Re: Water
With the Quabbin Reservoir at 85% capacity (a ten year low at least) and with many cities and towns around Boston in much worse shape during this latest drought, I thought it a good time to discuss our water supply and delivery and when we might need to cap regional growth, import water from the North, build new reservoirs, turn to large scale desalination, or all of the above.
We have backup reservoirs that are never used except in an emergency when supply from the Quabbin is disrupted. Sudbury Reservoir, Lake Cochituate, Chestnut Hill, and the others connected by the acqueducts are still maintained as backup supplies despite being taken offline 80 years ago as
primary supplies by creation of the Quabbin. The only issue with those is that they are currently set up for emergency, not auxiliary, use and thus aren't treated. You may remember a couple years ago when that pipe main at Wachusett burst and the emergency supply had to be activated; the water stayed on, but it wasn't drinkable without boiling. Those sources would be fully usable in auxiliary capacity if they were hooked up to treatment facilities, but we're a long way away from needing to consider those measures.
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Re: severity of droughts. . .
We can't draw false equivalences between a New England drought and a California drought, because the causes and behavior are very different. California has the Sierra Nevada bedrock limiting the water absorption of local ground vs. New England glacial mush. So much of the West is terraformed desert without local aquifers, which is why there is so much reliance on a small handful of reservoirs for such vast distances around. Over-drawing the reservoirs is their primary cause of "The Water Wars", because areas of large population density don't have aquifers of their own.
Here snowmelt and small streams through the glacial mush gives pretty much everyone an aquifer that replenishes to *some* degree seasonally. Northern New England isn't in a drought at all right now, so we are getting some groundwater replenishment from a wide swath of Maine and northern New Hampshire + Vermont. It is not at replacement-level from what Massachusetts is actively losing to the drought, but it is at least a race of moving targets unlike Lake Mead where everyone's fucked if they overdraw the Colorado River watershed for a period of too many years. We have a much more geologically elastic water supply here.
The global weather patterns that cause droughts in the west aren't the same as the ones that cause them in the east. The wintertime
El Niño/La Niña cycles have opposing effects on the Pacific Northwest vs. Southeast, and Southwest vs. Great Lakes. They usually only affect winter temperature, not precipitation, in the Northeast. It takes some very specific and rarer/less oft-repeating variations in those cyclical ocean patterns to move the winter drought map over New England and cut off the snowmelt or rain supply from the higher elevations. We had just that this past winter, but it's threading a fine line that statistically doesn't happen as often as an El Niño/La Niña cycle screwing the West/Upper Midwest/South with the wrong intensity at the wrong time. Climate change is of course going to make those more likely in the future, but climate change also plays the percentages. It's the El Niño/La Niña's that are going to get way more extreme first.
Over here our drought patterns tend to skew more to summer, not winter, as result of blocking high pressure ridges over Ontario and Quebec. That's what we've got right now: pockets of big drought west and east of Lake Champlaign with a lull in the middle, and the Upper Midwest soaked in more rain than it can handle because that's where all the cold fronts normally bound for here are getting blocked. It's bad, but the skew to summer makes the effects look worse than it really is because it's amplified by time of year when reservoir replenishment is at its lowest and lawns/gardens are growing at their fastest. It is not, however, the kind of structural deficit it'll take years and years to climb out of like the Cali drought unless we have a multi-year slate of dry winters. Dry winters are far worse for us than dry summers. We've only had one anomalous dry winter so far, so it's far from a pattern.
This is currently only the worst drought in 10 years...which is not saying very much because the 21st century so far has been pretty wet here. There were a couple during the 1980's that were much worse and coincided with multiple dry winters. The worst in recorded history was the mid-1960's Northeastern drought, which is ranked as a Top 5'er for the entire U.S. over the last 100 years. Yes...Top 5 on a list that includes the Dust Bowl and the 2010's Cali drought. Although a repeat of the 60's drought today would cause only a fraction of the economic damage, because that was the last time the Northeast was producing any economically significant agriculture.
Basically, it's far far from panic time. The biggest adjustment we have to make as a society is the one we've known about all along: stop dicking around and start caring about state-of-repair on those 19th century water mains that leak like a sieve. We lose more water from infrastructure that's 50 years past replacement date than we do from overconsumption or under-innovation on the supply side. Dead-unsexy infrastructure renewal grunt work...decades upon decades of it. Quit screwing around and git-'R-dun.
Also, the one place that is most vulnerable to a disruption in groundwater is the Cape, which has one aquifer and a majority of residents getting their potable water from wells (including some town-supply pipes that are just distributed from larger wells). Much greater pains need to be taken against contamination of the Cape Aquifer and leakage from any distributive pipes tapping directly into it. And if there's any place where some disaster modeling should occur, it's in what to do if a climate change event hits the Cape Aquifer so severely for a number of years that auxiliary supplies are necessary. But the Cape is the one exception in New England where if the local supply dries up, the people are fucked. Everywhere else has pretty robust auxiliary reserves.
Next, you're just taking the same jaundiced look at the sustainability of postwar sprawl-urbia. Not that we're anywhere near as bad as the West Coast here, but does the car-centric suburban office park that has its lawn sprinklers going all day have a sustainable future when that "greenspace" [four-letter word variety] isn't being used for anything? Go throw that on top of the pile of all the other sustainability questions about those piggishly anachronistic sites. And do it with commercial properties like that before fighting the fight with the homeowner in Sudbury who over-waters his lawn, because poor water use goes hand-in-hand with poor land use. It's all wrapped up in the same diminishing returns of sprawl.
