlike the rivers flowing west off the Cascades, the Deschutes and some others flowing east off the Cascades are fed predominantly by ground water, not surface runoff.

Because of that, due primarily to the high permeability of the relatively young volcanic rocks comprising the High Cascades, the Deschutes is generally less prone to the vagaries of drought and climate change than its surface water-fed counterparts. Grant feels that fact may mean that the Deschutes' flow will better weather warmer climate.

Interesting, but controversial, as the Deschutes is fully appropriated (see the article). Read the entire article here:

Download river_for_warmer_times_bulletinclimatechange2007.pdf 

Here is a longer, more technical article about Grant's work from the USFS Pacific Northwest Research Station (PNW):

Download scifi97.pdf

"Remember - life is just an eddy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics." -- Anonymous

New Jersey: No Drinking Water By 2020?

The article below is from the 24 October 2007 Asbury Park Press; Tom Baldwin is the reporter. Looks like the New Jersey water folks did not have 20-20 vision.

Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) had it wrong - the West will need to send water to the East.

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New Jersey Drinking Water Running Out

Supplies won't meet projected needs by 2020

TRENTON — New Jersey officials heard sobering news Tuesday that the state is running out of drinking water, but environmentalists said the bigger problem is the government is not doing anything about it.

"This is not a problem we have in the future. This is a problem we have today," said Joseph Maraziti, a former chairman of the State Planning Commission, addressing the state Clean Water Council's annual public hearing.

"We have a gross underinvestment in infrastructure," Maraziti said, noting the crisis might strike by 2020, not long after today's first-graders graduate from high school.

Fletcher Platt, executive vice president of the Millburn-based engineering consulting firm Hatch Mott MacDonald, said New Jersey's nearly 8.8 million residents will swell in numbers by a million by 2020.

"We do have 100-year-old water-distribution systems," Platt said, noting water supplies are inadequate to meet projected needs.

Platt foresees faster population growth in New Jersey than the Census Bureau, which projects the state will have nearly 9.5 million residents in 2020. It wouldn't reach 9.8 million residents until 2030, under those 2005 federal projections.

Others at Tuesday's hearing also voiced concern about the water infrastructure.

"We've been drunk with water," said Ben Spinelli, executive director of the State Planning Commission, saying the biggest problem is neglect.

"We are probably going to be the first state in the nation to reach build-out . . . The infrastructure that is in the ground has started to reach the end of its useful age," Spinelli said.

Sheila Frace from the federal Environmental Protection Agency said the politics of water, common in parched Western states, is moving east.

"Where we have been is not going to get us to where we are going," Frace said, noting climate change is an added dimension to the demand-supply problem.

Water, said Cranbury Mayor David Stout, has been the foundation of all civilizations.

As if they were symbols of the problem, plastic-wrapped cases of bottled water rested on a table at one side of the room, though participants could have sated their thirsts at the drinking fountains out in the hall.

Environmentalists such as Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club, coupled with David Pringle of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, said they have heard these forecasts with annual regularity, but they see no action by Trenton.

"It's the same message year in and year out," said Pringle. "Nothing changes. Are they going to get it this time? Our water supply is getting increasingly polluted, and the state doesn't have the policies in place to address that."

"The state actually has policies that undermine clean water," said Tittel, such as spending $250 million in tax dollars to build a golf course on the Meadowlands instead of fixing Paterson's piping so rain-driven sewage does not spill into nearby streams.

Tittel said monitors on rivers show that pollution has moved 10 miles west, upstream in east-flowing streams, such as the Metedeconk, and 10 miles east, upstream on west-flowing rivers that empty into the Delaware River.

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"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others." -- African proverb

Something New for the South: Adapting to Drought (Or Not)

This article appeared in today's New York Times.

A big issue in the Georgia-Atlanta water situation is the release of water from Lake Sidney Lanier down the Chattahoochee River to maintain environmental flows for endangered species. We have faced this issue in the West for a number of years.

Last week, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue filed an injunction against the Corps of Engineers to stop the release of water from Lake Lanier. Alabama claims it needs the water, and Florida needs it to maintain the fishery in Apalachicola Bay. For years, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama have tried to negotiate a compact governing the ACF (Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint) river basin to no avail. The existence of such a compact might have improved the situation somewhat, but it certainly would not have mitigated the drought itself.

Certainly, the lack of drought planning is a major issue here. No one saw this coming, or if they did, they chose not to do anything about it.

What's that about the disconnect between land use planning and water planning?

Visit the Watercrunch blog to see the latest information on this issue.

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New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt

by Shaila Dewan and Brenda Goodman, the New York Times, 23 October 2007

ATLANTA, Oct. 22 — For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.

Dock at Lake Sidney Lanier (courtesy the New York Times)

The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared October “Take a Shorter Shower Month.” And Saturday, Mr. Perdue declared a state of emergency for more than half the state and asked for federal assistance, though the state has not yet restricted indoor water use or cut back on major commercial and industrial users, a step that could cause a significant loss of jobs.

These last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event — dry faucets.

“We have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency,” said Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey.

But a sense of urgency has been slow to take hold. Last year, a bill died in the Georgia Legislature that would have required that low-flow water devices be installed in older houses before they are resold. Most golf courses are classified as “agricultural.” Water permits are still approved first come first served.

