Beyond the Mirage: The Future of Water in the West

Let's be honest about this.

We Americans are spoiled.

We wake up in the morning, we turn on that tap and out comes as much water as we want.

People in the United States use more water per capita than any country on earth.

Why?

Because we could.

Well, we can't anymore.

There's been a long running dispute since the 1920s between the states over who gets how much of the Colorado River.

California in general looks at their supplies as secure and a higher priority than for example Arizona.

I don't want a state next door, for example, saying, 'Hey, they have water, we need it, let's take it.'

We have to defend what we've got here.

There won't be any winners and losers.

There will only be losers.

More breaking news coming in this time happening much closer to home.

The water levels at Lake Mead are now at historic lows.

And the fight to conserve water keeps growing.

In fact, according to new research from NASA, 35 years from now if the current pace of climate change continues, the Southwest as we know it will experience... All right, but first, don't think California's drought will impact you?

Well, financial expert Ryan...

I don't think it's going to be as simple as saying, 'Is it agriculture or is it cities?'

It's going to be returning to unsustainable use of groundwater.

I think we have to get back to a model where you acquire water in advance of growth.

That is not what our laws require.

The concern that I have at this moment is getting everybody to take a deep breath.

We developed an incredibly reliable water supply.

We have these wonderful projects and these huge reservoirs that lulled a lot of us into a false sense of 'the water will always be there'.

We need to move beyond that image, that mirage that our water supply is endless and start thinking about 'how do we have a resilient water supply in a time of change and competing demands for water?'

music bird and cricket noise Well, the West is really at the forefront of water problems in the country.

A number of factors come together.

One is drought.

The Colorado's now in the 15th year of drought and what we don't know is whether this is the 15th year of a 15 year drought or the 15th year of a 50 year drought.

Add into that climate change and the scientists are pretty well agreed that that's going to have adverse consequences for the Colorado River in particular and population growth.

Growth in the Southwest was after World War II, was during a wet period by and large in the 1980s through the mid-'90s and since the late '90s we've been in a drought episode.

So this is really the first time that we've seen this confluence of high population and severe and extensive drought.

Well, it's daunting.

There's no such thing as a even temporary respite.

You have to imagine when I took the job back in 1989, Las Vegas and the Greater Southern Nevada area, had less than 600,000 inhabitants and now we're over two million.

When you start connecting the dots and seeing how one impact triggers reactions and triggers consequences in other areas, you begin to grasp a different understanding of the "system".

In the Colorado River, starting at the Upper Basin, we move the water out of the basin.

In Wyoming we move it to Cheyenne.

In Colorado we go across the Continental Divide to the front-range cities.

Cross over to Utah.

Central Utah Project takes the water all the way to the Wasatch Front.

Come down to New Mexico.

It moves it out of the Colorado River Watershed to the Rio, to Albuquerque.

Las Vegas uses it.

300 plus miles of Central Arizona Project aqueduct goes to the central cities from Phoenix all the way down to Tucson.

On the other side, it goes all the way to the coastal cities of Southern California.

Because Metropolitan Water District of Southern California takes half its water from the Colorado River and half of its water from the Sacramento Bay Delta, they're connected.

What happens in the Bay Delta, matters in Cheyenne.

It is one huge plumbing system that is intricately connected.

When you start looking at the system in those terms, it changes your perspective.

When we think about water management and we think about reservoirs, what we're really talking about across the West is snowpack.

We think of reservoirs as physical things but dams are really structures to manage snow melt.

Winter storms coming off the Pacific Ocean, those are really critical to building up water in the reservoirs.

The Southwest in its back pocket has big droughts.

We're built for drought, as a colleague of mine says.

We should expect droughts.

It's related to cycles of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

So in the wintertime in the Southwest, when we have a warm tropical Pacific Ocean, so it's warm, it's more energetic, putting more moisture out there, we typically have a wet winter in the Southwest.

When we have a cool, tropical, eastern Pacific Ocean, we get a drought pattern.

Those years are called La Nia years.

Those stacking up of La Nia winters over decades gives us these drought cycles that we're currently experiencing right now.

Since 2000 in the current drought, we've seen Lake Mead decline by more than 100 feet in elevation.

