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Chicago area reaching limit on fresh water supply; Planners, manufacturers look for ways to get water to 2.2 million more people from the same — or smaller — supplies

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on July 13, 2008 at 7:50 am

From the Chicago Tribune:

With an estimated 2.2 million more people expected to live in Northeastern Illinois by 2030, the bottom-line question becomes not mortgage availability or zoning densities or commuting expenses but whether there will be enough water to go around and at what cost.

Perched on the edge of one of the world’s great fresh water sources, the Chicago metro area, ironically, is reaching the upper limit of the water it can take from the lake by court order while at the same time discovering the deep water aquifers supplying outer suburbs are not replenishing as before.

This one-two punch has galvanized state and local officials into trying to figure out ways to sustain the current fresh water supply and using the available supply more efficiently in the future.

“In the 20th Century, the emphasis was to ramp up the supply of water—dig more wells and build more dams, but the emphasis is shifting in the 21st Century away from finding new supply sources to better management of the supplies we have,” said Tim Loftus, project director for the 33-member Northeastern Illinois Regional Water Supply Planning Group, representing government, business and environmental groups.

Loftus, a geographer specializing in water resources at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, insisted Northeastern Illinois does not have “a water supply problem [but] a water management problem.”

“People may think as long as water is running out of the tap there is plenty. But we have been mining water and we need to [plan] now rather than address this on a crisis basis, ” insists Paul Schuch, director of Water Resources for fast-growing Kane County.

Read more from the Chicago Tribune by clicking here.

July 13, 2008 · Filed Under National water news

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