As the world grapples with rising water use and climate-fueled drought, countries from the United States to Israel to Australia are building huge desalination plants to bolster their water supplies. These plants can create water for thousands of households by extracting the salt from ocean water, but they have also drawn harsh criticism from many environmental groups:
Fort Bragg, long powered by timber, fishing and tourist economies, is getting notice statewide for its push to create monetary green out of the Blue Economy, state officials said. Blue Economy is the term coined for a nationwide trend seeking revenue from the ocean without extracting its resources or doing things that cause serious environmental harm.
California is currently suffering through its worst drought in over 1,200 years, a fact painfully illustrated by a hot, dry summer, nearly empty reservoirs, and a historically diminished Colorado River. New water restrictions have gone into effect across the state. As California scrambles to conserve water, desalination plants, facilities that use reverse osmosis filters to purify seawater and transform it into drinking water, have increasingly become part of the discussion.
The Marin Municipal Water District took a deeper look at some of the more complex and expensive options on the table for new supply: desalination plants and recycled water.
The district board and consultants with the Jacobs Engineering firm held discussion Tuesday on the preliminary cost estimates, water yields and challenges of building desalination plants and expanding the district’s recycled water system.
The port city of Tianjin is in desperate need of water. The surface and groundwater supplies of this sprawling northeast Chinese metropolis have shrunk to dangerously low levels due to decades of reduced rainfall and overexploitation of the Hai River that flows through the city. According to the Tianjin Environmental Protection Bureau, the city’s per capita water resources are one-twentieth of China’s national average, far below the UN benchmark for a water-stressed region.
New water conservation restrictions … ongoing drought … California clearly has a water problem. But lucky us — we live by the ocean! Why not take the salt out and use some of it for drinking?
“A knee-jerk reaction is: stick a straw in the ocean, bring water in, and we’ll never have to worry about the drought again,” said Garry Brown, the founder and director of the environmental group, Orange County Coastkeeper. “And it’s so much more complicated and on so many levels.”
Nestled along the Central Coast, Cambria is a picturesque town famous for its vintage clothing and antique shops, its one-of-a-kind olallieberry pies, its scarecrow festival in the fall and its Disneyesque Christmas market and light display in December. Located right off of Highway 1 and 73 miles south of Big Sur, it’s a popular stop for those driving on the Pacific Coast Highway.
The idea of taking water from one community and giving it to another has some basis in American history. In 1913, Los Angeles opened an aqueduct to carry water from Owens Valley, 230 miles north of the city, to sustain its growth.
But the project, in addition to costing some $23 million at the time, greatly upset Owens Valley residents, who so resented losing their water that they took to dynamiting the aqueduct. Repeatedly.
“Herders and farmers have their feet on the ground, but their eyes on the sky.” The old saying is still popular in Spain’s rural communities who, faced with recurrent droughts, have historically paraded sculptures of saints to pray for rain.
The saints are out again this year as large swaths of Spain face one of the driest winters on record. Even as irrigation infrastructure boomed along with industrial farming, the country’s ubiquitous dams and desalination plants are up against a looming water crisis that scientists have been warning about for decades.
What happened — or didn’t — weatherwise during the last two months starkly reminds us of the erratic nature of California’s vital water supply.
After months of severe drought, the state saw record-shattering storms in December, creating a hefty mountain snowpack while replenishing seriously depleted reservoirs. But January, historically a month of heavy precipitation, was bone-dry.
With climate change, California’s wet periods have become briefer, albeit sometimes more intense, and the dry periods have become longer, making the state’s elaborate water storage and conveyance systems less able to cope with precipitation patterns.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
