That is a very sad story.

From your link

> Now, water suppliers across our region are now racing to fix the contamination.

I'm confused between 'racing to fix' and 'permanently contaminated'? Is it that it will get better but never be fixed completely?

The challenges will be great and felt by all in some way.

I live downstream from W.L.Gore in Maryland, the creator of this miracle substance, and a few years ago I myself began asking questions. I came to learn that they just dumped the stuff in the stream for decades and that stream is the source of my family's water via the town system. I had my water tested and came back at 70 ppt of which I then spoke to some doctors. This inspired me to write up and speak before the political board of my town and they did not believe me. Hilariously however someone knew because they stopped publishing PFA numbers in our water reports in 2022 but as a result of my speaking a few months later they brought in Inframark Corp who runs our town water and sewer. After they spoke to the town board at the meeting the town board was no longer smiling nor doubting my words. They were told that they must filter the drinking water and the operation will capex at about 4 MM USD with an opex for filters of around 2 MM USD annually. The town board was floored, but wait there's more, Inframark then told the board that they also must filter the sewer too since it must be removed as liquid products we use have pfas as well as RO systems which just re-concentrate it back into waste water. This sewer system capex was quoted at 10MM USD minimum and no opex stated since the plant already runs and filters costs were not known at the moment.

My story is real world for nearly the entire East Coast of the USA but since the problem cannot be seen few know about it or even concern about it. A town close to me, Newark DE, just announced a few months back going to spend tens of millions to filter their water with taxes ballooning from that and more. While a town to my West stated needing to spend about 20 MM USD to filter theirs. This is an absolute issue and I'd wager, polymarket conveniently makes it easy now, that this post ages well with time, or maybe I should say unwell. I have also been speaking with a lawyer in a big state that is running a class action and his information of course should be blasted on the news as more and more folks continue to consume liquids from plastic containers. Veritasium did a great piece on it a while back too but I have yet to have my own blood tested. For perspective I immediately bought a PFA specific filter and I installed it by extending our existing 3 stage to a 4 stage kitchen water tap at a cost of 600 USD for supplies. I then bought a whole house PFA filter a few months later and installed it too, costing me about 2000 USD in supplies, it is the size of a large compressed air canister so room is needed. I have so much more on this PFA topic but I am already going on too long. Your health doesn't matter until it does and no pill is going to filter this stuff from your organs.

So the problem from the post then becomes: the water that we do have to drink probably isn't safe either.

This leads me to question how many other chemicals we continue to "create" that in time will too show health impacts to many. We are certainly leaving our mark in this layer of soil for some future species to find and ask their own questions about us, such as how smart we really could have been given what they dig up.

Stay Healthy!

The BBC said (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo) that in 30 years, private water and sewerage companies in England and Wales have extracted over 86 billion pounds (~USD $115 billion), while investing very little.

Meanwhile, consumer water rates in those areas increased by as much as 50% in the past year alone.

> Are these profits more or less than the interest to bondholders you'd otherwise be paying?

Apparently rather more

"Earlier this year, Corporate Watch calculated that £2 billion a year could be saved – or £80 per household – if the water supply was in public ownership. The government can borrow much cheaper than the companies and there would be no private shareholders demanding their dividends"

The research is cited in the document if you would like to critique

https://corporatewatch.org/the-severn-trent-takeover-corpora...

Even the Economist and FT are underwhelmed by the performance of many of England's privatized water utilities:

https://www.ft.com/content/bda390bc-8cc4-4fa4-9a90-36af08651...

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/05/the-real-proble...

The frustration I have with this is that the money is there, today but our culture in the US does not understand the value of proper taxation to fund infrastructure and social services in the US.

We waste billions of tax dollars on frivolous pursuits, misaligned incentives and defense contractors rather than investing in communities and infrastructure, and that’s just at the federal level. Plenty of states and localities follow these same patterns then turn around and say they have no money for proper maintenance of civic infrastructure while being bilked by private companies

dunno where you're located, but 32k for sewage and water doesn't seem that terribly expensive if you compare what it would cost for each house to dig a well and install a septic system.

Are you sure that's the big lesson? That wolves don't exist?

To me the big lesson was that wolves do actually exist, and if you repeatedly claim that they are here when they are not, then nobody will believe you when they actually are here.

I don't see how anything you have written would help the reader understand what you took issue with?

You would think so, but this is actually completely wrong. Prawns and fish use the most freshwater per calorie of any food https://ourworldindata.org/water-use-stress. My point about cows reinforces the point on inequality of impact- the Colorado River is vulnerable and arid, yet we waste this water on cows.

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You, me, and everybody else can stop consuming animal products right now, at this minute. Water use is only a small part of the argument- these animals emit tons of carbon, and more than anything else, they use just as much land as there are forests remaining on the planet. I wish we could focus on visualizing the amount of habitat destruction wrought by animal agriculture. 80% of all agricultural land is for animals and the food they eat.

"Marginal" land for agriculture used to be America's Serengeti and now it's a vast, dead monoculture. And let's not forget- these animals feel, and they have a perspective with which they relate to and understand the world, just like we do. If we have a choice, we should choose to not consume products of cruelty which destroy our planet. It's easy.

It would be currently impossible for desalination to meet the immense water demands of the midwest. Water is not the only variable we should consider, either. That land used to constitute an immense, rich ecosystem, and now it consumes water, emits more carbon than the entire transportation sector, and kills billions of animals in the most cruel ways imaginable. Cheese is cruel and wasteful and we kid ourselves if we put our vanity above the needs of our planet and its nonhuman inhabitants

Totally agree. But if we believe in property protection, we shouldn't steal those rights though.

