US West prepares for possible 1st water shortage declaration

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: CriticalStinker

What sucks too is farmers are penalized if they don't use the water,

Can you elaborate on this? Do rates go up if consumption goes down?

Very complicated subject actually. Agricultural water users don't pay a water bill like most other people do, they have 'shares' also known as 'water rights'. Some of the highest paid attorneys on Earth deal exclusively in water rights. There are only so many shares, and the demand for rights is far higher than the number of shares available. Far higher.

Generally, water rights break down into two categories, those with "junior water rights", and those with "senior water rights". 99.9% of agricultural water users are junior rights holders. This means their rights are granted to them from senior rights holders. The senior rights holders are almost mythological creatures, god like. I've never even met one, or even know who one is. They're very elusive.

Water rights generally transfer with property title, BUT they don't have to. This is an important distinction. To give an example, a 640 acre parcel of land (1 section) might sell for $300k with no water rights. With water rights, that same parcel of land will sell for $2-3m. The value of the water is HUGE. Here's where it gets complicated.

If someone wants to say build a town or a city, they can't just punch a well down into an aquifer and start drawing water out of it, they have to buy the water rights they will need. Now remember, there are only so many shares, and no one gets water without shares. No one. Now, this part will bend your brain... The net amount of water by rights in a given area must always remain the same, so if a city needs 'x' thousand acre-feet of water and it doesn't have the water, it must not only buy the rights to the water, but it must also come up with an 'augmentation plan' to replace the water it takes. This is why you see water pipelines getting built everywhere. And then it gets even more complicated.

Water doesn't only come from wells in the ground. In fact, much of it comes from the surface (lakes and rivers, etc.). These sources of water are governed by the same rules, but it's much more complicated. There are very old laws governing how this works, almost as old as this country. The easiest way to describe these laws is with a saying. This saying is called "First in time, first in right". What this means is, the people who were there or came first have the water rights (in theory). So, when you think about this from a watershed perspective, theoretically the people at the far end of the watershed have the ultimate water rights. Why? Because the interior of the country was settled long after the coasts where people arrived initially. Now imagine for a moment how complicated this all gets when you scale this up to the state to state level. It's Biblically complex. Almost unimaginably so.

So back to the guy who doesn't use enough water. When John Q. Farmer doesn't use his allocation of water, he knows there are others (cities and developments) leaving no stone unturned looking for water rights. He can have his water rights amended based on his utilization. A very crude example would be this; lets say he has water rights for 100 gallons (the measure is acre-feet, but we won't get into that in this example). If he uses 100 gallons then he keeps his 100 gallons for next year but if he only averages 80 gallons over several years he can have is rights amended to 80 gallons. And they do this in a court of law, it's called adjudication. If the same farmer sells his property today, he can sell it with 100 gallons of water rights, but if his rights get amended he can only sell the exact same property with 80 gallons of rights. Because the rights are so valuable he has a very big incentive to use every drop of his rights...else he loses money when he sells his property...even if it's 3 generations later.

It is through this process that cities exist at all. Today a city would have to buy the rights, unless they can use the courts to figure out how to steal the water first, and the above example is just one of a thousand different ways they can do that. Now imagine John Q. Farmer...he's up against entire cities and their legal teams. So yeah, he's got one hell of an incentive to use every drop of his water...or sell it to someone else first.

I could go into the whole "ditch system" thing, but this post is long enough. Trust that it is just another method of dealing with water.

There's an old saying in the west, and it goes like this..."Whiskey is for drinkin', an' water is for fightin'!"

Never were truer words ever spoken.

And just a side note to the above explanation; the above system may seem unfair, and in many ways it is unfair, but if you think about the larger picture historically it kind of makes sense. Kind of.

If one person owned half the state of Colorado, Montana or Wyoming, and they had the water rights to go with it, they would have to use that water. If they sold everything but one acre, and kept the water rights (extreme example), they would have more water rights than they could use. So, often times people will ask a question like...how do they know how much water a person uses? Well, a piece of land can only take so much water before it floods and/or kills everything growing on it and becomes a lake. Because agronomists know how much water certain crops take, they can tell how much water a person uses. They don't need to meter the water.

