Blue Gold

Djaughe · April 14th, 2008, 02:30 PM

The Great Lakes contain nine-tenths of the nation's fresh water...in the next 10 years this is gonna be an interesting topic...

Quote:

Lawmakers Reach Agreement on Great Lakes Compact
Posted: April 9, 2008 01:01 PM MST
Updated: April 14, 2008 02:08 PM MST
Governor Jim Doyle announces lawmakers have reached an agreement to protect one of Wisconsin's most precious natural resources. Doyle called a special session to approve the Great Lakes Compact.
The Compact creates protections for the Great Lakes and ensures the continued availability for regional economic growth.

The Compact bans long distance diversions and provides a framework for ensuring sustainable water use in the Great Lakes basin. The new agreement also creates a statewide conservation program and introduces incentives for regional water planning.
"This is an outstanding day for all of Wisconsin," says Doyle. "Our Great Lakes waters in many ways define who we are, and now the Great Lakes Compact will ensure that we protect this tremendous resource while responsibly using the water we need to prosper and grow."

State lawmakers have debating the interstate water treaty. Republicans were concerned the compact would allow governors of other Great Lakes states to block any Wisconsin request to draw water from the lakes.

In a statement, Republican Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch said the final version of the Compact needed to be strong and fair for Wisconsin. "This legislation was never a simple question of ‘do you or don't you want to protect the Great Lakes?'

"I doubt you can find anyone in Wisconsin who wants to allow Arizona or Georgia to stick a straw into the Great Lakes, but any well-meaning legislation can have unintended consequences. We owe it to the people of Wisconsin to give full consideration to every single detail, from our families' drinking water to economic development and small businesses to our interaction with our neighboring states," says Huebsch.

The Great Lakes generate $55 billion in tourism for the region. It also creates nearly $377 million in personal income from wages and salaries. Wisconsin harbors handle approximately 44 tons of cargo that supports 11,000 jobs.

The Great Lakes Compact has been signed into law by Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Minnesota as well as both Canadian Provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Governor Doyle has called for a special session on April 17 so that Wisconsin can sign its Great Lakes compact into law.

AzCards21 · April 14th, 2008, 03:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jughead

Wisconsin harbors handle approximately 44 tons of cargo that supports 11,000 jobs.

I can just see 11,000 people unpacking two truck loads of goods.

Djaughe · April 14th, 2008, 03:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AzCards21

I can just see 11,000 people unpacking two truck loads of goods.

Freakin packer fans....

AzCards21 · April 14th, 2008, 10:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jughead

Freakin packer fans....

The asses would out weigh the freight.

Mulli · April 15th, 2008, 04:59 AM

If there isn't enough water for you to live in the desert, don't live in the desert. Hands off the Great Lakes, losers.

Djaughe · April 15th, 2008, 05:40 AM

Old but interesting article...

Quote:

September 18, 2006
What Thirsty Arizona Really Wants

Bone-dry state seeks to import jobs, export water-saving technology
By Andy Guy

Great Lakes Bulletin News Service

PHOENIX—Five minutes into his interview, Alan Stephens, the chief of staff operations for Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, squashed the single biggest fear driving efforts to protect the world’s largest freshwater lake system from massive diversions.

“We’re not planning to go after the Great Lakes,” Mr. Stephens said about his scorched desert state’s true intentions concerning the unrivaled freshwater ecosystem 1,800 miles east of here. “Augmenting our limited water supply is important. But you don’t do that by taking other people’s water. You do it by improving resource management and cleaning and conserving your own supply."

In the last century, “augmenting” the limited water supplies of thirsty Western states like Arizona meant cooking up schemes to divert vast amounts of liquid gold from neighboring states and regions - even those as far off as the Great Lakes Basin - to cities like this one. The thought has long made people in the basin very nervous.