Any temporary payment will not be trusted, since future governments can undo it.

The government should buy the land, and the rights, at full market value, discounted by the value of a new perpetual right to graze what is left after the flooding. Peat bogs are also the best carbon sinks we have, aren't they?

One interesting part of this, is that there are plans to reforest some of these areas (which were deforested perhaps 1000 years ago), and the main opposition to that is from the general public, who like to look at the hills as they are! People are complex...

The problem isn’t just farming in the desert. The problem is all those people living in the desert in the first place. There is a reason the Spanish then the Mexicans did almost nothing to settle and develop California. It was massive water projects by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that made modern California possible.

The water pact is even more specific in that at least WI I believe you have to be East of the subcontinental divide to pull water from Lake Michigan.

Another poster mentioned real estate peaking in a zip code of AZ for having limited access to fresh water. I wonder how long until real estate along the great lakes starts becoming a long term hedge.

We also have a treaty with Canada about the usage of water from the Great Lakes.

There's an even bigger problem if you're talking about the soutwhest in general: huge parts of it are thousands of feet above the Great Lakes. The energy costs of moving water horizontally are probably doable; pumping millions of acre-feet 5k feet vertically are almost certainly not (no matter what energy source you suggest using for this).

> The southwest is structurally unsustainable

Nope. Agriculture in the southwest is structurally unsustainable, that's all.

Of course, for California, that has enormous consequences, but then say California, not "the southwest".

Unfortunate probably cheaper to reroute the lake.

it's hypothetical remember, its just a fantasy solution

> People don't know how to be efficient at scale.

Do you understand how much more food we produce on roughly the same amount of land (globally) than we did 60 years ago? Claiming that we don't know how to be efficient at scale is absurd.

Now, it is true that these production levels are very dependent on a bunch of practices that are likely not sustainable, and that's a serious and pressing issue. But the problem is not efficiency.

Further, as others have noted here (and so have I), it is animal-based food production that uses so much of the water that we use, and that's a choice we've made (particularly in the USA). We could make different choices (and some of us have tried to).

In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.

Groundwater recharge from surface to an aquifer where it "rests" can take up to 1000 years.

We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water

A lot of countries have city wide hot water plants, especially in Northern Europe and Asia, I think you will find them in northern Canada as well . Some places have building wide hot water, not in the USA though.

We have a hot-water-on-demand heater for the entire building. It's about the height of a hot water heater but the radius is maybe 4x and the whole thing looks like it was designed by apple.

This is a commonly stated aphorism which betrays a deep ignorance of the issue. Namely the logistics. If we had Star Trek transporter technology we could in fact solve world hunger. We could take the excess bananas grown in Colombia and drop them outside the doors of hungry people in Nigeria. But we don't. It is very expensive and difficult to transport food and water from one place to another. The world has sent Africa $1.5T over the last 50 years, and yet the number of undernourished people has almost tripled in that time, from 100M to 282M as of 2022. Why?

1. Corruption. I saw this first hand. For every $1M sent into Africa, a very large proportion is confiscated by tribes, gangs, militia, and the government. You can send all the excess food in the world, but there are thousands of people between production and the hungry person who is eager to violently steal it.

2. Africa's population is booming. Thanks, in part, to food aid. Half of Nigeria doesn't have access to toilets. 40% doesn't have electricity. 25% doesn't have running water. Their fertility rate is 5.2 children per woman. We are unintentionally propping up a future catastrophe.

3. Food aid has destroyed local farming and food production. Locals cannot compete with free.

4. Equitable allocation is impossible. There is no hunger score above each person's head. Even if there were, there is no supply chain anywhere in the world which can reliably and repeatedly deliver the necessary food aid to each person in the deepest African jungles. We rely on distribution hubs which are sparse, poorly run, intermittent, and subject to temperature and humidity extremes. This means food perishes fast unless it is ultra processed and packed for durability. Basically army rations. Even those expire after some time. Meaning we can't just take the Colombian bananas and send them around the world. Only certain foods work, and they need to undergo expensive and specialised processing. This entire supply chain is far more expensive than you can imagine.

I will close with my own opinion. While the world could sustain a higher population, it is clear to me that it will result in diminishing quality of life for everyone. Crowded conditions and increasing scarcity are not aspirational goals for humanity.

Water available in Nunavut, Canada is no help to Algeria's water crisis. And the opposite, natural gas available in Algeria is no help to Nunavut energy situation.

Let's concentrate on couple of countries to simplify the discussion: Iran, Egypt, Algeria. Water scarcity there is dominated by explosive population growth there in the last 70 years.

Water is not scarce in general, just yet. It scarce where population is exploding.

I think it's both. Local populations adapt to whatever the local reservoirs can sustain but as soon as an unexpected climate event occurs (such as unusually low rainfall in a given season), the water reserves can no longer sustain the population. See Cape Town (2015-2018), Chennai (2019), São Paulo (2014-2015), California (2012–2016 & 2020–2022), etc.

If the local reservoirs were not already at capacity, or had much more redundancy, these events would have been much easier to manage. Fewer people in high risk areas would in fact reduce the risks of water scarcity.

Why would you leave the question of whether it's true or not aside? If it's false, isn't it a good thing that not many people are ready to admit something false?