One thing is certain: whatever the cause, it is a global disaster in the making. Coastal areas are expected to start flooding within a decade or two. FEMA has upped the cost of federal flood insurance in Florida to the point where homeowners at risk — required by their mortgagees to have flood insurance — can't possibly put their homes on the market. The terminology used during the housing bubble for a home where the mortgage amount exceeded the value of the house was that the home was “under water.” Now that is a literal threat! Don't look for help from Congress this year – it's an election year! Now Floridians are suggesting that some insurance companies should start selling private flood insurance to Floridians who can't afford NFIP premiums. Any takers yet?

But real wars are happening, usually between states with the battles occurring in the courts. Georgia wants to realign its border with Tennessee so that it can tap into the Tennessee River for water in North Georgia. Alabama and Florida are suing Georgia for hogging the water in the Chattahoochee River — we Atlantans are taking too much of it, and the oysters in Apalachicola Bay aren't getting enough fresh water to survive. As an oyster-loving Atlantan, that is serious news! But consider that the populations of both Florida and Atlanta have more than doubled in the last couple of decades, and the reasons for the need for water are clear.

It is even worse on the western side of the nation. Water from the Colorado River and other rare rivers in the area supply every major city in the region: Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the like. By the time the Colorado River reaches Yuma, Arizona, it is just a muddy trickle, and Mexico gets none of it. According to Michael Wines in a front-page story in the January 6 New York Times, the flow from the Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell, will be increased so that the water level in Lake Mead, created by the Hoover (Boulder) Dam between Nevada and Arizona, will rise, as the water intake tunnels for the Southwest are just about above the lake's level. A new tunnel is being built, but it may be too late, or too little. Meanwhile, Los Angeles continues to grow, as does Las Vegas, and Florida will soon replace New York as the second most populous state, and both Arizona and Nevada are not all that far behind. Well, after last winter's blast of cold in the Midwest and Northeast, who can blame the migrating snowbirds?

“If Lake Mead drops below 1,000 feet above sea level, millions of people will lose their source of water,” writes Wines. “Lake Mead currently stands about 1,106 feet above sea level, and is expected to drop 20 feet in 2014. A continued decline would introduce a new set of problems. At 1,075 feet, rationing begins; at 1,050 feet a more drastic rationing regime kicks in, and the uppermost water intake for Las Vegas shuts down. At 1,025 feet, rationing grows more draconian; at 1,000 feet a second Las Vegas intake runs dry.”

But just as “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” (a reference to using money intended for the Westminster Abbey Church of St. Peter to pay for the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral in London after the 1666 fire) taking more water from Lake Powell is not a viable solution either. Wines continues, “There, a 100-foot drop would shut down generators that supply enough electricity to power 350,000 homes. The federal Bureau of Reclamation's 24-month forecasts of water levels at [Lakes] Powell and Mead do not contemplate such steep declines. But neither did they foresee the current drought.”

Something Fishy in the Midwest's Rivers

Overabundance and shortages are not the only troubles in America's water. When my wife and I were on the CPCU Seminar trip to The People's Republic of China in 1984, there was usually a big fish on the food turntable placed in front of us at meals. (It was on some sort of a “lazy susan” that had a chicken's head hanging over the side so that when it was rotated around the table the chicken's head would knock over somebody's water glass — not that we were drinking the water anyway, but…. If you've seen the ending of the movie Christmas Story where the Bumpus's hound dogs stole the turkey and the family had to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, you can picture the scene.) Those well-nailed-together (i.e., lots of bones) fish were Chinese (or silver flat-head) carp. The New York Times reporter, Michael Wines, reported the day after his story about Lake Mead that those carp, which first escaped from a Southern fish farm where they were imported to devour algae, have migrated up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and may now have escaped from the Illinois Barge Canal into the Great Lakes.

They are hard to catch, these carp, but if they multiply as expected in Lakes Michigan, Huron and Erie, well, you may be eating carp instead of those Apalachicola oysters. The voracious carp eat one tenth of their weight a day in plankton, depriving other types of Great Lakes fish (like perch, walleye and bass) of their basic food source. Bon appetit!

Solutions Hard to Find

America's water problems are not new. Westerners have fought water wars for a couple of centuries. The War of 1812 was largely over who would control the Great Lakes. Consider that water (as well as oil) is often the source of war in sub-Saharan Africa, and it may well be a factor in the Mideastern turmoil we attribute to fundamentalist Islam. In my home town of Cleveland, water pollution was a national disgrace — but the Calumet in metro-Chicago wasn't much better. When the chemicals spilled from a storage tank on the Elk River east of Charleston, West Virginia, this January, it polluted the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers all the way beyond Cincinnati. Then a Duke Energy coal ash pond leaked into the Dan River in North Carolina. Water is more expensive than oil; if you doubt that, price a bottle of water at the local gas station. It will probably take eight bottles to make a gallon, and at more than $1 per bottle, that's probably three times the cost of the gas.

Some water-short cities are considering a special tax on swimming pools; others will offer tax cuts if you dig up your water-thirsty lawn. There's lots of water — soon to be too much water — in the ocean, but we can't drink it. Perhaps some day some scientist will figure out how to run our cars on water without using expensive energy to convert it, if there's enough water to do that. Or we'll figure out how to take salt out of the ocean so that deserts can bloom instead of blowing dust and sand at us. Some day…. Until then, the best we can do is save our snow each winter and use it on our gardens in the springtime. Oh, and learn to like carp.