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Originally Posted by powderjunkie
I suppose I should have phrased it as 'have continued to find ways to provide' water for their huge populations. It would be interesting to know more about the financial costs involved (let alone ecological costs), and whether they are really being paid by residents - evidently not as it has not been a factor in stemming population growth.
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Here's a high-level map of where LA get their water from:
This is what Owens Lake, the lake in the middle of the Los Angeles Aqueduct line on the map above, actually looks like:
They sucked the entire Owens Valley dry. With respect to cost water prices in LA have almost doubled since 2010. They're screwed.
Phoenix's prices haven't soared like LA's but they're in for a shocker. Most of their water comes from the Salt River watershed, which is pretty much tapped out. Future water is planned to be drawn from the Colorado River (which parts of Nevada and California already overdraw). This is what the river looks like by the time it gets to the Gulf of California:
New York City has the benefit of drawing water from a watershed that naturally replenishes and filters itself, and therefore they don't spend anywhere near the amount of money we do—proportionally—on water treatment. Still, they opened a $3.2 billion treatment plant in the Bronx in 2015 to help filter the 10% or so of the billion+ gallons of water they use every day, and
last year they announced they'd be spending $1 billion on programs to maintain their water quality.
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Which isn't to say it isn't something we should be working on, but my point is that it will be hard to view it locally as a 'crisis'. It will be an uphill battle in terms of individual behaviour when you can look at any number of bigger cities in the world with more difficult situations who haven't really had to turn off the taps...
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I agree that it will be an uphill battle. People really are quite ignorant of precarious our water supply is in southern Alberta.