The Big Thirst, page 11
That’s what’s missing from the conversation in Atlanta—where the most serious water conservation law limits the hours you can water the grass, unless of course you’re watering important grass, like on a golf course. And it’s missing from the water conversation in most places that have serious water problems—not how to get through the dry spell or the drought, but how to think differently about the available water and change how we use it.
What the officials in Las Vegas realize, and what even the residents have come to appreciate by imposing a daily water tax on themselves, is that the cost of water isn’t what it takes to clean it and pump it to your house. The cost of water is, first, the cost of running out of water. What happens to an economy—in Las Vegas, in Atlanta, in Australia—built assuming a certain level of available water, when that water drops off dramatically?
And the cost of water is the cost to add the next gallon of supply—the effort and money, the time and political will required to find new water, secure it, and deliver it.
Neither of those costs is in your monthly water bill.
Patricia Mulroy, for all of her success both in helping Las Vegas change and helping Las Vegas grow, doesn’t sound optimistic. After she has spent twenty-one years trying to give Las Vegas a sense of both water appreciation and water security, the precipitous drop in Lake Mead makes the city seem less water secure than ever. “Are things kind of a mess now, again?” says Mulroy wryly. “Yes. Maybe I should have retired in 2000”—when Lake Mead was full.
Mulroy is worried about the impact of climate change on water supplies and water infrastructure. She’s helped form a climate-change alliance composed of some of the largest water utilities in the country.46 She’s worried about micropollutants—the residue from birth control pills, pharmaceuticals, pesticides—that seem to be slipping into drinking water supplies, including her own. “Does it need to be dealt with?” she says. “Absolutely.”
She’s worried about attitude. “Future generations are not going to be living the same way we’ve lived,” she says. “They’re not going to have the luxury of the abundance of supply per person that we enjoy.” In testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2009, Mulroy said, “We know that the way we’ve been managing water resources for the last hundred years is obsolete.”
By that, Mulroy means that, as individuals, as companies, as communities, we use water in ways that are wasteful and shortsighted, that don’t actually get real value out of the water available. That’s something we can only change by paying more attention to how we use water. No one person in Las Vegas, no one company in Atlanta, is causing the water problems in those places—everyone together is.
But there’s a much larger sense in which Mulroy thinks we’ve been mismanaging our water and will need to change. For Mulroy, water is just another resource—like electricity, or coal, or gold—and romanticizing water, or investing it with special status, doesn’t help you get it, manage it, and use it.
Mulroy briefly considered, for instance, building her own desalination plant on the Pacific coast in either California or Mexico, and piping the water three hundred miles inland to Las Vegas. What dissuaded her? The electricity just to pump the water from the coast to Las Vegas would cost $400 million a year, more than the entire operating budget of the SNWA. Not that she’s given up what seems like a wild idea, though. Mulroy has started talking to officials in both Mexico and California about building and operating a desalination plant, and trading the desal water to her hosts for a piece of their Lake Mead water.
Mulroy told President Obama he should consider a major public works water project, on the scale of Hoover Dam itself. She thinks the federal government should create a system of canals to capture, then divert Mississippi River floodwaters straight to the Midwest. When the Mississippi River floods, whole communities are devastated; the water they are devastated by is largely wasted. Mulroy isn’t talking about diverting the Mississippi itself—she knows something about the politics of river water—just the floodwaters.
The result, in theory, could save the Mississippi River basin from periodic natural disasters, it could allow states east of the Rocky Mountains to access a new source of water, it could even allow the United States to replenish the desperately falling Ogallala Aquifer in the high plains. “One man’s flood control is another man’s water supply,” says Mulroy. “You could capture 9 million to 14 million acre-feet of water a year.” That’s more than all the water Arizona, California, and Las Vegas take from the Colorado River.
“It’s an engineer’s idea,” Mulroy says. “People are still stunned by it. But the interstate highway network, what did that cost?” And where would we be without it?
One of the things that makes Mulroy positively angry is a territorial protectiveness people have about water. Perhaps that’s understandable, given that she and Las Vegas will never have any water that other people try to take. But she clearly thinks we have an immature attitude about how we manage water as a resource. The Great Lakes states, in the last five years, have passed a new agreement (that also includes Canada) forbidding any water from within the Great Lakes basin to be diverted in any way outside the basin. The compact was motivated in part by fear that dry western states would try to purchase water from Great Lakes communities and pipe the water west.
“We take gold, we take oil, we take uranium, we take natural gas from Texas to the rest of the country,” says Mulroy. “We move oil from Alaska to Mexico. But they say, ‘I will not give you one drop of water!’
“They’ve got 14 percent of the population of the United States, and 20 percent of the fresh water in the world—and no one can use it but them? ‘I might not need it. But I’m not sharing it!’
“When did it become their water anyway? It’s nuts!”
Imagine Texas passing a law that no oil drilled in Texas could leave the state.