Some would say, 'Well, that's the sign of the drought,' and it's true in part.

The three lower basin states-Arizona, California and Nevada-were allocated a portion-7.5 million acre feet a year.

California got 4.4 million acre feet, Arizona got 2.8 million acre feet and Nevada got 300,000 acre feet.

It's generally considered that the compact came together after a wet period but sometimes it's also considered to be a little bit of political stretching that you make the number higher to make sure that you can satisfy everybody on the river.

So it's a combination of a wet period but also maybe selecting the period that you look at to make the allocations.

The reason that we're heading this way is because we're not charging those evaporative losses in Lake Mead, we're not charging the lower basin's half of the Mexican treaty obligation to the states.

All of those things are being taken out of storage.

The fact that the Colorado River is over allocated by which I mean there's actually more rights to water than there reliably is water in the river every year and you've got really kind of the perfect storm.

Lake Mead is full at about elevation 1220 so we've come down dramatically.

Currently Southern Nevada has two intakes into Lake Mead.

At elevation 1050, Southern Nevada loses its upper intake.

That's 40 percent of its capacity to be able to move water into Southern Nevada.

That's unacceptable.

The second intake sits at elevation 1000.

The question for Nevada is what happens below elevation 1000.

They will be struggling to find a way to get water out of that lake.

We needed an intake below.

Tonight, one of this century's most ambitious projects at the largest reservoir in the nation, which looked like this in 2000.

Take a look at what it looks like now.

If we look up, what's up there?

Lake Mead.

That's holding back the lake.

Exactly.

Wow!

We spent a billion dollars going underneath Lake Mead and putting a new intake structure at the bottom of that reservoir that will allow us to take water from those elevations.

Southern Nevadans get it and they completely understand how their water reality has changed over the last 15 years.

It is not inconceivable that Mead drops below dead pool.

Dead pool is elevation 900.

That means no water leaves Lake Mead and goes downstream.

Nothing can come out of Lake Mead, physically.

This isn't a piece of paper that can be changed.

This is a physical limitation.

And this is where it stops being a Nevada problem.

Well, I think often the way you look at the Lower Basin I think it's generally considered that Arizona first and Nevada second have the greatest risk associated with prolonged shortage conditions on the river.

The CAP system essentially brings Colorado River water from Lake Havasu on the Colorado/California border.

It's 336 miles long and brings it across the desert to the cities in Phoenix, to the agricultural districts largely in Pinal County.

One of the things that Arizona had to agree to in order to get the CAP authorized was to allow California to have a senior priority over the CAP.

Arizona, the Central Arizona Project that is, will be reduced 'til the point that it has no water before California's 4.4 million acre feet is cut.

That agreement that Arizona was going to be the junior partner is coming back to haunt us.

1075 feet of elevation is the trigger for a Level One shortage.

If that shortage is declared, then CAP would lose access to about 320,000 acre feet or about 20 percent of what we deliver on an annual basis.

As Lake Mead continues to fall, if it continues to fall, at 1050 the reduction increases to 400,000 acre feet to Arizona and at 1025 the reduction would be 480,000 acre feet to Arizona.

We have priorities within the CAP system.

That priority says that our municipal customers and the Native American customers are our highest priority.

They would be the last ones to be cut off if our supplies dried up.

That shortage is going to impact those excess users we call them.

Well, this alfalfa that we're in right now is sold to a local dairy-T&K Dairy.

They're going to feed it to their cows.

Those cows will produce milk turned into bottled milk, ice cream, cheese, yogurt, butter, all kinds of dairy products.

We use a lot of water to grow these crops and so the real consumer of that water is the public when they buy and consume the food.

In shortage level three we lose all of our CAP water.

There was a hope that there was a cycle of droughts and so people are looking at the '30s drought and they had like a '50s drought, then a drought in the '70s and a drought in the '90s.

And it's sort like they come, they're pretty regular but the fact of the matter is they really aren't.

This is a cross section of wood from the Upper Colorado River Basin.

So you can see some sequences where the rings are wider and then they get narrower and wider and narrower and this is just a nice representation of the tree recording periods of drought and periods that were wetter.

The longest drought occurred in the 1100s and we define it 60 years of drought.