Nervous enough, in fact, to spur the Great Lakes states and Canadian provincial governments to finally sign the long-awaited Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Sustainable Water Resources Agreement last December. The agreement, which is meant to end any continental water wars before they can begin, sets strict new standards that make large water withdrawals from the region difficult, if not impossible, although individual legislatures must still enact the basin-wide standards in their own states.
Basin state residents should not feel completely sanguine about Mr. Stephen’s reassuring words, however.

They actually point to a brand-new kind of competition between bone-dry places like Arizona and water-rich places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The new contest is not over which region can best poach or defend a water supply; instead, it is over which can spark vigorous new business growth by most quickly developing new technologies that can stretch and improve available water supplies.
And the Grand Canyon State seems to already have a leg up.

Pumping Up a New Economy
That is because while Great Lakes leaders talk new water treaties, Arizona is already acting to develop new water technology. Governor Napolitano, a Democrat, and other state officials have ditched expensive plans to build powerful pumps and transcontinental pipelines and instead have begun to coordinate top talent at several state universities with public economic development dollars and private industry to gain a competitive edge inthe lucrative water conservation business.

The governor, Mr. Stephens says, is convincedthat developing drastically improved water conservation and purification products and selling them worldwide would bring thousands of new, high-tech, high-paying jobs to Arizona.

Water-tech’s potential market is vast. Approximately 1.4 billion people now live without access to clean drinking water, according to the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century, an international association of Nobel laureates, policymakers, and scientists. The commission also found that seven million people—mostly children—die each year from water-borne diseases. The governor’s administration is looking hard at the problem.

“As water supply and quality is becoming a global problem, water is turning into a booming business," according to a 2003 report prepared for the Arizona Department of Commerce by the Battelle Memorial Institute, a scientific and technological consulting firm based in Columbus, Ohio. "Worldwide, annual industry revenues are estimated at $300 billion, with the United States accounting for more than half of that amount."

"This number is expected to grow as water becomes scarce and consumer markets begin to mature," the report continued. "Water markets are emerging in Australia, Chile, and Mexico, with expanding potential in the Middle East, Asia, and North and South Africa.”
The report details the promise of targeting growth in the water industry. Water supply and wastewater treatment is a $122 billion global market, for example, and demand is escalating for modern technologies that use it more efficiently and improve its quality.

The market for improved desalination of seawater, currently estimated at $2 billion annually, is projected to grow to $70 billion by 2020. Irrigation is already a $30 billion annual market, with demand for water-conserving systems growing 10 percent each year.

Incubating Water
Some entrepreneurs in the Great Lakes region are beginning to pursue the opportunity, too, but the state has shown little interest in most of their ideas. In April 2006, approximately a dozen business leaders submitted water-related proposals to Michigan's 21st Century Jobs Fund, a $100 million initiative specifically designed to funnel public investment to high-tech companies, generate modern employment opportunities, and diversify the economy.

Applicants included a company called Applied BioSensors Inc., which seeks venture capital to commercialize a more effective water-quality testing device. In a separate proposal, Syed Hashsham, an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Michigan State University, is developing a computer chip capable of detecting some 50 toxins that threaten water quality. And John McCulloch, the Oakland County Drain Commissioner, aims to establish the Michigan Drinking Water Protection Technology Incubator.

The incubator would accelerate the rise of small businesses developing new technology to improve the safety of public drinking water supplies, which rely on increasingly antiquated water distribution and wastewater treatment systems. Since designing, building, and commercializing the new, modernized equipment is a pricey proposition for entrepreneurs, and since that equipment is often expensive for municipal water providers to buy, install, and maintain, the incubator would initially partner with established companies to speed new, cost-effective products to market.

Those companies include American Water Signal, which has developed a wireless drinking water monitor that hides in fire hydrants, and DynamOx, which has an idea for a better way to treat and clean wastewater.

"The firms who get the new equipment to market first win," said Jim Ridgeway, who heads a Detroit-based environmental consulting firm working on the incubator project. "This could be worth a ton. There is a tremendous opportunity in Michigan to take our existing knowledge, leverage that knowledge, and develop, test, and commercialize the new technologies."

