Okay, the photo to the left should look familiar to you by now. It's Cynthia Barnett, author of Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., an exceptional book I urged you to read. I also reviewed it a while back, referring to it as 'Cadillac Swampland'.
Last week, I met her in person when she keynoted the American Water Resources Association's (AWRA) Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, NM. [Disclosure notice: I chaired the meeting and invited her to speak].
She gave an excellent presentation, based upon her book. I thought I would highlight a few of her talking points and my take (in italics).
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Barnett started out showing a USA map with the 100th meridian, the vertical line roughly separating the dry West (<20 inches of rain per year) from the wet East (>20 inches per year). John Wesley Powell said this meant that the East would have plenty of water and would not have to fight over it; irrigation would be unnecessary. That was one of the few things Powell got wrong. She then posed a great question: What assumptions are we making now that will seem equally far-fetched in 50 or 100 years?
She showed a map of Florida. Just above Orlando an imaginary horizontal line indicated a hydrologic divide. She pointed out that most of the population (80%) is south of that line but only 44% of the precipitation falls there. The north-south distributions of people and water mimic those of California.
She correctly indicated that the Atlanta water crisis is not as simple as Georgia humans vs. the mussels in Apalachicola Bay, the spin Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has invoked. It's more complicated than that, as it also involves Alabama, environmental flows, farmers, etc. The Governor is scoring some political points by painting Atlanta and Georgia as the victims; I don't know about Georgia, but my former home (albeit briefly) Atlanta is no more a victim than any of the other players.
Her comments on the The Tampa Bay Water Wars and Tampa Bay Water's desalination plant fiasco resonated with me.
The Southwest Florida Water Management District had been pumping ground water unsustainably for years. Staff knew this but the upper echelons refused to believe it, even denying that pumping had anything to do with sinkhole formation.
The Tampa Bay desalination plant illustrated potential problems with mega-infrastructure. It is now producing water at 25 mgd (million gallons per day) but came in four years late and $40M over budget. Why? Tampa Bay Water wanted to build the biggest desal plant this side of Saudi Arabia. But it was built on the cheap and its 10,000 membranes were fraught with problems. The water, slated to cost $1.71 per thousand gallons, now costs $3.19 per thousand gallons. Hey, it's still much cheaper than bottled water!
Barnett indicated desal plants are nothing new. There are 250 small-scale plants nationwide, working just fine; Florida has 120. And more importantly, while the Tampa Bay desal plant sat idle, the utility reduced overall ground water pumping from 192 mgd to 121 mgd - despite population growth. Go figure...
Here are four points Barnett said we can learn from the Tampa Bay situation:
- The structure of water agencies makes them slow to change conventional wisdom
- Lawsuits and politics rarely net more water
- Regional cooperation and serious conservation are important
- Mega-infrastructure projects seem to have unintended consequences
To further illustrate the conservation aspect she said that water use in the greater Boston area hit a 50-year low in 2004 after the implementation of an aggressive conservation program. Sarasota County in Florida has reduced per-capita consumption to 90 gpd (gallons per day) from 140 gpd.
She noted Florida's water demand has been on the upswing although it is declining elsewhere, even in those places where the population is growing. In Seattle, total water use has been constatnt since 1975 despite a population increase of 30%. She said that Florida's water supply plan calls for an additional 2 billion gallons per day by 2025 whereas California's plan calls for the same amount of water use in 2030 as today's use, even though it will add more than 12 million people.
She mentioned that if Mirage gets just one point across, it's this: Economic prosperity and increased population growth need not equal greater and greater water consumption. Amen!
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Upshot: great talk from the author of a great book. If you get a chance to see her in person, do so. She and her book are about more than just Florida; there are cautionary tales for us all.
Very good news: she's working on another book. You'll have to ask her the topic.
"Those who have failed to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat its mistakes." -- George Santayana
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