Yesterday, the Strawberry Moon went dark at 2:32 in the afternoon. So today begins the Hay Moon. I’m not sure how much hay-making we’ll be doing in New England. Apart from the storms of the past week, it’s been wet since early June, and before that it was very dry and very cold. In the first paper published since the storm — Saturday — half the articles were dedicated to this disaster of a growing season and it probably long-term effects on food, particularly natural animal feed, in other words, hay. This past weekend more storms rolled through New England, this time with wind and a few tornados down near the coast. This is all likely to increase costs for food, both throughout the Northeast, a to a lesser extent, nationally because this is where all the apples come from. It’s also having serious effects on water systems, many of which are overwhelmed or just broken after all these intense storms.
The round of storms that came through New England on Sunday mostly stayed east of Vermont. It was rainy and damp most of the day, but the rain was a light drizzle. So all the warnings for further flash floods were unnecessary. I know that it’s better to anticipate something that doesn’t happen than it is to be surprised by something that does, but I wonder how many people are starting to ignore all the warnings because some didn’t come true. I think that’s a human tendency, one of the reasons ‘crying wolf’ is such a dangerous business. We don’t do a very good job of distinguishing the lies of a bored shepherd from reasoned projections that do not materialize. After a very few rounds of preparing for nothing, we become complacent and stop preparing at all. We do like our ‘normal’.
I hope Vermonters are still on high alert because the water is still high — and highly dangerous. The ground is still saturated. The rivers are still just short of flood stage and moving fast, carrying large loads of debris — like whole trees. It wouldn’t take very much rainfall in a short period of time to send the rivers back into our town centers. Or maybe break the dams this time. The ground is still so fluid and unstable that hillsides continue to slump even when it’s sunny, and enormous holes keep opening in the roads. There are jokes the world over about potholes so large that a VW Bug will get lost in one. Some of the craters in our roadways now are large enough to swallow a front loader, because that actually happened this week (no injuries beyond shock). And these holes are unpredictable and sudden, one minute a slightly cracked layer of concrete, the next a gigantic sinkhole. We are driving on karst. Well, others are driving on karst; I’m trying not to drive much at all.
Another warning that I hope Vermonters are still heeding is the water boiling advisory. In the initial storm, water systems in many Vermont communities were contaminated with flood waters, carrying all manner of microbes and toxins. Then, after a couple days of intensively pumping water from buildings, it stormed again on Thursday, and this overwhelmed the drains. In my town, a main burst and sent water rushing back into Main Street. The hardware store that had only just emptied out nine feet of floodwater from its basement was inundated with three feet of sewer water. So we’re still advised to boil washing and drinking water, and this advisory will probably remain in effect for another few days. The water systems have to stabilize before the water can be tested for pollutants, and that stabilization doesn’t seem to be happening. In fact, it’s supposed to rain for much of the week. Maybe not flood, but enough to keep the stress on the storm drains.
We also have to worry about mold now. Even if it’s not visible on damp porous surfaces, we’re being advised to assume it exists anywhere that flood waters inundated structures. The town’s Facebook page — where all the most recent information is being posted — says any fabric or wood pulp products, from carpet to upholstery to books and photos, should be tossed because there is no hope of cleaning it. I recycled several boxes of books, all of which had sentimental value, because water got back into the garage on Thursday and covered the books in filth. Most were so saturated I couldn’t separate the pages, and all of them were coated in road run-off, a sludgy mud that reeked of oil from my neighbor’s antique car. But even worse were the several dozen boxes of paper records that came out of my employer’s basement on Friday. Those bins spent a week marinating in foul floodwater, and all manner of things were visibly growing on the boxes.
I’m lucky that no water came into my house without first filtering through many feet of soil. It would be horrible to get mold in the basement. I’d probably have to rip out any wood in the basement, including the first level subfloor and supports. Or just condemn the house. I’m not sure what my insurance would cover. Mold is so hard to completely eradicate in a wood structure that often there is nothing to be done but complete replacement. And a house this old might not be worth it to the insurers, nor even my mortgage lenders. I suspect I would have no choice but to take the replacement money and pay off the loan, leaving me with nothing. This is a very common story in all kinds of disasters, one that has left many thousands homeless.
So I’m running the basement dehumidifier non-stop right now, and I broke down and bought a window air conditioner for the second story that doubles as another dehumidifier. I also have fans moving the air around in most rooms. I am not clearly winning the battle against moisture. My indoor weather station says the air is 75% humidity. But I’m also not losing. There is no indication that the wood is wet, never mind rotting.
