San Diego, a coastal city that faces water stress. Photo: tomcio77/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons

Today, 73 percent of the residents of San Diego favor purifying wastewater and adding the cleaned water back into the potable water supply.

That’s an astonishing leap from 2005, when only 28 percent favored re-using water to extend the drinking water supply.

It’s even more astonishing because San Diego famously considered adding re-use water to its drinking water supply back in 1998 and 1999. But public opposition — you might say public distate — was so strong that the city council killed the plan.

Since then, San Diego’s Water Authority has been working quietly but steadily to change both the details of its plans to use recycled water, and to change public opinion.

Indeed, an astonishing 54 percent of those in San Diego think the water supply already contains recycled water — even though it doesn’t.

San Diego, in fact, is one of the cities in Southern California that is gradually pursuing a notion of “water independence” — finding ways to ultimately provide water for itself without having to depend, as it does now, almost totally on water brought in from both Northern California and the Colorado River, from Lake Mead.

The San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) has been polling its water customers almost every year over the last decade, and just this month released the details of its 2012 poll about water attitudes (PDF).

The document detailing the water attitudes of San Diego residents is long (144 pages) and detailed, but it contains wonderful nuggets:

• 95 percent of San Diegans believe it is a “civic duty” to use water as efficiently as possible (but only 25 percent say they’ve used less water in the last year)

• San Diegans in the poll drink bottled water more often than tap water — 70 percent said they drink bottled water “often” or “sometimes”; only 55 percent said they drink tap water “often” or “sometimes.” (That one is hard to believe — 45 percent of San Diegans don’t “sometimes” use tap water for coffee? For toothbrushing? Really?)

• 82 percent of those in San Diego say that adding water from a desalination plant to the city water supply is “very important” or “somewhat important” to making sure water service is reliable (a number that hasn’t changed in 6 years).

• 57 percent of San Diegans think the price of water is either fair, or inexpensive — but 43 percent think water service is too expensive. (Efforts to make San Diego more water independent are likely to increase the monthly water bill.)

• But 62 percent said they are wiling to pay more, if the increases in water bills increase the reliability of the San Diego water supply.

As interesting as the specifics of the poll are (PDF), what’s really interesting is the effort the SDCWA is making to understand water attitudes as it tries to tackle supply challenges for San Diego. It’s clearly easier to make smart water management decisions, and palatable water management decisions, if you understand what your water drinkers think. It would be great if the water utilities in every major metro area made the same kind of effort to understand water attitudes in their service areas.

(Thanks to Rob Davis of news site Voice of San Diego for first tweeting about the San Diego survey.)

See photos of San Diego’s reclaimed rivers>>

Charles Fishman is an award-winnning investigative journalist and best-selling author whose most recent book, “The Big Thirst,” tackles the question of how people can successfully manage water in a coming age of scarcity. He can be contacted at cnfish@mindspring.com.

Drought is still too unpredictable. Photo: Tomas Castelazo, Wikimedia Commons

Weather forecasting has gotten a lot better in the U.S. in the last 20 years — today, the four-day forecast is as accurate as the two-day forecast was in 1988. And storm forecasting — both for tropical storms, like Isaac, and winter storms — is also dramatically better.

But seasonal forecasting remains poor, and the current drought — which is wreaking literally billions of dollars of damage to farmers and business people across the country — is a vivid example. (See photos of the drought.)

As recently as May, according to this excellent analysis by Andrew Freedman of “Climate Central,” the U.S. Agriculture Department was predicting the biggest corn harvest in the U.S. since 1937, based in part on how much corn farmers were planting.

In April, May, and June, the National Weather Service’s drought outlook “showed no hint of an impending widespread drought, let alone one of the top 10 worst droughts on record,” as Freedman put it.

So while farmers across the country were spending money to plant crops, they had no hint of the devastating weather just a few weeks over the horizon.

How could weather forecasters not be able to anticpate a drought of this severity and extent, that was just around the corner?

Quite simply, the tools scientists have to understand seasonal climate aren’t up to the task. Those tools could be better, but NOAA and NWS aren’t getting the resources they need to gather detailed data about weather, and to develop the sophisticated computer models that would help them see large seasonal weather patterns developing.

The total NOAA budget — which includes not just weather prediction but operation of satellites, along with fisheries management — is $5 billion. The drought is estimated to be costing at least twice that — $10 billion — in damage to the U.S. economy, in just this single year.

