boognish_bear said:
1
The $174 billion quoted here is spread out over 50 years. The previous projection was $80 billion.
Yes. We have water problems, but not a lack of water. The deficiency is the lack of infrastructure to bring the water from where it is to where it's needed. One of my rolodex sources is a guy in the infrastructure dept at BRA , the son of a dear friend. He and other sources of information on water are telling me that this session or next, Lege will adopt a water policy to justify the funding to start transitioning water systems away from ground water sources (and to start tapping & piping as yet unused groundwater reservoirs.
As we see in so many of these DC discussions, DC critics see a headline and engage in confirmation bias without actually reading the article carefully to understand what it says. The link does not say "we're out of water." It says stuff like:
"Population growth, extreme weather, and economic development needs
are all increasing demands on our infrastructure, and the state is going to need more water, sooner," Kirkle said. "This is all
while water projects are becoming more costly and complex because the easiest and cheapest local projects have already been developed." Translation: most water systems, particularly rural systems, are based on wells drilled in the geographic center of a CCN. That made a ton of sense when they were first developed 50-199 years ago. Such minimizes the amount of pumps & pipes needed. Short runs of pipe, 2-3 miles long, which minimizes the pumping requirements. And the artesian water is already well filtered, easy to purify. Problem is, those well are overtaxed. They're now declining. And nearly all of those CCNs do not have the revenue base needed to run a new pipe 6-10 miles to collect water from a new source (in most cases a river) nor the more powerful pumps to move the water that distance, nor the more complicated purification systems need to treat "dirtier" surface water. I mean we're talking about systems that have 500-1000 meters generating less than $100/mo per meter on average. No way they can float a $100m water project. So they're stuck, unless they get help.
The Brazos River dumps
5.4 BILLION gallons of water into the Gulf every day. Every drop of it is owned by someone via right or a contract. Very little of the Brazos is used because it is almost brackish with respect to treatment. You have to desalinate and remove other dissolved solids or your purification plant will gum up with scale. That's. a $30-50m spend before the purification even starts. Takes a BIG entity to finance that. I can show countless examples of small CCNs which literally touch the Brazos yet cannot use a drop of it because they cannot afford the equipment to do so (see above). so their wells drop feet or inches every year and they can't do any thing about it. That's where the DataCenters are a godsend - they bring the tax base required to develop the infrastructure necessary to overcome those infrastructure limitations.
And then you have lots of cases like Corpus where they are literally surrounded by water but failed to act in time. They finally put together a plan to desalinate brackish water from the bay. Then the environmentalists sued them and stopped the project, because Corpus was planning to discharge the super-salty refuse back into the brackish bay, potentially changing the ecosystem into a salt water system thereby destroying plants & animals depending upon brackish habitat. All Corpus had to do was spend a little more money to pump the waste water into the Gulf. But they short-armed it. And now they're screwed. Not really a water supply problem. Just bad civil administration.
We do not have a shortage of water.
We have a shortage of water pipe.
Read the article again. That's what it actually says.
