Water Shortages Top Arizona Issue, But Not On Ballot: Report

Science is on the ballot in Arizona and across the country in the Nov. 6, 2018, midterm election. You won’t see referendums on the ballot, but natural and environmental disasters like the California wildfires and hog feces spills in hurricane-ravaged states raise the stakes in the midterms.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime,” Bill Holland, the New Mexico policy director for the League of Conservation voters, told Popular Science, which put together an inventory of the top scientific, environmental and technological challenges by state.

Governors are on the ballot in 36 of 50 states, and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the 100-member Senate will also be decided. Popular Science said candidates are actively campaigning on some issues, like opioids and fossil fuels, but silent on others. Still, regardless of the outcomes of the individual races, Congress and state legislatures will have to confront them, magazine said.

In Arizona, water conservation has taken on renewed urgency after a prolonged drought. The state gets its water from two large reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, that store water from the Colorado River.

“But a triple whammy of prolonged drought, this past winter’s paltry Rocky Mountain snowpack (which feeds the river’s lower basin), and years of overuse by cities, farms, and factories have left levels low enough to risk a water shortage—the first ever—within the next two years,” Popular Science wrote.

Lake Meade, the largest water reservoir in the U.S. provides water from the Colorado River to Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico. Its water level is expected to dip to 1,080 feet above sea level by the end of the year, just 5 feet shy of the the threshold to trigger a shortage. If that happens, “Arizona and Nevada, who have the most junior rights in the basin, would face the biggest cuts. Grand Canyon State water managers recently began drafting a drought contingency plan to soften the blow through conservation and other measures,” the magazine wrote.

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Water quality is a big issue across the country. States in the Chesapeake Bay watershed have been asked by the EPA to submit specific nitrogen-reduction plans. In Iowa, farm runoff contributes to the massive algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico — called the “dead zone” — that chokes off oxygen to marine life, threatening that region’s seafood industry. Farm pollution is also a big issue in Arkansas,

The water crisis in Flint, where 100,000 residents were exposed to dangerous levels of lead after a swtich in the city’s water source, is a big issue in the Michigan governor’s race. And in Kansas, where an investigation by the Wichita Eagle newspaper found that hundreds of residents of the Sunflower State drank and bathed in water tainted with dry-cleaning chemicals, voters are pressuring elected officials to rescind legislation that directed regulators to stop looking for contamination and “make every reasonable effort” to keep sites off the EPA Superfund list.

Oil and gas drilling threaten the caribou of Alaska and Delaware’s tourism industry. Oklahoma has seen a whopping 13,000 percent increase in earthquakes over the past decade, an uptick that corresponds with expansion of oil and gas exploration, especially fracking. Pennsylvania, which sits on the richest natural-gas deposits east of the Mississippi River, is also trying to figure out what to do about fracking.

Infrastructure, access to the internet and climate change — especially in coastal states threatened by rising sea levels — are issues in many states. And in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, residents are steeling themselves for the next storm as they struggle to recover from the the pummeling they took during the 2017 hurricane season. The local Climate Change Council says the island is unprepared for intensifying storms, droughts and what could be a 2-foot rise in the sea level.

YOUR TURN: If you could tell Arizona politicians one thing about water conservation, what would it be? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Photo of Hoover Dam at the Lake Mead Recreation Area in Arizona and Nevada by Moritz Wolf / imageBROKER/Shutterstock