60 years is like so much longer than anything we've seen in the 20th or 21st centuries.

What would happen if that occurred now?

So mega drought is a relatively recent term.

So we're not there into mega drought yet but, we're starting to show the characteristics of mega drought.

We've had long duration, some very severe years and during the course of this drought, temperatures have been steadily rising.

That's one of the reasons I do this work is because when we start to look at those records and say, 'Listen, this happened,' I think it's possible.

The factors that influence climate were no different back then than they are now with one exception and that exception is that humans are influencing the climate.

The way that we do climate science is through building models and using computer simulations to be able to try to understand how these things change.

What is a model?

What's the word model mean?

A climate model is really a mathematical representation of wind and rain and evaporation and the sun expressed in computer code that then tries to make basically three dimensional pictures of the climate through time.

What's not known is so much less than what is known as far as how the climate system fits together on the big parts of it.

Colorado River streamflow is projected to decrease over the course of this century.

The estimates range from about five to 15 percent.

As the atmosphere warms up and the atmospheric circulation becomes more vigorous, the storm track will track further to the north.

So a lot more moisture tracks to northern latitudes and again, that leaves us high and dry at the southern latitudes which would also increase the likelihood of mega drought.

And what we've seen over the last decade is a decrease and then a what I always call these sort of nick of time storms or nick of time winters will come along and they'll just dump record snowpack across the Colorado and then the flows go back up again and Lake Mead recovers slightly.

But you're still...you're sort of bumping a long down, it just sort of slows down maybe the inevitable over the long term.

If we don't get good, large winter snowpacks in the next six years, seven years, we're liable to be at elevation 1000 in Lake Mead, even with the reductions in the guidelines.

The modeling the Bureau of Reclamation has done, which suggests that those reductions may need to be on the order of as much as two million acre feet to if we looked at climate change scenarios maybe up to six million acre feet reduction to maintain elevation 1000.

Where's that water going to come from?

We have agreements in place down to elevation 1025 but you have to remember, Mead is a V. The further you go down in that reservoir, the faster the rate of decline.

So once you've crossed 1025, it's not going to take you very long to hit 1000.

The rate at which this lake diminishes increases dramatically.

At that point, the shortage sharing agreement no longer holds and it really would be up to the Secretary of the Interior as to who is going to get water out of that river.

California has both the highest entitlement on the river but also the most secure.

You've got these senior water rights.

They're not the worth the paper they're written on because once you cross 900, there's nothing for you to take.

We're dealing of course with California and Nevada next door.

We also have the so-called Upper Basin states and eventually we'll have a little bit more I don't want to say conflict with them but as they use more and more of their Colorado River entitlement, less of that unused water will be available to us and that'll put further strains on us.

Nobody wants to make a commitment to something that will destroy the agricultural economy or undermine future growth.

It is in everybody's interest to conserve early, leave that water in Lake Mead with no one's name on it.

It's not a savings account for any particular municipal provider or for any agricultural provider but it is there to preserve the system from crashing.

The level of statesmanship that's going to be needed is extraordinary.

Groundwater, you could consider it fossil water, it was accumulated over tens of thousands of years that it took to work its way into the groundwater system so once it's drawn down, it's essentially not going to be available for...within our lifetimes or many lifetimes.

My first job almost in Arizona many, many years ago was serving as the executive director of the Arizona Groundwater Management Study Commission.

In those days, we were pumping our groundwater at far greater rates than the groundwater was being replenished.

What we did was create these geographical areas called active management areas or they're most frequently referred to as AMAs.

You can't drill a new well without a permit from the department.

You can't bring new ag land into cultivation.

Groundwater should be a savings account.

It's there for times of shortage and for emergencies but not for day in and day out use.

If shortage comes on the Colorado River, it does look as though we'll have to dip into some of those supplies but we will do so cautiously.

So what I would expect to see is that over the next five years or so you'll see a pretty significant investment in wells here in the City of Phoenix but we hope not to use them.

CAP has been the lifeline for the state but the state also cut a deal when we got funding for the CAP to be the lowest priority in times of shortage.

In the areas where CAP water has been used in the Phoenix, Pinal and Tucson areas there's been a lot of water level recovery.

