Running Out Of Good Water
By James Donahue
I lived most of my life in Michigan, usually within a stone’s throw from Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, so I never worried about running out of fresh water. We drank it, bathed in it, swam in it, fished in it, washed our cars in it and watered our lawns.
I used to watch the steamboats dock at the harbor in our town, bringing tons of coal to power the local factory that produced chemical products. That plant, which provided jobs for most of the men in the town, spewed foul smelling odors into the air and dumped its waste directly into Lake Huron.
No more than a mile away from the factory was the city’s water treatment plant operated by Ernie Ritchie. I went to school with his sons, Jack and James, and sometimes came to their house, located right next to the water treatment plant. Ernie sometimes gave us tours of the water plant and assured us that the water we drank was safe. He didn’t worry about the toxins spewing from the town factory, so we didn’t either.
Later while working as a news reporter, I began writing about the problem Michigan cities were having keeping bacteria and other contaminants out of the community water distribution systems. I wrote about beach closings because of high concentrations of bacteria from farm and city sewage spills, warnings about eating fish laced with mercury and other chemicals from industrial and medical dumping, and a growing problem of industrial toxins like PCB, mercury, and dioxins poisoning our soils and fresh water supplies.
The more of these stories that I dealt with, the more concerned I became over the years about preserving the quality of the water in those Great Lakes. I watched in alarm as electric generating plants using coal and nuclear energy got away with dumping waste waters into the lakes. New mining operations opened in Northern Michigan with massive waste disposal occurring in Lake Superior. And the once fresh waters of the lakes continued to get more and more polluted, in spite of state and federal laws designed to protect our air, soil and water.
Somehow it seemed that large corporations had the money and the legal power to sidestep the laws and get away with dumping their waste anyway. I watched as environmentally concerned protesters were arrested and jailed on trespassing charges. The polluters were freely getting away with their crimes.
For a while my wife and I lived in Arizona where water conservation was such an important issue that the very act of drilling a water well or damming a stream was a political issue. The few artificial water reservoirs that existed were strictly guarded and reserved for providing drinking water in towns and watering livestock.
I now am living in California where the state and the entire western portion of the United States is experiencing such a severe drought that water restrictions are in place everywhere. Dripping faucets in our homes are something to be alarmed about. We are learning to take fewer and very short showers. There are no sprinklers running in private yards. Crop farmers are under orders to make extreme cuts in water use, possibly to the point of losing their nut trees and prized grape arbors for the state’s great wine industry.
Yet while this has become part of our daily lives, we read stories about the massive water use by oil and gas companies in the new “fracking” technique for freeing gas and oil deposits in the ground, the Peabody Coal Company pumping billions of gallons of pure water from an aquifer under that state to “slush” coal from surface mining operations to electric generating plants in Arizona and California, and a major source of the bottled drinking water produced under the brands Arrowhead, Dasani, Aquafina and Crystal Geyser are coming from either the ground or from municipal water sources in California. Aquafina and Dasani water is bottled by the Pepsi and Coca Cola companies that also produce their soft drinks at the same sources.
California is so heavily populated and has become such a major center for food production that the long drought has forced increased pumping of water from the state’s underground aquifers. Most of this water is going into food production.
A recent story in Mother Jones magazine said: “Tens of thousands of groundwater pumps run day and night” sucking so much water out of the ground that the surface of California is sinking. In fact, the sinking is so severe that it is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways.
“Tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress,” the story said.
While the state is not doing much to monitor the problem, some researchers believe that some areas of California are sinking as much as one foot per year. These areas are described as large “sinkholes” that are so vast in size that the people living in them do not realize that the ground under them is sinking as much as it is.
I am living in the central part of California, on a high hill looking down over a sprawling suburb of Santa Cruz. Beyond the trees and the hodge-podge of houses lies the great Pacific Ocean. From where I stand in my yard, it seems incredible that this state could be running out of water.
Well, technically, we have lots of water here. A fog rolls in each night to water the vegetation so everything is green and lush. But community workers patrol the neighborhood regularly, watching for lawn sprinklers, people washing their cars or places where hoses are left dripping. Homes are monitored for dripping faucets. All that water in the Pacific Ocean is polluted. If not laced with salt it also is full of toxins from industrial, agricultural and even nuclear power plant pollution. Believe it or not, the nuclear waste from the Fukushima disaster has now reached our shore and the oil spills along the southern California and Alaskan coast have taken their toll. Eating fish from the sea has become a reckless thing to be doing.
Dead sea creatures are found washed ashore along with tons of plastic, pop and beer cans and other indescribable debris all along the coast. Who would have thought that humanity could have polluted a body of water as large as the Pacific Ocean?
What fools are we.
