The Big Thirst, page 25
“I said to the staff, ‘Well, surely the last twenty years is a better indicator of what will happen next year, and the following year, than the last ninety years.’
“They said to me, ‘No, no, no. You don’t understand. You have to take the entire average.’
“The problem was, from within [Water Corporation], we had a consensus that the best indicator of the future was the entire past,” says Gill. “It turned out to be good, coming in from the outside clean like that.”
Gill was new to predicting reservoir inflows. And you had to be careful, because new dams and reservoirs are expensive, hard to get approved, and hard to build.
“I was in charge of this water utility, in a state that was growing. We have a monopoly—we cover the whole state. It’s a pretty big responsibility. And I was being paid to be slightly paranoiac. I was waking up at 3 a.m. after the plan was released, thinking, There’s something going on here. It’s just wrong. We have to do something about it.”
He went back to Water Corporation’s staff. “Quickly, they started agreeing with me. They said, ‘Yup, things are getting dryer, and getting dryer more quickly.’ Which also horrified me.”
How could the outsider so easily see something that the water professionals had overlooked? And, Gill wondered, what would they do if what they were seeing on the bar chart was the new reality?
This was all just before 1996, which turned out to be a big year only in comparison with the previous twenty-two years—although the Mundaring dam overflowed, 1996 didn’t quite make it up to the ninety-year average.
It was easy enough to do the math. Perth’s average reservoir inflows were 338 gigaliters a year from 1911 to 1974. They were exactly half that, 177 gigaliters, from 1974 to 1996, including the flush year of 1996. Despite having seven reservoirs, Perth was using more water than was coming in.
Soon Perth wouldn’t even have enough water to meet its current needs, let alone support booming growth.
In February of 1996, in the midst of the first moderately wet year in two decades, Gill convened a scientific seminar for his own staff, about climate and rainfall trends. For Gill, the most startling presentation came from a scientist from the University of Washington who had studied the relationship of redwood tree rings and stream flows, going back five hundred years.
“If you core those redwoods, and measure the growth rings, going back five hundred years, the thickness of the rings is closely correlated to stream flows,” says Gill. In his presentation, the scientist first revealed fifty years of data, and there was a clear pattern. In the next slide, he revealed the prior fifty years of data. “Oh, you’d think, I see now, it’s actually wetter!” says Gill. The scientist just kept adding fifty years of earlier data, slide by slide. “Every time he unveiled a bit more of the picture, you’d come to terms with it, you’d get the picture. But the picture you got was just wrong.
“By the time he’d unveiled five hundred years of data, it was clear there was no cycle at all.”
And if five hundred years of data is humbling in rainfall and climate terms, well, Perth’s hundred years of data is in fact representative of nothing, except what you’ve built your dams to expect.
That meeting helped change the conversation inside Water Corporation, and helped change the sense of urgency. Gill and his staff took the fifty-year plan and accelerated much of the “new source development” into the next five years—three new dams, a couple new treatment plants, development of deep wells to tap groundwater.
The single-page bar graph showing water flows into Perth’s dams is as plain a presentation device as you can get—it is utterly without adornment or digital-era special effects. It would be exactly the kind of report page or PowerPoint slide you might flip past. But if you take the time to study it, it has an utterly arresting quality. In fact, the single-page Perth bar graph has become a staple of the Big Dry across the country. Water officials in Adelaide, in Melbourne, in tiny Toowoomba can instantly produce versions with their own data: years running along the bottom, bars rising to show water flows. Laurie Arthur even has one for the water availability at his farm. They are all equally austere, and equally stunning.
Jim Gill has learned to use an updated version, with water flows starting in 1907 and running right up to 2008, to devastating effect, using precisely the technique he found so effective from the University of Washington professor.
Gill begins in 1995, the year he started, leaving the whole century open but covering the future years—then he slides away the cover sheet, unveiling each recent year, year by year. You don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know how much water is coming.
