The Water Wars are Coming
Image Credit: Open Mind
And it’s not just the American West where trouble is brewing.
Myriad stories have been written about the fight over water rights in the West, especially after 20+ years of a megadrought. The Colorado River Compact was written 101 years ago and no longer applies to today’s environmental conditions.
However, there’s a new area where water is running short: the Midwest.
From Minnesota to Missouri and Iowa to Indiana, the market is quickly identifying water as the most precious resource it always has been.
Midwest Drought
We are seeing record low precipitation and unseasonably warm temperatures all across the Midwestern states, with Iowa getting hit particularly hard.
In fact, 50% of the Midwest is technically in a drought, as defined by NOAA.
Those are some pretty disturbing numbers, but here’s a number that’s even worse: 0%. That’s how much water the small city of Caney, Kansas will have by March 1 without decent rain.
Not having rain for five months might seem like a stretch, but the fact that we’re even talking about a town having absolutely no water in the early spring is catastrophic.
All this might be surprising since we’re in the middle of November, but you need to remember that warming temperatures extend the growing season, which increases the amount of water that needs to be used for irrigation. This is just one example of the cascading effects of climate change.
We’re seeing those same effects up and down the Midwest and Plains states, as the Mississippi River is at historically low levels, which translates to smaller loads in the barges that transport much of the country’s grain.
The cost of barges is normally extremely low, at 1/10th the cost of trains and 1/16th the cost of semis, which has contributed to the extraordinarily low prices we have enjoyed for the past several decades.
In case you haven’t made the connection, there’s a cascade of failures among America’s farmland. The 1–2 punch of lower output due to irrigation issues and higher transportation costs are just the beginning of higher prices over the coming years.
But this isn’t a farmland article. It’s about water, and there’s more than just agriculture and less rain causing our water shortages.
Beyond Drought
Industry has always been a large user of water, and it has only demanded more with bigger and bigger manufacturing facilities. Just take a look at the LEAP district in Lebanon, Indiana, which is about 25 miles northwest of Indianapolis.
The Indiana Economic Development Council wants to build a vast manufacturing site on 9,000+ acres of former farmland. While local pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced a brand new plant in the district, it’s intended target is a chip manufacturer, lured to the state via funding by the CHIP Act.
Part of that plan is to run a water pipeline from an aquifer in Tippecanoe County (home to West Lafayette and Purdue University) to the industrial park, 40 miles away. Then they want to dump the wastewater into an Indianapolis reservoir another 20 miles further south.
How much water will they pipe?
Well, the IEDC is being abnormally coy about the exact numbers, but the best estimate is up to 100 million gallons per day.
For comparison, the entire population of 1.8 million people and thousands of business that reside in the 9 counties that make up Central Indiana currently use 300 million gallons per day.
So, just one industrial park will increase the total water usage by 33%.
Plus, it is expected the drain the source aquifer to the point where the residents and businesses in Tippecanoe and surrounding counties might lose their water entirely, especially in a dry year.
The cherry on top of this whole situation is that Indiana has no law that restricts the extraction of water from a public source of water, such as an aquifer. Translated, that means any company can suck as much water from any water source in the state with no legal or financial ramifications whatsoever.
If you don’t think red state Hoosiers will put up a fight when their rivers run dry, you’ve got another think coming.
Other US Cities
This is just one example. Even keeping in Indiana, there’s another city, Cicero, that is situated next to a huge freshwater lake, Morse Resevoir, but the city is slowly running out of water.
Their two options are a) buy water from a local water utility or b) find their own untapped aquifer and drill another well.
The problem with buying water is that will just drain the already tapped aquifer faster than anticipated.
The problem with finding another aquifer is that the most productive are already tapped. The minimum flow rate needed is 600 gallons per minute, or 864,000 gallons per day. While that is dwarfed by the LEAP requirements, it’s still tough to come by in an already developed area.
There is another crisis coming when you drive up I-65 from Indianapolis to Chicago, where water prices increased 111% between 2010 and 2018. That might seem weird, as the city is on the shores of Lake Michigan, but they are facing the same problem as Cicero, just with lots more people.
Overall, a report by APM Reports (the investigative arm of American Public Media) showed triple-digit increases in water costs in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Duluth, and Buffalo.
With all of these cities sitting on the Great Lakes, which is the largest source of freshwater in the world, then what’s the problem.
The problem is the double whammy of crumbling infrastructure built in the last century and the lack of federal funding to replace it.
When the government doesn’t help, companies have to replace the infrastructure themselves, and the cost then gets shifted onto the customers. And the poorest customers are at a substantially increased risk of having their water shut off.
Can you imagine having to tell your children that they can’t even get a glass of water? I can’t being to think what that does to someone’s mental health, or their children’s, not to mention the physical health aspect of not having access to clean drinking water.
It’s heartbreaking, especially in light of the financial turmoil most of the population is going through right now.
The thing is, this problem is not going away. In fact, it’s only going to get worse as companies and governments keep ignoring or under funding the issue. The scope of the infrastructure repairs is so vast, that it would take $1 trillion to fix it all by by 2034.
The same thing is happening on the coasts of the US, too. Yes, the oceans are salty, but that can be solved by building desalination plants. The problem still lies is how to get the water to the people with infrastructure that is outdated and broken.
Do you think millions of people are going to sit idly by while they are priced out of fresh water for them and their children. I don’t think so.
The Global Impact
These mistakes in water infrastructure aren’t happening just in the United States. Countries the world over are having to come to terms with too much demand and not enough future supply, and people aren’t happy.
Take a look at the articles below.
Governments are making it any easier with their mismanagement of the most precious natural resource. From South Africa to China, the time when the misuse of water has resulted in there being none now has an official name: Day Zero.
The Takeaway
You’ve probably heard the Survival Rule of 3, where you can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.
Not drowning it pretty easy in a non-emergency, and so it not being without shelter. However, not having water is quickly being normalized during non-emergency situations.
Not being able to pay your water bill takes away one of the truly necessary items to live, and the increasing population and constant demand for economic growth will only strain the water system further.