Despite the rising sense of urgency over gaining a foothold in the lucrative global water market, only five of the original 12 water-tech proposals survived the first round of the state’s intense review process. Along with 179 other finalists, the applicants moved onto the second phase of the 21st Jobs Fund competition, which is managed by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. But only one idea—Mr. Hashsham's water-smart chip—ultimately received funding. The $966,000 applied research grant is expected to generate two new jobs for the state's homeland security industry.

More of the Same?
Mr. Ridgeway was optimistic that the Oakland County incubator would eventually receive start-up funding. But he expressed concern that Michigan economic development lacks a cluster focused on the growing water industry. The state currently manages the Life Sciences Corridor to cultivate research and development opportunities in the health industry. And other programs specifically promote the advancement of advanced automotive engineering, homeland security, and alternative fuels. But the high-tech water business is not really on the state’s economic radar.

Unlike Arizona, Michigan’s current business plan and political discourse perpetuates the debates of the 20th century. In 2001, for example, Michigan offered subsidies worth nearly $10 million to the Perrier Group to attract the company to the state. The company now extracts and bottles its Ice Mountain water brand in the heart of the Muskegon River watershed, and exports it to much of the rest of the country. Yet, at the same time, a proposal to open a world-class water laboratory in downtown Grand Rapids to draw researchers from around the world withered away due to a lack of start-up capital—and any help from the state.

The current political season seems to promise more of the same. Michigan’s two gubernatorial candidates talk far more about halting the export of Great Lakes water than about promoting the development and export of new water-friendly technologies. Democrat Jennifer Granholm, the current governor, remains focused on the state-level action necessary to execute the recently signed basin agreement.

“The collective regional focus now needs to be on all states passing, and Congress ratifying, the agreements which will enact the prohibitions on diversion contained in the Agreement," Governor Granholm, recently said.

Her opponent, Republican Dick DeVos, has added little to the campaign’s discussion so far, either.
"The Great Lakes are our number one asset—the largest source of freshwater anywhere in the world," reads his campaign Web site, which adds that Mr. DeVos does "not favor Great Lakes water diversion. We have an abundant, renewable, sustainable resource in water that, if used intelligently here in Michigan, can create jobs. However, will fight any diversion of water outside Michigan."

True Conservatives
In the meantime, Arizona continues to push ahead. The state has launched a comprehensive economic development plan to invest in water-tech innovation, attract high-tech companies, generate good paying jobs, lure talented workers, and remain competitive in the knowledge economy.

Still in its early stages, the program started with the announcement in October 2004 of the Arizona Water Institute, a collaboration among water experts from three state universities organized to support water policy, planning, and technology development. State leaders intend to double employment in the water sector by 2010. Four demonstration projects are already under way; the largest is a Web-based “information backbone” focused on the state’s water resources.
The activity is already attracting some high-profile attention. China, for example, is talking with Arizona State University, one of the project’s collaborators, about promoting sustainable growth, according to Alan Stephens.

With a desert landscape, limited water supplies, and one of the fastest population growth rates in the nation, Mr. Stephens said Arizona faces a water management challenge that is a microcosm of the challenges confronting the entire planet. He said the state is well positioned to become the "the water management capital of the world."

“We want to take our experience, market it, and make it a driver of our new economy," he said. "We want to translate our water expertise into job creation.”

“Arizona is a conservative state," Mr. Stephens added. "We’re not just going to throw money at unrealistic goals and ideas. We’re going to do our research, define the new markets, and begin to allocate public resources accordingly. There’s tremendous potential here and we’re going to do it right.”

Andy Guy directs the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Water Project from Grand Rapids. Read his blog at greatlakesguy.blogspot.com. Reach him at aguy@mlui.org.