The system was intended to prevent situations like the extreme example.

originally posted by: Lysergic

originally posted by: CriticalStinker
a reply to: Guyfriday

Answer that and you'll see that the "Water Wars" never really ended.

Oil will go out of style soon.

Water will probably be next. If we have renewable cheap energy, water won't be much of an issue for developed nations because of desalination... But a different story for the third world.

Bush said that water would be the next oil, as they bought up a huge supply in South America can't remember it was the largest aquifer but something along those lines.

"His land rests atop one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world: Acuifero Guarani, by name."
5minforecast.com...

Wouldn't surprise me if the coming shortages would be Oil, water, then finally oxygen.

Right, I'm gonna watch me some more sci-fi

originally posted by: MiddleInsite
There's plenty of water, just not where people live. The Great Lakes for example. Over time, I have no doubt, people will MOVE if they can't drink.

See, problem solved. No need to worry. We can all go back to worrying about how longs it's been since Kamala Harris hasn't been to the border, or held a press conference. For those of you who get your news from FOX. LOL!

Like no one lives around the Great Lakes and there aren't any laws concerning water rights. Just stick a straw into the lakes and water the desert with it. Better yet, go to some county and pump it up for for chump change and ship it out for some bucks, Ice Mountain is getting away with it.

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean

"Once in a Lifetime" by The Talking Heads

a reply to: JinMI

The issue with Desalination plants is that it has a huge environmental impact. First because it has to be built on the coast, which the land is valuable, second because to are sucking up millions of gallons of ocean via a pipeline, and spitting out millions of gallons of Brim salt water somewhere. The Brim is highly concentrated salt, you could spit it out to salt factories i guess, but you still have to put the excess somewhere in the ocean which will make a dead zone. The more you put in the ocean the bigger the dead zone. That impacts fisheries and tourism.

Camain

originally posted by: MiddleInsite
There's plenty of water, just not where people live. The Great Lakes for example. Over time, I have no doubt, people will MOVE if they can't drink.

See, problem solved. No need to worry. We can all go back to worrying about how longs it's been since Kamala Harris hasn't been to the border, or held a press conference. For those of you who get your news from FOX. LOL!

Your dismissive attitude on this is remarkable.

Some studies claim 25% of Earth's population live in areas of water stress

So are you saying the solution to this is that nearly 2 billion people just move? How much fresh water do you have up in Torrington? You might change your tune when some chunk of displaced migrants start showing up in Northern CT looking for fresh water. Then the NIMBYism will kick in, full throttle.

Aren’t the farmers out in the Midwest sitting on top of a huge drying up aquifer watering millions of acres of corn to make asinine ethanol to add to gasoline?

In other words using up fresh ground water to make ethanol to make the environmentalists happy, makes total sense.

Edit to add: theconversation.com...

2020 and 2021 have been pretty good years for rainfall. If one looks at the past rainfall levels, the data shows things are pretty much normal. I looked at these records that date back to the 1800's. It's a fact that most countries don't guard their bodies of water with the respect and care due them and for that people will pay a price. I don't understand why this message hasn't gotten through to people over the ages.

But in the USA, you can check data on rainfalls here. Plug in any current month of the current year and it will give you percentages of levels plus the graph shows info clear back to 1895 on averages.

www.ncdc.noaa.gov...

I live right on Lake Michigan and drink it's water every day. About 15 years ago they made us hook to city water that comes out of Lake Michigan but we have to pay for it. Generally we still have our wells and use them off and on to keep them working. Lake water isn't too bad but the dew in the morning from the Chicago haze looks like mud running off your windshield if you park outside.

originally posted by: Guyfriday
Here's a thought to fallow on, "Why is it that Nuts and Wine grapes are grown in the same areas of California where that isn't any readily access to water?"

Most vineyards are minimally watered if at all, it helps to produce more concentrated fruit when the vines aren't watered regularly.

originally posted by: camain
a reply to: JinMI

The issue with Desalination plants is that it has a huge environmental impact. First because it has to be built on the coast, which the land is valuable, second because to are sucking up millions of gallons of ocean via a pipeline, and spitting out millions of gallons of Brim salt water somewhere. The Brim is highly concentrated salt, you could spit it out to salt factories i guess, but you still have to put the excess somewhere in the ocean which will make a dead zone. The more you put in the ocean the bigger the dead zone. That impacts fisheries and tourism.

