Are We Running Out of Water?

Droughts and half-drained reservoirs raise an ominous question: Is America running out of water?

Water Wars

On a cloudy Tuesday last November, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue convened an unusual gathering on the steps of the capitol building in Atlanta. With his state mired in the 21st month of a historic drought, the governor had decided it was time for an appeal to the Almighty. Backed by a boisterous youth choir and several local pastors, he led 250 concerned constituents in solemn prayer. Their plea was simple: "We have come together for one reason and one reason only," Perdue intoned. "To very reverently and respectfully pray up a storm."
The next day, up to an inch of rain fell in and around Atlanta—an early Thanksgiving present and the first rainfall the region had seen in weeks. It rained at Christmastime too. In fact, it rained for nine of the last 12 days of the year. The city's prayers, it seemed, had been answered.

Skeptics were quick to note that weather reports in the days leading up to the vigil showed a fair chance of precipitation. But whether a testament to the powers of prayer or meteorology, the showers had no lasting impact. Georgia is experiencing the worst drought to strike the Southeast in 100 years of record keeping. The strain on an already tight supply has set off "water wars," pitting farmers against city dwellers and one state against another in a region of the United States where water has always been plentiful.

And it's not just the Southeast. On the other side of the continent, the vast swath of land that runs from the mountains of Wyoming to the desert of Southern California is in the ninth year of its own record-breaking dry spell. Water levels at two massive reservoirs serving millions of people in seven states have plummeted to the halfway mark, with slim prospects of ever regaining full capacity.

In analyzing the conditions that led to these problems, scientists blame everything from climate change and the global weather pattern known as La Niña to poor resource management and rampant development. Whatever the causes, persistent droughts have pushed these two regions to the brink of a crisis that threatens most of the nation. A 2003 federal report found that officials in 36 states expect local or statewide water shortages in the next decade. And that's with normal rainfall. Under drought conditions, that number jumps to 46 states.

With so much of the country now at risk, it's time to ask a momentous question: Is America actually running out of water?

Drastic Measures

Scanning his parched pastures last June, Gerald Long knew he had a problem. With one dry year behind him and another staring him in the face, the Bainbridge, Georgia, rancher had no hay to sustain his cattle through the winter. There was none from the year before, and with so little rain, his spring crop had failed. To make up for the shortage, he'd have to plant an extra feed crop and hope his overtaxed irrigation system would provide enough water to make it grow. It was something that he hadn't done in 35 years of farming and that would saddle him with thousands of dollars in increased costs. "I had to push everything to the maximum to make sure we had some winter feed for the cows," he says. "But you do what you have to do."

Long's emergency measures kept his cows from going hungry. Other ranchers weren't so lucky. "A lot of Georgia farmers ran out of hay last year," says University of Georgia livestock economist Curt Lacy. Forced to buy hay on the open market, they were jolted by a 43 percent price increase from the previous year. "I've never seen anything like it," says Lacy.

Neither has anyone else. The drought currently punishing the Southeast has been rated "exceptional" by climatologists—the kind that happens once every 50 to 100 years. As one dry month follows another, states and municipalities have imposed tight restrictions on outdoor water use for landscaping, swimming pools, and car washing, and Georgia's governor has required local governments to cut water consumption by ten percent.

Making a virtue out of necessity, many residents have embraced conservation with good-humored resignation. At Athens restaurants that are trying to cut back on dishwashing, "drinking wine in a paper cup has become the new chic," says Georgia's state climatologist, David Stooksbury.

"You see people driving around proudly in their filthy cars," adds Chris Scalley, who owns a fishing guide service on the Chattahoochee River 25 miles northeast of Atlanta. "Every little bit counts."

Growing Pains

While lack of rainfall is the immediate culprit, the underlying problem is more profound: a water supply that cannot keep pace with a rapidly expanding population.

At the heart of that supply is Lake Lanier, a man-made reservoir at the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River. Last fall the lake's water level sank to an all-time low. The effects of that drop have reverberated beyond Georgia, to the neighboring states of Alabama and Florida.