The dots are blue.

If those districts don't receive any more CAP water, the blue dots may turn red or fading from blue to red.

It's not the big cities that are really at risk.

It's the new areas where people want to grow.

A lot of the rural areas of the state when we were drafting the act said, 'We don't want any part of it.

Leave us alone please.

We'll just go on the way we've been going.'

Willcox area, people are having to deepen their wells or drill new wells in chasing that finite groundwater supply.

Well, you start thinking about how you use water a lot differently when you don't have any on a regular basis.

The first thing that happens is we stopped watering trees.

Showering became just kind of like a military shower.

Most people don't understand you flush a toilet tank, you're probably flushing three gallons at a shot.

So everything just kind of changes your outlook.

We went to paper plates.

We stopped cooking anything that couldn't be done in the oven or one pot meal.

None of this...no dinner parties.

Sorry.

And the only thing you could really do is drill a new well.

That would be about $34,000 just to drill and case it.

I think after the initial panic phase and that you start getting into a little bit of an anger thing because you're like, 'Well, how come I'm out of water?

Why is my well going dry?'

Then you find out other people are having the same thing and you see all the big agricultural pivots in the area and you're like, 'Well, they're pumping all the time.

It's their fault.'

You can't blame the farmers.

They're just...farmers are doing what farmers do.

I know on top here we added 30 feet up that lane.

Yes, in there.

Okay.

All right.

I'll make the drawing to show that.

This well that they're drilling in the background in this case will probably just go to 1000 feet.

When you start to pump from greater and greater depths, the cost of drilling the well, the cost of operating the well, the cost of pumping per acre foot just puts the price of water beyond their reasonable rate of return for the crop that you're growing.

The next two to three decades we'll see a major change in the kind of farming that's done in many areas just simply because of this shortage of groundwater.

I think we're right on the cusp.

Tonight we're very honored to have all three of our Arizona legislators here with us.

Are we going to talk about water or not?

Yes, we are.

Well, let's do it now and talk about conflicts after that.

They really don't want the state to step in and tell them what to do.

On the other hand, if somebody doesn't do something, pretty much people's wells are going to dry up and that affects the economy.

It's not just Willcox.

It's other areas of the state where groundwater supplies are drying up.

At the time the Groundwater Management Study Commission was established, California also established a special commission to look at its groundwater laws and then they issued their final report and nothing happened to it.

I like to say it rained the next year, rained really hard and nobody cared anymore.

Now, California, because of the drought and because of a number of different things is finding that pumpers are rapidly depleting their groundwater supplies.

Well, the Central Valley of California where a lot of the produce for the whole country is grown, every well driller in the State of California that has any equipment at all is probably somewhere up there drilling wells in order to keep the crops coming along in a timely manner.

People are racing to drill deeper and deeper wells there at the cost of $250,000, $500,000 a well.

We have been supporting our economy and especially our agricultural economy on spending water that wasn't renewed, that wasn't replaced so prolonged overdraft.

We estimated that in the Central Valley to be about 125 million acre feet of water that had been taken out of storage and not replaced and resulting in steep declines in water levels as well as significant land subsidence.

In some areas as much as 50 feet of land subsidence.

The last official snow survey for the state resulted in a determination of five percent of normal, the lowest ever recorded in I think well over 100 years of recording snowpack.

So we have dry watershed conditions, low reservoirs and then no snow melt running off into those reservoirs.

Irrigation districts that usually have a significant surface water supply, the majority of the water comes from surface water.

This year they have almost no surface water and they'll be over pumping their groundwater basins as well as fallowing land.

We've seen water temperatures spike which has been very damaging for salmon populations.

The Sierras got hit with two extraordinarily dry years and the system crashes.

When you're talking about the, what, fifth largest economy in the world, dependent on this water supply, can you afford to not assume the worst?

There've been any number of wet years but the strife between the Bay Delta communities and Southern California, between urban and ag, the inability at a human level to find compromises and accept responsibility for the entire system eluded California.

Completely eluded them.

California's water crisis is forcing state officials to find new ways to limit resources.

But one community, it's called Mountain House, is only days away from having no water at all.