Djaughe · April 15th, 2008, 05:49 AM

More recent article:

Quote:

Options running dry

With thirsty neighbors, the Great Lakes region can learn from Atlanta's desperate attempts to find a new supply of drinking water

By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com

March 23, 2008
Atlanta - People hoping to protect the Great Lakes from becoming a Paul Bunyan-sized water cooler for an increasingly thirsty world like to invoke frightening language.
They say we'd better act fast to build a legal dike around the world's biggest freshwater system, because wars in the coming decades won't be fought over oil. They will be fought over water.
It can sound silly, especially in a shore-side city like Milwaukee, where the sun always rises on a horizon of boundless freshwater.
But there is nothing silly about what's unfolding less than 500 miles south of Lake Michigan. The Southeast is in the midst of a drought so severe some have been putting bowls under their air conditioners to capture the condensation dribble, and cities as big as Atlanta have stared down the prospect of literally running out of drinking water.
It's got people there thinking about water in a whole new way.
"It's like having a good wife and she either passes away or leaves you," said Tony Reames, mayor of Orme, Tenn. "You don't appreciate her until she's gone."
Reames is intimate with that sense of desperation. His little town went dry last fall and had to be rescued by water-toting fire engines.
Fearful of a similar fate for the booming megalopolis of Atlanta, Georgia legislators this winter did what they thought was only rational. They proposed snatching a piece of water-rich Tennessee.
Georgia wants to redraw the state boundary line about a mile north so it might some day poke a pipe into the Tennessee River and inject Atlanta and its surrounding counties with a water fix. The idea is to keep this metro area of 5 million clipping along at a growth rate that has it adding more than 100,000 residents every year. A lot of livelihoods are hitched to that growth, but Tennesseans have no intention of ceding any land to their neighbors to the south.
Two governments tussling over one border rarely bodes well for citizens on either side.
Fighting in the region

It has been a decade since a Canadian businessman hatched a plan to sell tanker loads of Lake Superior to Asia. Public opposition was ferocious, and the company that called itself the Nova Group eventually backed off. But it didn't have to.
The realization that existing laws might not prevent someone - anyone - from profiteering off the world's most spectacular set of lakes sent Midwestern political leaders into a panic.
The governors of the eight Great Lakes states made their stand at Niagara Falls in 2001, where they gathered above the billowing mist and pledged a tougher set of laws to ensure outsiders would never get their hands on Great Lakes water.
Easier said than done. Seven years later, rules have been drafted to restrict water diversions from the system of connected lakes that hold 90% of the nation's surface freshwater. But the effort to adopt them has stalled in a few of the Great Lakes states, most notably Wisconsin.
The reason: Lawmakers can't agree on how to define who is an outsider. They can't figure out where to draw the magic line that will entitle those on the inside to all the Great Lakes water they want, and force those on the outside to go somewhere else for this life necessity.
They're tussling over a border.
Wet weather, dry city

