Where has all the WATER GONE?

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Planning water supplies

Communities throughout the Hemisphere are grappling with efforts to preserve and manage this precious natural resource

For Joel Millan, the quest for a bucket of safe drinking water is more than just the routine ritual of survival that dictates the daily lives of tens of millions of people throughout the Americas. The calluses on his thin fingers attest to days of pick-and-shovel work, laying pipelines that would bring the first drinkable water to his neighborhood in Nueva Tacagua, a poor rancho on the outskirts of Caracas. With a shiny red toolbox under his arm, full of such possessions as a hefty pipe wrench, hammer, and hacksaw, he's off on his daily rounds. Decked out in a green baseball cap and white T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Hidrocapital, the city's water utility, Millan will check for leaks in a system that's notorious for losing from 40 to 50 percent of its water through ruptures in the system. Before his day is over, he'll make repairs and assist apartment dwellers with their faulty plumbing, as well as share information about water conservation with the rancho's residents.

Part of a pilot project designed by Hidrocapital that trained seventy men between the ages of eighteen and fifty in basic plumbing skills, Millan and other members of the Community Water Squad have become agents for change. While learning a new skill that might eventually earn them regular employment, graduates of the program--they serve as volunteers for two months in return for the training--assist the city in extending water lines to unserviced areas. They also help raise the consciousness among community members of respect for and proper use of this life-sustaining resource.

From the northern reaches of Canada to the tip of Patagonia, there are few regions of the Americas that don't face imposing obstacles in dealing with a variety of water-related issues. The list of concerns is long and will require higher levels of public awareness and involvement, innovative approaches to problem solving, and better use of available funds and technology to reverse trends of misuse, mismanagement, and outright neglect. Among the most pressing challenges are insuring a sufficient supply of potable water for human needs and obtaining the vast amounts required to sustain agriculture and industry essential to economic development. At the same time, managing watersheds for myriad reasons, including protection of increasingly scarce sources of fresh water, preserving healthy natural systems for populations of fish and wildlife, and minimizing the threat of floods, will, by necessity, have to become a more important priority. Contamination by heavy chemical fertilizer and pesticide use and agricultural waste is another source of concern. Accounting for over three million deaths worldwide annually, unsanitary water breeds such diseases as typhoid fever, dysentery, and cholera.

The issue can be boiled down to a basic, unrefutable fact: Fresh water suitable for human use is a finite resource, accounting for less than 3 percent of the earth's total water supply. Of that tiny amount, most--2.0 percent--is locked away in ice caps and glaciers, while groundwater adds up to just 0.62 percent, lakes 0.009 percent, and rivers a mere 0.0001 percent. What's more, rapid population growth and associated environmental degradation are contributing to a growing crisis of water scarcity around the world that may reach crisis proportions in a matter of years. Already, according to the World Health Organization, 1.1 billion of the earth's inhabitants, or one-sixth of humanity, lacks access to the bare minimum of safe drinking water, while 2.8 billion, almost half of the world's population, exists without a minimum level of sanitation. Water scarcity increasingly affects every nation of the Americas, leaving no one immune from what many experts predict will be one of the defining issues of the new century.

In the U.S., the massive Ogallala Aquifer, a vast underground reserve of fresh water that stretches from the Dakotas to Texas and supplies roughly one-third of all groundwater extracted in the U.S. for agricultural irrigation, has experienced severe depletion, principally in Texas. Such rapidly growing urban centers as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tijuana have long since outstripped the capacity of local watersheds and groundwater systems for supply of their basic water needs. More and more, they've had to look elsewhere for desperately needed supplies or consider expensive technological options. Even on a hemispheric scale, there are few regions where water-associated issues pose such...