La Paz Is The Red Queen; Running Ever-Faster In A Post-Glacial, Post-Water World
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La Paz has now entered a post-water world, where strict rationing is a way of life for many. For months, some of the city’s neighborhoods received water only once every three days for a few hours. (In mid-January, it increased to every other day.) When water does flow, people rush to fill anything handy—bathtubs, buckets, trash cans—so they can drink and cook and flush until they run out again. The crisis has cut most Bolivians’ meager daily use (an average 48 gallons compared with an American’s daily 100-gallon habit) by two thirds. To cope, people go without nonessential water activities, like laundry and bathing.
Even when water flows, it too often resembles a failed urine sample; it’s streaked with angry orange particles, thanks to pipe gunk and reservoir sediment. Still, piss water is better than no water, which is what you get in the higher-elevation poorer neighborhoods, where the water pressure is just too low. To survive, most everyone must buy at least some bottled water, a once unthinkable luxury for the poorest people in South America. And they must also rely on the Water General.
Every morning, his troops drive to a dwindling reservoir to fill their fleet of 113 cisternas, each the size of a fuel tanker. They dispatch it gallon by gallon to communal tanks that have popped up on street corners and in plazas. When they arrive, crowds materialize, lugging blue, yellow, and white garbage cans, and keep coming until the trucks are drained.
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A soft-spoken professor at the Institute of Hydraulics and Hydrology of the Higher University of San Andrés in La Paz, Ramirez did not want to be the Cassandra for this catastrophe. But the science left him little choice. In 1998, he began measuring Chacaltaya, a glacier an hour’s drive from the city, which held a world-famous attraction: the world’s highest ski resort. Ramirez expected shrinkage. But the reality surprised even him: Just 15 meters thick, the glacier was disappearing at a rate of at least 1 meter a year. Ramirez calculated it would be gone by 2015. In 2005, he went to city officials to warn them and discuss the consequences for a city that relies on glacial runoff for water. He laid out a dire timeline. The bureaucrats politely listened but were unconvinced. They told him: “Maybe it will happen, but maybe it will not.” It turned out Ramirez was wrong—but only in his optimism. By 2009, six years ahead of his calculations, the glacier had vanished, leaving nothing but a brown stain. The revelation hit the worldwide media like a storm. But La Paz’s travails are greater than glacier melt. In recent decades, temperatures on Altiplano rose by about 2 degrees Celsius. In the past 15 years, annual rain and snowfall declined by 20 percent. Local water officials say that will fall at least another 10 percent by 2030.
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Brown diamonds - With its glacier gone, the world’s highest ski resort now sits on a barren rock pile.
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http://www.popsci.com/la-paz-without-water#page-4
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