You start the dishwasher, expecting an explosion. Instead, you get “like four drops of water.” You hear the toilet flush ten times, “Ten times right… Not me, of course. Not me. But you. Him.”
You’re probably thinking, What’s the deal with water?
Central California
Much of the fruits and vegetables and nuts consumed in the U.S. is grown in the Central Valley. Running through the middle of California from Redding to Bakersfield, the climate ranges from semi-arid to arid. The Valley is fertile thanks to irrigation. The irrigation comes from surface water controlled by dams and canals. During droughts, which occur regularly, groundwater is pumped out.
But the Valley is subsiding. Overall, the ground has sunk as much as thirty feet since the 1920s, the result of pumping more out of underground aquifers faster than can be replenished. Farmers and rural homeowners now drill hundreds of feet to replace wells that were fifty feet deep. Many small agricultural communities are without safe drinking water. Chemical fertilizers and dairy manure seeping into the ground results in nitrate contamination of their water supplies.
Large Central Valley farmers, many corporate-owned, exert their political muscle to promote sending water to them from the Sacramento Delta and points north. They blame liberal politicians for their water woes. Meanwhile, acreage is being replanted with thirstier almonds and pistachios.
Harney County Oregon
As you know, it always rains in Oregon. Unless you’re on the dry side of the Cascade mountains. Harney County sits on the high desert plateau that is eastern Oregon. Like the Central Valley in California, because it’s desert doesn’t mean that things don’t grow. Irrigation makes the desert bloom. Ninety-seven percent of water goes to agriculture. In Harney County, it’s mostly hay. The hay is grown to feed livestock.
The water comes from underground. Like the Central Valley, the water that took thousands of years to fill subterranean aquifers has been pumped out in just a few decades. Now it’s crisis time and the solidly-Republican region is struggling to work out a plan combining voluntary cutbacks with subsidies for farmers who retire land from irrigation. Voluntary conservation has yet to work anywhere else. As Republicans they are opposed to subsidies, except when they’re in favor of subsidies — for themselves.
Oregon Coast
Bayocean Park was a desirable place to be in the first half of the twentieth century. T.B. Potter. a Californian — of course! — real estate developer saw the four-mile-long, half-mile-wide spit between Tillamook Bay and the Pacific Ocean and thought, “I could make a lot of money selling lots here.” He platted his new town in 1906 and sold six-hundred lots over the next few years. The home sites had expansive views of the ocean to the west and the bay to the east. He built a hotel, a dance hall and even a natatorium featuring both fresh water and salt water.
Potter’s steamship, the S.S. Bayocean, made once-per-week trips from Portland to this picturesque enclave, three days each way. The white-knuckle journey traversed the Columbia River bar — still treacherous today — and the unprotected entrance to Tillamook Bay. The homeowners assessed themselves to build a protective jetty at the mouth of the Bay to make the trip a little less unnerving.
You’ve probably already figured what happened. The jetty changed the ocean currents, the beach began washing away. Waves took out the swimming hall in 1932. Soon after, the hotel began its slide into the Pacific. By 1938, fifty-nine homes were gone. In the 1950s, storm-tossed sea water surged into the Bay, changing the spit into an island and burying a thousand acres of oyster beds under sand. In the early 1970s, a second jetty was built, as the Army Corps of Engineers had originally said was necessary but property owners didn’t want to pay for. By then, it was too late. Today Bayocean Spit is a county park.
Southern California
The city of Los Angeles suddenly has a surplus of water. In 1913, the city’s surreptitiously-planned scheme began draining Owens Lake, sending the water through a two-hundred-mile aqueduct to keep Angelenos’ lawns green. (Remember the movie “Chinatown?”) L.A. transformed a body of water that handled steamship traffic into a dry lake. On windy days Owens Lake sent dust as high as ten-thousand feet, the largest source of dust in the U.S. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has spent a billion-and-a-half dollars on mandated dust abatement.
A labyrinth of pipes and pumps recirculates a shallow cover of water on the dry lake. Much is lost to evaporation. As the last couple years of heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains melts, L.A. now has more water than it immediately needs. D.W.P. is working on a scheme to send the excess snowmelt to Owens Lake. Actually, it’s going into the aquifer beneath Owens Lake, to be pumped out during dry summer months to keep the dust down. Why not send it into the aqueduct and to L.A. when it needs it? Because after passing through the depleted aquifer, the water will be adulterated with levels of natural contaminates — arsenic, for example — and unsafe for drinking and possibly for irrigation.
