Superacueduct will help cure water woes
Published on Sunday, June 21st 1998 on The San Juan StarMan,... and woman, of course..., needs water. So does all of nature. But few understand the true value and the magic of water. In the whole solar system, only Earth has water in all its three physical phases at the same time. Only on this planet is there vapor, ice, and liquid water side by side in nature. The Sea, for example, is a gift so rare that only on this planet has God put one there. Although our oceans cover only 70% of the planet, they hold 97.5% of all our water. Polluted with salt. OK for manatees, but not fit for human use, according to E.P.A.’s Water Quality Criteria. Not potable. We can’t drink 97.5% of all the water out there.
Puerto Rico, lo and behold, is a small island. It has no receding glaciers, no offshore icebergs, no snow-capped sierras. It only has a lot of people: the highest population density in the hemisphere, second only to Barbados. Puerto Rico is earnestly trying to solve its water woes. But it cannot. Environmentalist groups and the courts –even the highest court– are opposed to water woe solutions. Does the problem have a solution? Or is the solution the problem? Let’s do some hard arithmetic. Pull out your calculator.
A unit of measure commonly used in estimating water resource volumes is the acre inch. Simply put, the acre inch is the volume of water you could hold in a pan one acre in size, and one inch deep. This pan would hold 27,154 gallons of water: one acre inch. If you measure Puerto Rico in acres, the island is about 2,215,090 acres in size. If you had one inch of rainfall over the whole island, and if you could hold it before it all evaporated or spilled into the sea, you could have 27,154 gallons times 2,215,090 acres, or 60,148,553,860 gallons of water. If you could only store it or hold it.
Thank God, however, Puerto Rico’s annual average rainfall is not just one inch. It is more like 75 inches. If you multiply all those acre inch gallons on all those acres by the 75 inches of rainfall in a year, you would come up with our potential yearly rainfall water resource: no less than 4,511,141,539,500 gallons. Round off to 4.5 trillion gallons. That is our potential resource, if we could store it, keep it from running into the sea, and keep it from evaporating. Oh, yes, and keep it away from plants and trees, which would evapotranspirate it into the atmosphere.
If you divide the average yearly rainfall volume by 365, our daily average potential volume of rain is 12,359,291,889 gallons. If by magic we could build a funnel in the sky the size of Puerto Rico, trap all our rainfall in it and pour it into one lake, only Toa Vaca, Cerrillos and Caonillas have the design capacity to hold one day’s worth of rain over the whole island. Dos Bocas would fill its design capacity in 19 hours’ worth of rain. Carraizo would fill to design capacity in only fifteen hours.
Now let’s look at the demands that we would put upon that water resource. By census, Puerto Rico’s 1996 population was 3,782,862 inhabitants. By arbitrary whim, let’s say that each one of us consumes 70 gallons of water per day. No one drinks 70 gallons, but we flush toilets, shower, wash cars, sprinkle lawns, wash clothes, cook, and so on. Seventy gallons per day per capita is a common ballpark standard in some manuals. If we multiply our 1996 population by 70 gallons per day, our population would consume 264,800,340 gallons of water daily. If we multiply the daily consumption by 365, our yearly consumption of water would be 96,652,124,100 gallons. Round off to 96.6 billion gallons.
Now comes the acid test. If we divide our potential yearly resource by our yearly consumption, we discover that we have a resource 46 times greater than our consumption. We should all be drowning in water! Forty six times the water we need! Even if we choose to double the per capita consumption to 140 gallons a day, we would still have twenty three –23– times the water we need! (Acueductos often uses 100 gallons per day as per capita consumption, or 400 gallons per dwelling unit of four.)
Yet when a gate fails at Carraízo and the lake drops a few meters, we have a "national" crisis. The end of the world is near. And if Guajataca drops below the stand pipe, there is mass water rationing. Apocalypse now. Even with an ample potential surplus of a water resource!
Whatever happened to fixit? To technology? To know how? To let’s do it right, for a change? Whatever happened to all those good things that our engineers learned at Mayagüez?
Let’s face it. Where do we have the most water storage? South of Arecibo. Where do we have the most water users? In the San Juan megalopolis. Well, let’s bring the Arecibo water to the megalopolis! That would certainly fix it for the megalopolis! More rain will come!
But that solution is a no-no! The environmentalists have opposed the supertube, and the Supreme Court boss is still lobbying to get enough judicial votes to tear down the pipe that has been built.
If the Supreme Court orders to demolish the supertube, the Court must file an Environmental Impact Statement. Why? Because an order to demolish the supertube is a major government action requiring an EIS by law. Because destruction has a greater environmental impact than construction. Because no existing landfill has the capacity for the demolition debris that will result from the destruction. Because a new landfill will have to be permitted, and that new landfill will require a site permit and an EIS. And because the alternative to destroy and delay needed infrastructure will eventually adversely affect the quality of life of all residents of Puerto Rico.
If the Supreme Court has to obey the Environmental Law, then checkmate, Judge! Let’s see your EIS.