Not, mind you, that Mulroy really thinks there would ever be a pipeline from Chicago to Las Vegas. She’s girding for the process of getting permits to build a pipeline to bring groundwater from only two counties away, if she ever gets permission to take it. But she finds irrational the attitude that regards transcontinental oil and natural gas pipelines as routine, even essential, and transcontinental water pipelines as unthinkable, even sinful. “Nothing makes better cheap politics than water,” she says.
Emerging from hours of conversation with Patricia Mulroy, you certainly end up with a heightened alertness to how water is being used and misused. And yet, right there on the Strip, in the midst of all the waterfalls and lagoons and fountains that Mulroy can both explain and justify, there appears to be a glaring irony. In the town that is paying golf courses to rip out acres of turf and specifying the hose nozzle you use to wash your car, the wide median along the city’s main street is covered in vivid green grass. How in the world does Mulroy justify cultivating turf down the center of Las Vegas Boulevard?
It’s actually a bit difficult to get out to the middle of the Strip—in most places, it’s flanked by four lanes of traffic in each direction. But if you dodge the tour buses and rental cars to dash out to the grassy median, and reach down and stroke the turf, you’ll find it soft, cool, and appealing to the touch. And then, if you grab it and pull, you’ll find that the blades are stubbornly planted and a whole patch tugs up when you grab just a bit.
The grass in the median of Las Vegas Boulevard turns out to be like many of the other water features on the Strip: like the canals of Venice and the shark reefs of Mandalay Bay and the topless allure of the adults-only swimming pools. The grass is soft, beautiful, perfectly cultivated. And it’s fake. Of course.
Las Vegas is a potent lesson in not taking water for granted, and also in not taking for granted that you understand the water you think you see.
The water that Las Vegas returns to Lake Mead—the purified wastewater that gets Las Vegas its critical return-flow credits—runs back to the reservoir in an old creek bed called the Las Vegas Wash. Right near the shore of Lake Mead, you can stand on the bank of the Las Vegas Wash and watch the water flowing back to the lake. The Las Vegas Wash has no natural flow. All its routine flow comes from the outfalls of the city’s wastewater treatment plants (and from storm water when it rains). The Wash looks like any other creek at the edge of an urban area. It meanders through the landscape, its banks creating a greenway through the desert. About four feet deep, the Wash is often not more than fifteen or twenty feet across.
When you stand on its banks, what you’re seeing is something remarkable: It’s the real-time indoor water use of all of Las Vegas, the water that 2 million Las Vegans are using right now to shower, to cook, to wash clothes, to clean the bathtubs in the suites of the Bellagio. The water moves at a good clip—it turns out to be about a million gallons every eight minutes—but part of what’s extraordinary about the current in the Wash is how utterly unremarkable it is.
In a city that prides itself on water wonders of all kinds, this quiet stream is in some ways the most wonderful of all. It’s a display not of the new tricks we can think of for water to do, but of a new way of thinking about water. We can use it, we can clean it, we can return it, and we can reuse it. That’s what the world itself has been doing since long before we arrived, and many water problems would get much easier to handle, or disappear altogether, if we could finally accept that lesson.
When you stand and watch the Fountains of Bellagio, it’s hard not to be amazed at what people have managed to get water to do. When you stand and watch the current of the Las Vegas Wash flowing back to Lake Mead, it’s a quiet reminder of what water can, eventually, get people to do.
4
Water Under Water
You gotta have a Plan B.
—Eric Wilson,
manager of Galveston’s water utility
when Hurricane Ike destroyed it in September 2008
I’M STANDING IN THE DARK, at the bathroom sink in my Comfort Inn hotel room in Galveston, Texas, washing my hands. Or I hope I’m washing my hands. It’s a Monday night, September 22, about thirty minutes past sunset, and the whole room is dark. The power has been out for ten days, since Hurricane Ike shredded Galveston, and flooded it, the previous weekend.
The beachfront Comfort Inn, mostly undamaged, is renting rooms because it has a generator, but the generator routinely cuts off, sometimes for a couple minutes, sometimes for hours.
It’s my fourth day in Galveston, and I’ve spent it watching plumbers and electricians, city workers and navy sailors struggle to bring water service back to the city before its furious and impatient residents are allowed back to their homes at 6 a.m. on Wednesday. The city manager doesn’t want to delay the reopening of the city to its own inhabitants even one more hour, and he also has no intention of allowing sixty thousand residents back if the water isn’t turned on, if the toilets can’t be flushed whenever necessary.
The race to get the water restored started before Ike had even finished lashing the island—it’s been ten days of methodical but frantic effort, with just thirty-six hours to go. From the moment water service to Galveston mysteriously failed four hours before the eye passed over the island, nothing has gone as expected, and nothing has gone smoothly.
I’m in the bathroom in the dark, washing away the day’s grime. I’m holding a flashlight in my mouth, and thinking about what it means to wash your hands with water that isn’t safe to drink. Hurricane Ike has obliterated Galveston’s ability to provide water. Two of the three main water-pumping stations were crippled, as was the city’s main sewage treatment plant. A small building containing the electrical controls for the treatment plant has a sludge line on the walls four feet up, right across the fuse boxes and electrical circuit boxes, indicating that for hours the building and its vital motor and pump controls were awash inside with a mix of seawater and sewage.
