As reported in a recent New York Times op-ed, “water poverty exist in nearly every state” across the United States.  This fact came as a surprise to George McGraw, founder and executive director of Digdeep, a non-profit focused on providing clean water to people around the world.^[1]  As McGraw explains, protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation are a reminder that access to clean water remains a problem for many Americans; however, “long-running water emergencies fester in near-total obscurity elsewhere across the country, many of them on native reservations.”^[2]

 

 

Approximately 6 percent of Native Americans and Alaska Natives live in “water poverty.” This includes 24,000 households that lack access to running water or basic sanitation; and 188,000 households “in need of some form of water and sanitation facilities improvement.”^[3]  In Thoreau, New Mexico, which is part of Navajo territory in the American Southeast, much of the existing water supply is not potable. Home to approximately 170,000 people, many of the reservation’s inhabitants lack proper equipment to sustain the water supply; and the only reliable source of water is allocated from surface water and shallow aquifers—many of which are poisoned by uranium mines.^[4] 

 

Such problems, however, are not exclusive to reservations. As McGraw explains, roughly a half a million U.S. households “lack basic plumbing amenities like hot water, a tap or toilet.” For instance, in the dry lands of the Coachella Valley, farm workers suffer from the effects of contaminated drinking water as well as open sewage.

 

 

California’s six-year drought has only exacerbated the existing water poverty.  During the past two years, for instance, Sebastian Mejia, a farmer in the Central Valley, has had to “haul buckets of water to his home so his family could take showers, flush the toilet and wash the dishes.”^[5] 

 

A wet winter ameliorated water scarcity across the state and the valley—“a national symbol of the drought”—and regulators recently responded by ending the statewide, mandatory 25 percent cut in water use.   Since the mandate was dropped, there has been a marked increase in Californians’ water use.^[6]  Government officials and nonprofits have expressed concern at the annulment of the measure, which “stopped the implementation of a growing set of effective urban conservation and efficiency programs,” and also eased the pressures on utility companies and households to improve their “water-use efficiency.”^[7]

 

Felicia Marcus of the Water Resources Control Board reported to the New York Times that the state may have to “reimpose mandatory cuts if conservation continues to decline and California endures another dry winter.”^[8]

 

 

Meanwhile, drought in Cuba may soon lead to the construction of five new desalination plants.^[9]  Ines Maria Chapman, president of Cuba's National Institute of Water Resources, has reportedly stated that the first plant will be commissioned in the city of Santiago de Cuba this year, with a daily capacity of 2,160 cubic metres of water.^[10]

 

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