The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Author:Charles Fishman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2011-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

IN AUSTRALIA, IN UNDER TEN YEARS, one vitally important point has been made bluntly clear: Despite their utter reliability, our water systems are anything but robust. They are durable. But they are rigid, locked into their own assumptions of where the water will come from and where it will be needed. They have no flexibility, no adaptability. When the rain they rely on falls somewhere else, when the river stops flowing, when the underground aquifer we’ve been tapping starts to fall, we look around in astonishment and betrayal. What just happened?

Our water habits rely on those same assumptions of water availability. Abundant, flowing water is its own invitation to indulgence. That’s true in nature—who can resist putting a hand in the flowing current of a creek? And it’s especially true in a world where literally no signals tweak us about our water use, either as we’re using it or even in our monthly or quarterly water bills. The astonishing monthly electric bill is a sharp reminder of why we use the air conditioning carefully in summer; the price of a gallon of gas encourages us to consider cars with good mileage when it comes time to buy a new one.

But we’ve set up a system that treats water differently. A short shower is virtuous, but hardly rewarding, whereas a long, steaming bath—using in twenty minutes the water many Australian cities hope is a full day’s supply—is alluring, easy, and relaxing. Why not? You could take a bath four days a week without actually knowing how much water you were consuming; you could take a bath four days a week without noticing a change in your water bill. Indeed, despite water scarcity from one end of Australia to the other, even in cities like Perth and Toowoomba confronting crisis conditions, the typical home water bill remains less each month than the cell phone bill. Imagine how water habits would change if our bathroom and kitchen faucets simply displayed a small, digital readout showing how many gallons we were using, and had used from that faucet that day? It would be fascinating, it would be fun, it would save a lot of water.

In Perth, Jim Gill retired as CEO of Water Corporation in December 2008, and was succeeded by Sue Murphy.19 “You cannot overstate how hard it is to follow Jim Gill,” she says. “He is the water god in this state, and in some ways in Australia.”

Murphy shares with Gill a career steeped in engineering and construction. She spent twenty-five years at one of Australia’s leading engineering firms before Gill hired her to manage construction of that first desal plant. And she, too, knew nothing about water when she joined Water Corporation. “For me,” says Murphy with a smile, “water was just a source of large construction projects—dams, reservoirs, pipelines.”

But as CEO, Murphy’s mission is completely different from Jim Gill’s, although she feels it with at least as much urgency. She wants to confront the problem Gill didn’t have time to confront: Perth’s water culture.

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