Good, reliable weather forecasting is a quiet but essential tool for keeping the economy productive. Freedman’s story, “Lack of Warning on Drought Reflects Forecasting Flaws,” is discouraging for what could have been avoided had we known the drought was coming, but a reminder that relatively small investments in weather science pay huge dividends.

Charles Fishman is an award-winnning investigative journalist and best-selling author whose most recent book, “The Big Thirst,” tackles the question of how people can successfully manage water in a coming age of scarcity. He can be contacted at cnfish@mindspring.com.

San Antonio's River Walk is a popular tourist destination...that runs on recycled water during the dry months. Photo: Allan Howard

I love a good sewage treatment plant. The wastewater treatment plant of San Antonio, Texas, USA, resembles its sister plants around the world: a wide expanse of deep, in-ground concrete tanks filled with brown liquid. There’s a faint organic odor, not unpleasant, and noise from big pumps and motors that are moving city-size quantities of water.

I’ve toured a dozen sewage treatment plants in the last couple of years while researching a book about water. I spent a week watching the staff of the City of Galveston struggle to bring the sewage treatment plant back to life after Hurricane Ike. I scrambled down a 20-foot ladder to the bottom of a half-million-gallon treatment tank. It had just been pumped out, and it was wisest not to look too closely at the debris covering the bottom.

Almost by accident, I’ve become a treatment plant tourist. And I’ve discovered that not much has changed in the world of municipal sewage treatment in the last 20 or 30 or 40 years.

Editor’s note: So begins the story “San Antonio has turned its water treatment plant into a gold mine” by Water Currents’ Charles Fishman, in the August issue of The Rotarian, the magazine of Rotary International. In the piece, Charles explains how the growing, water-stressed city has been making the most of its supply by recycling as much H2O as possible.

The world-famous Alamo uses recycled water, as does a Toyota truck factory. The scenic, touristy riverwalk? Turns out those boats ferrying so many visitors and relaxing locals ply through entirely recycled water during the dry spring and summer.

Charles also describes how a little planning turned San Antonio’s water treatment works into a small natural gas plant, in a clear win-win.

Read the whole story>>

San Antonio has a rich history and a growing population, and it is now home to some water ingenuity. Photo: Allan Howard

California's Fresno State is leading a charge in water research. Photo: Fresno State

Across the U.S., three major research universities have decided that we need big leaps of progress in water — in water technology, water access, and water management. Those three universities — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Fresno State, and Michigan State — think they can make a difference.

Imagine, for a moment, if water in the next 20 years gets the kind of attention and investment, the kind of arresting questions, that Silicon Valley has brought to whole sectors of the economy in the last 20 years. Look what the digital revolution has done to medicine and media, to telecommunications, even to shopping.

Imagine if water management — in the environment, in treatment plants, on farms, in factories, in rural villages, in our own homes — can make those same kinds of leaps.

And imagine if water starts attracting the kind of talent that, say, iPhone app programming attracts.

There really could be a “blue revolution.”

Those three universities are focusing attention and resources on water issues, and most important, they are pulling in a whole new cast of people to do what water needs most: Ask impertinent questions.

The kind of water problems facing people around the country and the world — how to modernize water systems, how to make them more efficient, how to grow much more food with less water, how to make water re-use routine — those problems need one thing most urgently: New ways of thinking.

That’s why the programs at UNC-CH, Fresno State, and Michigan State are so encouraging, and also so important. In an era of dramatic austerity across U.S. higher education, the fact that these three universities are carving out the resources to make water issues a priority says two things: they see a real opportunity, and they see an urgent need.

UNC-CH is about to embark on a two-year campus-wide focus on water issues. The effort, starting this fall, is the first time UNC-CH has asked the entire campus to focus on a single theme.

The intent is for every school and department to focus on water issues — undergraduates, medical and public health researchers, environmental scientists, law school and public policy folks.

The water theme’s impact remains amorphous — the goals include connecting water researchers on the sprawling campus who have been unknown to each other, to “making major breakthroughs in the study of water.” But UNC is just getting started, and one of the people driving the campus-wide effort is Jamie Bartram, now a faculty member, who previously headed water efforts for both the UN and the WHO. UNC is kicking off the water focus by hosting a major conference this October on water and public health.