But all this has made me think hard on what it means to be resilient. Maybe not self-sufficient (because I don’t really believe in that term) but able to weather all this weather. There are hard lessons in all this water, things that have bearing on all scales, from my house to my town to my region. To be able to withstand an energetic climate, we have to plan, we have to build resilience into our daily living. This means not only designing our communities so that any essential structure or system sits well out of range of flood waters, but we also need to build redundancy into our water systems. A human body can go without food for quite a while. With only rudimentary shelter, we can tolerate extremes of heat and cold. But we can’t live for more than a few days without fresh water intake. In high heat or vigorous activity, both common in times of disaster, dehydration and death can be a matter of hours. If we have just one system for obtaining this essential need, we are living with dangerous fragility. And it’s likely that we won’t be living long in such circumstances. So we need redundant water supplies.
It is good policy to always have two reliable sources for water, and these days, the municipal system might not be considered reliable. In wet climates, water treatment plants and pumping stations are easily overwhelmed in disasters. In arid climates, wells and surface water sources are running dry and becoming increasingly concentrated in pollutants, both natural and human-caused. We often think that water-stressed regions are deserts. But as my town shows, communities can be water-stressed in the middle of a flood. In fact, water-stress often peaks when weather is very wet because pollutants easily foul the water systems. Most water treatment plants are located on or near sources of surface water, for obvious reasons, but this means any flooding or saltwater incursion will infiltrate the municipal water system first. So perhaps a better redundancy policy is to have two water supplies in addition to the public or municipal source — because that main source will be the first to fail in times of stress.
Those main sources are already failing even where the weather is congenial. Nearly all water systems pull water from wells, from groundwater not from surface water. We tend to think that these wells are more insulated from surface conditions, less polluted and less subject to weather. But this is not the case. Wells are failing in all climates. This is mainly due to increased pumping that drops the water table below the depth of the well, but it is also due to increased industrial pollutants, increasing sea-water incursion, and rising concentrations of natural pollutants such as salts and minerals.
The relationship between the groundwater that feeds a well and the surface water that is fed by rain is complex. Generally, the groundwater table intersects the surface wherever there are surface bodies of water, and the water table slopes downward, deeper, away from surface water regardless of surface topography. So usually, water flows down from lakes and rivers into groundwater bodies. We call this recharge because water from the surface, ultimately from the atmosphere, becomes groundwater. But not all water percolating into the ground reaches the groundwater. Most rainwater never penetrates more than a few feet, and in that top layer, most water is almost immediately taken up by plants and fungi and other soil organisms.
But even if there is water beyond plant and soil needs, it can’t enter groundwater just anywhere. Groundwater is not merely water in the surface layers; it is bodies of water under the surface, often deep under the surface and usually held in place by some very specific configuration of rock. There is usually an impermeable layer that prevents the water table from rising to the surface. (Yes, water always flows down on the surface, but this is not true underground. Water under the surface not only flows with gravity, it flows to lower pressure, and the surface is always much lower pressure than anywhere underground. So subsurface water also flows up and sideways and wherever it can to get to lower pressure.) The impermeable rock layer stops flow in both directions, keeping groundwater in the ground and preventing recharge from the surface.
In some places, like the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, the water table is higher than the river. This is because the river is cutting deeper into the surface and is leaving the old water table hanging. Water flows out of the groundwater reservoirs and into the river, and there is hardly any groundwater recharge from the surface. In fact, there is groundwater loss. Groundwater is recharging the river — rather quickly — because water is flowing downwards — the way it wants to flow — and to a place of lower pressure — the way all things want to flow. So the loss of water from groundwater to the river is rapid and substantial.
Now, under the impermeable layer there must be a permeable layer that allows for water to collect and flow. Groundwater is not pooling in open caverns underground, though that is possible. Groundwater collects in and flows through buried, but still porous, sediment as well as certain kinds of sedimentary rocks. Sandstone, which has quite a lot of pore space and mineralogy that doesn’t interact much with water, is the best groundwater medium. But water can also flow through denser rocks like old igneous and metamorphic rocks, those that don’t have natural pore spaces in their structure but have developed interconnected cracks and holes through time. The thing to remember is that water usually, but not always, flows from surface bodies of water to the groundwater in specific locations with specific geology. Because of this, rainfall doesn’t always flow into groundwater, and a good rain may not do anything to recharge a well.
Groundwater in many places in western North America, particularly in the Great Basin, is not being recharged. In many places the groundwater table is higher than surface water, as it is in the Rio Grande Valley (for the same reasons). But it is also deep water, buried under thick impermeable layers. In much of the North American continental interior, groundwater was last recharged when there were enormous lakes from glacial melt at the end of the Pleistocene. Some water from those lakes flowed into groundwater, but as those lakes evaporated, layers of dense clay, salts, and other impermeable deposits were left behind on the surface. So the groundwater was buried and sealed off, and it has not seen much recharge in the last 12,000 years.