You don’t even need to know the real amounts of water, just watch the heights of the bars. The long-term average water flow is a line 1.5 inches tall—that’s the water Perth actually needs. The tallest bar on the sheet— with a century of data—is 4 inches high, 1945. Gill’s first year, 1995, is three-quarters of an inch tall. Then comes 1996, not quite 1.5 inches. Okay! Then 1997: a half-inch. 1998: less than a half-inch. Two years in a row with one-third the necessary water.
Nineteen ninety-nine and 2000 feel like a relief—both pop back up to three-quarters of an inch tall. But wait—they only look good compared with the years just before them. Together 1999 and 2000 equal just one average year going back to 1907.
“You have to plot scenarios,” says Gill. “Let’s look at the worst years. What if we have a string of those?”
The shift in perspective is striking. You can feel a tiny bit of what the water suppliers, the water officials, see and feel at times like this. We’re grumpy about not being able to water our lawns, about our dirty cars and our short showers. This small exercise gives you a taste of the anxiety of being responsible for the empty reservoirs. How much water is coming?
Gill keeps revealing years. Two thousand and one is a stunner: barely a quarter-inch of line, a tiny stub—the lowest year of water flow in a century.
“In 2001, it was clear this was one helluva crisis. After 2001, I started asking a different question: What if that 2001 rain is repeated for two or three years in a row? What happens then? We were just going to run out of water.”
Mind you, by 2002, Water Corporation had done almost everything in its fifty-year plan to “secure” more water. “We had built three new dams and there just wasn’t much water in them,” says Gill. “You could see the mud in the bottom.”
THE POLITICS OF WATER was never far from the surface in Perth.
The city has the relaxed charm of South Florida or Southern California from a more innocent era. Downtown is compact and walkable, with a waterfront along the Swan River that is busy with people taking advantage of Perth’s mild climate; suburbs of single-family bungalows with gardens in front and a patch of yard in back roll out for miles in all directions.
Even before the Big Dry, Perth’s climate was more like that of Greece or Spain than the English countryside, and yet in Perth, as in Toowoomba and much of Australia, the individual English-style garden is much prized.
Sue Murphy was a senior Water Corporation manager hired by Jim Gill, and she succeeded him as CEO in 2008. She often uses Perth’s English gardens as an example of how water habits that literally make no sense take hold and come to seem natural. “If we’d been settled by Mediterraneans of some kind—Greeks, Spaniards—we would not have these English gardens everywhere. We have them because life in the beginning was miserable here, and people were trying to re-create what they had back home in England,” says Murphy.
It’s not just the gardens. Perth’s residents have installed 100,000 backyard swimming pools.
Despite the slow erosion of its water supply by 2001, the water culture in Perth was complacent. “We hadn’t had water restrictions of any kind for twenty-three years,” says Gill. “Perth had grown—people here are affluent. At Water Corporation, we felt all hell would break loose if we only allowed outside watering two days a week.”
Gill is a better tactician than his colleagues in Toowoomba. He didn’t attempt to shock the culture—he wanted simply to wake people up to the water situation. Water Corporation started advertising aggressively, getting residents tuned in to the drought, urging them to reduce their daily water use, inside and outside, in advance of restrictions. Dual-flush toilets were mandated in new construction, as were low-flow showerheads.
Inside Water Corporation, there was an air of controlled panic. Gill and his staff planned to be able to run Perth with no water at all in the reservoirs that had historically provided 70 percent of the city’s supply. They planned in an emergency to use nothing but wells.
Gill and his lieutenants also established a drought war room in a second-floor conference room at Water Corporation headquarters. “We were looking at the weather forecasts every day,” says Gill. “We were looking at the sunshine out there every day. I looked at the satellite images every day. I looked at the three-month look-ahead forecasts. I looked at the global circulation models. It always seemed bad.”