UNC is determined to use its resources to approach water in an interdisciplinary way. The co-chair of the water theme’s steering committee, alongside Bartram, is Prof. Terry Rhodes, a singer who is just finishing a stint as chairwoman of UNC’s department of music. Rhodes becomes UNC’s associate dean of fine arts and humanities this summer.

“We want to make sure that this initiative reaches all corners of the campus — including the fine arts and the humanities,” says Rhodes. “We are developing new courses in the college of arts and sciences on water, we are obviously going to focus on the challenges water presents. But we also will be celebrating water, with performances, theatrical and musical and artistic ventures. We want to make sure we celebrate water as well as study it.”

FRESNO STATE sits in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the nation’s most important and most productive farming areas, and Fresno State has long focused on water management and helping farmers use water efficiently. A part of that work, the university has hundreds of acres of working farm land — corn fields, orchards, vineyards, dairies — and a farm store selling everything from student-grown corn to student-made ice cream to Fresno State vintage wine.

Fresno State and the San Joaquin Valley have created a little-noticed center of water expertise, what local water people call “Blue Tech Valley” — the university, it’s International Center for Water Technology (ICWT), and 120 water technology companies in the immediate area. Among those 120 companies: a water technology center for Grundfos, the world’s largest pump company, and North American headquarters for the world’s two largest micro-irrigation companies, Jain and Netafim.

In the last few years, Fresno State has begun amping up its focus on water, expanding and modernizing a state-of-the-art hydralic lab, the WET Center (Water Energy Technology). The WET Center — a soaring, 20,000-square foot space with the ability to test a full range of water systems — functions as an R&D lab for water technology researchers, and also as a third-party testing facility for companies working on new products.

The WET Center is also an on-campus incubator for new water tech companies — with three or four start-ups given office space in the lab, and another 10 startups using WET faculty and staff as advisors.

Perhaps most significant, amid the dramatic cutbacks across California’s university system, Fresno State is adding eight new faculty positions devoted specifically to water technology and water research — four starting this fall, four more starting in the fall of 2013. “The university has determined that water is a priority,” says David Zoldoske, who heads Fresno State’s ICWT.

The Blue Tech Valley proponents — both at the university and in the business community — look constantly to Stanford and Silicon Valley to understand how to inject water research with more urgency and creativity, and they understand the need for close connections between the university and the business community. A local water businessman, for instance, has donated $330,000 to support the initial research efforts of Fresno State’s eight new faculty members.

“At the end of the day,” says Zoldoske, “we’d like to be the Silicon Valley of water technology.”

MICHIGAN STATE sits in the midst of the Great Lakes, the most water wealthy area in the U.S., and one of the most water rich areas in the world.

MSU has more than 100 faculty members working on water issues — a hydrologist modeling the entire water system of Michigan in real time, an algo-ecologist who is one of the leading experts in the world on algaes, an environmental economist trying to connect sustainability and economics.

In fact, MSU already has a Water Sciences Center, dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary water research, and a Center for Global Change, studying the impact of climate change on humans, including the impact of dramatic shifts in water availability.

But after a review last year, MSU concluded it wasn’t doing enough. Says the opening line of that report, “Michigan State University is uniquely positioned to become a global leader in water science and policy.”

At MSU, they use the phrase “The Blue Economy” — all the hidden ways water powers the economy, all the ways it could power the economy more effectively. They want the blue economy to start having the impact that the silicon economy has been having for two decades.

The immediate result is something Michigan State is calling the Global Water Initiative (GWI). As at UNC, MSU’s effort is a work in progress — still searching for a structure to magnify the water work being done, and inspire new work. Michigan State has decided to focus on its existing areas of expertise: water and food production; water and the environment; and water and public health.

Will there be some kind of campus-wide water czar? Not clear.

Will there be a single water-research building to bring scientists together in the kind of collaborative workplace that often inspires breakthroughs? Sure, but not anytime soon (at least, not without a major donor).

Most dramatically, the GWI is backed by real academic muscle: MSU is adding 16 new faculty positions devoted to water, double what Fresno State is adding, eight starting this fall, eight in fall 2014.

Says MSU’s Steve Pueppke, an associate vice president for research, “We are making the largest investment in water research of any university in the U.S.”

And MSU thinks that’s something to crow about.

