In the book Cadillac Desert [1], a number of very frightening near-future scenarios are examined.  I thought it worthwhile to ponder some of those, as I think that they would be useful for a wide audience, even though such scenarios are worthy of great concern.  Let us see what a true “worst-case” scenario would look like for the United States regarding its water situation.

Let us remember that not too many summers ago a prolonged drought in the southeastern United States nearly brought Florida, Georgia, and Alabama into war over the water from the Appalachian mountains in Georgia that serves as water upon which parts of all three states depend, and realize that if this could happen in places with a lot of water (comparatively) that they would be even worse in dry areas.  The Bible has something to say about that sort of experience, albeit in a different original context:  “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.  For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breasts which never nursed!’  Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!”  For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?” (Luke 23:28-31).

Start With A Drought

The worst sort of doomsday scenarios would start with a long drought, for a few reasons.  For one, droughts force the use of groundwater aquifer reserves, which are already chancy in much of the United States (even Florida).  In some areas like the Great Plains (from about Lubbock north), a breadbasket area sits on top of a rapidly shrinking Ogallala aquifer.  Let us therefore assume a drought that causes this aquifer to begin to fail, which would lead to a great deal of trouble in West Texas and points north of there–great trouble of Dust Bowl proportions.  This would lead to a highly mobile and destitute group of “Okies” looking to start again somewhere else.

But where else?  If there is simultaneously a drought in Southern California and the Southeastern United States there would be no great agricultural areas left for these people to go–nowhere to farm, no land to work in, no well-watered place for them to find useful employment.  Let us also remember that in this particular crisis we would be dealing with a government already so far in debt that it would be unable to spend its way out of political disaster through the building of dams as was done in the Great Depression with the Tennessee Valley Authority in the East and the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams in the West.

Let us also add that such a drought would cause dramatic problems in the Central Valley (The San Joaquin Valley) of California with its dwindling groundwater reserves, which would cause massive problems to the areas around Fresno and Bakersfield, and shortages of a large variety of agricultural products that are primarily grown in Southern California (as well as the other areas where this drought would affect).  The droughts would also do one other very exceedingly bad thing–they would dry the soil to make runoff a greater problem when the rains finally did come, after the agricultural areas had been dried out to such an extent that farming activities on them had been greatly imperiled.

The Floods Came

It is the second part of this disaster that is at least equally worthwhile to examine.  Why would rains be a bad thing after a drought?  What could go wrong.  Well, if you’re a scientist looking for doomsday scenarios, a lot could go wrong.  Scientists, for example, warn about a superstorm that affects California once every hundred or two hundred years and that would bring such rain as to flood a quarter of California’s homes, and probably a great many of its dams, causing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage [2].  This sort of event happens about as often as a San Andreas Fault super-earthquake, once every 100 to 200 years or so.

What would be bad about a superstorm, aside from its effects of soil runoff on drought-parched ground, and its flooding of river systems that would lead to homes and business flooding, would be its destruction of dams and the emptying of the water in its reservoirs, adding to the flood dangers downriver and destroying the water storage for the future, at a time when the state and nation would lack the funds to rebuild such critical infrastructure.  If an earthquake in the west and a hurricane in the Southeast or East Coast is combined in the same general time span the real problem would become the priorities.

Rivers Changing Their Course

To top off the perfect storm of water-related disasters, one would need to have two rivers change their course.  The first is the Colorado River.  This river serves as an important part of the water requirements for Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.  Any problem with its dams (Glen Canyon, Hoover) or any successful attempt by the river to change its course to the Salton Sea areas (in the Imperial Valley) would be catastrophic to the fates of many people over a wide area.

Likewise, the Mississippi River has been seeking to change its course to the Atchafalaya River basin, and it doing so (despite the best efforts of the US Corps of Engineers to prevent it) would destroy a lot of oil rigs and refineries and also turn Baton Rouge and New Orleans into cities buried deep in the Bayou, far from the flow of the great river, a fate that would probably leave them to be abandoned.  Needless to say, the good people of New Orleans and Baton Rouge are not willing to suffer that fate if they can possibly avoid it.

Conclusions

As I mentioned in my review of the book [3], Cadillac Desert is full of apocalyptic scenarios, any one of which would be calamitous, and several of which would be catastrophic.  These sorts of disasters would be beyond the control of human beings, and more than one at once would probably be beyond our ability to even mitigate to any great amount.  Nonetheless, human beings would be blamed for such disasters, if they were in political office, and people would suffer on the ground as a result.  Would such experiences be seen as the malign hand of a wicked God or as judgment for sins going back generations, with a response of repentance and humility to the disaster?  Somehow I strongly suspect the former, even though a little discernment could allow one to realize that these disasters have been looming for quite some time.

[1] Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert:  The American West And Its Disappearing Water, (New York, NY:  Viking Penguin Inc., 1986).

[2] http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110117/us_yblog_thelookout/scientists-warn-california-could-be-struck-by-winter-superstorm

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/book-review-cadillac-desert/