 HOME | BLOG | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | PAST ISSUES | ADVERTISING RATES | RACK LOCATIONS Water for the Future? By Tim Keim Readers know that I'm often critical of our water quality in Chatham County, and now I'm trying to understand what kind of quantity we can expect in the future. This is all part of trying to figure out what the carrying capacity of Chatham is with respect to our available water resources. Carrying capacity is the number of people that the land can support within its resource budget. Since I hail from California where water is imported vast distances to millions of people and huge tracts of farmland, that information is always in the back of my mind as I contemplate our future water needs here in Chatham. As water becomes ever more precious with climate change altering precipitation patterns, there is an important lesson we can learn from our fellow citizens in the arid West. That lesson is: don't overpopulate. How can we tell when there are too many of us? The rule of thumb I use is living within the limits of your local watershed. Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas all import water from the Colorado River. They outgrew their local watersheds decades ago. None of these cities should have anywhere near the population that presently burdens their drought ravaged region. Importing water from afar is the evidence that a region has exceeded its resource budget. At present, Apex, Cary, Chatham, and Morrisville draw water from Jordan Lake. The so-called “safe yield” of the lake is 100 million gallons per day (mgd). Currently, 67 million mgd are allocated among the users above. According to U.S. Army Corpsman, Ralph Duckson, about 50 percent of the allocation is used. The safe yield was calculated by using data from the worst droughts on record. The 100 mgd number has been in use long before the drought of 2007, which is the worst drought we've seen. So, it's time for a new calculation. The 800 pound gorilla in the room, of course, is climate change. A study of the southeastern states done by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture concluded: “The severe drought in 2007 across the study region was the best example that demonstrated how changes in precipitation patterns could cause serious water supply problems. Water resource planning must consider both the uncertainty of water supply due to climate change and continued increase of water demand due to population increase.” If the consumers of Jordan Lake are only using about 50 percent of our current allocation and the drought of 2007 seriously threatened our water supply, then it seems logical to me that the safe yield of the lake may be much less than previously calculated. Therefore, any future allocations of Jordan Lake could be extremely risky. We have reached the limits of growth for our watershed. So, shall we now begin to work out complicated water importation schemes as they do in the West? Certainly not. Just as we're realizing that our orgy of irresponsible financial overconsumption has come to end, we must understand that we must live within our natural resource budget as well. This will entail two major changes in the way we live. First, we will have to learn to control our population. Either we do it voluntarily, or nature will do it for us. We have no right to continue the rapacious use of our land, soil and water. They are not renewable. Human population must find a homeostatic balance with the natural yield of our resource base. Two, and here's where we as technological adepts can really shine, we must devise more clever devices to conserve the water to which we're limited. The easiest way to begin is by recycling our wastewater. Toilet to tap technologies exist, it's just the idea that is so unpalatable. These technologies are more effective than simply diluting partially cleaned sewage by discharging back into our rivers. For millions of years nature has been cleaning and recycling water, and we must learn to do the same. All this may seem rather abstract now. Jordan Lake is full for the moment, but parts of NC are still in drought. Climate change promises to challenge our ingenuity to thrive on our blue planet. We must plan for a future of not so rainy days. This article originally ran in the Chapel Hill Herald. |