Beyond conservation—Perth residents ultimately scaled back per person consumption enough to save 45 gigaliters a year, which is equivalent to what an entire desalination plant produces—there were really only two options for adding water that didn’t depend immediately on rainfall: tapping a vast aquifer called the Yarragadee and building a desalination plant.
In typical Gill fashion, he went for both. “We wanted two solutions on the go at any one time,” says Gill, “because one might fall over at any time.”
Yarragadee posed political and scientific problems: Assessing the dynamics of deep aquifers is very difficult, and there wasn’t much science available on the Yarragadee. Farmers and residents in the area were suspicious of tapping the aquifer to supply the entire city, worried their own wells would dry up, worried about salt water creeping in from the Indian Ocean, worried about the sustainability of sucking water out of a source that, while seemingly large, had taken 100,000 years to accumulate.
Environmentalists were equally opposed to a big desalination plant. One of the problems with desalination is that, when you take in a hundred gallons of seawater, you typically produce about forty-five gallons of pure drinking water. You’re left with fifty-five gallons of water that has all the salt in it that was originally in the hundred gallons—double-concentrated brine. You aren’t, in fact, adding any salt back into the ocean that wasn’t there to start. But before it is diluted, that stream of brine can do a lot of damage to the ecology of the ocean where it is disposed of.
The site of Perth’s proposed desalination plant—and the place where it was ultimately built—is on a bay called Cockburn Sound. So the desal plant wouldn’t be sending double-concentrated brine back to be diluted by the Indian Ocean’s tides and currents. The brine would go into a semi-enclosed bay. The very real worry was that the desal plant’s super-salty effluent would turn Cockburn Sound into a lifeless salt sea.
Desal faced opposition for another reason, one Americans find hard to appreciate. In Perth, there is widespread agreement that the absence of rain is the result of climate change. A desal plant is a huge consumer of electricity. So there was resistance to desal based on the idea that the desal plant was only necessary because of climate change—but that building it would increase greenhouse gas emissions and so ultimately make worse the very problem it was supposedly solving.
As Perth’s water crisis became more and more obvious, all kinds of ideas were floated. The level of water or engineering expertise was irrelevant. Colin Barnett, running for premier of Western Australia, backed what became known as Colin’s Canal—the idea that all Perth’s water problems could be solved with a big ditch. Because the unpopulated northern part of Western Australia is flush with tropical rainfall that runs into the ocean, Barnett argued that the state should simply build a canal to bring the water down to Perth. Sometimes the distances in Australia seem to confound even Australians. It is literally the equivalent of proposing to supply Las Vegas, Nevada, with water by building a canal from Niagara Falls, New York.15
Gill set his staff to analyzing whether the city could really tap, and then rely on, the Yarragadee Aquifer, which was his first choice, and the first choice of many at Water Corporation. He was skeptical of desalination—it wasn’t just expensive and energy intensive, many recent desalination plants had proved infuriatingly difficult to get built and running properly. The largest desal plant in the United States, in Tampa Bay, was just half the size of the one being considered for Perth, and Tampa Bay’s plant ran 30 percent over budget, didn’t start making water until five years after its scheduled completion date, and took yet more years to provide the amount of drinking water it was designed to.16
But unlike Toowoomba, where city officials locked in on a single solution, Gill took both the aquifer and desalination seriously. He sent staff members to a German engineering firm with experience building desalination plants, then he went to Germany himself.
“I did have quite a bit of doubt about whether we could do it right,” says Gill. “I went to Stuttgart and I said, Make your best case. I needed them to convince me it would work, that it would not take three to five years to come to nameplate capacity. They were very convincing.”
For Gill, even years later, it wasn’t a close call. “The preferred source was very clearly the Yarragadee,” he says. “There was minimal environmental impact, it was less expensive, less energy was required.”
But the Yarragadee opponents were loud and potent. And Gill came up with two masterstrokes that helped make desalination publicly acceptable.