Money and attention, creativity and strategic plans, of course, don’t always equal results. If they did, we’d have a cure for cancer. But water has been completely left out of the transformations that have swept through so many other areas in the last 20 years. And two things are absolutely true. The water tools that have gotten us this far — which have worked brilliantly in the developed world for the last 100 years, while somehow failing 40 percent of the people on Earth miserably — those tools are not going to cope with a new era of water scarcity across the globe.

And problems that get no investment, and no attention, don’t get solved.

Know of other university programs bringing fresh attention to water issues? Post information as a comment, below, or email Charles Fishman, cnfish@mindspring.com.

Charles Fishman is an award-winnning investigative journalist and best-selling author whose most recent book, “The Big Thirst,” tackles the question of how people can successfully manage water in a coming age of scarcity. He can be contacted at cnfish@mindspring.com.

Photo by Steven Depolo, Flickr Creative Commons

Despite organized anti-bottled-water campaigns across the country and a noisy debate about bottled water’s environmental impact, Americans are buying more bottled water than ever.

In 2011, total bottled water sales in the U.S. hit 9.1 billion gallons — 29.2 gallons of bottled water per person, according to sales figures from Beverage Marketing Corp.

The 2011 numbers are the highest total volume of bottled water ever sold in the U.S., and also the highest per-person volume.

Translated to the handy half-liter size Americans find so appealing, that comes to 222 bottles of water for each person in the country — four bottles of water for every man, woman and child, every week.

Indeed, bottled water sales aren’t just growing — it’s fair to say they’re booming. Volume increased by 4.1 percent in 2011 — five times as fast as the 0.9 percent growth in the sales of beverages overall, according to Beverage Marketing. Bottled water sales, in fact, are growing twice as fast as the economy itself.

“Americans are drinking more bottled water because they find it convenient, appealing and also healthy,” says Gary Hemphill, who is managing director for information services at Beverage Marketing, and a longtime observer of bottled water and beverage sales in the U.S. and around the world.

The resurgence of bottled water — sales dropped in 2008 for the first time in 31 years, and again in 2009, tracking declines in overall drink sales because of the recession — may be surprising given the debate about its value as a product in the last five years.

The record sales year comes as more than a dozen colleges and universities have taken the extraordinary step of banning sale of bottled water on campus, often under pressure from student organizing campaigns that encourage students to drink tap water.

Just last week, Loyola University in Chicago announced it would stop selling bottled water in cafeterias and on-campus stores this fall, and remove bottled water from vending machines starting in 2013. Loyola joins at least 15 other schools in the U.S. and Canada in banning bottled water sales, including the University of Vermont, Washington University, DePauw University, and Harvard’s School of Public Health.

At least four major municipalities — New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago’s Cook County — have banned use of government funds to purchase bottled water.

Despite the record amount of water sold — 2011 beat out the previous, pre-recession year of 2007, when volume was 8.8 billion gallons — 2011 was not a record year in dollar sales of bottled water.

At retail, Americans spent $21.7 billion on bottled water in 2011, just under 2007’s spending.

The big three bottled water companies — Coke, Pepsi and Nestlé — have been discounting water heavily in the last few years, to sustain sales through the recession and the growing opposition.

“Pricing in this category has been aggressive,” says Hemphill, “which has helped.”

Although the U.S. has among the safest tap water in the world, the U.S. remains the largest market for bottled water. The next two, in order, are China and Mexico, both countries in which tap water is either unavailable, or typically not considered safe to drink.

The increase in Americans’ consumption of bottled water is extraordinary — the growth having more in common with digital-era products than typical consumer products.

As recently as 2001, per person consumption of bottled water was just 18.2 gallons per person.

Despite the size and visibility of the business, the amount of water actually sold is relatively tiny, compared to tap water volumes. U.S. water utilities supply more than 1 billion gallons of tap water an hour, every hour of the day.

The total amount of water in the bottles Americans buy in a year would only supply U.S. tap water needs from midnight until 9 a.m. on January 1.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst, which is being released in paperback tomorrow with a whole new chapter.

Rope swings are a rite of passage for many, but water officials have some in their sights. Photo: Phil Kates, Flickr Creative Commons

Although water is always with us — sitting on the desk in a bottle, splashing from the kitchen tap, at-the-ready to be flushed in the toilet — water problems often seem remote.

