Following a Monday “carp summit” at the White House with Obama administration officials, Governor Jennifer Granholm said in a statement that she was “very disappointed” with the administration’s plans.

“While we did have some areas of agreement with the White House, we believe that the plan does not adequately address the concerns we have been voicing about the imminent threat Asian carp pose to the Great Lakes,” Granholm said. “I believe the proposal’s primary objectives are not sustainable, and that this is a plan to limit damages — not solve the problem.”

Michigan officials and several representatives from other states in the region have called for immediate closure of the Chicago locks. They hope to prevent the invasive fish species from decimating the Great Lakes’ $7 billion sportfishing industry. 

But the Obama administration and the state of Illinois have opposed the move. Under the administration’s proposal, the locks may be closed more often, while the water around them would be treated with poison to kill nearby Asian carp before they enter Lake Michigan.

The administration’s proposal, known as the Asian Carp Control Strategy Framework, would also involve increased DNA sampling of the waters, a third electric barrier in Chicago-area waterways to drive the invasive species away from the lake, and land barriers to keep carp from getting past the electric blockades during floods. 

The plan includes funding for chemical treatments if the barriers fail, and for further research on controlling the carp.

Sources: Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Detroit News, Washington Post

In a month or two, I have a new book coming out from Island Press called Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water. Look for it at your local… well, wherever you buy books now.

The book is a popular account of the reasons we buy bottled water, the manipulations of the private water bottlers to get us to buy it, the industry war on tap water, the history of weird claims made for bottled water, and much more. It explores the remarkable explosion in bottled water sales and the recent consumer revolt that is beginning to threaten sales.

But make no mistake. The war for what you drink continues.

Water Number: $4 a bottle. In the latest skirmish in the war on tap water, the sports arena that hosts the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team — with the lovely name of the Quicken Loans Arena concession — has removed its drinking water fountains. The only way for thirsty fans to get water now is to wait in line at the concessions counter for a free small cup or pay $4 for bottled water or try to drink water from the bathroom faucets.

This isn’t the first time a sports arena has run into trouble over water fountains. In September 2007, the University of Central Florida opened its brand new 45,000 seat football stadium with a sell-out crowd on hand to watch the UCF Knights battle the Texas Longhorns. The loser? The fans. With temperatures near 100 degrees the crowd found out the hard way that the stadium had been built without a single drinking fountain (in apparent violation of building codes). Security concerns kept out personal water bottles. And the only water available (other than the taps in the bathrooms) was $3 bottled water, which quickly sold out. Eighteen people were taken to local hospitals and sixty more were treated by campus medical personnel for heat-related illnesses. After a massive public brouhaha, the University quickly retrofitted the stadium with water fountains.

So what’s up with the Cleveland Cavalier’s arena? A team spokesman offered the explanation that the fountains were removed to prevent the spread of bacteria and illnesses on the advice of the NBA and the International Association of Assembly Managers. But according to Gabriel Baird in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the NBA and the IAAM both deny that they recommend removing water fountains.

An NBA spokesman said “We have not made any recommendations for teams to turn off water fountains.” The director of life safety and security for the International Association of Assembly Managers told reporters that the association recommends regular, thorough cleanings of all hard surfaces but not removing fountains. And Matt Carroll of the Cleveland Health Department noted that “There is nothing out there that suggests that water fountains are a particular concern.”

A local 17-year old fan, Matt Woods of Wadsworth, Ohio cut through all the fog of excuses when he noted, “The reason is so you have to buy a $4 water.”

This story is doubly ironic. In July 2006, Cleveland was the butt of an abusive advertisement by Fiji Water — a controversial water bottler that ships water from the South Pacific to markets around the world. The city fought back with water-quality tests and discovered that compared to Fiji Water, the city’s tap water was as high, or even higher in quality, won blind taste competitions, and was a thousandth the cost.

We must fight to save our tap water — both the quality and access. Public spaces must have public water fountains: new models offer filtered, chilled, and even ultraviolet-purified water. Our municipal systems must continue to improve the quality of the water they deliver and educate consumers about the bargain they’re getting with tap water. And our national water-quality laws must be both enforced and strengthened to ensure our water remains safe, tasty, and protected.

Water fountains must be considered, protected, and treated as assets, not liabilities.

Peter Gleick

By Steve Kellman
Circle of Blue

As owner of a Traverse City-based charter fishing company and captain for another local charter outfit, Steve Huston fears Asian carp invading Lake Michigan.

Huston spent the past 33 years working in the charter and tournament fishing industry around northern Michigan. If the fish that have infested Chicago-area waterways get into the lake, he says he and his fellow charter captains will lose their jobs.

“If they do replace the sportfish, the salmon and the trout, we can’t make a living,” Huston said. “If they displace the small fish, the feeder fish, it’ll end sportfishing in Lake Michigan.”

Fears about the invasive species lurking on the lake’s threshold—and anger over the failure of state and federal officials to stop the carp in their tracks—prompted Huston and a hundred other people to brave 20-degree temperatures for a Saturday morning rally on the banks of the Boardman River. Several carried signs bearing slogans like “Close Chicago Lock,” “Cap the Carp” and “Lock out the Carp… Not the Boaters.”

Also in attendance were Michigan representatives Dan Scripps (D-Leelanau), Wayne Schmidt (R-Traverse City), Andy Neumann (D-Alpena) and Gary McDowell (D-Rudyard), who threatened the possibility of economic sanctions and a boycott of Chicago businesses if protective action isn’t taken soon.

The rally came two days before Great Lakes governors, including Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, are scheduled to be in Washington on Monday to talk to White House officials about the carp invasion and the threat to the regions fisheries and environment.

The International Joint Commission, the bilateral agency overseeing Great Lakes policy, also is scheduled to convene its second public meeting on Asian Carp in Ypsilanti, Michigan on February 17.

Rep. Schmidt, who said he learned to fish on the Boardman River, noted that the pressure to close the locks is bipartisan and spans both state and national boundaries. Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, along with Ontario, Canada, have all announced their support of a legal effort by Mike Cox, Michigan’s attorney general, to seal off the Great Lakes from the invasive species. The fish have already overrun portions of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, driving out game fish and upending ecosystems. They were originally imported to clean southern fish farms in the 1970s, but escaped into the rivers. The bighead variety of the fish can grow up to four feet long and weigh 100 pounds. Meanwhile the silver carp variety is known for jumping out of the water at the sound of boat motors, knocking people out of their boats and causing serious injuries.

