Water Shortages

Water Shortages Water has been one of our natural resources that we have used throughout time in many different ways. We have developed ways to make it more available and use it to create energy. However, because we have made it more available, we have developed issues that waste our good clean water, take old pipes that have been used to transport water across cities for example. Because they are so old, they tend to waste about 7 billion gallons of water every day (CQ Report, 2010, p.531). And due to natural events like low rainfall and snowfall, we have been through many droughts which have almost emptied our reservoirs (CQ Report, 2010, p.531). Although we humans can’t create or destroy water, we can make it unusable by flushing our clean water into the ocean leaving it salty or when toxic-waste pollutes our groundwater it becomes unusable and unsafe for household use (CQ Report, 2010, p.533). Before we know it we will have more unusable water than we do useable and our resource will simply vanish unless we develop a technique to change that. Therefore we ought to make our water shortage a nationwide concern and promote desalination to broaden our water range. Before getting into that, let’s take a look at the background and current situation of our water supply. In 1860 our first water lines were laid to wash garbage out of public streets and as it began appearing in other parts of the town, wealthy Americans began to install running water in their homes(CQ Report, 2010, p.538). In the 1870s, scientists discovered microorganisms that caused diseases; the microorganisms came from people dumping waste into our clean water and various pollutants from factories and industries. By the 1920s, cities started filtering their water with sand which then led to chlorination cleansing. During this time, the dust bowl happened causing a major drought, which led the government to allow the farmers to pump their irrigation water from underground resources (CQ Report,