Drought…somewhere else. And how many of us are farmers, anyway? The lettuce and tomatoes always appear in the supermarket.

Fading aquifers…but who can envision an aquifer? You turn on the hose, the water arcs across your lawn.

And water policy decisions are even more evanescent. Who can really stop and grasp the details of withdrawl permits or irrigation allocations?

But how about when the local water authorities quite literally cut down the rope swing your kids use to plunge themselves into a peaceful, slow-moving Florida river? When officials tell you it’s to protect the river your kids have so enjoyed plunging into over and over? That they are, in fact, protecting the river from your kids?

There’s a water policy decision that smacks you in the face like a badly executed cannon-ball.

Florida is home to some of the most vividly short-sighted water policy anywhere. Rain delivers more than enough water to Florida, in a typical year, that it needs. Florida systematically collects that water and throws it away, right into the ocean — then to supply its vast farms and sprawling cities, Floridians pump furiously from an aquifer that underlies most of the state, and which is seriously over-used.

Florida is also home to some of the most beautiful river and spring landscapes in the U.S. It’s hard to believe that one of the keys to protecting the state’s waters is excluding children in swim trunks from those springs. Isn’t the point of the protection precisely to let us enjoy the water?

The same state that cut down the rope swing out over the Suwannee River last year allowed a new permit for a power plant in Jacksonville to take 163 million gallons of water a day from the same river system — that’s 6.8 million gallons of water an hour, enough for a city of 1.5 million people.

At least that old rope swing won’t slow down all that pumping. Thank goodness.

Florida is also home to one of the nation’s finest water journalists and authors, Cynthia Barnett, and in an essay in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times, she tells the story of her kids’ lost Suwannee River rope swing, and the larger Florida water decisions that surround it.

Barnett is the author of a book about water in Florda, Mirage, and last fall a second book, Blue Revolution, which is about the need for a whole new attitude about water in the U.S., a new water ethic.

Both are elegant, inspirational, indispensible.

But water has the most impact on us when it is immediate, even intimate. Barnett’s short story in the Tampa Bay Times is about getting the small things right while getting the big things terribly wrong; about disconnecting ourselves and our kids from nature; it’s about Mother’s Day. And it’s about the unaccountable loss of the exuberance that comes right at the moment you let go of the rope and plunge for the water.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

Australian farmer Laurie Arthur farms 10,000 acres, using the same amount of water as a city of 40,000 to produce food for 100,000.

Laurie Arthur is a farmer in the heart of Australia’s bread basket, the basin of the Murray River, who was kind enough, when I was trying to understand water, to explain how water works for farmers.

Arthur lives out in the wide open country east of Adelaide and north of Melbourne — flat, irrigated farmland where his nearest neighbor is 12 miles down the road, and where his white farm truck is often flanked by squads of kangaroos, who have no trouble keeping pace as he drives from field to field at 40 or 50 mph.

Arthur lives comfortably in a world most of us never visit, and even have a hard time grasping. He farms 10,000 acres. That amount of land is impossible to visualize, but its scale is easy to bring down to Earth.

Arthur took me to a single 150-acre field, which seemed to spread out in all directions toward the horizon. (You could park five Wal-Mart Supercenters, including their full parking lots, on that one patch of dirt.) That single field has a perimeter of 2 miles.

It is 1 percent of Laurie Arthur’s land.

If the land Arthur is responsible for cultivating is hard to grasp, the water he uses to make it blossom is truly astonishing.

To raise a single year’s crop, Arthur uses 1.6 billion gallons of water (6 billion liters) — a big slug of water. It’s enough to supply all the water needs for a town of 40,000 people, for a year.

One guy, with one farm, using as much water every single day as a city of 40,000 people.

Laurie Arthur has the charm and wry humor we find so irresistible in Australians — a disarming confidence, along with the bemused understanding that today, farmers are far more alien creatures than, oh, astronauts.

Arthur has introduced himself at school parent events as a farmer, and had fellow parents turn to him matter-of-factly and say, “Oh, you’re a water waster, then.”

What is Laurie Arthur doing with all that water, anyway?

He’s raising food — rice, to be specific.

In a year when everything goes right, Arthur raises 20 million pounds of rice, using those 1.6 billion gallons of water.

Is that good, or is that cavalier?

