A Question of Birthright
(See Cover)
All the rivers run into the sea; Yet the sea is not full; Unto the place from whence the rivers come, Thither they return again.
--Ecclesiastes 1:7
Without it there can be no life, and down through the ages man has accepted the water around him as a gift from God--a birthright to be squandered or saved according to the demands of circumstance. Confident of an unending supply from earth's mighty rivers and timeless seas, man has wasted water and polluted it. Parched by unpredictable droughts, he has migrated thousands of miles to slake his thirst. He has fought over it since ancient times: Sennacherib of Assyria revenged himself on Babylon by dumping debris in the city's canals; today armed Arabs and Israelis challenge each other across the banks of the disputed River Jordan.
Man's current concern over water reflects a serious, worldwide shortage in the midst of plenty. For while it is a fact of nature that water swamps nearly three-fourths of the earth's surface, it is also an ironic truth that it cannot always be found where it is needed, when it is needed, in the amounts that are required. Of the 326,071,300 cubic miles* of water on earth, 97.2% is in the oceans, unfit to drink, too salty for irrigation. Another 2% lies frozen and useless in glaciers and icecaps. The tiny usable fraction that is left is neither evenly distributed nor properly used.
The chronic drought that is a way of life in the Sahara and the Middle East has now descended on lands as far off as Korea and Bechuanaland. Australia is suffering its worst water shortage in half a century; the normally moist northeastern U.S. is watching its green lawns wither through the end of a dry summer while its reservoir levels drop lower and lower. And even in the areas where water remains abundant, man is fouling it with his untreated sewage and industrial wastes.
Everywhere, water troubles have bred a new and urgent interest in the long-neglected science of hydrology. President Johnson has set up a Water Resources Council to study U.S. water needs and oversee conservation; he has set aside up to $275 million for research and the development of an economical system for converting sea water to fresh water. Scientists and industrialists from 58 nations will gather in Washington next week for the first international symposium on water desalinization. For hydrologists, who had to take a back seat during the 1957-58 International Geophysical Year, this burst of attention has led not to a year of their own but a decade.
Under the sponsorship of UNESCO, scientists from more than 70 nations began this year to pool their research talents and facilities in the International Hydrological Decade. IHD scientists are already establishing a worldwide net work of hydrology stations to map climate conditions, to study precipitation, ground-water levels and stream ecology, and to measure water's capacity for self-purification. Says Michel Batisse, a French engineer who heads the IHD: "It may turn out that the most important results of the IHD will not be strictly scientific but the side effects. For the first time, and forever, modern civilization will become water-conscious."
Unquenchable Thirst. The consciousness comes none too soon. In the next 20 years, the world's demand for water will double. Americans, who consume 355 billion gallons a day, will raise their requirements to more than 600 billion gallons; it will be a trillion gallons by the end of the century. The statistics are less a reflection of the country's burgeoning population than the result of modern industrial society's increasing and unquenchable thirst. For all the bathtubs, dishwashers, washing machines and lawn sprinklers of an affluent era, home use of water still represents less than 10% of the nation's consumption. Nearly half goes for irrigation, another 40% for industry. It takes 770 gallons of water to refine a barrel of petroleum, up to 65,000 gallons to turn out a ton of steel, 600,000 gallons to make a ton of synthetic rubber.
Demand is so high that the search for fresh water and for the means of putting it to work economically has become an expanding challenge to scientific ingenuity. Dowsers, who used to roam the land with their unreliable witch-hazel divining rods, are no longer adequate--although there are still enough of them around to call a meeting of the American Society of Dowsers Inc. this week in Vermont. Man has taught himself to prospect for new sources of water by seismic refraction and aerial photography. Since World War II, engineers have gone into the remotest valleys to dig wells, build dams, cut canals and lay pipelines. In the U.S., some $10 billion is spent annually on dams, waterworks, sewage-treatment plants, pipelines, canals and levees.
With the pioneering Tennessee Valley Authority as a pattern, river basins all over the world are being crosshatched with dams, laced with power lines and irrigation ditches. The waters that will be backed up by Egypt's giant Aswan Dam are expected to bring forth a better life on the Ni'e. When the project is completed in 1971, Aswan Dam will put 2,400,000 acres of new land into cultivation, generate 10 billion kw-hours of electricity annually and, hopefully, double Egypt's national income. In Iraq, where water is so scarce that the penalty for maliciously damaging an irrigation works is death, plans are being made to dam the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for power and irrigation. Brazil has just completed the $186 million Furnas Dam, South America's largest hydroelectric complex. In a project financed by the U.N. and 20 Western nations, four dams are being thrown across the Mekong River and tributaries in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam. As part of the Indus River project, India has built one of the world's highest dams (740 ft.) across the Sutlej River at Bhakra.