Saturday’s protest comes three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Cox’s motion to order an immediate closure of the locks that connect Lake Michigan with the carp-infested waters of the Chicago Waterway System. Cox filed a new Supreme Court motion to close the locks Thursday, citing new evidence that carp may already have entered the lake as well as a study that has found Illinois’ estimates of economic damages from closing the locks to be “seriously exaggerated.” Cox, a Republican, is also running for governor.

Wearing a Big Kahuna Charters baseball cap and carrying a handmade placard that read “No Carp!”, Huston said Saturday that he worries the effect of an Asian carp invasion will not be limited to sportfishing.

“You think alewives are a problem?” he said, referring to the small fish that die by the millions each summer and foul Great Lakes beaches with their carcasses. “Just wait until the Asian carp start dying off when they run out of food.”

Ryan Matuzak, captain of his own charter boat and guide service and president of the Grand Traverse Area Sport Fishing Association (GTASFA), took a break from ice fishing Saturday to attend the rally. He planned to head back out on the ice after the rally was over.

Fishing is “everything to me,” Matuzak said. “I’ve fished the entire state, all of its waters, all the way from Lake Superior down to Lake Erie and both sides.”

GTASFA helped sponsor Saturday’s rally, Matuzak said, and urged Michigan’s attorney general to take legal action over the locks.

“We’ve been involved in the push for this lawsuit probably since the first of November,” he said. “We need to make sure our voices are heard.”

Rep. Scripps, an environmental attorney, told Circle of Blue that he knows the sportfishing industry firsthand, having fished Lake Michigan with charter captains from Leelanau County’s century-old Fishtown village. Scripps said that while on the campaign trail before his 2008 election, he often kept a fly rod and a set of waders in the back of his truck.

“After a long day of door knocking, there’s nothing better than jumping in a stream and throwing a couple of lines in and hoping to find something coming back at you,” he said.

Scripps added that the carp pose a threat to the region’s entire recreational boating industry, not just the sportfishing industry.

“If you go to some of these rivers where the Asian carp already are, you just don’t see boat traffic anymore… These are just silent rivers at this point because it’s too dangerous to boat on them,” he said. “And to know that that could happen here unless we take action shows why we need to act.”

Scripps also agreed with Rep. McDowell’s calls for more drastic action if Illinois officials don’t act now.

“If we need to ratchet up the pressure to get their attention, then we need to ratchet up the pressure,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t go that far, but we’re talking about a tourism industry that it’s hard to put a price tag on, a $9 billion boating industry, and $7 billion sportfishing industry… That’s real money and real jobs.”

Rally organizers took the occasion of Saturday’s event to announce the launch of a new Web site, No Asian Carp, where concerned residents can sign a petition urging Gov. Pat Quinn and other Illinois officials to close the locks. The site, which is being promoted by Michigan House Democrats, joins Stop Asian Carp – Protect Our Great Lakes, a project of Attorney General Mike Cox, as a forum for concerned residents to sign a petition calling for immediate action to stop the carp’s spread.

“I don’t care what petition you sign, frankly,” Scripps told the crowd at Saturday’s rally. “We need action, and we need it now.”

Steve Kellman is a reporter for Circle of Blue. Reach Steve at steve@circleofblue.org

See previous Circle of Blue coverage: Asian Carp Knocking at the Great Lakes’ Door; Michigan Attorney General Seeks To Slam It Shut, Michigan Takes Asian Carp Fight Back To the Supreme Court

Read more: No Asian Carp, Stop Asian Carp – Protect Our Great Lakes, Northern Michigan Legislators Tell Illinois: Keep Your Carp!

By Steve Kellman
Circle of Blue

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox filed a new brief with the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday in his effort to sever the ties between carp-invested canals around Chicago and Lake Michigan, following the high court’s rejection of his initial motion.

The legal maneuver comes amid a flurry of activity over the threat that Asian carp pose to the world’s largest freshwater system.

Three Great Lakes governors—Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, and Illinois’ Patt Quinn—plan to meet with Obama administration officials Monday to discuss how to combat the spread of the invasive species. The U.S. House of Representatives scheduled an emergency hearing on the carp crisis for Tuesday in response to calls from Michigan’s congressional delegation. The hearing will be held by the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

Joel Brammeier, president of the 40-year-old non-profit, the Alliance for the Great Lakes, plans to testify at the hearing on behalf of closing the locks. In 2008, the Alliance conducted a study for the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission on the feasibility of separating the carp-invested river from the Great Lakes.

“Next week will probably be the biggest spotlight on carp management in months, if not years,” Brammeier told Circle of Blue. “I’ve never seen this level of engagement.”

“What hasn’t been apparent yet is if the agencies are willing to go to the mat and make stopping Asian carp priority one in both word and deed, and I’m very hopeful we’ll see that level of engagement next week.”

While Cox acknowledged the impending White House summit in a statement about the new legal brief, he said immediate legal action is still needed.

“We think the Court should take another look at our request to hit the pause button on the locks until the entire Great Lakes region is comfortable that an effective plan is in place to stop Asian carp,” Cox said. “While we would like to see significant and immediate action as a result of next week’s meeting between the governors and administration, that is an unknown at this time, so our battle to protect the Lakes will continue.”

Meanwhile Asian carp, which can grow up to 100 pounds and four feet long, have displaced native fish along the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.

Michigan officials are pressing for an immediate closure of the waterways that connect the carp-infested Illinois River with Lake Michigan, fearing that the invasive species will destroy the lakes’ ecosystem and devastate its $7 billion sportfishing industry. Their efforts have drawn legal support from the Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as from Ontario, Canada.

Illinois state officials have opposed the move, saying the closure could damage the Chicago region’s shipping industry, which uses the system of canals and locks to transport millions of dollars worth of goods and commodities annually. And the American Waterways Operators, a national trade association representing the U.S. tugboat, towboat and barge industry, has warned that closing the locks could raise transportation prices and cost hundreds of people in the barge transportation industry their jobs.

In his latest Supreme Court motion, Cox cited new information that became known after the court’s Jan. 19 denial of his original motion–the discovery of Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan, which suggests that efforts by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to contain the carp are not working. In a statement on his state Web site, Cox pointedly noted that the DNA evidence “was available three days before the Court made its decision but not provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers until afterward.”