Well, with enough water to supply a city of 40,000 people for a year, he raises enough food to feed a city of 100,000 people for a year — all 100,000 people, 3 meals a day, for 365 days.*

Arthur smiles. “How much is the right amount of water to feed a city of 100,000 people?”

Today is World Water Day. The point of World Water Day is to draw attention to our favorite, our most familiar, and our most taken-for-granted resource. There is a delightful irony for water folks in the fact that World Water Day is itself mostly ignored by everyone outside the world of water. (Could we start a day to draw awareness to World Water Day?)

Every person on Earth revels in water every day, in some fashion — whether we celebrate water or not.

This year, the theme of World Water Day is the connection between water and food. Although most of us never think about water when we tuck into an omelet, or a turkey sandwich, or a dinner of salad, steak and rice pilaf, there is no more intimate connection than that between water and food.

In fact, food is water.

         To finish reading this essay, click here. It is cross-posted with IBM’s SmarterPlanet blog.

Also find out how much water is embedded in common foods, and learn about the global water footprint of our crops.

Airmen shut off a hydrant after a water main burst on an Air Force base. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Kenny Holston

In the last two years, we have spent a huge sum of money on infrastructure — one kind of infrastructure.

Infrastructure — that’s the stuff we know is important but unsexy. The asparagus of investment.

But these infrastructure numbers are anything but unsexy:

In two years, we’ve spent $57.4 billion on this one style of invisible system.

That’s $500 for every household in the U.S. — $21 a month, every month, for two years.

Did you notice?

Did you whine?

Did the $21 keep you from paying the cable TV bill, or slow down your daily Starbucks investment — or force you to give up your Lipitor?

Not hardly.

In 2010 and 2011, Verizon and AT&T — just those two companies — spent $57.4 billion installing and upgrading the high-speed cell phone networks (3G and 4G) we all use every day.*

If anything, our complaint is that they aren’t moving fast enough, they aren’t spending enough, their pipes aren’t big enough — how come this iPhone is so slow?

Two companies. Two years. Two data networks. $60 billion.

That’s why your smart phone bill is $80 a month per person.

What’s your water bill? On average, it’s $34 a month  — for the family. That’s $10 a month per person — 30 cents a day for all those baths and pots of pasta, for all those cups of coffee and toilet flushes.

Last week, there was a big moment in the world of water.

The word “trillion” started being used in connection with the word “water.”

A big study was released describing the attention our water infrastructure needs in the next 25 years — and the headline number was that we need to spend $1 trillion on the pipes that bring us drinking water.

Now, $1 trillion is serious money. That’s more than the total Defense Department budget — although to be fair, the Pentagon spends $1 trillion in 18 months, and the water pipes need $1 trillion over 300 months.

Still: $1 trillion.

We need to spend that on water pipes, huh?

But here’s the question: What are the water pipes worth?

Do we value our water service as much as, for instance, our electricity? our cable TV? our cell phone service?

One of my favorite, little-known tidbits from the world of water is this. In Washington, DC, there is a major drinking water main that supplies K Street, and then runs on up to Capitol Hill.

That water main — which supplies water to the flossy, high-powered lobbying firms — was installed between 1858 and 1860. The lobbyists are drinking water from a pipe that was laid before Lincoln was inaugurated.

What if they were sweet-talking Senators over a phone system that was installed before Lincoln was inaugurated? Oh, wait. The telephone wasn’t invented until 1876.

When will it be a good idea to replace that 150-year-old water main, in the nation’s capital? When will we have the money to do that?

And, perhaps more to the point, if you could cut a slice of that pipe, set it on the kitchen counter, and look at it, would you be happy drinking water from it?

Well, that’s the whole point of last week’s report about water pipes — although the report itself is a little drier. It is the work of a quiet but invaluable organization called the American Water Works Association — the group that represents all of America’s water utilities.

With a classic bit of water-geek humor, the report is called, “Buried No Longer.” Bring those water pipes into view! We can’t hide the work they need!

And “Buried No Longer” — which clearly represents an incredible investment of effort and money — is a painstaking accounting of our water mains. What kinds of pipes does each region have? When were they installed? It’s all there — including 21 pages of charts at the end. Water folks love a good chart.

It is filled with amazing facts.

How many miles of drinking water mains have we got? In the U.S., 1 million miles. That’s 20 times the length of all our interstate highways.