The catalogue is immense. But for all his works and all his study, man's understanding of water remains curiously limited. "Considering the forces that man is trying to affect," says Dr. Raymond L. Nace, a U.S. Government hydrologist, "we can say that he has scarcely made a dent." But scientists keep trying. Attempts at weather control, for example, have been as unsuccessful and unreliable as appeals to the rain gods of old, yet researchers continue to seed clouds with silver iodide and Dry Ice, hopeful that they may some day learn to manage what they cannot yet predict.
Constant Resource. Back of all such experiments is the inexorable fact that the supply of water is limited. The earth has exactly as much water now as it ever had: no less, but no more. Unlike any other resource, the 326 million cubic miles of water are not used up. In nature's familiar, never-ending cycle, water falls to earth as precipitation, seeps underground, flows into lakes and streams, and rushes toward the oceans. Sooner or later, it evaporates back into the air or is given up by plants in the process of transpiration. An acre of corn gives off to the air about 4,000 gallons of water each day. In time, the water returns to the earth again in the form of rain and snow.
Precisely because the vast but limited supply is indispensable, water has inevitably aroused bitter disputes; the very word "rival" was used in Roman law as a term for those who shared the water of a rivus, or irrigation channel. The U.S. Supreme Court last year had to settle a longstanding feud between Arizona and California over use of the waters of the Colorado River. Continuing Mexican complaints have finally persuaded the U.S. to agree to dig a canal to divert salt-polluted waters from Arizona irrigation runoff before they can re-enter the Colorado and flow past Mexican cropland. But diplomacy has not yet managed to move the Jordanians and Israelis to settle their quarrel over who should divert how much water and where from the Jordan.
Whatever their water problems, whatever sends them out to squabble with their neighbors, more often than not cities and nations have only themselves to blame. They squander their supplies in haphazard irrigation, pollute their readiest sources, and are casual about preparing for dry years. In 1950 a research team warned New York City that it would need additional water by 1970, recommended the installation of meters* and stringent measures to stop leakage in the aqueducts and water mains. A pumping station was built upriver on the Hudson, then dismantled as soon as the 1950-51 emergency was over. Nothing was done about meters, and the city still loses at least 30 million gallons of water daily from leaks. Now, after a fourth straight year of drought, New York's reservoirs are down to 36% of capacity and still falling.
Living in Filth. New York's lack of foresight is no exception. Most of the major waterways of the world have become cesspools of progress. In medieval Paris, the streets were open sewers, but the Seine flowed so clearly that from the bridges it was possible to see fish swimming among the stones and green plants on the bottom. Today, after an energetic cleanup campaign, the streets are clean, but the Seine is murky and grey, except for the occasional white fluff of detergent suds. Once England's M.P.s fished for salmon in the Thames at Westminster. No more. In Poland, the Vistula's filtration system is clogged with silt and scum, and Warsaw must tap other water sources. Sickest of all the Great Lakes, Erie is so close to dying that the states along its shore face the prospect of paying a billion dollars apiece for pollution control.
"We are living in our own filth," says John W. Gardner, the new Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. U.S. rivers and streams, like the muddy Missouri, used to be contaminated with nothing worse than silt, some salt, and the acids from mines. Now they are garbage dumps. Raw sewage, scrap paper, ammonia compounds, toxic chemicals, pesticides, oil and grease balls as big as a human fist--these are the unsavory contents of thousands of miles of U.S. waterways.
Industry now pours at least twice as much organic material into U.S. streams as the sewage of all the municipalities combined. Americans who once could be excused a superior attitude about sanitation after traveling abroad, now come home to find that their own drinking water may come from rivers into which steel mills pour pickling liquors, paper mills disgorge wood fibers that decay and use up oxygen, and slaughterhouses dump the blood, fat and stomach contents of animals. Pollution has become such a problem that it is all but impossible to calculate the probable cost of cleaning up the streams. A conservative estimate: at least $40 billion over the next decade.