The new motion also includes the results of a transportation study that challenges Illinois estimates of the economic damage from closing the locks. The study, by Wayne State University transportation expert John Taylor, determined that statistics previously submitted to the Supreme Court by Illinois and the federal government on the potential economic costs of lock closure are “seriously exaggerated.”

While Illinois and the federal government claimed that lock closures could cost the region $190 million a year, the new study places the annual costs at less than $70 million. The study also estimated that the number of jobs overall would increase due to the need for new modes of transposition like trucking.

Sources: Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, Detroit Free Press, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

See previous Circle of Blue coverage: Asian Carp Knocking at the Great Lakes’ Door; Michigan Attorney General Seeks To Slam It Shut

The court determined that the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s claims to tens of thousands of acre-feet of water in rural Nevada expired a long time ago and are currently invalid.

The water authority has aggressively pursued construction of a 300-mile pipeline connected to a series of wells since 1989. The multi-billion dollar project would channel water from rural areas and provide an alternative freshwater source to the Las Vegas’ rapidly growing population, which threatens to exhaust Nevada’s allotment from the dwindling Colorado River.

The agency recently said it will only build the pipeline if it is absolutely necessary. Some authorities say that desperate scenario might arise before the end of the decade, as drought and climate change are expected to further lower water levels in Lake Mead.

But the court ruled that the state engineer didn’t follow local law when the application was first filed 20 years ago. Then state engineer Mike Turnipseed failed to rule on the request during the appropriate one-year time frame. And although the application could have been extended, none of the requirements—including an ongoing study, court action, or permission from the rights applicant and protestors—were met.

The water authority tried to address the missed deadline in a 2003 legislative amendment, which added language about when an application ruling could be postponed—either for municipal use or “where studies of water supplies have been determined to be necessary. . .or where court actions are pending.”

However, last Thursday’s court decision stated that the amendment does not apply to applications submitted more than one year prior to its enactment. As a result, the 1989 applications were once again assessed under the previous state law and invalidated.

With the pipeline project in a state of uncertainty, the water authority would have nothing to pump to southern Nevada.

The agency has already re-filed its applications from 1989, and said it will follow all necessary procedures. It now awaits a district court ruling on whether the applications must be redone or meet new legal requirements.

Meanwhile, opponents question whether the pipeline is necessary.

Growth has stalled in the region, and projected shortages are less severe than expected. Some critics are calling for reassessment given new water supply from Lake Mead, potential desalination plants, and extra Colorado River water in Arizona.

“What’s the point of doing these multibillion-dollar projects if we find out in 30 or 40 years that we don’t need them?” Southern Nevada Water Authority board member and county commissioner Steve Sisolak told the Sun.

The pipeline has also faced consistent opposition from environmental groups and residents of rural communities.

Authorities and citizens are waiting on the district court to find out what will happen to the water authority’s claims in four towns, and what the future holds for the pipeline project.

See Circle of Blue’s previous coverage about the interstate water issues associated with the Nevada pipeline here.

By Steve Kellman
Circle of Blue

The people responsible for some of the largest water utilities in the U.S. gathered in Washington, D.C. last week to exchange climate change coping strategies with overseas counterparts.

The two-day meeting, Climate Change Impacts on Water: An International Adaptation Forum, brought together more than 200 water system executives, policy and climate officials, and scientists from around the world.

As U.S. cities from Atlanta to Las Vegas already suffer severe water shortages, and others struggle with rising sea levels, hurricanes and floods, the forum was designed to help authorities develop successful responses to climate-related challenges.

Diane VanDe Hei, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) told Circle of Blue that forum speakers were from regions grappling with a water surplus as well as with drought.

For example, Paula Verhoeven, climate office director for the city of Rotterdam, described how her South Holland city is coping with rising oceans and heavy rains — a particular challenge given that much of the city sits below sea level. The port of Rotterdam is the largest in Europe and for decades was the busiest in the world. City planners have gotten creative with a series of dikes and levees with built-in remote sensors to hold the water back and warn engineers when a dike is in danger of failing.

“They’ve got different types of levees, different types of sensors, even homes that float on water,” VanDe Hei said. “They’ve created levees that are broader, and actually have a park on top of them… As the speaker said, rather than trying to keep the water out, they’re looking at how to use the water.”

Several speakers from Australia discussed how they are coping with the worst drought in the country’s history, and how climate change research can provide water managers with better information for the future.

“They discovered that they needed to go out into the community first to discover what their priorities are in terms of water,” VanDe Hei said.

“We held the forum in Washington, D.C. because we wanted to raise the profile of water to policy makers, and I think we did that,” VanDe Hei said. She noted that federal officials attending the forum included those from the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco delivering a keynote address. Dr. Lubchenco is pushing to create a National Climate Service that would act as an authoritative source of policy-relevant climate information.

“We definitely need better models and better predictors,” VanDe Hei said. “The past doesn’t tell us what the future’s going to look like and water utilities need to predict far ahead and they need to predict for worst cases… We need scientists and the federal government to support the development of the tools needed to make those kinds of decisions.”

Now that the forum has concluded, organizers are drafting principles that will help water departments strategize how to cope with climate change, VanDe Hei said.

Presentation materials from the forum’s speakers will also be posted on the forum Web site at waterclimateforum.org.

Courtesy giacomazzi/ / CC BY 2.0

Brazil’s government issued an environmental license for the construction of the Belo Monte dam on a tributary of the Amazon River, Reuters reports.

The company that wins the bid to build the dam will have to pay $800 million and fulfill 40 conditions designed to reduce the environmental and social costs.

“The environmental impact exists but it has been weighed up, calculated and reduced,” said Environmental Minister Carlos Minc, according to Reuters.

Cost estimates for the project range from $9 billion to $17 billion. The facility – to be built on the Xingu River in Para state – will generate enough electricity to power 23 million homes, the BBC reports. Only China’s Three Gorges and the Itaipu dam along the Brazil-Paraguay border are larger.

More than 12,000 people will be relocated and nearly 100 square miles of rainforest will be flooded because of the embankment. But critics of the dam say that costs are not being adequately assessed.

“No one knows the true cost of Belo Monte,” said Aviva Imhof, campaigns director for International Rivers in a press release.