Built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s, Lake Lanier was one of the great public works projects that defined the postwar era. A chief purpose was to prevent flooding in Atlanta and other points downstream. Today Lanier is also the main water source for more than three million residents in Atlanta and its suburbs. The Corps controls the release of water from the reservoir into the Chattahoochee, which runs south through Atlanta and along the Georgia-Alabama border to the Florida panhandle. There it becomes the Apalachicola River, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico. As water released from Lanier runs downstream through a series of lakes and dams, it supplies hundreds of towns, factories, farms, power plants, and recreational facilities in all three states.

Here's the rub: The area that collects the water that feeds into Lanier, called the drainage basin, occupies only 1,040 square miles. "That's extremely small," says David Stooksbury, considering that since Lanier was built, Georgia's population has increased from about 4 million to nearly 10 million and continues to grow by more than 200,000 a year. Metro Atlanta has jumped from 1 million people to more than 5 million.

For the better part of two decades, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida have been locked in a legal struggle with the Corps of Engineers over the rights to Lanier's water. Georgia reached an agreement with the Corps in 2003 to increase Atlanta's allotment by 65 percent, a deal that Alabama Governor Bob Riley attacked as a "massive water grab." The plan was struck down by a federal court last February.

As the water wars continue, some Georgians accuse officials of dragging their feet. "This watershed can only provide so much water for the population here," says Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group based in Atlanta. "There has been a refusal or inability on the part of most of our leaders to admit that fact and to look harder at how we could more efficiently use our water."

If there's a bright spot for the Southeast, it's that the drought surely won’t last forever. The region typically averages 50 inches of rainfall a year and is lodged between two major storm-generating bodies of water, the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. One good tropical storm year would replenish water stocks—at least until the next drought. "While there are certainly hazards built into those storms, they tend to act as drought busters as they move inland," says Jeffrey Underwood, Nevada's state climatologist.

That's no reason for complacency. Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, predicts that periodic droughts will remain a natural part of the climate in the Southeast and that their impact will likely worsen. "Water is a finite resource," Fuchs says. "Growth and development may not be sustainable at their current levels. To just sit back and wait for the next hurricane is a false hope."

Another Dust Bowl?

In the West, it's long been understood that there will never be enough rain and that the solution is to make existing stocks of water go further. Western writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner captured this fact of life eloquently: "Water," he wrote, "is the true wealth in a dry land."

One of the most vital sources of water in the region is Lake Mead, a vast reservoir some 25 miles east of Las Vegas that was created during the construction of Hoover Dam, a spectacular engineering project that tamed the mercurial Colorado River, brought hydroelectric power to a region considered uninhabitable without air-conditioning, and allowed the desert to bloom with everything from ranches to casinos. As the reservoir was formed, the remnants of an ancient Native American settlement, dubbed the Lost City, were submerged.

Lake Mead is part of the Colorado River system, which also includes Lake Powell, a second huge reservoir some 150 miles east, on the Utah-Arizona border. Fed by melting snow from the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado system is the main source of water for 30 million people in the Southwest. Millions more in California and Nevada rely on water from the Sierra Nevada. But a stretch of unusually dry years has driven levels in Mead and Powell to near-record lows. Today, as Lake Mead dries up, the ruins of the Pueblo Indians' Lost City have reemerged, an eerie emblem of the drought.

As in the Southeast, population growth is a hazard. During the 1990s, Nevada's population jumped by 66 percent, the fastest rate in the nation. Arizona was the second fastest, at 40 percent, with Utah and Colorado clocking in at 30 percent—more than twice the national average. This growth will likely continue at an even faster clip in the future. Nevada and Arizona alone are expected to double their populations by 2030.

There's another climatic player: global warming. Growing scientific evidence warns that climate change could render the Southwest's growth and development trends untenable.

Here's why: Unlike the Southeast, where most precipitation comes as spring and summer rainfall, in the West those months are written off as a dry season. "We get all of our water in the winter from frozen precipitation," says Underwood, the Nevada climatologist. The snowstorms that blanket the West's mountain ranges each winter form a thick snowpack. As that snow melts in the spring, it feeds streams and tributaries to replenish Lakes Powell and Mead and other, smaller reservoirs. The reservoirs draw down gradually through the warmer months, and the process begins again.