All this is to say that if we are pumping water from these places it is not being replaced. And we are definitely pumping water. Much of the continental interior would not support large human populations without groundwater pumping. Large-scale agriculture would be impossible in many of the places we think of as the country’s bread basket. Some places would be uninhabitable. We are taking water that was stored up thousands of years ago to accommodate human settlement where human settlement is imprudent. This water is not being replaced. It takes no great powers of prophecy to see that this is not going to end well — and that it is going to end. Given the rates of well drawdown and failure across the region, it’s probably going to end soon. So back to my point that a resilient household needs at least two reliable water sources… If you live in this region, you probably can’t rely on wells, neither private nor municiple.
But it is increasingly true that you can’t rely on wells anywhere. Groundwater is vast. There is thirty times more freshwater held in groundwater than rivers, lakes and other bodies of surface freshwater. And yet wells are failing everywhere. Much of this is due to over-pumping, taking more water out of the well than flows in from groundwater. This happens even in places where rainfall is plenteous and recharge is possible. Wells are running dry all over New England because we’re taking more than can be replenished. Now, we’ve had some ugly droughts, but we’ve also had years with well above-average rainfall. So why aren’t the wells getting filled back up with water? Why isn’t there groundwater recharge?
This is a case of too much water, too much surface flow. If the rivers are running fast, if lakes are overflowing their banks, if water can’t seep into the subsurface in the places where groundwater intersects the surface (remember, this is pretty much only at normal surface bodies of water, not just anywhere), then there is very little flow into the ground. Rushing water will not recharge groundwater and refill wells. It is more likely that rushing water will flood wells from the surface, filling wells with dirty water. This is what happened to many private wells around my town. This is often worse than a dry well because once pollutants enter a well, the water is useless. Worse than useless, it may even be toxic. And it doesn’t go anywhere; on human time-scales a polluted well is forever. (For this reason, intentionally fouling a well earns hefty punishment, even death, in nearly every human culture but late-stage capitalism.) In any case, floods may fill a well with surface water, but floods rarely recharge groundwater. In a highly energetic climate, one that vacillates between drought and flood, groundwater does not get replenished. In such a climate, heavily pumped wells or even wells near a heavily pumped location, are not reliable water sources.
There is another fragility in pumping. While it can be done with wind or water driven turbines, most well pumping — and all pumping in large systems — is done with electricity. And again, while this electricity can be generated with localized turbines or solar panels, most electricity for well pumping comes from the grid. So water is dependent upon a functioning electrical energy system. When the power goes out, so goes the water. Water is also dependent upon the fuels and systems that feed the electrical energy system, most commonly natural gas. When there are pressures on fossil fuels, this affects the water system. Furthermore, water from wells or surface sources all must be treated, and nearly all large-scale water treatment systems use huge amounts of electricity. Even the water filtration system on my farmhouse well required continuous electricity, as well as a fair degree of added salts (though there are charcoal filtration systems that require no energy and probably do a better job of filtering the water). The general rule is no power — which is quite common in times of stress, including flood — no clean water. This is a highly unreliable way to supply water, one that is almost guaranteed to break down in times of stress. As we’ve seen happen. Frequently.
So as we are building out resilience in our living spaces, we need to build in better water security, including at least two reliable sources of clean freshwater. In places where the water system is already stressed, such as places where salt water is infiltrating the groundwater (Florida) or where pumping is greater than recharge (Kansas) or where industrial pollutants are high (nearly everywhere), it’s best to have several back-ups, at least one of which is completely independent of the water source(s) of the grid system. This is very difficult, but it is essential. Without a continuous stream of clean water, we will not survive.
I am boiling water and I’ve bought some bottled water. And I don’t like this sense of vulnerability. It is not sensible to depend on something that breaks. So I am considering ways to reduce the water fragility here. I can capture rainwater for some uses, like laundry and garden. I could store clean water in a tank, filling it up when the taps are flowing and using it periodically, regardless of need, to keep it fresh. And there is an emergency supply. There is a natural spring in the woods above my house, well above most sources of pollution around here. It is strong enough to flow year round with many gallons per minute. Not an inexhaustible source, but a sufficiency in time of need. If things get dire, this spring could supply my neighborhood with enough water to get by, though it is work climbing there and hauling the water back home. Still, it is there and it is well insulated from the floods.
These are paths available to me. They are specific to me, but they can be generalized. If you would make your water sources more secure, look around you. Most of the places that humans live now were settled before water systems became so fragile. There are probably still ways to access water outside the grid, even allowing for a few decades of intense pollution and overuse.
On the other hand if your community depends entirely upon fragile water — or, worse, no clean freshwater is possible at all — then you need to move now, to someplace that has at least two reliable sources. Because without water, there is no life. And at those stakes, you always want a back-up plan.
©Elizabeth Anker 2023
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
