Your author lives in Phoenix, AZ and was born and raised in California. In both these states, there has been, more than once, municipal announcements about water conservation announcements about water shortages. Financial penalties for excessive use of water! Several cities in Texas are sending out their WATER police to see who is running their sprinklers at all or improperly-using up too much of the city's "allocation" of water.
I need to shift gears now, so this situation is put into a different perspective. Horse and buggy-how people got from place to place throughout America until the early 1900's when Ford, among others, produced autos to make WHAT the horse and buggy did out dated!
From the early 1900's till the end of the 1900's offices used typewriters to create notices, messages, legal documents, etc. In the latter 1900's, computers had "word processing software" which eliminated the need for typewriters.
We could go on and on, depicting how things used to be done and comparing those activities to the ones that [our] culture chose to switch to. Some non-American cultures still use horse and buggies and typewriters because their ways of doing things are not based on efficiency. Switching gears back again.
When Phoenix issued one of its many water shortage bulletins, your author, a teacher/professor, remembering the rule in science that says matter [water is/has matter as do a zillion other things] cannot be created or destroyed but only have its form changed.
So, your author called the local Phoenix water plant manager and asked about the water bulletin. He admitted readily that indeed, the amount of water Phoenix has has not changed-HOWEVER, the location of "large amounts of drinkable water" has changed. The aquifers and rivers and lakes have either had their water pumped out for whatever use, and the bodies of water feeding Phoenix have dried up.
Who can argue with that? Since all counties must have municipal resources for its people, those resources must be "managed" and their management is both archaic and sources of inter-state legal battles for generations and generations.
Phoenix seems quite capable of running water from a river here or there, or pumping water up from sub-terranean aquifers, but not capable of getting agreements with Mexico to let us pump water up from the Gulf of Mexico. Unless I am mistaken, California even gets a share of the water going down the Colorado river. Here is why that makes no sense and why Texas has no business being dry any day of the year!:
Study a map of the US. We know that on one side, New York, Mass, and other states share the Eastern Seaboard-they face the Atlantic Ocean. On the other side, California, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and Oregon face the Pacific Ocean. Florida faces two bodies of water, and Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas face the Caribbean Sea. HUGE BODIES OF WATER.
Of all these states, perhaps only California has a water DE-SALINIZATION plant. A desalinization plant is a huge building [but its size need not be huge to do what it needs to do] that sucks water from its adjacent supply of water [the Pacific Ocean] and sends it through a salt removing process. When done, it sends it into the [just guessing here] drinkable water supply for the city of Los Angeles.
Desalinization
While the plant in Los Angeles is ½ the size of a football field, it need not be. A desalinization plant just removes salt. It can remove other contaminants too and if it does, that plant becomes a multi-purpose plant.
Adding a photo-voltaic power system to a water filtration plant means it can operate with no outside need for electricity-and it needs no humans except to periodically see that its filters are replaced and that its pumps are still pumping.
California should have hundreds of these plants, as should every state that faces water. But they don't. Also. There are no state laws in place that require states to share water-or pump water-
waste or clean-into or out of their state!
Therefore, if California, and Texas, two states having almost emergency water problems again, would set up both hundreds of almost free cleaning plants on the edge of the bodies of water, and pump that water in a 50-100 mile radius, no one would ever be without unlimited amounts of free water.
Also, those same state/federal laws about sharing water-could be put to use to allow a city that is flooding, to pump its excess water to a surrounding state. FACT: at no time in the recorded history of the world, has water flooded all areas at the same time. Thus, when it is flooding in one city and county or even an entire state, there is no reason whatever why each state governor can't make arrangements with adjoining states to open up adjoining [at the city or county level] clean water and sewer water connections and either pump UNWANTED water out-[flood water] or pump WANTED water in [drinking water.]
For years, municipalities around the nation have said 'The cost will be so horrible.' Sure, if the only line connection methods available are via sub contractor who might want to charge $10,000,000 to do the job. However, none of this needs to be sub-contracted. Each city/county has a water department. Those departments have the staff and equipment necessary to do the job.
If they do not, they can email me and I will help coordinate this. It is absurd, therefore, for any city/county state, to ever again, flood or have less drinking water than it wants/needs.
Or.. we can have jet planes and racing cars but THINK horse and buggy. The choices are up to us.