How much is all that pipe worth, in the ground? $2.1 trillion. Each American can lay claim to $6,774 worth of water pipe.

What does it cost to lay new water main? $2 million per mile.

Over and over again, the report returns to the fact that we need to spend $1 trillion. The report divides the money up by region, by family. It warns that in some places, monthly water bills could triple. It even answers the question: What will happen if we don’t spend the $1 trillion. (No surprise: All plumbing problems get more expensive if you ignore them, even $1 trillion plumbing problems.)

But the math is not that hard.

First, the $1 trillion is a little misleading — it includes replacing water mains that are wearing out (pipes, the report says, “last a long time, but they are not immortal”) and adding new water mains to serve growing communities.

Extending water networks can, and often is, paid for by the people getting that new water service — homes and businesses pay connection fees to cover those.

The mains that need to be replaced come to half that $1 trillion — $525 billion. Over 25 years, that’s $21 billion a year. With 114 million households in the U.S. today, that’s about $15 for each family, each month.

Which would mean that the average water bill would go from $34 to $49 a month — still less than the cost of a single smart phone plan.

Seems like a very reasonable investment. After all, you can’t get your water over WiFi.

__________________

* How big is that $57.4 billion invested by AT&T and Verizon in 2010 and 2011? Together, those two companies alone spent twice the entire NASA budget.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

Miami at sunset. Photo: Bryan Sereny, Flickr Creative Commons

I grew up in Miami, Florida, which back in those days called itself “The Magic City.” It was, for a lot of us, the city by the bay — I learned to swim in Miami, I learned to canoe there, and to sail, and I snorkled my first coral reef just south of Miami. It was the place that inspired my appreciation of water.

If you want to start the weekend off right, you can take a journey right now to Miami with this lyrical, evocative essay from today’s New York Times, “Terminal Miami,” by Choire Sicha.

It’s got the Miami where a pelican may crash land into your car windshield.

It’s got the Miami that is home to America’s first underwater park.

It’s got the Miami where there are free-range peacocks; where only one-quarter of the residents claim English as their first language; where I-95 actually begins — with a ramp peeling unceremoniously off U.S. 1, and if you take that ramp and stay with it, it leads all the way to Maine.

Ostensibly, “Terminal Miami” is about how Sicha learned not to be afraid of flying. And so it’s got the Miami that features a miles-long queue of jet planes, out over Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, floating in to land, often six or eight lined up in the sky at once. At night, their landing lights dazzle.

But the airport is just an excuse to write about South Florida, a place wedged between the bay and the swamp. “Terminal Miami” packs more vivid writing, and more feeling, into a few paragraphs than anything I’ve read recently. It can make you homesick for Miami, even if you’ve never lived there.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.

Did the Maya civilization decline due to loss of rainfall? Photo: Dennis Jarvis, Flickr Creative Commons

It’s possible that the stunning Maya civilization — with mastery of mathematics and astronomy, farming, water management, pyramid building and city planning — was undone by summer rain.

Not enough summer rain.

Undone, in fact, by exactly the kind of rainfall changes we ourselves are starting to experience — small shifts in rainfall that persist, and end up having an outsized impact.

The Maya dominated the Yucatan Peninsula for 600 years, and their settlement and civilization there spanned more than 1,000 years. And yet the great Maya cities collapsed and were abandoned to the jungle over a period of between 100 and 200 years. (See an interactive map of the Maya civilization.)

What happened is the subject of wide scholarly, archeological, and climatological debate — although drought has often been argued as the major source of the Mayas’ demise, a long-lasting, devastating drought.

The debate has lacked hard data, until last week.

In the journal Science, we’ve now got a graph showing precipitation over the Yucatan, during the last 200 years of Maya dominance — from the year 800 to the year 1000.

Actually, it’s not quite a graph of precipitation: It’s a graph of each year’s deviation from the typical rainfall. (We can’t reproduce the graph here because Science is a subscription-only journal.)

The years 810 to 815 were pretty wet — 10 percent more rainfall than usual. The years 820 to 840 were grim — not a single year of even average precipitation, and a cluster of years with 30 percent less rainfall than usual.

What’s so striking is that the periods of drought were relatively short, often broken by brief spikes of good rain, and the actual fall-off in rainfall seems relatively modest — 20 to 40 percent less than usual in the dry periods. In fact, over a period of 200 years, there are only a couple deep troughs reaching to 40 percent less than usual.