The Governor ordering the strictest crack down on water use in the state's history.

That means... We're in an historic drought and that demands unprecedented action.

It's for that reason that I'm issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reduction across our state.

They have cities that have no water and this is a real fight coming for this country.

I mean, we talk about oil all the time.

I think fresh water's going to be the next battle.

So we have some areas that agriculture's become completely dependent on this overdraft.

We will see a reduction in agricultural use of water in those basins.

You have to reach equilibrium in the basin and you have a target of when you have to get there and then you have five year milestones to make progress to achieve that.

The legislation is not near as strong as the Groundwater Management Act.

It allows for local areas to come up with local plans to manage supplies and then to allow the state to step in if the local areas aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing.

We look down the road and we know that growth will occur and we know that demand for water will increase and we know that if we don't plan for it now, then we will be in trouble.

The easiest thing is the most obvious thing and that's water conservation.

It's using the water that we already have more wisely, more efficiently, more cautiously.

Here in the City of Phoenix for example, we are using slightly less water than we did in 1996 and we've added 340,000 people to our population base.

Everybody's conserving water.

Can we do more?

Yes.

But it's not enough.

It's not enough to meet future demands everywhere and it's also not enough to stop groundwater mining.

I guess the concern I have here in California as a direct result of the drought is people looking for easy solutions and that would be, 'Let's retire a whole bunch of ag land,' and then all of a sudden you have to deal with the dust issues and what happens to that land and what happens to the economy in these small rural towns.

Across the west farmers use about 80 percent of every state's water.

When the amount of water that the cities need is really in the low single digits-two percent, three percent-of ag water, then I think what we can see is that it's not going to destroy rural life, it's not going to destroy the farm economy.

One of the things that will help is right now the market for water is in a very primitive state.

We could set up a bank just like a bank or stock exchange that served as a clearinghouse for people who want to buy or sell water.

I think the goal should be that farmers use slightly less water with modernized infrastructure paid for by the municipal and industrial sectors and grow as much as they did before but with a little less water and the water that they don't use is now available for municipal and industrial purposes.

Seeing whether the laws and regulations and political decisions can facilitate a more effective win-win kind of management of the water is a wonderful idea.

Implementation is difficult because of the human inertia.

'It's my water.'

It goes all the way back to the farmers and the miners fighting and shooting each other.

It's a very controversial issue and it's not one that can be just a surgical strike.

This is going to take a while to figure this all out.

Water's going to be the new oil and how we manage our water supplies in the future is going to affect our food production, our energy production, it's really vital.

And to lose sight of the fact that that water is produced by nature, then we really risk unraveling the whole system.

Arid regions are projected to experience some similar things, leaving these so-called subtropical areas high and dry.

That's the same kind of projection that we would expect for the African deserts, the Australian deserts, the deserts in parts of China and South Asia.

So the GRACE satellites essentially measure the earth's gravitational field as they rotate around the earth repeatedly.

Water moving around on the earth's surface is a significant reason why you get gravity changing because water has mass and gravity originates from mass.

And if you look at those snapshots, if you will, through time, then you can start to see how over large regional areas the gravitational field is changing.

Will we have globally enough food security?

As water supplies for agriculture are stressed, it would be a real confluence of issues in those countries.

If water is taken away from farmers in this region and it's taken away from farmers in other regions all around the world, it will affect the food supply.

By the middle of the century 2050, demand for food will be 70 percent higher than it is now.

In 2011 we reached seven billion people and of course that's only expected to go up.

You can't make those tradeoffs.

There is a global food responsibility and we're an integral part of that chain.

In the food economy rests our national security as well.

I don't know that anybody has the crystal ball to know how we're going to avoid real dislocations or real issues in certain parts of the world as the population grows but I think we know the direction in which we have to go and if we don't go in that direction, then we're not going to get there for sure.

So I've been a student of water policy and management for a long time and so when you consider the Southwestern United States and you look at the part of the Middle East where Israel is, I saw similarities there.

I think that there are lessons that we can learn from other areas.

How can we maybe do some things done elsewhere even better?

Water was always considered an absolute necessity and to the foundation for building the country and the ethos was one of togetherness, of everybody pulling in the same direction.