However large it is, the price, says Gardner, will have to be paid. If the U.S. does not spend the money to control pollution, it will have to spend it finding new sources of water. Only through pollution control can the country safely re-use the water it has. And re-use--or recycling--is something the country already depends on. Before it reaches the Mississippi, for example, the water of the Ohio is used in one way or another a total of 3.7 times.
Telltale Tap Water. The trouble is that such conventional methods of treatment and purification as filtration, dilution and chlorination are unable to cope with some of today's contaminants. Household detergents pass through modern treatment plants with only partial removal. Certain synthetic chemicals, reports the U.S. Public Health Service, can travel hundreds of miles, go through a treatment plant, and still show up in tap water.
One answer to pollution is a scheme that has proved successful in the Ruhr. Flowing through West Germany's most concentrated industrial region, the river remains clean enough for swimming and boating within the shadow of smoke stacks -- all because of the Ruhrverband, a cooperative society of 250 municipalities and 2,200 industries along the river. The society gets results with a simple principle: he who pollutes the waters must pay the cost of purification. Carefully calculated assessments have enabled the Verband to build 102 purification plants since 1948, and encourage members to clean up their own wastes. The Ruhr's steel industry has installed water-circulation systems in its plants to use the same water over and over again. As a result, the plants now draw only 2.6 cubic yards of water for the production of one ton of steel, compared with the 130 cubic yards they used in the past.
No such cooperation yet exists in the U.S., where there is no law compelling factories to disclose the amount or type of their wastes and few companies that will volunteer the information. Meanwhile, the need for pollution control be comes daily more obvious.
Prayers & Plans. Reaction to the problems of supply -- whether the difficulty stems from too much water or too little--parallels the trouble of pollution. It is always when danger is imminent and ominous that nations have buckled down to the task at hand. In The Netherlands, where three-fifths of the population lives on land reclaimed from the sea by an intricate network of dikes, dams and canals, the Dutch are now spending $830 million to throw up steel levees and floodgates to keep the sea from counterattacking. In Israel, where water scarcity is as old as the land, planning and technology have been equally dramatic.
As late as 1950, Israelis relied on wells, rain tanks and collection systems. When there was no rain, they could only pray. Now Israelis have drawn up a master plan, nationalized all water, instituted strict rationing, tapped the Sea of Galilee, and laid out a grid of modern wells, reservoirs and pipelines. So well managed is the country's water supply that nearly 90% of all possible sources are being used--and 98% of all Israelis have running water.
Hardly a drop escapes the notice of the country's watchers. When the seas begin to seep into fresh-water wells near Tel Aviv, engineers pump fresh water into rock cavities between the wells and the sea, building up a barrier against seawater intrusion. Since agriculture is Israel's heaviest user of water, Israeli scientists are systematically searching for the answer to a question that has plagued farmers throughout history: How much water does each crop actually need? Using radioactive tracer materials, American-born Soil Physicist Daniel Hillel is keeping track of irrigation water as it enters the fields and as it escapes through evaporation or plant transpiration. He radiates neutrons into the soil near plant roots and measures the results: the more water in the soil, the slower the neutrons move. He shoots leaves with beta rays to determine their water content. Going back to the same leaves daily, he keeps a record of their transpiration rate. After 200 experiments of this type, Israel has been able to reduce irrigation 20% while increasing crop yields 60%.
And still, some water gets away. Soil experts are spraying plants with anti-transpirant chemicals, usually fatty acids, to reduce the loss of water from leaves. Because more than half of most irrigation water evaporates or is absorbed by the soil before it reaches its destination, Israeli farmers are encouraged to apply a wax coating to their ditches to form a barrier against absorption. Like the ancient Nabataeans who once cultivated the desert, the Israelis also practice "runoff farming." But the Nabataeans used wadi beds as catch basins; the Israelis cut contoured strips and seal alternating strips with modern, petroleum-based chemicals. Water is caught in the sealed strip and runs off into the parallel strip where the crops are planted. "We have discovered little that is really new in water planning," says Yaacov Vardi, an Israeli water engineer. "Our success has been to take well-known theories, put them into action on a daily basis and show the world what to do with little water."
According to Aristotle. Desalinization, one of the oldest methods of all, is getting a workout, not only in Israel but around the world. Aristotle taught his students that "salt water, when it turns into vapor, becomes sweet, and the vapor does not form salt water again when it condenses." Julius Caesar relied on stills to convert salt water for his legions to drink during the siege of Alexandria. Ancient mariners learned to boil their drinking water from the sea. Only now, however, is desalinization being attempted on a large scale.