And Georgia is not at the back of the pack. Alabama, where severe drought is even more widespread, is even further behind in its planning.

A realistic statewide plan, experts say, would tell developers that they could not build if no water was available, and might have restricted some of the enormous growth in the Atlanta area over the last decade. Already, officials have little notion how to provide for a projected doubling of demand over the next 30 years. The ideas that have been floated, including piping in water from Tennessee or desalinating ocean water, would require hundreds of billions of dollars and painful decision making the state has been reluctant to undertake.

“It’s been develop first and ask questions later,” said Gil Rogers, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Instead, Georgia has engaged in interminable squabbles with neighboring states over dam releases and flow rates. The latest effort at mediation with Alabama fell apart just last month. And Georgia officials insist that Atlanta would have plenty of water were it not for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which they say has released more water from its main source of water, Lake Lanier, than is necessary to protect three endangered species downstream. Last week, Mr. Perdue filed for an injunction against the corps to stop the release of water. (Downstream, Alabama officials responded in protest, saying they need the releases.)

“We are not here because we consumed our way into this drought, as some would suggest,” said Carol Couch, Mr. Perdue’s director of environmental protection.

Those making that argument against Georgia include many people in Florida, the only state in the region to have adopted a water plan and home to the downstream end of the basin that includes Lake Lanier. An editorial Friday in the St. Petersburg Times said that the blame lay not with the corps but with “a record drought, unrestrained population growth and poor water-conservation habits.”

Bruce A. Karas, vice president of sustainability for Coca-Cola, said no one from the City of Atlanta or its water planning district had approached company officials to ask them to conserve water. Mr. Karas said the company had worked to reduce consumption on its own since 2004.

“We’re very concerned,” Mr. Karas said. “Water is our main ingredient. As a company, we look at areas where we expect water abundance and water scarcity, and we know water is scarce in the Southwest. It’s very surprising to us that the Southeast is in a water shortage.”

Mary Kay Woodworth, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Landscape and Turf Association, said almost 14,000 workers in landscaping and other businesses that depend on planting and watering had lost their jobs.

“This is a precious natural resource, and it has not been managed well,” Ms. Woodworth said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re in this situation today. The infrastructure was not in place for the development.”

In 2001, the state did establish the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District for 16 counties and dozens of jurisdictions in the Atlanta area. The district has focused on conservation pricing, under which the price of water rises with consumption, and on incentives for replacing inefficient plumbing and monitoring for leaks, a major cause of water loss.

Some environmentalists criticize the district, saying its requirements are weak and its progress unmeasured. The district’s projections, they say, are based on an outdated estimate of water availability, provided by the state, that does not take into account climate change. Pat Stevens, chief environmental planner for the Atlanta Regional Committee, which provides employees to the water district, said the plan was being revised and the requirements would tighten.

“You can’t just do this overnight,” Ms. Stevens said. “Otherwise, you will close businesses.”

“We will out-conservation California,” she added. “But, you know, it takes time.”

In January, the Legislature will consider a proposal to expand the planning process statewide.

State officials defend their response, saying the drought got very bad very quickly.

And Georgia is not the only state in trouble. The drought has afflicted most of the Southeast, a region that is accustomed to abundant water and that tends to view mandatory restrictions as government meddling. Lake Lanier is part of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system, which forms much of the border between Georgia and Alabama and then spills into Florida. There, the river provides a habitat for two types of mussel and a sturgeon that are endangered.

The temptation to blame the corps is strong. Because of years of litigation, the corps operates the dams on the river system under an interim policy driven largely by the need to protect the endangered species of fish and shellfish downstream. Critics say the policy’s minimum-flow requirement does not take into account severe dry spells and is not supported by science. Mr. Perdue has said that the flow is twice what nature would provide under similar circumstances.

Two weekends ago, the corps added to the pain in North Georgia by increasing the flow out of Lake Lanier even as it was shrinking. The lake is the only one in the basin that still has water in what is considered the storage pool, usually the top 60 percent of capacity. (Using the remaining water, called “dead storage,” could require different intake mechanisms and more treatment.)

In response to Mr. Perdue’s complaints, the corps has agreed to consult the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which protects endangered species, about modifying flow requirements in the Apalachicola River.

With a public anxious over the possibility of running out of water, the corps has not been the only entity to shoulder blame.

On Oct. 1, Stone Mountain Park began to make snow for a winter mountain, hoping to attract children who had not seen the real thing. The mountain was planned during the very wet summer of 2005, and the state and local governments were duly informed, said Christine Parker, a spokeswoman for the park.

The state announced a Level 4 drought response on a Friday and, after park officials reviewed the list of exceptions for businesses, snow-blowing began the following Monday, before much of the public had fully grasped the severity of the situation. After the project was ridiculed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the park shut it down. Ms. Parker said that only then did the park hear from state environmental authorities.

Stone Mountain had never intended to take a cavalier attitude toward the drought, Ms. Parker said, but had not been given any guidance.

“A lot of businesses are having to go out and ask the right questions,” she said, “so they can do the right thing.”

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If you want to keep up with the Altanta water situation and the Southeast drought, read Robert Osborne's excellent Watercrunch blog.

"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." -- Anonymous