Men Argue, Nature Acts
Wanted - water poster, put up by Ardingly Reservoir
This is terribly English: I’m talking about the weather again. For those that read ‘no rain in the UK’, the situation has just taken a turn for the worse. With parts of Central and Eastern Europe suffering their worse drought in 200 years or as the sign by the Ardingly Reservoir more modestly states: the ‘driest since 1976′, the local water company has asked the government for a drought order. It’s confusing because we were threatened with ‘the hottest summer on record’ and that never happened. It wasn’t hot, it was dry and there is an important difference.
It is winter in England, but you wouldn’t know it. There have been strong winds, but no rain. There have been cold mornings, but no rain. There has been sunshine and frost and mist, grey overcast mornings and fog, but no rain. Because of this, on the 9th December we were informed that there are ‘only two months water supply left in the Ardingly Reservoir’. Two months of water for in excess of 70,000 homes in England, in winter? Should we not be deeply concerned that amongst all the squabbles over ‘feed in tariffs’, ‘carbon tax’, wind or solar farms, those that control the collective destiny seem completely unprepared for what is actually happening?
England is a country where it rains in summer and rains heavier in winter, only it hasn’t been raining. A ‘drought order’ from the government will be followed by a hose-pipe ban in what is usually one of the wettest seasons of the year. ‘Water levels are so low’, that the order seeks to ‘drain the River Ouse‘, which also has very little water in it – because it hasn’t rained.
People are being urged to limit their water consumption during the holiday season, which is unlikely to happen as it is traditionally a time of excess. Besides, it is hard to believe in a situation that is the exact opposite of what it has always been. In a world of dramatic images and sudden calamities it is the slow drip of the subtle transformations that catch us all unprepared. A spokeswoman for South East Water says that: “a long spell of continuous rain will be needed to prevent a severe drought next spring and summer”. England is not prepared for this, complaining about the rain is part of the national character, rain is something we have plenty of – usually. And should I mention hosting the Olympics at this point? Averting a crises by lowering consumption somehow just does not seem likely.
Against this backdrop it has been recently reported that there have been new shale gas finds and that these can be drilled using a technique called fracking. Large amounts of water are used to remove gas in this way: each well can consume up to 9 million litres of water a day, of which only 50% can be re-used as the rest becomes heavily polluted. In our desperate attempts to quench our thirst for energy, will we drain and pollute our most precious resource: water?
Anti- fracking poster. Source: progressohio on flickr.com
The American visionary engineer, Buckminster Fuller, asked us to think of the world as a spaceship. If we stretch that concept to evoke the comparison of a lifeboat, it should be of vital concern to everyone on the boat if we discover that our supplies of food and water are being polluted. What should we think of those that are supposed to guide our ship, that as those supplies dwindle away, they squabble at summits, they distract us, they tax us, they talk of ‘trading credits’, anything – except take coherent moves to prevent the problem that is evolving. The column inches that discuss the economy is vast, but to the man in the desert water is priceless.
Alex King is an architect working under the title Designalexable. His work and ideas can be seen at designalexable.blogspot.com and designalexable.tumblr.com His Santiago Townhouse design was the winner of the British Homes Awards, Future Homes category 2011. Follow him on Twitter @designalexable
A few hundred miles north and we see quite a different picture. At the end of November Glasgow experienced 41mm of rain in 24 hours causing flooding (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-15922080) and a search of the BBC news website for "Scotland floods" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=scotland%20floods) shows flooding most months since July this year. In the Southern Highlands, a quarter of November's rain fell over 48 hours triggering landslides which again closed a busy route for the third time since 2007 (http://ecowarriorme.blogspot.com/2011/12/rest-and-be-thankful-but-not-about.html). Only today has the road opened fully (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-16154878). Engineers have been talking about the idea of establishing a national water grid to pipe water from wetter parts of Britain to the increasingly dryer south east but this has problems of its own - not least the massive energy required to pump huge volumes of water hundreds of miles. When we get very short bursts of very intense rainfall like we have seen over the past few months it is difficult to collect it and it carries a lot of silt. There are also ecological issues with transferring water from one catchment to another as it can change the characteristics of the receiving water course due to differing mineral contents, thus affecting ecosystem. Short of moving people from the south east to wetter parts of the country, it may be the only long term solution, despite the drawbacks. Chris.
[...] only that, but fracking seems to contaminate water supplies with carcinogenic chemicals that stay in the system for decades, if not longer. The data is [...]