By James Donahue
I lived most of my life in Michigan, usually within a stone’s throw from Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior, so I never worried about running out of fresh water. We drank it, bathed in it, swam in it, fished in it, washed our cars in it and watered our lawns.
I used to watch the steamboats dock at the harbor in our town, bringing tons of coal to power the local factory that produced chemical products. That plant, which provided jobs for most of the men in the town, spewed foul smelling odors into the air and dumped its waste directly into Lake Huron.
No more than a mile away from the factory was the city’s water treatment plant operated by Ernie Ritchie. I went to school with his sons, Jack and James, and sometimes came to their house, located right next to the water treatment plant. Ernie sometimes gave us tours of the water plant and assured us that the water we drank was safe. He didn’t worry about the toxins spewing from the town factory, so we didn’t either.
Later while working as a news reporter, I began writing about the problem Michigan cities were having keeping bacteria and other contaminants out of the community water distribution systems. I wrote about beach closings because of high concentrations of bacteria from farm and city sewage spills, warnings about eating fish laced with mercury and other chemicals from industrial and medical dumping, and a growing problem of industrial toxins like PCB, mercury, and dioxins poisoning our soils and fresh water supplies.
The more of these stories that I dealt with, the more concerned I became over the years about preserving the quality of the water in those Great Lakes. I watched in alarm as electric generating plants using coal and nuclear energy got away with dumping waste waters into the lakes. New mining operations opened in Northern Michigan with massive waste disposal occurring in Lake Superior. And the once fresh waters of the lakes continued to get more and more polluted, in spite of state and federal laws designed to protect our air, soil and water.
Somehow it seemed that large corporations had the money and the legal power to sidestep the laws and get away with dumping their waste anyway. I watched as environmentally concerned protesters were arrested and jailed on trespassing charges. The polluters were freely getting away with their crimes.
For a while my wife and I lived in Arizona where water conservation was such an important issue that the very act of drilling a water well or damming a stream was a political issue. The few artificial water reservoirs that existed were strictly guarded and reserved for providing drinking water in towns and watering livestock.
I now am living in California where the state and the entire western portion of the United States is experiencing such a severe drought that water restrictions are in place everywhere. Dripping faucets in our homes are something to be alarmed about. We are learning to take fewer and very short showers. There are no sprinklers running in private yards. Crop farmers are under orders to make extreme cuts in water use, possibly to the point of losing their nut trees and prized grape arbors for the state’s great wine industry.
Yet while this has become part of our daily lives, we read stories about the massive water use by oil and gas companies in the new “fracking” technique for freeing gas and oil deposits in the ground, the Peabody Coal Company pumping billions of gallons of pure water from an aquifer under that state to “slush” coal from surface mining operations to electric generating plants in Arizona and California, and a major source of the bottled drinking water produced under the brands Arrowhead, Dasani, Aquafina and Crystal Geyser are coming from either the ground or from municipal water sources in California. Aquafina and Dasani water is bottled by the Pepsi and Coca Cola companies that also produce their soft drinks at the same sources.
California is so heavily populated and has become such a major center for food production that the long drought has forced increased pumping of water from the state’s underground aquifers. Most of this water is going into food production.
A recent story in Mother Jones magazine said: “Tens of thousands of groundwater pumps run day and night” sucking so much water out of the ground that the surface of California is sinking. In fact, the sinking is so severe that it is starting to destroy bridges, crack irrigation canals and twist highways.
“Tens of thousands of square miles are deflating like a leaky air mattress,” the story said.
While the state is not doing much to monitor the problem, some researchers believe that some areas of California are sinking as much as one foot per year. These areas are described as large “sinkholes” that are so vast in size that the people living in them do not realize that the ground under them is sinking as much as it is.
I am living in the central part of California, on a high hill looking down over a sprawling suburb of Santa Cruz. Beyond the trees and the hodge-podge of houses lies the great Pacific Ocean. From where I stand in my yard, it seems incredible that this state could be running out of water.
Well, technically, we have lots of water here. A fog rolls in each night to water the vegetation so everything is green and lush. But community workers patrol the neighborhood regularly, watching for lawn sprinklers, people washing their cars or places where hoses are left dripping. Homes are monitored for dripping faucets. All that water in the Pacific Ocean is polluted. If not laced with salt it also is full of toxins from industrial, agricultural and even nuclear power plant pollution. Believe it or not, the nuclear waste from the Fukushima disaster has now reached our shore and the oil spills along the southern California and Alaskan coast have taken their toll. Eating fish from the sea has become a reckless thing to be doing.
Dead sea creatures are found washed ashore along with tons of plastic, pop and beer cans and other indescribable debris all along the coast. Who would have thought that humanity could have polluted a body of water as large as the Pacific Ocean?
What fools are we.