Galveston’s water pipes, the ones in the ground, are mostly undamaged—except for outlying beachfront areas, beyond the protective seawall, where the water pipes have in many cases been scoured away.
Bringing all this back to life—the pumps, the sewage treatment plant, the pipes—is turning out to require more than just money or manpower or a sense of urgency. It’s requiring an exhausting level of persistence and ingenuity.
One of Galveston’s inland pumping stations is undamaged, and it is running at partial capacity using patched-in electrical generators so big they come on 18-wheelers. That means that even though the city’s water system—inbound and outbound, faucets and drains, clean and dirty—is basically a dead fish, a narrow strip along the beachfront is receiving emergency water pressure. The Comfort Inn is inside that emergency zone.
The limited water available is officially non-potable. No one knows how safe it is, or what’s in it, no one has time to treat it or test it, and the official word to the hundreds of government staff and recovery workers double-bunking in a few beachfront hotels is not to drink the water, or even brush their teeth with it. There is a “boil water” order out for those places receiving city water. The notice advises that the water should be heated to a “rapid boil” for four minutes. Straight from the tap, it is considered unsafe even for pets to drink.
This is the water I’m using to wash with, ice cold, by the light of a flashlight. One place I’ve been this Monday is a spot few humans ever get to stand: the bottom of a wastewater treatment tank normally filled with about half a million gallons of sewage, a cylindrical concrete pool ten feet deep and ninety feet across. The bottom was still clogged with the kinds of debris you’d expect, from both the sewage treatment plant and the hurricane. Most vividly, the debris pile was dotted with dozens of condoms, bright red and green.
What does it mean to soap up with dirty water? My dog routinely slurps from thoroughly ugly puddles. What does it mean to wash your hands with water that is officially unfit for a dog?
Once you start wondering, the water seems to hum quietly with peril, with invisible infectious possibility. A few hours earlier, I walked the bottom of a sewage treatment tank—but now I’m thinking, Is washing with this tap water making me cleaner or dirtier? I have been showering every morning, forcing myself beneath the icy spray, and wondering whether the water that splashed on my face, into my eyes, in my mouth was dangerous.
It isn’t often that a good-size American city has both its water system and its sewage treatment facilities completely obliterated in a single swipe—it isn’t often, that is, that you get to see what a modern American city with no routine water service feels like.
People routinely make do without electricity; we improvise around having no working refrigerator, or microwave, or traffic lights.
But without routine water service, it is hard to imagine civilization proceeding. Water is basic. It may be the most fundamental need beyond air, the one thing without which we cannot make it through a single day. And in the modern developed world, most people have no independent source of water, no simple, safe alternative that is the equivalent of a flashlight or a camp stove, a home generator or a cooler packed with ice. What’s more, in a devastated city—particularly a city devastated by water—the first thing people want to do is clean up, and even basic cleaning up requires clean water. The average American uses 99 gallons of water a day at home; that’s 750 half-liter bottles of water, the most common size in which we buy our indispensable Poland Spring and Evian. Seven hundred and fifty half-liter bottles per day, per person. In a crisis, even in a pinch, bottled water will not save us.
Like so much of modern life, safe, reliable water and sewer service is both essential and a complete mystery. We have no idea where our water comes from, we have no idea what happens to it when the dishwasher is done with it. We have no idea what effort is required to get the water to us, and no idea what’s required to get rid of it.
That ignorance doesn’t matter, until things start to go wrong.
In Galveston, Hurricane Ike literally washed away the Hooters restaurant built on pilings over the Gulf of Mexico—when dawn broke on Saturday morning, it was gone, as if it had never been there. Ike’s storm surge filled the first floor of the University of Texas Medical Branch hospital, rendering the ER and the operating rooms of one of the nation’s premier level 1 trauma centers useless for months. The city of Galveston decided civilization would not, in fact, proceed without water service.
AS HURRICANE IKE WHIRLED toward the coast of Texas in early September 2008, it had the dimensions of a monster storm with a monster’s personality.
But Hurricane Ike didn’t get much attention. September 2008 was one of the most momentous months in modern U.S. history, and unless Ike was staring you in the face, you were paying attention to something else.
September 2008 was the month that the U.S. government let Lehman Brothers fail, and it was the month in which the sub-prime mortgage crisis nearly unraveled the world’s economy. The historic, unprecedented events came day after day, one more astonishing than the previous. The arrival of a hurricane on the Gulf Coast couldn’t compete with the financial tornadoes that seemed to be flattening one institution after another. Insurance giant AIG was taken over by the federal government. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the federal government. Wachovia was rescued by Citibank, and was then re-rescued by Wells Fargo. The Bush administration proposed the first $700 billion bank bailout, and the U.S. House rejected it. Washington Mutual failed—the largest bank failure in U.S. history—and was seized by the FDIC.
