SoCal resident moves to New England to escape water wars, but finds them anyway

From the Boston Globe:

It sounds strange, but I moved here for the water. Already in the early 1980s, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that the West would be running out of water, with the mighty Colorado River overtaxed, and the water table declining beneath the arid lands of Nevada and Arizona. That was about the same time that the late Marc Reisner started researching “Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,” which was published in 1986.

I knew I had to get out of Southern California, and New England seemed like just the place. I didn’t care about the climate; I looked at the upper Northeast as the aqua-Arabia of the future, overflowing with the one resource people would need to make it through the 21st century: water.

Oops.

A while back, I bumped into Federal Reserve Bank economist Robert Tannenwald, co-author of a very disturbing report on New England’s water resources. Nowadays, as I see pictures on the evening news of a half-full Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, or read about water crises in Georgia and elsewhere, I remember Tannenwald’s words about potentially “severe water shortages” in New England. His message: It can happen here. In fact, it is.

Taps running dry, subdivisions stealing each other’s water – click here to find out how water wars are done in New England in this column from the Boston Globe.

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