“The project would displace tens of thousands of people, and destroy the livelihood of thousands more. Even as Brazil argues that the international community should support rainforest protection, its government insists on promoting mega-infrastructure projects in Amazonia that are socially and environmentally indefensible.”

Critics also argue that the dam will produce less than 10 percent of its electrical generating capacity during the four-month dry season.

Additionally, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has had a series of problems with Brazil’s environmental agencies. Silva’s push to build dams in the Amazon caused his environmental minister Marina Silva to resign in the spring of 2008. Meanwhile the environmental protection agency led by Silva often refused to issue licenses for large dam projects, according to the New York Times. President Silva split the agency into regulatory and licensing functions in 2007, prompting its employees to strike.

More protests are expected since the dam has been approved. Local opposition groups will be holding demonstrations this week in Para, according to International Rivers.

“We want to make sure that Belo Monte does not destroy the ecosystems and the biodiversity that we have taken care of for millennia. We are opposed to dams on the Xingu, and will fight to protect our river,” the chief of the Kayapo indigenous group said in International Rivers’ press release.

Source: Reuters, BBC, International Rivers

The planned pipeline from Lake Palestine will connect to the Cedar Creek and Richland-Chamber reservoirs.

The Tarrant Regional Water District received approval for a $101 million loan to finance part of a 180-mile pipeline serving the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Texas Water Development Board announced in January.

The pipeline from Lake Palestine will be jointly developed by Dallas Water Utilities, and combine two independent projects in order to save $500 million in capital costs. Additionally it will cost several billion dollars in future operations and maintenance costs, according to Wayne Owen, the planning director for Tarrant Regional.

Total cost for the project is estimated at $1.6 billion.

By connecting Lake Palestine with two of Tarrant Regional’s existing supply reservoirs, the water district will save on energy costs, Owen told Circle of Blue.

“This project will allow us to move water from any of the three sources in regards to most economic means,” Owen said. “The biggest expense for us is energy to pump and transport water. A large portion of the savings is in energy.”

The pipeline will increase Tarrant Regional’s supply capacity by nearly 200 million gallons per day, while Dallas will divert 150 million gallons per day.

The pipeline route will be finalized in March, and construction could start as early as 2013, said Chad Lorance, communications manager for Tarrant Regional. The water district hopes to finish the project by 2018.

The subsidized loan from the water development board will cover conceptual design and permitting costs and will be paid for by annual bond issues over the next six years, Owen said.

Money for the loan came from the water development board’s Water Infrastructure Fund, which finances projects included in the state water plan, said Ken Peterson, general counsel for the board.

The state water plan, last updated in 2007, aims to develop projects that will maintain a 50-year supply of water for Texas, Peterson told Circle of Blue.

The new pipeline will not affect Tarrant’s lawsuit against Oklahoma for access to its water resources, Owen said. Instead, the pipeline’s expanded capacity will allow the water district to fully use the water in its existing reservoirs.

Tarrant Regional’s lawsuit was revived in December when U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton allowed the water district to file an amended complaint clarifying its position. The Oklahoma attorney general’s office filed a motion to dismiss the amended complaint earlier last month. The judge has not ruled on either action, Owen said.

Tarrant Regional supplies water to 1.7 million customers through wholesale contracts to the cities of Fort Worth and Arlington and to the Trinity River Authority.

Read more about the 2007 Texas State Water Plan.

© www.survivalinternational.org

Botswana’s Bushmen have had a longstanding struggle with the government about their land rights on the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. While the Bushmen won a major legal battle against the government in 2006, hundreds of the indigenous peoples still live in resettlement camps, according to the NGO Survival International, which focuses on tribal rights.

By James G. Workman
Special to Circle of Blue

Now that they had been prohibited from negotiating contracts to secure water as a private commodity, Qoroxloo’s band of Kalahari Bushmen was left no choice but to seek it as a fundamental human right.

This was legal terra incognita, and human rights lawyers initially filed the lawsuit as a last resort, hoping to reverse the evictions, gain leverage, bring all parties to the table, and broker a fair settlement. “The government should not feel boxed into a corner,” one local attorney told me on several occasions. But when the President officials established their siege of the reserve and refused to budge, 243 Bushmen challenged President Mogae head-on in Botswana’s High Court.

Many expected a swift judgment, but instead the case crawled across 251 weeks like a Kalahari tortoise at midday. Stenographers churned out 19,000 pages of court transcripts. Bushmen plaintiffs and government respondents filed 4,500 pages of legal documents. The legal process was agonizing, and only got underway in 2004, whereupon the first Bushman witness, hunched in the witness stand, spoke softly. Too softly. His voice was nearly inaudible. Within minutes an irritated Chief Justice M. Dibotelo had him stop mumbling. “You must speak up!”

Amogelang Segootsane explained his voice was naturally low.

Dibotelo leaned forward, instructed the witness to stand on his feet and project from the abdomen so that everyone could hear.

Amogelang said he was exhausted, having traveled a long and difficult journey on foot through the desert to get here. The city was disorienting. He had camped out in unfamiliar bush and had not slept well.

Dibotelo repeated his instructions for the third time.

© www.survivalinternational.org

An awkward silence followed. Here at the country’s defining human rights trial, the court was demanding that a thirsty, destitute, fatigued, and frightened witness stand up for several hours in a hot and airless room under cross examination by a sneering government attorney while officials poured icewater from pitchers in front of the man who for two years had been denied a drop.

Dibotelo paused to consider the situation.

The U.S. was already accusing Botswana of gross human rights violations against Bushmen: violence during interrogations; lengthy judicial delays; limits to journalists and academics; activist harassment. Of course America itself faced similar allegations: excessive force during questioning of suspects; holding prisoners indefinitely without trial; press restrictions; and using water to extract information. But if activists challenged the Bush Administration for waterboarding, Mogae’s government was on trial for precisely the opposite reason.

Amogelang said he found himself standing up, “here in this box,” ordered to project his voice, for two reasons. First, the government cut off his family’s regular supply of drinking water. Then it stopped him from bringing a regular supply of drinking water to his family by himself. He didn’t want to come to court, but he had no choice.

Dibotelo stressed that this was not an inquisition. “We are not trying to persecute….torment you…you can sit down and rest when you feel the need.”

Witnesses who were subjected to waterboarding typically gave in within 14 seconds, but water deprivation took longer. Some Bushmen endured months or years thirst before caving in. A few dozen Bushmen lived on indefinitely or died under questionable circumstances. But they never cracked. Still, state-sponsored thirst might eventually accomplish the task at hand, and offered undeniable advantages to those in control: no scars, no direct force, no physical restraints, and no apparent liability.

