Dry Rivers and Parched Throats: The US Drought Crisis

It seems like one cannot go a single day without hearing about the situation in Flint, Michigan. With every news cycle, more and more shocking information about the scandal comes to light: whether it be allegations that the state government knew about the problem for months and tried to deflect blame, or charges that the state was slow to react because the city’s population is overwhelmingly poor and black. As shocking and horrific as the situation in Flint is, it may be just the opening act of widespread and ongoing water crises across the nation.

Already, the Southwest is beginning to feel the strain of a lack of water. The Colorado River, a force so powerful that it carved the Grand Canyon, is beginning to run dry in places. For both the Southwest and California, the Colorado is exceptionally important: in addition to providing the water to more than 40 million Americans across cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and even San Diego, the water from the Colorado is also used to irrigate more than 4 million acres of farmland stretching from the cattle herds of Wyoming to the fields of California. Compounding the problems with the Colorado, Lake Mead—just south of the Las Vegas Strip—has been running low, with some researchers believing that the lake, which provides water to more than 22 million people in the Nevada and Arizona area, could run dry as well. With California still locked in the midst of a crippling drought, and with the prospect of low water levels even when that crisis has passed, it does not look like a good situation for the West.

Some may think that this is just an issue for those in the West and Southwest—but that’s where they'd be wrong. This is an issue that stretches from California to New York, with every state having to deal with the crisis. In Montana, if the demand for water does not stop increasing, state officials claim they will have a "drought–like" crisis on their hands. In Maryland, rising sea levels threaten fresh water reserves, especially in the eastern part of the state where population has been growing. In Colorado, officials are keeping a close eye on the effect fracking may have on their ability to deliver fresh water to their people, not wanting a repeat of what happened in upstate New York when fracking led to the water in people’s homes being flammable.

The trend of water scarcity in the United States is growing and growing quickly. Americans use an average of 25 billion gallons of water a day doing stuff like taking showers, preparing food and washing clothes, and that figure doesn’t even take into account the water used for things like producing the electricity we use, or—and this really is the big one—how much water is used in producing food. Consider this: it takes more than a gallon of water to grow a single almond.

Steps must be taken to stop this, and the most obvious thing to focus on is climate change. With scientists already saying that 2016 is gearing up to be another incredibly hot year, this could have disastrous impacts on already water–starved areas that rely on melting snowfall, especially from places like the Rocky Mountains, to replenish their fresh water supply. As rising temperatures and tides threaten fresh water supplies from California to Maryland, a grim truth may have to be faced by Americans: the time of unlimited water access may soon be coming to its end. Already more than a fifth of people on the planet live in areas where water is scarce or hard to access, with that number expected to rise to a whopping 50 percent of the total population having difficult access to clean water by 2030, according to United Nations estimates.

Now, as worrisome as that is, there is still time to put in preventive measures to combat these water crises. America is not going to plunge into a barren hell–scape of roving gangs fighting each other for barrels of water, a la "Mad Max" anytime soon, but water scarcity is something that needs to be addressed, hopefully before stories like Flint go from being an outrage to the norm.