Mark Crisp is an Atlanta-based water consultant who has watched during the past 20 years as his metro area sprawled toward what he considers a slow-motion unnatural disaster. In a ninth-floor windowless conference room with water-supply maps on the table and walls, he cups his head in hands and shakes it in disbelief at the news of the legislative push to redraw Georgia's map.
"Absolutely asinine," he said of the strategy, which proponents contend is justifiable because of an allegedly botched survey conducted 42 years before the Civil War.
Georgia, he points out, is already in a ferocious legal tangle with downstream neighbors Florida and Alabama over rights to water in an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir northeast of Atlanta. He said it makes no sense for the state to open a northern front in what is becoming an increasingly desperate campaign for water reserves.
The lush hillsides outside Crisp's office along the economic river that is I-75 belie the trouble that Atlanta has built itself into.
The region is blessed with an outrageous amount of rainfall - about 50 inches on average annually. By comparison, Milwaukee gets less than 31 inches of precipitation annually and famously rainy Seattle gets less than 40 inches.
But the important and troublesome factor for Atlanta is not how much rain falls from the sky. It is how little flows from outlying areas into the city.
The region sits almost at the top of its watershed, which means there isn't a lot of water flowing into it. Think of a watershed as a cone. If you are a metro area of millions, you want to be situated near the bottom of that cone, where waters gather and rivers run deep and wide. But Atlanta, which staked its future on the Chattahoochee River, was built near the top.
"You have a very big population in a really, really bad place," said Joe Cook of the conservation group Coosa River Basin Initiative, based in Rome, Ga.
Building more reservoirs downstream isn't a simple solution; there are loads of human, industrial and environmental demands for that same water in Alabama and Florida.
Water wasn't a problem when Atlanta was merely a regional economic center. In 1970 - four years after the Milwaukee Braves relocated from what was then the nation's 12th largest city to the budding hub of the South - Atlanta wasn't even one of America's 25 largest cities. Now it is the nation's ninth-largest metro area and its fastest growing. It added a staggering 890,000 residents - nearly the entire population of Milwaukee County - between April 1, 2000, and July 1, 2006.
Crisp said a day of reckoning has been coming for years. The city has no problem when it gets typical rainfalls, but trouble comes quickly when droughts strike, even if an Atlanta drought is a normal rainfall year for Milwaukee.
"You can't invite everybody to move here and build here and then caveat it with: 'Sorry, but once we have droughts you have to quit using water,' " he said.
Crisp said the key is not laying claim to a neighboring state's water; it's working with them to share what is available, and it is Atlanta learning how to live within its means, even if that means restricting development in some areas.
"This is the fourth wakeup call we've had in 20 years," he said. "And we still haven't woken up."
'Kids are scared'

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue tried to wake up residents last fall when his administration declared the Atlanta area was in danger of going dry within four months. Literally. If no rain came, homes could run out of water. Residents were ordered to stop filling swimming pools, watering lawns, washing cars and running fountains. Rains have since returned to the region, sometimes with a vengeance. But the area is still in a drought, and its drinking water reserves remain well below normal.
Some contend that Perdue exaggerated the threat last fall because the region's primary drinking water reservoir, Lake Lanier, actually held more reserves than it stated publicly, though that "conservation pool" water at the bottom of the lake is not easily tapped and is of dubious quality due to past industrial pollution. Regardless, the warning struck a chord.
Kathy Nguyen, head of water conservation in Cobb County, said the threats of a great metropolitan region running out of water trickled all the way into the psyche of schoolchildren.
"Kids are scared," she said in early February. "They're taught that every little thing needs water to live, and then they turn on the news and hear that they only have 90 days of it left."
Adults were equally spooked. Nguyen said during the drought's peak last fall, her department received hundreds of calls each day from neighbors turning in neighbors for watering their lawns.
Others called wondering what in the world was going on, furious they had to watch their lawns and shrubberies wither.
"I get lots of calls that start with 'bitch' and end with click," she said.
City vs. species

Perdue blames federal bureaucracy for exacerbating "the single worst drought in Georgia's history."
The problem, the governor asserted, isn't so much a lack of water as the way the federal government has decided to allocate it.
Lake Lanier was built by the Army Corps in the 1950s for flood control and hydropower, among other uses.
A half-century later, the lake has evolved into the main water source for one of America's most dynamic metro areas, but Atlanta isn't alone in relying on that water. Alabama and Florida have their own claims to water in Lake Lanier, as do some endangered species.The Army Corps last fall kept the release rates high on the rapidly diminishing reservoir to help downstream endangered mussels, and that riled Perdue and other state political leaders.
At a news conference held on the brown banks of a shrinking Lake Lanier, Perdue asked President Bush to essentially shelve the Endangered Species Act for the foreseeable future, "so that . . . all species may have access to life-sustaining water."
Standing at his side, Georgia Republican Congressmen John Linder was even more direct, claiming that humans were the species most threatened by the drought.
"We are now put in a position where we have to choose between the health and safety of the people who live in Georgia or protecting species that will now be endangering our welfare," he said.
Neither man said a word about the divisions of earth-moving machines chewing their way through what's left of the open spaces and forests around Lake Lanier and across metropolitan Atlanta.
Political leaders downstream, meanwhile, saw the news conference as a cynical attempt to pit humans against endangered species.
"Georgia has repeatedly framed its request as a contest between the Atlanta area and endangered mussels in Florida. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the action that Georgia seeks will have dire consequences on people and their livelihoods downstream," Alabama Gov. Bob Riley wrote to President Bush two days later.
Riley said the downstream flows Georgia opposed were necessary to maintain minimum water for numerous industrial purposes, including cooling water for an Alabama nuclear power plant, which could otherwise be forced to shut down.
Lake Lanier water is also needed to sustain Florida's celebrated $134 million annual Apalachicola oyster industry.
The real problem isn't a lack of water, said conservationist Cook. The real problem is the size of Atlanta.
He sees it as a problem that, like the metro area itself, gets bigger every day. And it is a problem that regional political leaders appear ill-equipped to fix.
"If you go to any county commission and say: 'You don't need to grow. Stop recruiting business. Stop recruiting growth.' They'll just laugh at you because that's completely counter to the prevailing mind-set," Cook said. "And that mind-set is: If you're not growing, you're dying."
Waukesha: On same path?