The High Court had to decide whether that coercive method—which might be called the intentional use of compulsory thirst—was legal. Judge Dibotelo offered the Bushmen plaintiff a glass of water as a courteous gesture. But did he have to? Or could his government deliberately restrict or prevent Bushmen from access to water? The question was not hypothetical. Repercussions from the High Court’s precedent-setting ruling would resonate beyond borders. On behalf of 6 billion humans, the UN danced around the very same question: were Qoroxloo and all other Bushmen inside the Kalahari Reserve endowed with a human right to water?

For that matter, was anyone?

Liberals generally held that truth to be self-evident. At the dawn of this century, a loose assembly of anti-globalization protesters, trade unions, religious leaders, public utilities, peasant farmers, American social activists, French intellectuals and human rights groups galvanized into the self-proclaimed Global Water Movement. As the essential element without which no living thing can exist, the group’s leaders like Maude Barlow argued, water must be secured for the people, by the government, against Big Business. And its manifesto demanded: “The Earth’s fresh water belongs to the Earth and all species, and therefore must not be treated as a private commodity to be bought, sold, and traded for profit…the global fresh water supply is a shared legacy, a public trust, and a fundamental human right.” Armed with right against might, the Movement provoked nonviolent confrontations and proceeded to chase “foreign economic imperialists” and “water barons” like Coke, Vivendi, Suez and Bechtel out of town, from Kerala, India to Buenos Aires, Argentina to Sydney, Australia to, most spectacularly, Stockton, California, where citizens rose up to overthrow a $600 million water privatization contract with the foreign-based OMI-Thames.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Heart of Dryness available at Amazon.com

Eventually RWE, the German parent conglomerate of a dozen water company subsidiaries from coast to coast, fled the U.S. market altogether. Finally, the Movement called on the United States, World Bank, World Trade Organization and United Nations to insert key phrases their founding charters left out: equal public access to rivers, lakes and aquifers; equal shares of public water to drink, wash and bathe; and the inalienable right to water. “Basically we see water as an issue of human rights versus corporate rights,” said Marlow. Indeed, she asserted, “water is the most important human-rights issue of them all.”

Prominent conservatives adamantly disagreed. This so-called ‘right’ didn’t hold water, figuratively or literally. America’s Founding Fathers were not socialists. They would no more engrave in the Constitution a right to water than they would a right to land, food, medicine, jobs, housing, transportation or fuel. Doing so might even weaken other human rights by making people increasingly dependent on big government. Certainly, water was a necessity. But nothing good came from calling its economic goods and services a ‘right.’ To secure access to water, people must simply deploy “real” and “classic” political rights like free speech, free assembly, and free press. Indeed, “the trouble with rights like ‘water and sanitation’ is that they often achieve the exact opposite of their aims because they invite state intervention into all kinds of areas. Thus, these rights run the risk of bringing about exactly what human rights are supposed to prevent: an omnipresent state.” What’s more, ran the counterargument, it’s impractical. How would any emerging so-called ‘right to water’ be quantified? Would people get an unlimited supply? Would it flow as unrestricted as speech or religious worship, or would failure to pipe free water to every door, on demand, expose leaders to prosecution for human rights violations? What Thomas Paine said about liberty—“What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly”—could equally apply to water. Instead of ensuring conservation for all species, said conservatives, a human right to water would quickly lead a nation to waste, pollution, corruption, biodiversity extinctions and, quite literally, state insolvency.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James G. Workman is an award-winning journalist and has served as an environmental consultant to U.S.-cabinet members.

Between Left Bank and Right Bank, billions of non-ideological people like Qoroxloo or Amogelang fell through the cracks. For example, Bushmen did not oppose water as a tradable good, but that conservative option had been closed off, and when denied access to water, the so-called “real rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness had been consequently infringed. At the same time, Qoroxloo found no liberal written precedent, either. Paine’s The Rights of Man, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and Madison’s Bill of Rights were all silent on the matter; even the post-War UN Declaration of Human Rights failed to mention freedom from thirst. At the time of the siege, no country anywhere recognized, enforced, and clearly defined an explicit human right to water. And against the Global Water Movement, one powerful country fought quietly to keep that issue off all multilateral agendas, out of written charters and banned from binding statements. It wasn’t North Korea, Burma or Cuba that smothered debate about the human right to water; it was the United States of America.

The U.S. attended multi-lateral UN meetings with the express intent to water down language that elevated water as more than an economic good. The richest, most powerful and most individualistic country in the history of the world did not recognize water as a human right, and wanted nobody else to, either. For years, the legality of thirst remained an ideological abstraction, unprovoked and untested in court until the challenge from Bushmen starting with Qoroxloo’s low-voiced co-plaintiff, Amogelang Segootsane.

When the convoy came, Amogelang recalled being surprised at “how much water was poured out of the tanks.” He told the Court he “did not know what to think,” but assumed “there was something wrong with the people’s heads, or the tanks.” The intent soon became clear. One truck took the tank away; others carried off his neighbors. Those who remained “were very hurt.” Their provisions dwindled. As husband and father of three, he had to act. If the government could not bring water to his family, he would.

So one day he stored up wild kgengwe, a water-rich plant, for his family, and proceeded to walk south. He crossed tiny salt pans. Well outside the Kalahari Reserve, he filled plastic barrels with water at a tap and brought them back in a borrowed donkey cart. He did this every few months until the day he was blocked. As the guards made him pour all his water out they explained they were only following orders, and if he didn’t like it he could write their bosses, asking permission. Amogelang could not write or count past ten, but he knew who could, and decided to seek her. He walked further out of the reserve to Kaudwane, slept near a fire with people he knew, and told them he sought permission to take water into the Kalahari. When they asked if he could also bring water to their families remaining in Gope and Metsiamenong, he said he did not know, but would try.

He rode south, sharing a bareback horse until he arrived at Lethlekeng, a town so large it had a gas pump. From there he hitched a ride over smooth asphalt until reaching Gaborone, where drivers killed more people each day than Botswana’s lions killed each century. He could not read signs but searched the disorienting streets. He asked directions, in his low voice, and pronounced a name. People knew it. They pointed him toward her understated office, where he stepped up to the door, and knocked.

