Readings on the Midwest Water Wars
I’m following a new environmental drama in my Hoosier hometown. Some geniuses in the Indiana statehouse decided to court agreements to build gigantic computer chip plants in an area of the state that lacks one critical thing: there’s no water. Computer chip manufacturing apparently requires a ton of water.
“No problem!” the intellectual giants said. “There is the large Wabash River aquifer to the north that we can just have piped 35 miles down to our site.” The only problem is that the math doesn’t math and the people of Indiana hate the idea of giving up their water rights on the word of business men who are now on the record openly lying about the science.
Here’s what I’m reading:
Purdue Groundwater Expert on LEAP by Dave Bangert
The following quote is building a metaphor so the average person can understand just how much water is planned to be removed from this critical aquifer *** every day *** for this chip plant. The state agency responsible for steering the plans lied by claiming the aquifer will be recharged because it’s connected to Lake Michigan. There’s zero evidence that it is, and there’s no evidence it will be recharged as quickly as it’s tapped, or that the communities downstream that are planned to absorb the runoff can handle this amount of water at all. The more you learn about this, the more you wonder why Indiana would choose such a bad location for a chip plant (the answer is always money).
“Ask people if they know what ‘one acre foot’ means. That’s a volume of water that we commonly refer to in hydrogeology. One acre foot means you have one acre of land that’s flooded to a depth of one foot. Imagine that you’re at the football stadium. Without the end zone, it’s about an acre. And so if you fill that to a depth of one foot, that is 326,000 gallons. Now think about how deep you would have to flood the field to get 1 million gallons – that’s essentially about three feet of water to pump out 1 million gallons per day. To pump out 10 million gallons, that’s a football field flooded to 30 feet. To get to 100 million gallons, you’ve got to flood it over 300 feet. … That’s taller than all the buildings in West Lafayette.”
The more people begin learning about this, the more chatter I see on social media suggesting that they just draw the water from somewhere else, like the Ohio River, the White River, Lake Michigan, even Lake Superior. It really didn’t bode well when Indiana futzed with the Kankakee River basin, which killed migratory wetlands and an estimated twenty percent of migratory birds in the early 1900s, for example, and it’s unlikely to play out well now. The following two books explain that kind of thinking and why it’s terrible for, well, just about everything.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
I’m kind of a nerd about science writing because it takes several types of technical skill and expertise to thread the needle so the layperson can follow along. This book, which won awards from all kinds of industry bodies, is wildly readable considering that it’s about the intersection of biology, commerce and hydrology. Egan covers the ways that people leverage water to meet their needs, which often means treating critical waterways like a cross between a highway and a landfill.
The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin
As communities around the Great Lakes basin grow, as as climate change progresses, it’s likely we will see a lot of scuttlebutt around lake water diversion. It’s extremely likely these will turn out to be the biggest environmental and resource conflicts in the coming decades. The author lays it all out, and the updated version includes three new chapters on water fights and, alarmingly, the effect of the invasive Asian carp, a voracious species that reproduces at a disturbing rate—which is transforming the ecology of the river as it makes its way through the Chicago River diversion and ever closer to Lake Michigan.
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