That Sinking Feeling

Ted Folkert

August 4, 2015

Part three of our sad story about “water-water, everywhere” – another shocker to jog our minds away from our I-Phones and back to the reality of the fragility of the necessities of life. And what could be more necessary than water? And what could possibly be more fragile?

A Sinking Feeling is what Diana Marcum called it in her recent article about Lake Oroville, California in the Los Angeles Times.

A hundred miles or so north of Sacramento and maybe 200 miles from San Francisco, is a place called Lake Oroville. Never heard of it? Well, neither had I, but Lake Oroville was created by damming up of several branches of the Feather River, a dam completed in1968, which took the lives of 34 men working in unsafe conditions. This dam is 770 feet high, the tallest in the U.S., and almost 7,000 feet across, for many years the largest dam of its type in the world. Oroville Lake has more than 160 miles of shoreline and the catchment area covers nearly 4,000 square miles. The tributaries that feed the lake drain parts of the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades and the Sacramento Valley.

This lake, it is said, serves drinking water to more than 20 million people between Napa and San Diego, provides hydroelectric power, protects Sacramento from floods and irrigates the Central Valley. Unfortunately, it is running out of water. The capacity of more than 3 million acre feet of water is now at 33% of its normal level, forcing the many house boats afloat there together like sardines in a can. I suppose the lake can still protect Sacramento from floods, although that doesn’t seem to be an immediate problem, but providing drinking water to 20 million people, providing hydroelectric power and irrigating the Central Valley may be a real challenge with the diminishing supply of water to replenish its capacity.

This problem is yet another hole in the boat of water to drink. So, my questions are: How do we resolve these incessant water supply issues for the future? Can we reapportion the water allocations from the Colorado River? Can we reapportion the water allocations from the Oroville Lake? Can we build a few hundred desalination plants? Can we depend upon there never again being another drought? Can we assume that the demand for water will diminish even though the population continuously increases? Can we reduce consumption sufficiently to solve the supply deficiency? Are we going to stop watering our lawns? Are we going to continue wasting water like it has no value?

The answers to these questions are: uncertain, probably not, probably not, probably not, no, no, probably no, probably yes. Alas, no favorable answers, none of the answers we were seeking to solve the problem.

And now we ask the final and most important question, like the unanswered question about saving our environment for the benefit of future generations: are we going to wait until it is too late?

And the answer is: Based upon our individual fixation on material possessions, based upon our obsession for being constantly entertained, based on our fearless leaders’ fixations on getting reelected, and based on our dependence on the other person taking care of the problem, and on our lack of concern about the infrastructure of city, state and nation – we have a problem! It may not be too late, but the problem is not going to wait for us, it is going to press on. If we think wars over politics, territory, religion and power have been brutal – wait until we have a war over water, then all the rest will seem like they never really mattered.

Think about it!