Hydrology: A Question of Birthright

• Share

(7 of 8)

Tomato Insurance. In many places it already is. The Caribbean island of Aruba has virtually no other source of potable water; St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which used to pay $2 per 1,000 gallons for water brought by barge from Puerto Rico, will soon be getting it at about 90¢ by desalinization. On the English Channel island of Guernsey, which ordinarily has plenty of rain, the government has installed a small desalinization plant as insurance against that one drought in every eight years, when tomato crops wither on the vine. For such small plants, salt disposal is a small problem; the briny residue is simply dumped back into the sea.

By the year 2000, the U.S. Government predicts, more than 7% of the nation's water will come from the sea. Westinghouse, the U.S.'s largest producer of multistage flash-distillation systems, has already installed 57. American Machine & Foundry Co. has a contract to put up the first nuclear-powered desalinization plant on Long Island. For Los Angeles, where the average annual rainfall is only 11½ inches, the Bechtel Corp. has drawn up plans for a proposed 150-million-gallon-a-day plant that would be the world's largest nuclear-powered system.

For the foreseeable future, though, it would be cheaper for New York City to pipe water from as far away as the St. Lawrence than to build a desalinization plant close by. Other regions are counting on reaching even farther to find watersheds. "By the time researchers develop a technological breakthrough to lower the cost of converted sea water," argues Warren Hall, head of the University of California's Water Resources Center, "we'll likely have a breakthrough in surface water transportation that would enable us to bring fresh water down from the Columbia River more cheaply than converting it from sea water."

Canadian Caper. However California works out its water problems, the rest of the U.S. will be watching with interest. For in that one state, the problems of the entire country, to say nothing of the rest of the world, are mirrored in microcosm. From the dry south to the rainy north, Californians must continually cope with drought and flood, poor drainage and sporadic runoff of mountain streams, diminishing ground water and seepage from the sea, pollution and landslides at dam sites. The , northernmost one-third of the state contains 70% of the water, while 77% of the water need is in the southern two-thirds. About 29 million acre-feet a year of northern water tumbles unused into the Pacific, while the southern cities and farms must import more than 5,000,000 acre-feet of water each year from the Colorado River. Faced with such diverse and disparate conditions, California has learned the necessity of looking ahead, is now preparing for its water needs in the year 2020, when it is estimated that half of the projected population of 57 million will live in the dry south.

At the heart of California's planning is the $2.2 billion Feather River Project. In 1970 the first Feather River waters will reach the Los Angeles area after traveling by pipeline and canal from north of Sacramento. The project will deliver some 4,230,000 acre-feet of water each year, while providing electric power and flood control and more lakes for fishing and boating.