California’s water disaster waiting to happen

From the Hartford Courant:

Earth’s most precious fluid is not gasoline, but the tiny fraction of Earth’s water that is neither frozen nor vaporized, low enough in salinity to be considered fresh and free enough of contaminants to be legally potable. By mid-century, its price will be on people’s minds the way liquid fuel is today.

My biggest concern is California, which has an enormous population, carries national economic clout and has the nation’s most vulnerable large water supply system.

In adjacent Arizona, the main problem is too little supply for too much demand. In California, it’s the environmental degradation of the West Coast’s largest estuary, the severe effect of long-term water rationing on our national economy, and a human catastrophe with a 95 percent certainty of happening before 2050.

When the engineered levees failed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the disruption to the water supply was local and temporary because the city wasn’t a public water supply for tens of millions of people living elsewhere. Not so for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which drains into San Francisco Bay. It provides water for approximately half the population and for irrigating the state’s richest agricultural region. As with the Mississippi, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is also a soft, muddy place in the process of subsiding below sea level, and is protected by more than a thousand miles of engineered levees. The main danger in California is “The Big One,” a high-magnitude earthquake emanating from the San Andreas- Hayward Fault system, now overdue.

Read more from the Hartford Courant by clicking here.

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