On the surface, the lake-freckled landscape in the Milwaukee suburbs of Waukesha County is as green as any you will find in the Midwest.
Settlers didn't even need to dig wells. The place bubbled with natural springs whose water quality was so famous that residents in the 1890s had to pull out a cannon to turn back laborers from Chicago who arrived with equipment and a devious scheme to pipe the water to the World's Fair in Chicago.
When wells finally were dug to serve a growing population, legend has it there was so much water underground it literally burst to the surface, spawning 100-foot-high fountains.
But the fast-growing county appears to be on a similar path as Atlanta - the springs have gone dry and levels in the deep aquifer that has sustained the area for the past several decades have dropped more than 600 feet in places. Much of the water that is left is too dangerous for human consumption due to radium and other naturally occurring contaminants, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
To meet federal requirements to reduce the levels of radium, a carcinogen, the City of Waukesha blends water from a combination of deep and shallow wells, along with a complex filtering process.
But it's a cobbled-together, short-term fix for a place that has no plans to throttle back its own building binge anytime soon. The real cure, Waukesha leaders say, lies outside its borders, a mere 20 miles to the east:
Lake Michigan.
Not so distant threats

The boogeyman for future Great Lakes water grabs has been far-away places such as Phoenix, Las Vegas or even the breadbasket communities of the High Plains that are rapidly draining their own great underground body of water - the Ogallala Aquifer.
Now the potential water seekers are surfacing closer, and if the Southeast were to get thirsty enough, it wouldn't take a wildly expensive system of pipelines and pumps to move Great Lakes water in its direction.
Chicago opened the era of massive Great Lakes diversions when the city replumbed the Chicago River in 1900 to use Lake Michigan water to flush its sewage down the Mississippi River basin. Today the river carries south about 2.1 billion gallons of Lake Michigan per day, but the system was designed for three times that volume.
Georgia Congressman Linder's words echoed up to the Great Lakes when he used the Lake Lanier news conference to tout his 21st Century Water Commission Act.
The federal bill, he said, will "ensure every American has access to adequate drinking water, even in times of severe drought."
Linder insisted he isn't talking about a water grab from the Great Lakes or any other state, though some Georgia legislators feel differently about their neighboring state's resources, as evidenced by the resolution to redraw the state's border with Tennessee.
Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin told media last fall it would probably be a good idea for the city to start looking at laying pipelines beyond its basin borders to tap distant water sources.
New Mexico Governor and then-presidential hopeful Bill Richardson said last fall it was time for the water haves to start sharing with the have-nots.
"I believe that Western states and Eastern states have not been talking to each other when it comes to proper use of our water resources . . . states like Wisconsin are awash in water," Richardson told the Las Vegas Sun in October.
Reaction in the Great Lakes, where water levels have been flirting with historic lows, was swift and shrill, and Richardson quickly backpedaled on the statement.
The pressure on the Great Lakes is only going to increase as the Southeast and Southwest continue to swell.
"Should the Great Lakes be looking ahead? Absolutely," said Mike Hayes, director of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln National Drought Mitigation Center.
Hayes said history shows that metro areas that figure out how to conserve water often wind up in the same trouble in a matter of years. The reason: They take their new-found surplus and use it to fuel new development.
"They're not going to let Atlanta run out of water. Or Charlotte. Or Raleigh-Durham. They'll come up with some solution," Hayes said.
"The key," he adds, "is what."
Looking for the bad guy