The techniques are as varied as the scientific imagination. Distillation by the heat of the sun seems satisfactory on the Greek island of Syme, but it requires too much space and sunshine to be practical almost anywhere else. Though not economical for seawater conversion, electrodialysis, in which electrically charged cellulose-acetate membranes attract the impurities, is being used to convert less salty but brackish waters. Still another method involves freezing. As a youth in Siberia, Alexander Zarchin, an Israeli engineer, became fascinated by the fact that he could drink melted water from the ice of salty seas. In freezing, he learned, the ice crystals form separately from the brine, then melt down as fresh water. One important advantage of this kind of desalinization is that it takes less power to freeze than to heat. A prototype plant, developed by Zarchin and built by Colt Industries Inc. of the U.S., is now in operation at the Red Sea port of Elath.
Most of the world's 200 desalinization plants, though, from Kuwait to Aruba to Chocolate Bayou, Texas, operate on the "teakettle technique," the colloquial name for multistage flash distillation. In this system, sea water is heated and sprayed into a low-pressure chamber where it flashes into steam. As it passes through a series of similar chambers, even more fresh water is steamed off until, in the more efficient operations, an average of 3 1/2 gallons of sea water is turned into a gallon of fresh. So pure is the result that sometimes a jigger of such contaminants as magnesium salts is tossed back in to eliminate the bland, distilled taste.
Similar systems can be adapted to almost any fuel--electricity, natural gas, or nuclear energy. In teeming Hong Kong, a desalinization plant is powered by burning garbage. It is the more immediate problem of cost that causes the most concern. By improving technology and experimenting with large-scale operation, engineers have already lowered the average cost of desalinization from about $5 per 1,000 gallons of water in 1952 to about $1. But the goal is still far off--less than 35-c-, which would make desalinized water competitive in price with natural water in the U.S.
When that distant goal is reached, another difficulty will arise: mountains of coarse, unusable salt will somehow have to be disposed of. Every quart of sea water contains an average of 1 1/4 oz. of salt; a 150-million-gallon-capacity plant would end up producing more than 23,000 tons of salt a day. "Only when you have effective water management and still have a shortage," says Jack Hunter, an assistant director of the Interior Department's Office of Saline Water, "then desalinization may be the answer."
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-c- 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 11 1/2 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.
On a grander scale, the Los Angeles engineering firm of Ralph M. Parsons Co. has proposed a scheme to tap the vast water reserves of northern Canadian rivers. Called NAWAPA, for North American Water and Power Alliance, the project would channel the waters to the Canadian prairies, 33 U.S. states, and three states of northern Mexico, opening up in Mexico alone eight times as much irrigated land as in the Aswan Dam region. But NAWAPA would cost $60 billion to $100 billion and take more than 30 years to complete.
All of which is a costly reminder that while the world stands in no danger of running short of water, it faces an ever growing problem of finding and delivering water at a cost man is willing and able to bear. Cities and nations of the future may well find their water bills soaring, and some water experts argue that a higher price would be beneficial, because it would encourage a wiser use of a vital resource.
In the Western U.S., for example, where the Federal Government has spent nearly $21.5 billion on water development, the price of subsidized irrigation water is unrealistically low--from one-third to one-tenth of the actual cost of delivering it. Says University of Washington Law Professor Ralph W. Johnson, an authority on the legal and economic problems of water: "It is time we stopped thinking about water as a unique commodity, governed by novel rules outside the ordinary economic pattern. It is no more unique than food, clothing or shelter."
The People's Choice. As the engineers and scientists of the International Hydrological Decade expand man's knowledge of water, man will have to face up to critical decisions. And in the U.S., at least, the questions are not so much technical as they are problems of economics and management. "After the hydrologist states the problem," says Dr. Nace, who proposed the idea of the 1HD and became the chief U.S. representative of the Decade, "the policymakers must solve it." Thus, the great problem is people. "How many of them know what water is about?" asks William E. Warne, director of the California Department of Water Resources. "Not one in a million." Yet the people, who use and misuse water, who pay the taxes and vote on the bond issues for water development and conservation, must make the political and economic commitment that will ensure a steady flow of it. Though it may be considered a gift of God, water must be harnessed and husbanded by people.
*A convenient hydrological measure that equals 1,101,117,143,000 gallons. -Except for industry, New Yorkers are charged flat fees that are not affected by the amount they use.
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