First, he proposed powering the desalination plant with all-new windmills, installed at a windmill farm up the coast from Perth, so the water factory would use only renewable energy. No climate impact at all.
To tackle the problem of discharging 42 million gallons of brine a day into Cockburn Sound, Water Corporation designed a discharge pipe for the water factory that over its final six hundred feet has forty nozzles sticking up like porcupine quills, a nozzle every sixteen feet, at different angles, to widely disperse the flow of double-salty water. And to satisfy the critics that Water Corporation’s design would work, Gill hired an outside consultant to assess the outfall pipe. He hired the most vocal critic of the desal plant, a prominent scientist, professor, and water expert named Jorg Imberger, who had said publicly, “Desal is like taking an aspirin for a tumor.”
Imberger’s study showed that the porcupine-nozzle design worked perfectly. The nozzles completely dispersed the high-salinity water from the plant, even in the enclosed bay. “It doesn’t cause a problem,” said Imberger.
Although Perth thinks of itself as having confronted its crisis and had a reasonable public debate about it, in the end the decision was made based on politics, rather than a technical analysis—as it was, in the end, in Toowoomba.
Geoff Gallop, the premier of Western Australia and both Jim Gill’s boss and admirer, was briefed right along on the science and the politics of choosing either the aquifer or the desalination plant. He chose the A$340 million desalination plant. “I was always a bit nervous about the politics of taking water from underground, despite the science,” says Gallop. “We’ve got our wine industry there, all the agricultural industry down there. The science was okay. But the politics of desal proved much better for me, whatever the science.”
Once Gallop chose desal, Gill didn’t hesitate. He controlled the plant construction tightly. Companies bidding to build and run it, for instance, were assessed by two separate teams—one evaluating engineering and construction competence, the other evaluating financial stability. (Tampa Bay’s desalination plant suffered through bankruptcies of three of its main contractors.) During construction, no tours, or reporter visits, or politician photo ops were allowed. “Managing that was very difficult,” says Gallop. “If the desal construction process had become politicized or had union problems, the press would have started to write, ‘The ill-fated desal plant.’ They avoided that completely. On time, on budget. That was a brilliant bit of management.”
The Perth water factory is the first facility of its kind in Australia— the first city-scale desalination plant being used to provide drinking water anywhere on the continent. Gill got it built in crisis mode—contracts let in July 2004, spring-pure water flowing to Perth’s water mains in November 2006.
The heart of the factory is a vast building, three acres under one roof, a warehouse-like space three stories high that is stuffed with pipes, pumps, electronics, and a noise so loud that you can feel it thrumming your bones. The roar drowns out everything, and the noise never rests, it never pauses or cycles. That’s what a modern reverse-osmosis facility sounds like.
Turning seawater into drinking water is a straightforward business— military and passenger ships have been doing it at sea for decades—but if you want to make city-size quantities of drinking water from the ocean, you need muscle. You need to suck in city-size quantities of water, and you need to slam that water through reverse-osmosis filter cartridges so fine that almost nothing gets through but the water itself.
Perth’s desalination plant guzzles 55,000 gallons of water a minute. To get everything out of the water—to squeeze out the salt and the shark poop, the seaweed, the decaying jellyfish, the bilgewater from a passing freighter—the water factory has to crank the water up to a pressure of 940 pounds per square inch, the same pressure the ocean exerts 2,100 feet down. It is almost enough force to crush the protective pressure hull of a nuclear submarine.17
Inside the main building at Perth’s water factory, there are thousands of white filter cartridges arrayed in racks—55,000 gallons of water a minute jetting through them, each cylinder holding fast against 940 pounds per square inch of water pressure, all that water jacked along by a line of enormous pumps right down the center of the building. That’s where the noise comes from: the pumps pushing the water through the tiniest of reverse-osmosis filter pores. It is, in fact, the sound of Perth rescuing itself from water disaster.