The argument now for Great Lakes leaders trying to conserve their water is figuring out who will be granted access to the bountiful resource in the coming decades, and who won't.
Existing law is simple. If you live inside the massive watershed of the Great Lakes basin, you are entitled to the water. If you live outside that line, you are not. The rationale is that water taken from the lakes but kept within the basin eventually flows back into the lakes.
But water diverted over that line never returns, and that can cause the lakes to shrink. It doesn't matter if the water is piped more than a thousand miles away to the Southwest or just a few feet over the divide, which in southeast Wisconsin can be a mere five miles from Lake Michigan.
Existing law requires unanimous approval for a diversion from all eight Great Lakes governors, something that the governors rarely consent to.
The glaring exception is Chicago, which is operating under a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court consent decree following the city's reversal of the Chicago River, something that many still consider outright banditry.
That drain on the lake has dropped the long-term average levels of Lake Michigan and neighboring Lake Huron by about two inches - not a staggering amount considering the two lakes have historically fluctuated by as much as six feet. But in recent years the lakes have hovered near record lows, and that has been wreaking havoc on the shipping lanes, beaches, marinas and lakefront property owners whose docks no longer reach the water.
The worry isn't what a diversion to a city of 60,000 will do to the lakes in the next 10 years. It's the cumulative toll of diversions to hundreds of cities and industrial or agricultural areas over the next century, or more.
Outsiders come calling

There are a couple of problems with the existing law. The biggest one is that the governors can oppose a diversion for any reason, and most believe that makes it too arbitrary to hold up in court; just one successful federal lawsuit could leave the lakes with no protections from diversions.
Another problem is that many see it as unfair. Why should the communities in Waukesha County be forced to drink from an increasingly contaminated aquifer when so much high-quality water lies just 20 minutes away?
The new proposed rules, referred to as the Great Lakes compact, continue to block diversions but make a specific exception for nearby communities, provided they send their treated wastewater back. The idea is to essentially engineer those places into the basin.
To become law the rules need approval from all eight Great Lakes states legislatures and Congress. So far four of the states have signed off, but the compact has run into trouble in Wisconsin, where some business and political leaders view it as too restrictive.
It might be fine to say no to Iowa, or Georgia, or Nevada. It's much harder for state politicians to say no to the residents of Wisconsin.
Compact advocates are in uncharted waters, trying to create a new border that is politically palatable today yet tough enough to beat back those on the other side when they come calling.
And they will come calling.
Just ask Tennessee.

AzCards21 · April 15th, 2008, 08:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jughead

"I get lots of calls that start with 'bitch' and end with click," she said.

Ok that's funny right there.

LVG · April 16th, 2008, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jughead

The Great Lakes contain nine-tenths of the nation's fresh water...in the next 10 years this is gonna be an interesting topic...

To address in brief - no. The main problem is getting the water from there to here. Figure that a tunnel runs you about $200m / mile (call it a 20 ft. dia tunnel), and you're running 360 billion - before you add in pump stations, treatment plants, ROFC's, security, so on and so forth. Going above ground would be worse - can you imagine the entitlements, imminent domain issues, law suits, and everything else involved?

Not to even mention the construction time. Tunnels don't go fast. There's only 3 or 4 TBM manufacturing companies in the world, and they only do a handful. It would take years to even get enough TBMs manufactured to make this start to work in our lifetimes.

