Water Resources And Their Role In Development

Water is relatively abundant in the Mountain State, given ample rainfall and being located in several watershed headwaters. That's not always true, of course, and in the Eastern Panhandle, where development has been significantly greater, there have been some drought periods when water became quite scarce. It's also not true of the states that are downriver of us, causing some of them to cast a covetous eye in our direction.  For example, I worked on a flow augmentation project for one client, located in another state, who had to make provision for maintaining the flow in the Potomac River during times of drought, in order to be granted a permit to withdraw water. One way to do that was to maintain water in West Virginia that could be released during low flow periods.

The Wharton School of Economics, at the University of Pennsylvania,  has done a report on water availability and how it affects business decisions.  Valuing Water: How Can Businesses Manage The Coming Scarcity? may overstate the present problem a little, but it does explain the challenges inherent in managing water:

We live on a water-stressed planet. As the Alliance for Water Stewardship points out, “Current demand for water from cities, agriculture and industry is already unsustainable in many regions, yet is projected to increase significantly in coming years.” According to a report by the 2030 Water Resources Group (“Charting Our Water Future”), just 20 years from now, global water requirements will be “a full 40% above the current accessible, reliable supply.” The report concludes that a third of the world’s population will live in places where this deficit is larger than 50%. 

The facts underlying these projections are sobering. We all learned in school that we live on a watery planet. But over 97% of that water is salty; less than 3% is fresh and drinkable. And nearly 70% of the fresh water is frozen in the form of glaciers, ice and snow. Underground aquifers hold almost all the potable water available in liquid form. The rate of depletion of the these aquifers — which sustain agricultural and corporate users and provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of people — more than doubled, according to Geophysical Research Letters, from 33 trillion gallons per year to 75 trillion gallons, in the four decades between 1960 and 2000.