Camain

you appear to understand the subject. thanks for the explaining.

I can't see any kind of pipeline from the Lakes as being feasible. Rocky Mountains too high.
not saying it CAN'T be done, but doubt that it will.

I don't mind using the water for agriculture. I do resent the continued support of (illegal) immigration into the area.

(snowflake: "You're supporting Big Agriculture over third-world people! Reeeee!")

agriculture feeds people. that's a good thing. does SoCal really need more people?

Well you would let them monetize water. It drops out of the sky free (yes it has to be worked on in places) then you let water companies dictate to you what you can or cannot have and how much you pay for it. Like Nestle.
Come on about desalination. The salt content in the seas and oceans are finite. The only consideration, like everything that has been said, is location. you can't dump tons of desalination by-product in one area, that would overwhelm the environment.
the reason that scenario doesn't work is the exact same scenario of the BS of glacial melt making the seas rise. FACT, there are (I use the word gazillion cos I can't find a higher figure amount) innumerable FRESH water rivers emptying gazillions of gallons per minute into the seas and oceans yet, 1. the seas don't rise and more importantly for this explanation, 2 this influx does NOT lessen the salt content of the seas and oceans.

One potential solution for mass-desalinization waste is to create building materials out of it, things such as bricks and blocks. These items have the same compressive strengths as masonry. A guy in the Netherlands developed a way to water seal the blocks with algae, also from the ocean. Otherwise, more traditional coatings can be used for waterproofing.

Fresh water and reduced cost building materials. Sounds like a good solution to me.

Last week, I took my grandson to Arizona to visit a flight university he wants to attend in Prescott (Embry-Riddle).
While there, I rented a car and we toured most of the state (Tuscon, Tombstone, Phoenix, Prescott, Grand Canyon village, Flagstaff and Winslow. This was about 1000 miles of highway driving and took a week.

We both commented on the fact that most signed rivers and stream bridges we drove over, there was absolutely no water below. I would say 1 out of 10 had some kind of water, but the rest looked like dry desert gulches where you could see that there was once running water, but now nothing.

There is just physical evidence that they have a severe water problem, and I have never seen anything like that in New England.

a reply to: charlyv

A lot of what they call rivers in az are like that...it was the same in new mexico too. Not to mention most rivers were like the creeks I grew up with in Virginia.

Anyway they are seasonal...water only flows after snow melt makes it down or the rainy season kicks in.

originally posted by: RickyD
a reply to: charlyv

A lot of what they call rivers in az are like that...it was the same in new mexico too. Not to mention most rivers were like the creeks I grew up with in Virginia.

Anyway they are seasonal...water only flows after snow melt makes it down or the rainy season kicks in.

Thanks, that makes sense. However, until we got north enough to Flagstaff and Prescott, that was some dry place! We were wondering where the farms with those circle watering fields got the water for the crops.

originally posted by: charlyv

originally posted by: RickyD
a reply to: charlyv

A lot of what they call rivers in az are like that...it was the same in new mexico too. Not to mention most rivers were like the creeks I grew up with in Virginia.

Anyway they are seasonal...water only flows after snow melt makes it down or the rainy season kicks in.

Thanks, that makes sense. However, until we got north enough to Flagstaff and Prescott, that was some dry place! We were wondering where the farms with those circle watering fields got the water for the crops.

Colorado River, and underground aquifers.
But I believe the climate was slightly different maybe wetter back in the outlaw days, since there was plenty of grass for cattle without supplementing hay. Also they always followed water with their horses, Today like you said, many of the old trails they used are completely void of natural spring water or run off.

originally posted by: RickyD
Really wish they'd hurry up and sort that weather modification already

They almost certainly did that a long time ago. That is what HAARP does (among other things).

I live in California and it's as dry as a bone.

For the past decade, I've watched lots and lots of farmers putting in wells to irrigate their orchards. They are lowering the water table. What happens when the wells run dry?

I drove north a couple of weeks ago and Lake Shasta is low. I'd say it's very low for this time of the year.

I think this is going to be a very dry year.