And that's to get in probably 200 mgd in (rough estimate). Relative comparison - Vegas is currently sucking in 200 mgd (millions of gallons per day), give or take, based upon demand. That's nothing in terms of quantity.

A better idea is what SNWA (Southern Nevada Water Authority) is proposing - take a couple of pipelines over to the California shores, build some desalinization plants, split the costs of the pipelines and plants with who ever is along the route, and pull the water from the ocean. Bigger capabilities, cost sharing, increase water, and local governments along the route will make sure that it happens.

{Edit} - This has got me thinking - two other possibilities:

1. Trucking - figure a standard large tanker truck hauls 9,000 gal. Cost is about $1/mile. Distance is 3,600 miles, total cost of $3,600, or $0.40 per gallon import, which is then subject to treatment expenses and transmission costs from the treatment facility. Bottom line is that typically, as a user, you pay about $2 per 1000 gal (it varies per location). Now, you'd have to pay $402 per 1000 gal just to have a cost neutral effect. In addition, this cost will fluctuate based upon fuel prices, increased highway taxes, etc... Finally, the amount of trucks would be staggering. Figure you need 200 mgd - that's 22,222 trucks per day. Give a haul route of 3,600 miles (there and back), and an average speed of 60mph - now you're running 2.5 days on the road, plus a day to load, and a day to off load, that's 5 days rounded, which means you would probably need well over 120,000 trucks running at any given time to ensure service.

That's a whole lotta trucking.

2. Trains - figure a standard train tanker holds 30,000 gal (the largest you can currently get). That means you would need approximately 6,667 tanks per day to meet 200mgd. I think (but don't know) that these cars are about 60 feet in length - that's 76 miles in length. The longest I've ever seen a train package is about 5 miles, so figure . You're looking at around the same haul time as a truck, which means you would have to have 16 freight trains running in per day. Figure 5 days haul / load / off load time at the same time, and you're running a total of 80 trains running at any given time to ensure service.

I have no idea what the current freight costs per train are - if someone does, it would be easy to guesstimate the costs. Regardless, I have a feeling that it is way more that the consumer would be willing to pay.

Bottom line - for the Southwest, the Great Lakes are just too far away for us to look at without constructing an engineering marvel.

Djaughe · April 16th, 2008, 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lvgentleman

To address in brief - no. The main problem is getting the water from there to here. Figure that a tunnel runs you about $200m / mile (call it a 20 ft. dia tunnel), and you're running 360 billion - before you add in pump stations, treatment plants, ROFC's, security, so on and so forth. Going above ground would be worse - can you imagine the entitlements, imminent domain issues, law suits, and everything else involved?

Not to even mention the construction time. Tunnels don't go fast. There's only 3 or 4 TBM manufacturing companies in the world, and they only do a handful. It would take years to even get enough TBMs manufactured to make this start to work in our lifetimes.

And that's to get in probably 200 mgd in (rough estimate). Relative comparison - Vegas is currently sucking in 200 mgd (millions of gallons per day), give or take, based upon demand. That's nothing in terms of quantity.....

We already built one called the Central Arizona Project Canal...approximately 300 miles long. The CAP idea floated from 1946 for about 22 years before the government signed off on just approving construction.

The project was finished in 1993...47 years later and cost $4 billion.

Its been done before - so its not like we're re-inventing something.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lvgentleman

...A better idea is what SNWA (Southern Nevada Water Authority) is proposing - take a couple of pipelines over to the California shores, build some desalinization plants, split the costs of the pipelines and plants with who ever is along the route, and pull the water from the ocean. Bigger capabilities, cost sharing, increase water, and local governments along the route will make sure that it happens.

Thats also an idea but the desalination process for that same magnitude of water will also be expensive...requiring quite a bit of energy. Then you'd have the brine by-product that would be tough to dispose of safely....of course that could be shipped to the Yucca Mountains.

Anyhow - I guess the point is that all options are and will be on the table... and none of them appear to be a perfect solution.