In about the mid-1960s, early '70s, competition took over between the sectors.

The cities started saying, 'Why does agriculture get so much water at such a low cost?'

We got into a situation which it was essentially a crisis, a crisis of the sources.

The aquifer levels were going down and as a result of that we were damaging nature.

There was a political process that took place where agriculture lost some of its position in favor of people.

So in about the year 2000 a decision was finally made by the government to go for desalination.

I'm not an engineer but I love to go actually see how water's being treated and what's happening.

You go to visit a plant like Hadera, which is a huge plant, you walk into it, it looks like a traditional...in my view a traditional plant with horizontal membranes almost as far as the eye can see.

So this is the end of the process.

The largest plant, the Sorek plant, built by the same company with different diameter membranes that are vertical instead of horizontal.

And then you go to the Palmachim plant where the bays of membranes painted different colors.

I can only describe that plant as whimsical.

They figured out how to double the capacity of that plant without expanding the footprint.

40 guys on a very tiny footprint of 3.2 hectors make about nine percent or eight percent of the water in Israel.

Kind of a miracle.

In terms of the story of Israel it's a big change because currently there's plenty of water in Israel.

We are self-sufficient, the Sea of Galilee levels are rising.

You can say that this program for the last 15 years essentially solved the problem of the water in Israel.

By now, with the technology that we have, sea water is in a comparable level economically.

The nice thing about sea water desal, the source of the water is endless.

I think the Israelis look at California and see a big coastline there with a lot of sea water next to it.

Here in Carlsbad we are developing the largest Here in Carlsbad we are developing the largest desalination plant in the western hemisphere.

The plant is 50 million gallons per day, will serve around 300,000 people which is about 10 percent of San Diego County.

We are able to predict what this water will cost for the next 30 years and at some point here shortly, imported water rights will be more expensive than desalinated water.

So we're hoping that this plant in Carlsbad will kind of pave the way for other plants in California.

California can follow the path and there is a plan to construct something like 15 desalination plants.

We are already starting building the Santa Barbara one.

If it takes the time that it took for San Diego, which was 12 years from getting the award to actually starting the building, it's going to take some time.

There's a number of concerns with large coastal desal and one is just the expense, certainly the carbon footprint.

As you probably know, California is very focused on renewable energy and on greenhouse gas emissions.

Desal probably has the highest carbon footprint of any of the water management alternatives that you could look at.

I would say that desal continues to be a more boutique application here.

Everyone sees desalination as a silver bullet solution.

It's not.

It is a critical part of the future but it is not the silver bullet.

Growth is outpacing the supply of water.

We'll eventually have to have some augmentation but in the meantime there are some other things we can do to forestall that time.

I think we here are just starting to think about some of the things that are just second nature in Israel.

Agriculture has changed radically.

Israel brings in all its grain from abroad.

It doesn't grow it.

It no longer grows cotton in this country.

Oranges are almost out.

I also see a company like Netafim as an example of that.

Netafim, developed over time, sets of drippers which are attached to plastic pipelines which emanate waters drop after drop.

For a very low cost of drip, you get a much higher crop per drop.

It's our responsibility to look for new ways of doing agriculture, especially here in the Southwest.

This greenhouse facility was built with the latest technology in climate control, irrigation control so I think this is part of what the future looks like.

The plants get shots throughout the day of irrigation water that has water and nutrients.

Whatever the plant does not use, it gets recaptured by these gutters and then recirculated to be reused.

So it's a closed loop system and that creates a big efficiency.

Traditional agriculture uses anywhere from 10 to 20 gallons per pound of harvested tomato.

In our system here, we can lower that number to two and a half gallons of water per pound of tomato.

Reclaiming wastewater and treating it to a level where it can be returned safely from a health point of view and from an environmental point of view to agriculture is one of the biggest achievements that Israel has had.

We now...we use more than 90 percent of the total amount of wastewater that is being generated in the urban area.

I think the real questions about reuse will be, will we reuse wastewater in the West and Southwest for potable purposes?

It's already being used that way in some places.

There's a lot of pushback.

Orange County did not bring their system online for three years while it had 1200 public meetings to educate the public about what they were trying to do.

So it can be done.

