United States Faces Water Supply Crisis

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30287, 13 November 1963, Page 10

United States Faces Water Supply Crisis

[From Special Correspondent. FRANK OLIVSR] NEW YORK, November 11. Recently when Hurricane Ginny was wandering up and down the east coast for a week or so people were actually wishing the storm would cross the coast. Hurricanes normally are feared, as their damage can be enormous; and the totally new desire to have a hurricane was the urgent desire for rain, so desperate has the water shortage become.

In the end Ginny only brushed parts of the mainland and went off towards the North Pole, kept away by a series of high pressure systems which have been causing the worst drought the United States has suffered in over 30 years. Similarly, the previous hurricane, Flora, which did so much damage in Cuba, was kept in the Caribbean by high pressure systems over the United States. Drought is almost chronic in the south-west part of North America but this year —from New England down to Florida—fields and woodlands have been powder dry most of the year, rivers are low and wells have been drying up. Many reservoirs of towns and cities look like large puddles, rather than wide, deep lakes. Florida, semi-tropical and generally rain-drenched from spring to autumn, recently went over a month without rain and then the drought was only broken by scattered showers.

Widespread Blazes The drought has caused serious shortages of water for people, but it has also been serious because of widespread forest fires from Maine to Florida. There is no estimate of acres burned but it is certainly enormous. The shortage has not happened overnight for in many parts of the east the water table has been going down steadily for some years. The 1963 drought simply underlined what has been becoming a very serious problem for the country as a whole. The flat farmlands east of the Mississippi have been getting drier and drier, and the water problem is a very serious one there too. Water shortage is one of the biggest problems facing the United States in the fairly near future. It is causing considerable worry at the Interior Department.

Unless other sources of water can be developed the water shortage will be acute within a generation. The population and, therefore, consumption is going up, the water table is going down and the rains are insufficient to make up the deficiency and bring" the water table back to what might be called a comforts able level. Greater Demand

Not only is the population growing, but these days individuals use much more water than their grandfathers, which helps to explain officials figures that half a century ago the country tapped about 10 per cent of its water resources and now taps better than 60 per cent. In addition industry has been steadily polluting rivers which have become too contaminated for human use. Water, the cheapest of things in days gone by, promises to become one of the most expensive. Many people blame the lack of rain on that handy whipping boy, atomic explosions. The jokesters blame the water shortage on the nunfiber of swimming pools, a swimming pool having become one of the new status symbols.

Others ask what about all that cloud seeding which was to produce lots of rain. The fact is that there are all too few rain clouds to seed. One reason for shortage of rain has been what the w-ea-ther experts call a wayward jet-stream far up in the sky and a steady succession of high pressure systems floating across the country from w-est to east. The theory is also developing that drought begets drought. The theory is that in high pressure systems clouds do not form, which means little chance of rain. The absence of clouds means more and more sunshine which dries up the ground and robs the air of what might be called normal moisture and this makes the possibility of rain even more remote. Thus, drought is apt to beget drought in a self-perpetuating process. Put another way. it is that the condition an anti-cyclone creates helps to keep the anti-cyclone alive. It is admitted by the experts that meteorology is still a very inexact science and that meteorologists need to know much more about inter-related weather matters than they do. The theory exists that the 1963 drought was really due to conditions which existed during the summer of 1962.

In short, weather is not a question of cause and immediate effect but cause and then all sorts of effects over quite long periods with dozens of factors entering the picture in the process. All this means that the day man dreams about, the day when he can control the weather, is stall far off. He needs, for one thing, to know more about the jetstream, that high-flying fastmoving stream of air which enables aircraft to make such fantastically fast passages west to east across both Pacific and Atlantic. This year it has been flowing much further north than usual and- this creates distortions in the jet-stream pattern elsewhere. In 1955, say the scientists, distortions in the jet-stream pattern were responsible for four great areas of drought in the Northern Hemisphere. What seems to lie ahead is the steady elimination of pollution of rivers and other waterways, the husbanding of water supplies by economic use by individuals and industries and the constant prayer for rain and more rain not to mention conservation plans and dams in all great river systems until the secrets of weather and climate are unlocked and science can develop means of at least partially controlling weather and the beneficent rain it can bring.