by John Lippert and Jim Efstathiou, Jr.
February 26, 2009 (Bloomberg) -- On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30-foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.
As they’ve been doing since June, they’ll blast and dig straight down into the limestone surrounding the reservoir that supplies 90% of Las Vegas’s water. In September, when they hit 600 feet, they’ll turn and burrow for 3 miles, laying a new pipe as they go.
The crew is in a hurry. They’re battling the worst 10-year drought in recorded history along the Colorado River, which feeds the 110-mile-long reservoir. Since 1999, Lake Mead has dropped about 1% a year. By 2012, the lake’s surface could fall below the existing pipe that delivers 40% of the city’s water.
As Las Vegas’s economy worsens, the workers are also racing against a recession that threatens the ability to sell $500 million in bonds so they can complete the job.
Patricia Mulroy, manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, is the general in this region’s war to stem a water emergency that’s playing out worldwide. It’s the biggest battle of her 31-year career.
‘We’ve Tried Everything’
“We’ve tried everything,” says Mulroy, 56, who made no secret of her desire to become secretary of the U.S. Interior Department before President Barack Obama picked U.S. Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado in December.
“The way you look at water has to fundamentally change,” adds Mulroy, who, after 20 years of running the authority, said in January she’s ready to start thinking about looking for a new job, declining to say where.
Across the planet, people like Mulroy are struggling to solve the next global crisis.
From 2500 B.C., when King Urlama of Lagash diverted water in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley in a border dispute with nearby Umma, to 1924, when Owens Valley , California, farmers blew up part of the aqueduct that served a parched Los Angeles, societies have bargained, fought and rearranged geographies to get the water they need.
Mulroy started her push with conservation. She’s paying homeowners $1.50 a square foot (0.09 square meter) to replace lawns with gravel and asking golf courses to dig up turf. That helped cut Las Vegas’s water use by 19.4% in the 7 years ended in 2008, even as the metropolitan area added 482,000 people, bringing the total to 2 million. It wasn’t enough.
Paul Bunyan
So she’s planning a $3.5 billion, 327-mile (525-km) underground pipeline to tap aquifers beneath cattle-raising valleys northeast of the city. She’s even suggested refashioning the plumbing of the entire continent, Paul Bunyan style, by diverting floodwaters from the Mississippi River west toward the Rocky Mountains.
If Mulroy’s ideas are extreme, one reason is that the planet’s most essential resource doesn’t work like other commodities.
There’s no global marketplace for water. Deals for property, wells and water rights, such as the ones Mulroy must negotiate to build the pipeline, are done piecemeal. As the world grows needier, neither governments nor companies nor investors have figured out an effective and sustainable response.
“We have 19th-century ways of utilizing water and 21st-century needs,” says Brad Udall, director of Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Unyielding Pressure
Water upheavals are intensifying because the population is growing fastest in places where fresh water is either scarce or polluted. Dry areas are becoming drier and wet areas wetter as the oceans and atmosphere warm. Economic roadblocks, such as the global credit crunch and its effects on Mulroy’s attempts to sell bonds, multiply during a recession.
Yet local governments that control water face unyielding pressure from constituents to keep the price low, regardless of cost. Agricultural interests, commercial developers and the housing industry clash over dwindling supplies. Companies, burdened by slowing profits, will be forced to move from dry areas such as the American Southwest, Udall says.
“Water is going to be more important than oil in the next 20 years,” says Dipak Jain , dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies why corporations locate where they do.
No Cheap Water
Even before the now decade-long drought began punishing Las Vegas, people used more than 75% of the water in northern Africa and western Asia that they could get their hands on in 2000, according to the United Nations.
This is a long and very interesting article -- more at this link: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=2065100&sid=a_b86mnWn9.w
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