If we're going to be essentially drinking the water that comes out of the backend of a wastewater treatment plant, we're going to want to be sure that the quality of that water is excellent.

A lot of the research I do tries to get at those questions.

Many emerging contaminants are compounds that have been introduced either through industrial or pharmaceutical compounds that are not necessarily subjected to environmental regulation.

Some of these compounds can behave as hormone-like compounds and therefore they can be biologically active at very low concentrations.

It has been observed, for example, that relatively low concentrations of some of these endocrine disrupting compounds in stream waters have a significant influence on the sexual development of fish.

To think that humans are somehow excluded from that type of effect is unlikely.

Many of the wastewater treatment plants we have in the United States and throughout the world were designed to remove traditionally recognized contaminants including pathogens.

They're not as effective on the other hand at removing many of these compounds that are being produced in a relatively recent time scale.

Currently there is a good solution for that.

It's both treating this from the source so telling people not to flush medicine down the drain, but also treating by what is called advanced oxidation which is a process that breaks all the carbon chemical connections.

Essentially we are past that.

It's an issue that has to be paid very close attention to but it's an issue that I believe can be managed and I think we have to.

I just don't think it's an option to use this water once and then dump it in a river or dump it in our case in the ocean.

The monsoon season is really a shift in our wind from off the Pacific this dry air to south and southeast where we're pulling up tropical moisture and we start to now have thunderstorms and this is what gives us our spectacular lightning, flash floods, where it'll rain on your neighbor's house and not on your house.

This pond here actually is a storm water pond.

What is the difference in water supply when you start putting in impervious surfaces like rooftops and roads?

And it dramatically increases the amount of water available to us.

Spatially across the whole region, the volume of rain falling is about equivalent to the volume of water that is purchased.

As opposed to the United States, in other parts of the world rainwater harvesting is really a common phenomenon; a quick, cheap, easy way for people to get water.

We just collect the rain that falls on the roof of the house.

That's the whole footprint of our water collection area.

And then from the cistern we pump the water into a water treatment facility in the garage.

We actually collect enough water to provide all our water needs inside the house year round and to provide for a 12,000 gallon swimming pool.

Capturing it on your roof and putting it in a barrel, that's pretty easy.

Capturing the rain that falls on the streets and buildings and sidewalks and all of those kinds of things, that's much, much harder.

The day may come when we will have to get involved in multiple levels of rainwater and storm water harvesting to use in our community.

I do envision that as a possibility and of course it has to be compared with other sources of water, if there are any, and whether...which ones are the best economically feasible.

As communities look to some of these more expensive options, the question of how do you pay for that is very important and who finances it?

Very few if anybody expects the federal government to be the source of let's say a major proportion of funding.

We need to invest.

We need to invest to have the kind of water supply for our children and our grandchildren that we're going to be proud that we did.

We are children of a culture that has become very accustomed to the silver bullet solution.

This has no silver bullet solution.

It is some desalting, it is some reuse, some groundwater banking, it is some structural facilities construction.

All those pieces have to come together.

It varies from region to region of what their stressors are and what their options are.

We've seen too many communities in the West and they had a contract, a right to a certain amount of water and it came through these two pipelines.

And that is the worst way to look at your system.

You have to look at all of your options.

But I suspect that the real problem is one that our society will not address.

We cannot have perpetual growth.

There's no such thing as perpetual growth.

People should not be planning for something that's impossible.

Well, we don't have a choice.

We're going to grow.

Births exceed deaths.

Look what we're doing as a human population.

It's unavoidable.

What kind of society do we want to live in?

What cultural things are important to us?

The dream of the quarter acre lot with grass all around it, those days are over.

So we need to change and I'm really very encouraged by the millennials.

This won't be as tough a transition as it is for the baby boomers who see it as a loss.

Every one of us is a water user, every one of us is a stakeholder and those decision makers will make their decisions based on what they think the public supports.

It's going to require leadership.

It is going to require leadership.

Without that, I'm not very optimistic.

But with that, we've shown in the past that we can take on huge issues.

We're trying to raise the kids as just being hopeful.

I tell them there are challenges ahead but I think it's going to be okay, quite honestly.

Yeah.

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