Water Wars: What It Will Be Like When Your Tap Runs Dry
Joshua Krause
The Daily Sheeple
September 9th, 2014
As the Western United States faces the prospect of suffering through a decades spanning drought, we can only guess as to what that may entail for the average person. While this sort of thing used to be considered unthinkable in the United States, recent news has given us a tiny glimpse of what the future may hold.
We’ve seen for the first time, residents of California, Ohio, and Detroit lose access to their clean water supply. As our infrastructure crumbles, and weather conditions worsen, many of us can expect to see water scarcity become a part of every day life. If this problem continues to escalate, it could quickly turn our standard of living upside down. If it spreads to the urban cores of our nation, things could get pretty ugly in a very short order.
If you need help imagining such a situation, look no further than India, where the city of New Delhi has been facing a desperate water crisis over the past few weeks. This situation is especially telling, because the shortage has nothing to do with the weather or pollution, but through government mismanagement and a rotting infrastructure that squanders 40% of the water that runs through the system. What’s really shocking though, is how that number lines up with the percentage of the city that has no running water:
The most urgent problem, though, is getting water to the sprawling neighborhoods of illegally constructed buildings, home to 40 percent of the city’s residents and largely without water lines. The city’s water agency, the Delhi Jal Board, sends 900 tankers onto the crowded roads every day. In some neighborhoods, a tanker passes every few minutes, its load sloshing down its sides.
But it’s nowhere near enough. Tankers usually stop for just 15 minutes, while dozens of people crowd around waving buckets and plastic tubes. Tempers flare in the fierce heat; fights are frequent. In some areas, people get just 3 liters (quarts).
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