Part 2. The Great Drain.
The Colorado River flows, at least it used too, about fourteen hundred miles long, from way up in the rockies all the way down to the Gulf of California. On it's way down to the gulf it carves it's path through arid desert sand and stone until finally reaching sea level. If you have ever been to the Grand Canyon maybe you can relate when I say I can close my eyes and envision a million years ago when this mighty river was still shaping the land. In just under one hundred years humanity has harnessed this wild bronco of rushing water, and diverted it's flow to make life possible throughout the Southwest. It's a beautiful thing to see how we can all thrive from this one water source without living near it. San Diego alone and it's one million plus population gets seventy percent of its water from the Colorado. Then there's Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc. all in the millions of h2o reliant people, all sticking our straws into the same cup. I repeat this is a beautiful thing as long as we can live in a state of balance with the give and take process of messing with nature. Unfortunately the last decade has revealed that not only are we completely out of balance with nature, but we also have slipped quite a ways into the danger zone where we aren't sure if we have taken it too far.
I won't post anymore pictures, there are so many and so easy to find online, i'll leave that to you if so desire, but the damage that's been done is plain to see. Lake Mead the nations largest reservoir, located on the southern Nevada and Arizona border, created after the great depression has a now famous white ring all along it's giant stone container, giving us a visual measuring stick of just how desperate the situation has become. It's half empty! It's at it's lowest level since it was created. Throughout California there are twelve major reservoirs. If you add up their average total capacity and figure the difference for what they operate at today, the number winds up at less than forty percent! Folsom is one of them, if you saw the time lapse photo I inserted into the previous post of Folsom lake, the visuals are shocking, the numbers are heart sinking. Recently however we've just learned that the situation is a whole bunch worse than we could've ever imagined.
A study published a few weeks ago by UC Irvine scientists has dropped the equivalent of a bomb on the community of concerned citizens, scientists, lawmakers, etc. It's the first of its kind, an analysis of data collected from the Grace satellite mission. Since 2004 it's been measuring the land mass via gravitational pull, above and below the ground of certain regions. Scientists were able to confirm the nightmare scenario that the Colorado Basin under ground water supply has disappeared at a rate nearly four times that of the surface water! They estimate that of the fifty-three million acre feet of water that has been sapped during this drought, forty million of it came from underground.
What does this mean? Well imagine for a moment that you just inherited a couple million dollars from a newly deceased, distant relative. Congratulations! You are now rich and it couldn't have come at a better time because recently life has been tough. You have been without a job for awhile and this cash means a lot. The weird thing though is that your uncle put some conditions on this money. You don't get to know how much there is, you just know it's a lot. You can't go to the bank yourself to withdraw the money, it has to be delivered by a bank rep in suitcases whenever you call them up. It seems a bit strange but who cares, once it's delivered it's good to go! Immediately you start paying people back that you owed, and of course others start calling you up now for a loan. You treat yourself nice and spread it around. At first you count the money in the suitcases but there is so much of it that over time you stop. Then one day while you're sitting at your giant swimming pool sipping a margarita, the delivery guy shows up with a message that over the years you have spent so much that soon the account will be empty. Not only that but because it's so low you aren't earning enough interest to replenish the supply at the rate you spend, and maybe worst of all the government has been slowly taking its cut which is making the balance disappear so fast that a life change may not reverse the flow of your fortune. Of course you panic, you haven't worked in so long that your job prospects are almost nothing and you can't go back to borrowing because like the blues man sings, "No one knows you when you're down and out."
If you haven't sniffed out the comparison, the rich uncle is nature, the money is water, the bank account is our under ground supply, the government is...well the government, and the delivery guy is the water companies who, despite their great efforts, are just the messengers who are basically not sure how much water is left either. Actually the government isn't just the government though, I was just trying to stay humorous. They represent the exponential decrease of our water supply as we continue along our path. Let me explain.
If we take the water off the surface and from below the ground we take away nature's ability to replenish it through the process of evaporation, transpiration, precipitation...all across the nation, etc. From there it takes care of itself. If the plants can't drink they can't give off moisture, which won't create rain clouds. The snow pack in the Sierras this year was about twenty percent of what it normally is, clearly demonstrating that this ancient process has been heavily compromised. I want to say again that I don't work for Greenpeace and I'm not trying to get preachy. I don't know where you stand on global warming and I don't care. Our existence isn't a millionth of a fraction of the Earth's existence so it has been hard for me to believe that in a few blinks we have burned enough fuel to dirty up the fish bowl that fast. If we keep it up, sure we will fuck it all up, but in light of this most recent historic finding by the good folks at UC Irvine my mind has arrived at some scary thoughts. Allow me.
For decades the cities throughout the southwest have exploded in population, throwing the balance of supply and demand for water completely out of whack. I believe this drought has less to do with us living in an unfortunate dry spell or fossil fuel driven global warming. Are they contributing? Of course they are. One would be a fool to not consider all factors. We are in fact about 40,000 years removed from the last North American ice age. At one time the five great lakes were one giant lake and the grand canyon wasn't yet so grand. Many things are in play here but it is now my overwhelming belief that we have withdrawn so much water from a part of the globe in such a short amount of time that we've taken nature's ability to cycle it back to us. In summation I'm saying that this is a man made drought...to be continued. (Thanks for reading please check out previous posts to view the whole story).
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