Alice Mogwe was a respected, no-nonsense, progressive liberal activist. Since getting her degree she had quietly, and more often not so quietly, made a name for herself, eventually addressing the UN. A decade earlier she founded Ditshwanelo, or ‘human rights:’ the prism through which she saw her homeland, her people, her mission. Any fight for rights invariably embraced the downtrodden underdog. Her ideal client might be an abused rural female HIV-positive Muslim communist gay Zimbabwean refugee, but reaching beneath all these outcasts, she defended Bushmen or, in her language, Basarwa.

As a local maverick from a royal tribal family, Alice was uniquely positioned to do so. Only she, not a foreigner, could educate her countrymen about the insidious nature of torture used against Bushmen hunters. Through Ditshwanelo she could legitimately investigate and challenge their underclass status as squatters in their own country. Alice knew the language intimately enough to trace origins of ‘Basarwa’ to a corruption of ‘bao ba-ba-sa-ruing dikgomo,’ which is to say, those who do not rear cattle, and then scold her nation for defining Qoroxloo in the negative, and abnormal, in terms of what she lacked.

Nevertheless her crusading organization could barely stay afloat. As foreign funds dried up, quixotic charities like hers might have to court the favor of government and actively seek out senior political figures for help, the same figures she might later need to challenge. It was a frustrating quandary. She sat at her desk with a back support staring at a wall of posters filled with worthy battles she had no time or money to fight. She firmly believed the Bushmen lawsuit had been inexcusably delayed by the aggravating rhetoric of foreigners, and now those same overseas human rights groups—unburdened by her own financial constraints—had taken the case out of local hands to fight in their typically Western confrontational manner. Alice, by contrast, still believed fervently in quiet diplomacy and one-on-one negotiation and compromise. Then again, she had no choice.

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The receptionist told her she had a visitor. She heard who it was and knew how far he had come to reach her office and she stood to welcome him. He was still dressed in her husband’s hand-me-down clothing that she had provided years earlier.

Dumela, Rra, she said, greeting him as an equal.

Dumela, Mma, he replied, smiling back.

What can I do for you?

Amogelang wanted to tell her his troubles, but she knew them. He wanted to convey his hopes and fears, but she shared them. So he cleared his low, barely audible throat, hoarse from the dusty journey, and said: We have no water.

Botswana maintained it never used force. When confronted in court with hard evidence of how, acting on orders, the President’s subordinates had most definitely deployed compulsory thirst in its deliberate efforts to make Bushmen move, the government attorney Sidney Pilane vigorously denied that any official had ever deliberately ended, stopped, destroyed, cut off or terminated, Bushmen water. Those words sounded so cruel and brutal, so—terminal. What the government merely had done, he asserted, was merely to “move its water provision” from one place to another.

It was a farcical legal claim, and a clever one. But before it could be tested, the argument left open a loophole that lawyers like Alice could exploit. She urged Bushmen to accept water in the new place outside, and then bring it back to the old one inside.

The government hadn’t figured on that. But as part of its siege, Botswana’s attorneys found yet another legal rationale that would try to prevent it. No one could interfere with government policy; policy was based on denying water exchange; so officials halted all trade across the Reserve boundaries. Water, along with anything else, became contraband.

So Alice found a second loophole. By definition, no individual can trade goods or services alone. So Bushmen women and men inside could go out and haul water back to themselves.

Officials apparently hadn’t considered this possibility, either. They soon had to. On behalf of all Bushmen, Amogelang requested permission, “for us to enter the [Kalahari Reserve] with water. So that we may have something to drink everyday. The places to which the water will be taken is Kukama, Metsiamenong and Gope. It is really heart breaking when one sees the sick orphans and the pregnant women.”

The next day, Botswana’s Water and Wildlife Departments passed the buck. “We have come to the conclusion that it is not our responsibility to give permission to people to carry drinking water” and referred the issue to the Ministry of Local Government. Five days later, the Ministry of Local Government’s permanent secretary explained calmly how his ministry did not “implement regulations relating to Parks.” It operated under the fiction that no one remained inside the Reserve; holdouts stayed of their own volition, in No Man’s Land, and “not the responsibility of Local Government.”

As an exhausted Amogelang sat before her, Alice had to explain how the Wildlife Department would let him bring water to his family once Local Government signed off, except Local Government couldn’t sign off because it had no authority over Bushmen once they entered the Kalahari Reserve; Local Government would quickly sign off on Wildlife and let him carry water inside, if he and Bushmen inside the Kalahari Reserve left; only in that case permission would not be necessary because they would have moved outside the reserve where the water was. This circular logic infuriated Alice. She believed in Botswana, took pride in its peaceful traditions, and strived to improve its governance nationally and its reputation globally. As the water situation deteriorated and options ran out, she tried turn crisis into opportunity and give diplomacy one last chance.

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Local Government Minister Margaret Nasha might be described by generous authors as “traditionally built” and by everyone else as fat. Nasha was the official who, along with the military officers, was responsible for cutting off water to Qoroxloo’s band; to Bushmen, she was the face of their rival. Bushmen said Nasha spoke down to them, as helpless children in need of guidance. Nasha compared Bushmen with elephants needing to be culled. Bushmen loathed Margaret Nasha. Alice picked up the phone.

She requested a few minutes with Nasha for a quick talk about certain unforeseen aspects of the Kalahari Reserve situation, with no direct bearing on the court case. Nasha knew how Alice’s tongue could get started and never stop, so had scoffed, only partly teasing, You? Quick talk? Won’t take long? Huh!

When Alice showed up with Amogelang at her side, Nasha visibly stiffened, and her eyes narrowed, but she held her anger in check and gestured for Alice to say what she had to, face to face.

For a change Alice said little, instead turning to Amogelang. Why don’t you tell her what you told me?

He looked at Nasha and in that low, soft voice said: We have no water.

Nasha came uncorked. According to two of the three people in the room Nasha proceeded to excoriate Bushmen like him, who remained inside the Reserve, correcting him that there was water, plenty of water, because the government had offered water, more water than anyone needed, schools with water for children and water for everyone who wanted to develop like all citizens all over the country, until, at last, she ran out of steam.

Then both women turned to Amogelang for his response, and he repeated what was at stake for billons who shared his predicament.

We have no water.

