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water

Unholy water bill

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Thought this was gunna happen. Yesterday the City’s water department sent me a second bill for this month, bringing the total hit to $214.

Cute.

Earlier this month I learned that someone had turned off the water service to my house and restarted it in their name. The CSR at the water dept thought I was a new tenant in the house. I explained that I’ve lived here for five years and have no intention of moving soon. She said they’d fix it.

So last week along came a bill for $130. That’s about normal: though it’s the highest bill I’ve ever had in this house, it’s only five bucks more than last July’s, and the water rates have gone up twice over the past year. Yesterday—Saturday, of course, when no one’s in their business office—I got a bill on a different account number with the same read date, dinging me for another $87.34!!!

The $130 bill is unitemized: where it’s supposed to list the number of gallons used this month and last month, it says “0.” The $87 bill shows I used 2992 gallons, about 15 percent of the normal amount for the dead of summer.

I suspect they’ve added the “someone’s” water bill to my normal bill.

Happy day. Now I get to spend half of Monday morning doing battle with those people, and probably getting nowhere. If they give me any guff, I’m calling the state AG’s office and reporting that someone stole my identity to get free water.

The water bill is normally astronomical at this time of year. We’ve had day after day of 115- to 118-degree weather. Every plant in the yard has to be watered every single day, and some potted plants have to be watered twice in a day to be kept alive. I’m determined to see the butternut squash through the summer: it has some tiny baby squash, and if it survives, we may get some fall produce from it.

The tomato plants are still alive, but their fruit literally cooks on the vine. The three vine-ripened tomatoes I’ve salvaged have tasted sweet but the pulp is strangely dry: unjuicy tomatoes. La Bethulia was right that chard will live in the heat…but it’s very, very unhappy stuff. The basil and the thyme are OK. Everything else is suffering terribly.

I could have bought a year’s worth of fancy vegetables at Whole Foods for what the water company is charging me this month!

Image: Matthew Bowden, Wikipedia Commons

Rain!

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Rain in the desert is a wonderful thing, especially these days. This morning we awoke to a steady drizzle that started during the night. The Sonoran Desert has allegedly been suffering drought conditions for almost a decade. In recent years, reservoirs dropped to alarmingly low levels, and some lakes went dry.

Within living memory, we’ve usually seen slow, gentle rains (called “female” rains by the Indians because of that gentle quality) in the winter and hard monsoon (“male”) rains late in the summer. But during the current years-long drought, we’ve had little or no winter rain and precious few monsoons. The monsoons finally returned last summer, and now we’re getting rain in December.

Several Southwestern states engaged in a compact to distribute water from the Colorado River. The calculations for how much would be available and which states should be served first were based on historic rainfall records. And, thanks to the generous allocations of water based on these optimistic figures, development proceeded. Apace.

Until the real estate crash brought a stop to building, Las Vegas and Phoenix were the fastest-growing cities in the nation. At one point, our wise leaders were allowing builders to blade an acre an hour of precious, irreplaceable Sonoran habitat. The result is mile on mile on ugly mile of Southern California-style sprawl, endless acres of Styrofoam-and-plaster houses on postage-stamp lots that now sell—if they sell at all—for pennies on the dollar.

All of which is heartbreaking for those who love the desert and ultimately frustrating for those who invested in real estate.

But a much bigger bust is lurking. Scientific studies have shown that over the long term, the so-called “drought” conditions we’ve seen recently represent the Sonoran desert’s normal climate. In other words, the assumptions upon which the water allocation agreements were made and according to which development was permitted were wrong. When a municipality or state requires that 100 years of water be available if a site is to be developed, the calculation to arrive at that water availability may also be ersatz. No one really knows how much water will be available for how many years. So, there’s a good chance that not enough water exists in the Southwest to support the huge populations being lured into the area. The classic discussion of this issue, which has yet to be beat, is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert.

If I were a young person trying to decide where to build my life in a time of global warming and the political and social unrest likely to accompany it, I would be looking at areas where plenty of water is available. While it’s true you can’t shovel heat, you can’t melt it and drink it, either. The Pacific Northwest, which is relatively unpolluted, reasonably progressive in most areas, and economically active, strikes me as a likely place to start a career and a family. Possibly the Great Lakes region, despite environmental degradation from historic mining and industrial activities, would be a reasonable second choice.

Water will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, globally and in large parts of the United States. A young person with the flexibility to build a life where she or he wishes would be wise to take that fact into consideration.