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A man in Arizona gets a glimpse of a potentially terrifying future. A future where the planet is hotter, the soil is drier, and our most precious resources are scarcer.
His job is to deliver water. And the task is getting harder.
John Hornewer now has to drive an extra hour each day to fill his truck, which then fills an underground tank at his home in the outskirts of Phoenix.
His normal supplier Cut the dead; more precisely, on January 1, the city of Scottsdale, Ariz., cut off the move to an exurban community which serves the desire to conserve water for its own residents.
They found new suppliers, further afield. Then another supplier cut them off.
And now they have to travel farther, spend more time in the truck, make fewer deliveries, and have to double the cost of hundreds of customers in the Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated community that has lost its water supplier.
“It was brutal,” Hornewer said in an interview. “The water carriers cannot continue.”
Hornewer refers to the Rio Verde Foothills as a warning sign, as the Colorado River shrinks and climate change is predicted to make things worse: “We’re the first domino to fall.”
‘One of our neighbors started peeing outside’
Ingenious water-saving tactics and boundaries are in place.
People are now showering in the nearby gym. Some eat on paper plates. He collects rainwater in an outdoor bucket and uses it to flush the toilet.
They flush toilets less often and promote water-saving methods with tongue-in-cheek slogans like: Don’t be shy, share the flush.
“One neighbor started peeing outside,” said one resident, Linda Vincent. “We haven’t reached that point yet.”
This county, Maricopa, is the fastest growing area in the fastest growing state.
Visitors can see why so many people want to live here: It’s a beautiful place. It has the suburbs of Phoenix on one side, horse ranches on the other, and in the middle, golden sunsets illuminate terra-cotta-colored mansions adorned in cactus landscaping.
However, this arid paradise can be a fairy tale.
The entire southwestern US has experienced a once-in-a-millennium drought since 2000 that has resulted in constant water use.
The purpose of the cuts: to save the Colorado River, the source of energy in the US Southwest, the main source of drinking water, power production, and crop irrigation.
It’s about to get even hard. The US federal government will, every day, announced additional cutsafter the country missed the deadline to come to a voluntary agreement on January 31.
There is that old saying in the West, the cliché by this point is attributed, perhaps inaccurately, to the writer Mark Twain: Whiskey to drink, water to fight over.
And in that part, lately, it’s war time.
Water dispute: ‘It’s getting ugly’
The competition over water allocation is pitting state versus state – Arizona versus California, in particular, has clashing views on what would be a fair allocation.
Even in the countries, it pits townspeople against farmers, and neighbor against neighbor.
“It just got worse,” said local horse breeder Mike Miola.
“People are angry.”
The main flash point: What agency should be trusted with the responsibility that previously handled Scottsdale, which provides local water transport trucks.
Some want to create new public agencies; another wants to hire a private company, Epcor USA, a subsidiary of Canada’s Edmonton-based Epcor.
Karen Nabity recently filed a police report.
This, remember, is a land without local government. Usually only ranchers here until a few years ago, before people started building their dream house.
Currently there are about 2,100 homes that get water in one of two ways: delivered by truck, or from private wells that draw from underground sources.
Some residents want to preserve the libertarian culture and fumed in Nabity to push for the creation of public bodies, so-called water districts.
Some threatened to show up at his house with torches and pitchforks. Friends gathered on the front porch to help him keep an angry crowd at bay. It is not.
“Unfortunately, there are some threats,” he said, while expressing hope for calm.
“Luckily, I have good neighbors.”
A permanent plan can take years to set up.
In the meantime, residents are hoping for an interim solution: that Scottsdale can agree to buy extra water and sell it to them. The plan must be approved by the city, then the county, and Scottsdale will begin by considering it Council meeting Tuesday.
Canada, this affects you too
It’s unclear where the water will come from in the long-term solution but here’s one place it won’t be: Canada.
The Canadian-headquartered company, Epcor, told CBC News that if selected as a supplier, it would not ship water across the border.
However, there is an international component to this struggle.
