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New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt
Shaila Dewan and Brenda Goodman, New York Times
...The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared October “Take a Shorter Shower Month.” And Saturday, Mr. Perdue declared a state of emergency for more than half the state and asked for federal assistance, though the state has not yet restricted indoor water use or cut back on major commercial and industrial users, a step that could cause a significant loss of jobs.

These last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event - dry faucets.

“We have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency,” said Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey.

But a sense of urgency has been slow to take hold.
(22 October 2007)
Contributor KJM Clark writes:
The story says a great deal about human nature by itself, but change the topic from water to gasoline and you have to wonder about the effects of Peak Oil on the US.

California has enough water
Dorothy Green and Jamie Simons, Los Angeles Times

The trick is to conserve the valuable state resource, make wise decisions about how to use it and cut waste.
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For all the doom and gloom about water in California, here's a surprising truth: California has enough water to meet its needs today and tomorrow without new dams, peripheral canals or catastrophic costs. But there is a rub. It will take political will and better management.

If, given the notorious stranglehold of special interests on Sacramento, you are rolling your eyes and saying, "Give up. It's hopeless," hold on a moment. There is a road map that can lead to a better future for Californians. Here's how:

Conservation. Stop hosing down the driveway, buy more efficient appliances and plug leaks. And by all means, every house should have a water meter; believe it or not, millions of houses in the great Central Valley still do not. With this kind of affordable and existing technology, we can save about one-third of the water used indoors, according to the nonpartisan Pacific Institute. Planting California-friendly, drought-tolerant plants and installing smart sprinkler systems can help to conserve more than half our outdoor residential water.

Store groundwater more efficiently. ...

Reuse nearly all of our wastewater. ...

Stop throwing away storm water. ...

Cut agricultural water use. ...

Dorothy Green is the founder of Heal the Bay and the author of "Managing Water: Avoiding Crisis in California." Jamie Simons is a writer living in Los Angeles.
(23 October 2007)
There's a strong connection between water and energy use. It takes water to generate energy. It takes energy (A LOT) to gather, store and deliver water to users. -BA

Expert: Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires
Scott Pelley, CBS News
Every year you can count on forest fires in the West like hurricanes in the East, but recently there has been an enormous change in Western fires. In truth, we've never seen anything like them in recorded history. It appears we're living in a new age of mega-fires -- forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we're used to seeing.

To find out why it's happening, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley went out on the fire line to see the burning of the American West.

Last fire season was the worst in recorded history. This year is already a close second, with two months to go. More than eight million acres have burned this year already. The men and women facing the flames are elite federal firefighters called "Hotshots."

...60 Minutes joined up with Tom Boatner, who after 30 years on the fire line, is now the chief of fire operations for the federal government.

"A fire of this size and this intensity in this country would have been extremely rare 15, 20 years they're commonplace these days," Boatner says.

"Ten years ago, if you had a 100,000 acre fire, you were talking about a huge fire. And if we had one or two of those a year, that was probably unusual. Now we talk about 200,000 acre fires like it's just another day at the office. It's been a huge change," he says.

...The severity of the burning and size of the fires caught the eye of Tom Swetnam, one of the world's leading fire ecologists. He wanted to know what's touched off this annual inferno and whether it's truly a historic change.

At the University of Arizona, Swetnam keeps a remarkable woodpile, comprised of the largest collection of tree rings in the world. His rings go back 9,000 years, and each one of those rings captures one year of climate history.

Swetnam found recent decades have been the hottest in 1,000 years. And recently, he and a team of top climate scientists discovered something else: a dramatic increase in fires high in the mountains, where fires were rare.

"As the spring is arriving earlier because of warming conditions, the snow on these high mountain areas is melting and running off. So the logs and the branches and the tree needles all can dry out more quickly and have a longer time period to be dry. And so there's a longer time period and opportunity for fires to start," Swetnam says

"The spring comes earlier, so the fire season is just longer," Pelley remarks.

"That's right. The fire season in the last 15 years or so has increased more than two months over the whole Western U.S. So actually 78 days of average longer fire season in the last 15 years compared to the previous 15 or 20 years," Swetnam says.

Swetnam says that climate change -- global warming -- has increased temperatures in the West about one degree and that has caused four times more fires.
(21 October 2007)