Timing is everything. "We want that snow to stay on the mountainside and melt nice and slow into our reservoirs," says Underwood. If warmer temperatures cause the snow to melt too soon or too fast, small reservoirs can't catch and hold the runoff. That means water that would ordinarily be saved for summer use is wasted. "You're losing part of your bank account," adds Fuchs. Worse, some of that precipitation may come in the form of rain, causing two problems: flooding and water that can't be stored. Early runoff isn't an issue for Powell and Mead, whose huge size allows them to store whatever water comes their way. But early springs and higher year-round temperatures cause other problems. More water is lost through evaporation, and a longer warm season increases demand on the system. "We're always worried about it warming up too quickly," says Underwood.

That's where climate change comes in. In recent decades, increasing temperatures in the West have led to more winter rain, less snow, earlier snowmelts, and higher evaporation rates—a cascade of bad news for the region’s water supply. Now a new study has confirmed what climatologists have long suspected. Analyzing 50 years of data, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and elsewhere report that these changes have resulted mainly from human activity and are likely to intensify in the future. The researchers postulate that global warming is also responsible for the long-term drop in precipitation in the West, though this is less certain. In a second study, some of the same scientists estimated that if current climate and water-management trends continue, Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021.

"If the climate changes as projected, the West will have to make do with less water or find new sources," says study co-author David Pierce. Brian Fuchs goes further, raising the specter of "a new Dust Bowl" unless major changes in water use and management occur. This ominous historical reference is to the Depression-era drought that drove millions of Americans off their farms in Oklahoma and other Great Plains states—many of whom ended up, ironically, in California.

Is the glass half full?

Amid the gloomy projections, the West recently received some good news. Last winter brought above-average snowfall, and hydrologists were predicting that the water level in Lake Powell could rise by as much as 50 feet, which would bring it to about 65 percent of capacity.

While experts caution that it will take more than one robust snow year to end the drought, there are signs that regional government officials and ordinary citizens are starting to heed scientists' warnings. California is leading the way. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, for instance, is nearing completion of a 12-foot-wide, 44-mile-long pipeline designed to catch the runoff caused by increased rainfall and earlier snowmelts—water that would otherwise be wasted. At a cost of more than $1 billion, the underground pipeline, known as the Inland Feeder, will rush water originating in the Sierra Nevada to Southern California at a rate of 7,500 gallons per second.

In Orange County, water officials recently unveiled an innovative project that converts millions of gallons of sewage water into drinking water. Using high-tech purification techniques such as reverse osmosis and microfiltration, the Groundwater Replenishment System, uninvitingly known as toilet-to-tap, produces up to 70 million gallons of clean water a day. Conservation is crucial too. In the Los Angeles area, the population served by the regional water district has increased 4 million since 1990. But water consumption levels remain the same, thanks to changes citizens have been urged to make, such as replacing grass lawns with native plants that need less water and installing low-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads, smart lawn sprinklers, and high-efficiency washing machines.

State governments are beginning to do their part as well. Last December, the seven states that rely on the Colorado River system reached a historic agreement to better manage the water supply and mitigate the effects of drought. Under the deal, which officials hope will end 85 years of interstate wrangling, a system of de facto water rationing will kick in when Lake Mead reaches established trigger levels. The flow of water from Lake Powell downstream to Lake Mead will be more effectively regulated to maintain sufficient levels in both reservoirs, and states will be allowed to "bank" water reserves in Lake Mead for future use, replacing the previous use-it-or-lose-it policy.

Many water watchers hope that the Southeast will follow the West's lead. Aiming to match the achievement of their counterparts across the country, the governors of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama have been negotiating a new water-sharing plan. That would help. But Georgia climatologist Stooksbury says what's really needed is a major attitude adjustment. Perhaps it's already taking place. After past droughts, his region reverted to old habits once the rains returned. He thinks things may be different this time. "We're all aware now that we're going to have to treat our water as a valuable commodity," he says.

That's a lesson everyone can take to heart. After all, when it comes to another vital resource, oil, we can at least imagine a world powered by solar panels, windmills, and other energy sources. But water is one substance we can't live without.