American West Water Crisis Analysis

With the issues that the U.S. is experiencing today, all these signs point towards a negative future. These noticeable issues seem to develop right under the American people’s noses. Even though these problems are serious, most Americans seem to be oblivious to the fact that these issues could have a detrimental effect on the world that they live in. Americans could be told information that explicates a serious issue that is happening in America and they would not take the issue seriously and disregard it most likely. Similarly, the water supply does not seem to have a promising future and most Americans seem to be blind to the possible outcomes that this issue could have on the U.S. later on. The water supply in the Southwest is an environmental

Abraham Lustgarten has written a very informative article that is published by Pro Publica and titled “How the West Overcounts Its Water Supplies.” In great detail, he analyzes the drought situation in Arizona and California to draw attention the underlying cause: the miscounting of available water. There is miscounting because officials are refusing to legally accept that the major water resource of the West—the Colorado River—is interconnected with underground water resources. All in all, Lustgarten writes a convincing article that effectively addresses the need for officials to recognize the interconnection of ground and surface water so that water shortage in the West can be better managed; he does this through his ability to gain the

Arizonans see California’s drought and water restrictions plastered all over the television and newspapers. Many Arizonans remain concerned about the well-being of Californians, while some may mistakenly think that it is not Arizona’s problem. I was one of those people, and while investigated the idea, discover how Arizona is in a bad situation because of it. What I, along with others, did not understand is the years of planning, legislation, and engineering that took place to get water to Arizona and the rest of the Southwest. The Southwest is an arid environment that relies on one river, the Colorado River, to deliver water to seven different

The city of Flint, Michigan went through a tragedy when the water supply turned bad with lead and toxians being released into it.The Flint water crisis started in 2014 and still has an impact on the people who live there today. This research paper explains the affects of the water crisis, and is to show and explain the hardship and struggle the people of Flint have been through. This state has a small population, but this crisis has a big affect. Flint, Michigan has gone through a tramendous struggle these past four years including, polluted water, economy affects, sociological and health impacts and criminal cases.

What if you were not able to shower for five months, what if you could not wash your

Organic ranchers and dairy farmers in California also feel the effects of the drought. They rely on green pasture to feed their animals a healthy diet. Due to the lack of rain, the pasture are drying up and the ranchers have to purchase supplemental organic hay from other states. In an attempt to fund the purchasing of this out of state hay, the organic farmers are selling herds to businesses for hamburger meat and the small

Did you know that the Flint water crisis affects over thousands of people. The Flint water crisis has been going on since April of 2014. The EPA should have intervened in the Flint water crisis much earlier.

The drought in California isn’t even close to seeing an end, in the article Solutions to California Water Crisis From Half a World Away by Stephen Stock, Michael Bott, Jeremy Carroll and Felipe Escamilla, it reports that California needs to brace itself for multiple decades more of this monumental drought and that it going to take trillions of gallons of water to catch up to the state current deficit. They summarized the severity of this drought by saying that it could rain every day in San Francisco and Oakland California for the next decade and a half and the state still wouldn’t have even made a divot in the terms of catching up. When there’s a shortage in the amount of water available, a state or country relies on the hidden water supplies underground in aquifers and ground water which they then drill into to

The problems with the water caused death and disease. The problems with the water affected the colonists by causing drought, disease,and death. It states (Blanton 55) , “Filth introduced into the river tended to fester than flush away.” That means that they put their filth in the water and it just stayed there and floated around in the water. That would definitely cause disease and death(Blanton 55). It also states (Blanton 55), “ Rivers and creeks became brackish as water levels rose.” This means that the rivers started to rise and the water became salty and undrinkable. They also dug shallow wells, but these didn't last very long because these were in danger of drought(Blanton 55). This is why so many colonists died because of water problems.

The Flint, Michigan water crisis was a media phenomenon from January 2016 to March 2016. As the rest of America started to realize everyday American citizens did not have access to clean water at the fault of their government, millions became outraged. Everyone chimed in from Black Lives Matter protestors, to the President and even Presidential candidates. The problem? The Flint water crisis started in April 2014 and is still ongoing (Robbins, 2016). But, when was the last time you heard of the crisis in the news?

The problem stated in this video is the water-crisis in the southwest region of the United States of America. The southwest region of America is rapidly growing and booming, which makes the water crisis become more significant than ever before, because of the mass population heavily relying on the Colorado river and other water resources like groundwater. Therefore, leads to depletion of the water resources, which is bad because life depends on water. I believe this water crisis is happening because of cities in the southwest region of America relies on pumping water from the Colorado river and not being very self-sufficient with the water. Potential solutions to this problem is to be more self-sufficient with water by recycling water such

Over the past 4 years the water crisis has been rearing its mean head not only across the globe, but here in our home country, in the state of California. The citizens in California have moved having a normal lawn of grass into the luxury category. Not only have lakes and rivers dried up, but reservoirs that provide water for the entire state have dropped to hazardous levels. In Calaveras County, home of the state’s fourth largest reservoir, levels of water have dropped to only 20% capacity.

If residents and corporations throughout the United States continue to frivolously waste water and refuse to make painless changes and upgrades around their homes, it will continue to increase in cost to people across the United States. For example, as a result of the water shortage crisis currently afflicting the southwestern United States, the city of San Diego, California, is currently constructing a desalination plant, located in Carlsbad, California. The idea of a desalination plant is to collect undrinkable saltwater from the ocean and, using reverse osmosis and other filtering techniques, remove the salt to produce clean, potable water (Barnett). However, there are many downsides to relying on desalination practices to provide for a city the size of San Diego. First and foremost, it is considerably more expensive to produce clean drinking water from saltwater as opposed to using regular surface water or groundwater. The act of filtering the water alone can be twice as expensive as traditional filtration methods. In addition, desalination plants consume much more energy than traditional treatment plants, mostly due to the fact that the filtration methods are much more involved. Desalination consumes twice as much power as recycled plants, and four times as much as pumping groundwater (Newell, Roohk and Reardon). For example, the Carlsbad plant alone will require the same amount of electricity as is used to power 125,000 homes in California. However, the biggest

Agriculture, probably more than any other human enterprise, is responsible for destabilizing our planet’s water supply. California and their emergency crisis on their low levels of water ultimately having a national controversial impact on the production of the agricultural industry.

Water is a human right, not a commodity. It is the essence of life, sustaining every living being on the planet. Without it we would have no plants, no animals, no people. However, while water consumption doubles every twenty years our water sources are being depleted, polluted and exploited by multinational corporations. Water privatization has been promoted by corporations and international lending institutions as the solution to the global water crises but the only one’s who benefit from water privatization are investors and international banks. The essential dilemma of privatization is that the profit interests of private water utilities ultimately jeopardizes the safeguarding of the human right to water. Access to clean, sufficient