Canadians have a direct personal stake in the health of the Colorado River. Most of the certain winter greens that Canada consumes, especially lettuce, is grown in the water-dependent southwestern sunbelt.
A precious reminder of Canada’s connection to the region just this season: Canadian grocery store saw an astronomical increase in lettuce prices last fall when other valleys in California were hit by pests.
“A lot of people around the world … need to pay attention to this,” Nabity said.
“Farmers will be left behind.”
The brutal math of the Colorado River
There are two main problems with the Colorado River: It produces way less water than expected, about 30 percent less; and people use it too much.
The problem started with a long-standing math error.
When the current treaty involving seven countries and Mexico was drafted in 1922, there have been several years of abnormal rainfall. This river will not provide the desired volume, which is 16.5 million hectares (about 20 billion cubic meters) allocated annually.
Then came the population explosion. Metropolises like Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix sprouted in what was originally a farming area, blowing through the target of 16.5 million hectares.
So take that demographic growth, add a genuine math error, throw in climate change and an epochal drought, and you have a potential nightmare scenario: Dead pools.
Dead pools occur when water levels drop so low that none of them pass over the Hoover Dam, collapsing the distribution system, leaving farms and homes dry in the southwest.
And that’s the trend, if the post-2019 pace continues. Hence, the FED’s urgent efforts to reduce water use by 20-40 percent below previous levels.
That’s a recipe for conflict.
Every liter of precious water allocation is jealously guarded. Exhibit A: Scottsdale undercuts its neighbor, the Rio Verde Foothills.
It has also fueled tensions in a country already notorious for political conflict between urban and rural areas.
Farmers versus the city
The farmers heard complaints about him. It is true that farms use 70 percent of the Colorado River’s water. The farmer’s defense is: We are here first, the city comes later. We feed all continents.
Nancy Caywood is in the third generation of five generations to farm south of Phoenix. His parents, who took care of this land, have the first date in a highway bar where country legend Waylon Jennings got his start.
He had to let go of the ground. Dozens of acres that could grow wheat and barley, are now dust. All because he has reduced the water and is now farming on the ground.
He said he heard people new to his country blaming farmers.
“The people who moved to this area – they called us … ‘podunk farmers,’ and ‘inbreds,'” she said.
He was in the store recently and heard two women talking, one had moved from California, who Caywood recalled saying: “”I hate farmers. … They’re trashing our air. They’re ruining our soil. They’re using our water.”
“I didn’t cut his eyes.”
According to the 1968 legislature give a dealThe Caywood area faced heavy cuts in times of drought, after California lawmakers agreed to a new canal for Arizona.
He said it’s time for California and its cities to take responsibility.
Solution: What it looks like
If not ending the drought, the monumental scope of the challenge will require contributions on many fronts.
This includes technological innovation: automation meter inspection; recycling dishwater for use in toilets; shift to desert landscaping, already is also done here, with rare grass lawns or illegal in parts of the southwest.
Farmers line irrigation canals with concrete to limit seepage. They installed drip technology. Rows of solar panels now cover the field, providing shade, and reducing reliance on water.
There is a pile of manure on a truck at Miola’s horse farm.
He pointed: “It’s going to be water. Believe it or not.”
(He said the tool was installed on the ranch for a few weeks to extract H20 for industrial use.)
Maybe the city of Scottsdale, Maricopa county, and the unincorporated community of the Rio Verde Foothills, will be able to work together and find a temporary solution.
In the meantime, we have to watch, residents say.
And it’s not just because they’re afraid for themselves: Miola says they’ll have to move if the well runs dry, and Hornewer says something needs to change for the town to survive.
But because this is not the only story about the Foothills of Rio Verde, in the view of some interviewed residents. It’s a story we’ll hear more often, in other places, says Jennifer Simpson.
“It’s a bigger story. This is just the beginning,” said Simpson, who manages the property for snowbirds.
“I think we’re just guinea pigs about what could happen. … This is not a poor community.
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