Could the Mayas have been undone by that kind of shift in rainfall over 100 or 150 years?

We think the catastrophic collapse of a civilization requires an equally catastrophic cause. But what if our expectation of water availability is so fixed that we lose track of it? What if small shifts in rainfall can have a surprisingly dramatic impact?

“Perhaps,” write the paper’s authors, “the magnitude of these droughts was rather modest despite the large associated environmental and societal disruptions.”

The detailed picture of Maya precipitation is the work of two paleoclimatologists, Martín Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling, and they analyzed lakebed sediments and stalagmites for a mix of isotopes that revealed precipitation. Their conclusions are remarkably detailed — Medina-Elizalde and Rohling were able to tease out the difference between the rainy season precipitation of the summers and the drier season precipitation of the winters. They found that it was the summer precipitation that fell off — and that much of the fall-off may have been due to fewer hurricanes, or hurricanes of reduced intensity.

We tend to be pretty confident in our ability to see and measure what’s going on around us, to understand it, and to adjust.

It’s not certain what happened to the Maya — but one thing is true: They had sophisticated systems for accessing groundwater and for collecting, storing, and distributing rainwater. Like our own systems, the Maya systems were elaborate and fixed in place. When the rain failed to appear in the quantities they had become used to, they didn’t have the flexibility to adapt their water system to serve the millions of people who relied on it.

They had built a civilization assuming a certain quantity of water, and when 20 or 30 percent less water appeared consistently, their entire way of life, perhaps especially food cultivation, became unsustainable.

The authors themselves note, somewhat dryly, that the variations in precipitation they found during the period when Maya civilization disintegrated “are not far outside the amplitude of those preceding this time interval, when the Maya civilization flourished.” That is, the amount of rain, and the variation in that rain, wasn’t too different between dominance and destruction.

Here’s the amazing thing. We’re not actually much better off than the Mayas — except for having a wealth of data to track our own vulnerability.

Last year, rainfall in Houston, Texas, was 55 percent less than usual. How will Houston fare if that persists for a couple years?

In 2007, Atlanta received 34 percent less rain than usual — and the city almost ran out of water.

This used to be Lake Menindee in New South Wales, Australia, before years of drought. Photo: Amanda Slater, Flickr Creative Commons

And then there’s the story of Perth, Australia. Perth is the first western city to confront the possibility of truly running out of water. (I tell the story of Perth’s dawning realization that it was confronting a water crisis in The Big Thirst.)

The equation in Perth in 2012 is startlingly similar to that in the Yucatan Peninsula in 912.

Perth has seen average rainfall drop 20 percent over the last 25 years. Water collected by its reservoirs fell by 75 percent over that same period.

Why?

Because the reservoirs were built assuming a certain amount, and location, of rainfall. As one Perth official put it, “All of a sudden, it looked like we’d built our reservoirs in the wrong place.”

For a chilling bar graph of what it looks like when a city looks water disaster in the eye, nothing matches the simple chart Perth’s water utility has put up online.

The crisis Perth confronted in the late 1990s, and avoided, was identical to that faced by Maya water managers — except Perth mustered the leadership and vision to fix its water problems.

Most metropolitan areas would be in a similar crisis if their long-term water availability suddenly dropped 20 percent — not to say 30 or 40 percent. Our municipal water systems have no more nimble adaptability than those of the Maya. Indeed, during the brutal 10-year drought in Australia, many big reservoirs were down to 30 or 20 or 10 percent capacity — there is nothing more ominous than a city-sized reservoir that is 80 percent empty.

The lesson of the Maya and the lesson of Perth are the same. Our water assumptions are just that: assumptions. We should be building municipal water cultures that have flexibility, multiple sources, the ability to re-use water, the ability to conserve.

Real strategic thinking about water isn’t about a new water treatment plant, or a plan to replace aging water mains. It’s about knowing what you’ll do if you’re suddenly faced with a 10 or 20 percent loss of available water, permanently.

Being ready for that kind of shift would change how we all think about water — from factory managers to dads doing the dishes.

In fact, we are all Maya.

Charles Fishman is an award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author who has spent the last four years traveling the world to understand and explain water issues. He is the author of The Big Thirst.