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The oil of the 21st century
BY PATRICK GARMOE
Daily Herald Staff Writer
Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006
Suburban sprawl spurs traffic jams, but new roads eventually relieve bottlenecks.
New homes bring more
kids to crowd classrooms, but new schools ease the squeeze.
As bulldozers continue
to stretch the suburbs, however, another predicament grows, unseen yet inevitable.
By the time today's
toddlers graduate from college, among their top concerns will be a scarcity of a simple yet almost irreplaceable commodity.
Water.
TO READ MORE CLICK HERE: Oil of the 21st Century
A source deep in the Earth
By Patrick Garmoe
Daily Herald
Staff Writer
Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006
When
most people in the Fox Valley and western Lake County turn their faucets, they tap into a process that began decades before.
More
than 100 years ago, water pouring out of suburban faucets this minute started its trek with a fall from the sky — in
western Illinois, Wisconsin or even Minnesota.
After
hitting Earth, the water seeps down, sometimes hundreds of feet below the surface, and then heads east.
Over
months, years, even centuries it creeps toward Chicago’s suburbs.
Water
pressure and slopes in the Earth pull and push the water into aquifers, layers of rock filled with water.
In the
suburbs, wells reach down into those aquifers and pump the water up to pipes, and then to homes from Lake in the Hills to
Batavia.
This
might sound strange to some, but it’s not as odd as another popular myth. TO READ MORE CLICK HERE: A SOURCE DEEP IN THE EARTH
Some gaze west for water
By Patrick Garmoe
Daily Herald
Staff Writer
Posted Monday, September 04, 2006
The standard
response to low-performing wells has long been to sink more wells.
Growth,
however, concentrates people and water demand, and more wells increasingly is not the answer.
Experts
say the discussion needs to tilt toward piping water from unpopulated areas to supply the needs of an ever-growing suburban
population.
“As
the area develops, there will be more areas where you have to literally import water into this area, for there to be sufficient
water,” said Larry Thomas TO READ MORE CLICK HERE: Some gaze West for water
A mirage called Lake Michigan
It
might appear to be an ideal solution for all water problems, but money and geology can throw cold water on the dream.
By Patrick Garmoe
Daily Herald
Staff Writer
Posted Monday, September 04, 2006
How can
this be?
How can experts warn of impending water shortages,
yet the Great Lakes, the world’s largest single source of fresh water, flourish nearby?
Forget aquifers and wells — why can’t
everyone just tap into Lake Michigan?
Because history, geology, law and, of course,
money all stand in the way.
Lake Michigan supplies water to Indiana, Wisconsin
and Michigan as well as Illinois.
We, however, live alone under legal limits on
how much water we can draw from the lake because we’re the only state that takes much more water than we return.
TO READ MORE CLICK HERE: LAKE MICHIGAN A MIRAGE
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