When Botswana cut off Bushmen water in 2002, few had heard of a “human right to water.” Three years later much of the outside world, from France to India to Ecuador and South Africa were taking steps to make it explicit. Bowing to “a growing movement to formally adopt” it, the Vatican proclaimed “The right to water is thus an inalienable right.” Even water-intensive industries like Nestle and Coca Cola—which in theory would face restrictions on economic activities, a weakening of demand for their product, and a potential hit to their bottom line—called for recognition of a human right to water for the sake of certainty and preserving their brand name. Finally, in a statement backed by Kofi Annan—and opposed by the United States—the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights called it “indispensable for leading a life in human dignity. It is a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights….The human right to water entitles everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible and affordable water for personal and domestic uses.”

The UNspeak would have aided Qoroxloo and her band if the words had been legally binding, and not legally hinting. The UN outlined what state parties like Botswana should, could, might and really ought to do when it could find the time. But the eloquence lacked teeth. There was in principle an implicit human right to water. Explicitly, it did not yet exist.

Back in Nasha’s office, as citizen, advocate and government official squared off over the one resource they each shared and all needed to survive, it was hard to imagine a more subversive idea. Amogelang embodied the moral imperative, Alice provided the legal context and Nasha, who had to govern, sent them away and pondered what to do. She put her finger to the wind and made a few calls. Days later Ditshwanelo received a letter from Jan. F. Broekhuis on behalf of the Director of Wildlife and National Parks: “We are pleased to be able to grant you permission to carry water into the Central Kalahari Game Reserve for use by yourself and your immediate family…”

Alice was thrilled, and cited this as a perfect example of how one-on-one compromise trumped the polarizing Western hard-line confrontational approach. Now Amogelang could continue his long donkey cart trips. It seemed a victory, a vindication of quiet diplomacy that affirmed the emerging human right to water, in writing.

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Or did it? The letter ominously concluded “…until further notice. Note that this permission does not permit you to supply water to any other persons that may reside in the Reserve.” Why “until further notice?” What exactly did “immediate family” mean to someone with twenty cousins, in-laws, nephews and nieces? And what if he did supply water to Qoroxloo’s band, in Metsiamenong, as he had promised? The words “grant you permission” were a far cry from “recognize your inherent God-given right.”

Alice protested that Bushmen should not be required to beg permission to bring water wherever they wanted from officials who were engaging in unlawful conduct. But Nasha’s government decreed otherwise. In demanding the last word, it used variations of ‘permit’ and ‘permission’ five times in three sentences. That signal was loud and clear. Like a driver’s permit, water extended as a temporary license need not be defended as an unconditional right. Accordingly, Botswana’s government could choose to grant what people desired, but it was not obliged to protect a right with which people were endowed.

The difference was subtle but profound, for the scales could always tip back. At any moment, the privilege that the government bestowed as a courtesy could be temporarily rescinded or permanently repealed. Something given could be taken away.

Two years later Botswana proceeded to do just that. The government alleged, without evidence, that Amogelang had been hired to bring water into the Kalahari, thus breaking the terms of their generosity. Officials reasserted that Bushmen could either stay inside without water or move outside to get water, but could not traffic back and forth carrying water of their own. A final letter concluded, “the aforementioned permit has been suspended until further notice,” and denied Bushmen freedom to fill up tanks and return home. Permission for water was revoked.

Amogelang’s extended family was subsequently forced, for the first time in their lives, to depart their ancestral homeland. From the day of the cut-offs they lasted three years, two months and eight days before finally caving in to compulsory thirst and state-sponsored dehydration.

Alice continued to negotiate legal terms with the government on, but kept hitting her head against arbitrary rules of state officials who claimed to be acting on the larger interest of Botswana. At one level, the UN became even more assertive in its statements about water, but failed to walk the walk. It remained for Botswana’s High Court to rule whether Bushmen deserved access to water as an unequivocal human right, on their own terms, in their own land. Yet even its rulings could be nullified by those with power.

Perhaps human rights are merely a reflection of grinding down raw power to an uneasy peace and equilibrium, a constant effort. Indeed, some lawyers and scholars trace the birth of human rights to a similarly temporary truce brokered eight centuries ago which in part hinged on who had access to water. In the 13th century, Britain’s King John fenced off streams, blocked river navigation, and sold monopolies to water resources that used to be free for all. He restricted water access until subjects revolted in a medieval asymmetric war. Thirsty serfs put pressure on their feudal lords and barons, who in turn made the king restore access to water for all, until “the rivers that [he] fenced were directed to be laid open.” They forced his hand at Runnymede—an island within a river owned by no individual—to sign the Magna Carta.

Thus scarcity brought conflict until a powerful equilibrium led all sides to inscribe the foundation of human rights. These came not from God, not through reason and conscience, not jotted down by NGOs to be passed by UN resolution, and not, as Americans were taught, conceived in liberty and born immaculate. All rights—and limitations on the state—emerged through ugly and messy processes, repeatedly and violently clawed and scraped and forced into the light where they could be defended.

Until that happened, tensions escalated. Qoroxloo’s stubborn band was the last of those who never caved in to the government’s compulsory thirst, who never surrendered to the siege, and who as a consequence brought armed government officials to advance on their camps. As Mogae constricted his line in the sand, death would come even to Bushmen denied access to water as a human right.

CHAPTER 15: HUMAN RIGHTS, WATER WRONGS

1. “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices—2005,” Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor March 8, 2006. Backed by bipartisan Congressional support, U.S officials were at that moment employing what a former CIA director described as the “professional interrogation technique” known as “waterboarding.” Officials immobilized the hooded witness horizontal or upside down and repeatedly poured water onto his face; convinced he was drowning, a gag reflex kicked in, he choked, sputtered and cracked in 14 seconds. The psychological effects lasted much longer; years later some traumatized victims couldn’t take showers, or panicked when it rained.
2. “CIA Whitewashing Torture: Statements by Goss Contradict U.S. Law and Practice,” Human Rights Watch, Nov. 21, 2005. Richard Esposito, “CIA’s Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described,” ABC News, May 19, 2006.
3. Kathleen Dean Moore, “Life, Liberty, and…Water?: In the struggle over water, human rights and environmental ethics flow together,” Orion, Winter 2002.
4. Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold; Jeffrey Rothfelder, Every Drop for Sale; Alan Snitow, Thirst.
5. Gleick, et al, The New Economy of Water.
6. “The Treaty Initiative to Share and Protect the Global Water Commons.”
7. Snitow, Thirst. The Treaty Initiative was unanimously endorsed by the 800 delegates from 35 countries to accompany demands on behalf of all the world’s citizens, including you.
8. Maude Barlow & Tony Clarke, Blue Gold, P. 239
9. “Stand Up for Your Rights: The Old stuffy ones, that is: newer ones are distractions.” The Economist, March 24, 2007; “Many Rights, Some Wrong: The World’s Biggest Human-Rights Organization Stretches Its Brand,” Economist, March, 24, 2007.
10. Reinout Wibier, The Economist, Letter to the editor, April 7, 2007. The World Bank’s water guru, John Briscoe, dismissed the Movement’s underlying premise: “What does it mean to say that water is a human right?” he demanded. “Those who proclaim it so would say that it is the obligation of the government X to provide free water to everybody. Well, that’s a fantasy.”
11. Peter Gleick, “The Human Right to Water.”
12. distshwanelo’ [pronounced " di - tsua [silent "h"] – ne – lo” with “di” being the plural prefix and the accent being on the “lo”]
13. Alice Mogwe, “Who Was (T) Here First?”
14. Letters of Correspondence Dept Wildlife and National Parks (Jan. F. Broekhuis) and A Segootsane c/o Ditshwanelo, 5th July 2002.
15. Constitutions of Ethiopia, Gambia, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Burkina Faso; Stephen C. Mcaffrey, “The Human Right to Water Revisited,” in Water and International Economic Law, Edith Brown Weiss, Laurence Boisson DeChazournes &
Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder, eds., Oxford University Press, 2004.
16. Patricia Dandonoli, “The Human Right to Safe Drinking Water: Business Responsibilities and Opportunities in Managing the Global Water Crisis,” Leading Perspectives, Business for Sustainable Responsibility, Summer 2008
17. United Nations Economic and Social Council, General Comment No. 15: The Right to Water, Geneve, Nov. 26, 2002: That is: “adopt effective measures to realize, without discrimination, the right to water.” Botswana would “have a constant and continuing duty…to move as expeditiously and effectively as possible toward the realization of the right to water.” Specifically, Botswana was obliged to: respect the right by refraining from unfairly interfering with people’s access to water, for example “disconnecting their water supply;” it had to protect people from interference with their access to water by others, for example price increases no one could afford; and it had to fulfil the right by taking all steps – legislation, implementation, monitoring – with available resources to realise the right to water.
18. Dandonoli, “The Human Right to Safe Drinking Water”
19. Letters of Correspondence Dept Wildlife and National Parks (Jan. F. Broekhuis) and A Segootsane c/o Ditshwanelo, 13 Sept. 2005.
20. The Commentaries on the Laws of England of Sir William Blackstone, 4th ed. (London: J Murrary 1876, 33-34, cited by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in foreword to Not a Drop to Drink, Ken Midkiff. Specific text reads: (47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly. * (48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.”
21. Jefferson’s inalienable rights may have been endowed by a Creator, but they were meaningless until enforced with bullets against Redcoats, then soaked in Civil War blood, and subsequently earned through aggressive demands, burned churches, cracked skulls and martyrdom of female suffragettes and black civil rights activists, by two World Wars and countless guerrilla skirmishes.

City officials in Waukesha, Wisconsin spelled out why they need Great Lakes water to replace their radium-contaminated city water wells Thursday, and why tapping into the world’s largest freshwater supply makes more sense than drilling more wells.

But several more hurdles remain before the city can become the first outside the Great Lakes basin to tap into the lakes since adoption of a landmark protection agreement in 2008.

Under terms of the Great Lakes Compact, cities outside the basin must win approval of the governors from all eight Great Lakes states before diverting water from the lakes. Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) also needs to sign off on Waukesha’s plan.

Waukesha Mayor Larry Nelson called the city’s efforts to secure a radium-free water supply “a critical public health issue,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Thursday. For years, the city has been figuring how to replace city water from deep wells contaminated with naturally occurring radium and salt. The city needs to comply with federal radium-safe water standards by 2018 under a state order.

The city made its case for Lake Michigan water in a draft application released Thursday. The application notes that the city has already made great strides toward reducing its water use through conservation measures, but it maintains that conservation alone will not serve the city’s water needs.

Between 1988 and 2008, the city managed to decrease water use by 31 percent despite an 18-percent increase in population, according to the application. Recent efforts to encourage consumption, including a ban on daytime water sprinkling, water rates that promote conservation, a high-efficiency toilet rebate program, and public education, have resulted in an 11-percent decrease in use in the past three years.

Waukesha currently uses an average of 6.8 million gallons of water a day and will need an average of 10.9 million gallons a day when the city is fully developed, according to the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC). The city and SEWRPC evaluated numerous water supply alternatives to meet those needs before settling on the three most feasible: using a mix of deep and shallow wells, switching to shallow wells alone, or switching to water pumped from Lake Michigan.

Besides the contamination issues with deep wells, the application notes that the deep water aquifer that those wells draw from is already depleted, and not reliable in the future. Switching from the deep wells to shallow wells exclusively would avoid the radium contamination but leave the city’s water supply vulnerable to other contamination sources, while reducing the volume of groundwater feeding wetlands, streams and lakes.

Given that, the city has concluded that using Lake Michigan for its water supply “has the least environmental impact and provides the greatest protection of public health.”

Any change to the city’s current water sources will be expensive.

Engineering and construction of pipelines to pump Lake Michigan water to the city and then return the treated wastewater to the lake via one of its tributaries, as required by the Great Lakes Compact, will cost about $164 million. Annual operating and maintenance costs for the pipelines are estimated at $6.2 million.

Switching to a series of shallow wells to supply the city would cost $174 million for construction, engineering, administrative, legal and other expenses, followed by an estimated $7.4 million a year to run and maintain the wells.

While the Great Lakes Compact prohibits water diversions outside of the lakes’ drainage basin, exceptions may be granted to communities in counties that fall at least partly within the basin such as Waukesha County.

The Wisconsin DNR will work with the city on a comprehensive environmental impact study for the project, the Journal Sentinel reported. The DNR will also invite the public to comment on issues that should be included in the study.

Sources: City of Waukesha, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

See previous Circle of Blue coverage: Waukesha’s Water Woes Herald Test of Great Lakes Compact