Americans who first dismissed New York’s plight as a local affair, and in fact welcomed the misfortune that had brought the proud city to its knees, rejoiced but briefly. They found that their checks were no longer honored; checks had to be cleared through the banking system’s clearinghouse in New York City. Credit cards likewise became worthless, and when cash ran out, citizens across the land were reduced to barter. Economic life became a shambles, and in its train came the usual consequences: a breakdown in public order, a precipitate rise in robbery, theft, random brutality, rape, and looting.
Meanwhile, in the city itself, the incidence of communicable disease soared, and diarrhea became endemic. Hepatitis and cholera were also reported with increasing frequency, and dehydration became the most common cause of death among infants and the aged.
The epidemic scare caused a new stampede. Terminals were jammed with the panic-driven. Limited to one suitcase per person, passengers abandoned other belongings, created fast-rising mountains of luggage beside which foresaken children whimpered for parents who in the confusion sometimes lost them forever.
Soon the streets were crammed with cars crawling bumper to bumper as their owners joined the hegira to any city or village with a water supply of its own. Bridges, tunnels, sidewalks, and footpaths were clogged with fleeing New Yorkers.
New York’s fast-dwindling population was learning the meaning of anarchy. Police and firemen had joined in the general flight, leaving lawlessness in their wake. The mobs that attacked and ransacked warehouses where Clorox was thought to be stored were only the harbinger of widespread looting and violence.
Fires raged unchecked. Whole city blocks were consumed as the few remaining firemen, unable to reach fires through stalled traffic, watched helplessly from afar.
It was the New York National Guard that, descending upon the city in tanks and armored personnel carriers, began the immense task of bringing order to the city, fighting fires, shooting looters, and providing emergency services to the old, the afflicted, and the solitary.
The men in uniform blasted whole city blocks into rubble as firebreaks. Gas lines that had fueled the conflagration were shut down. By and by, the menace of fires burning out of control diminished, and the clouds of greasy black smoke that covered the city like an imam’s robe began to dissipate.
By Christmas Day 2004, the City of New York was a city of devastation. Whole sections had been destroyed by fire. Streets were littered with burned-out cars and sidewalks with shattered furniture, television sets and children’s toys, garbage, and waste paper. And here and there a huddled lifeless body testified to the ferocity of what had become a savage civil war.
6. HEARINGS
4 JANUARY 2005
“I CALL AS FIRST WITNESS DR. CARL GARBOLOTTI.”
A husky man with a thatch of reddish hair and a bushy guardsman’s mustache took his oath and a seat at the witness table.
“Would you state in what capacity you appear before the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, Dr. Garbolotti?”
“I am testifying as chief hydrologist of the Interior Department’s Office of Land and Water Resources, Mr. Chairman.”
“Do you wish to make an introductory statement?”
“In view of the widespread media coverage of the catastrophe which has befallen New York City, sir, I think it is by now common knowledge that the United States is facing water problems of gargantuan dimensions, so perhaps my testimony can be most useful in supplying specifics.”
Congressman Castle nodded, making sure that his eyes did not meet the banks of television cameras clustered at the rear of the committee room. It was his first appearance on all four national networks simultaneously, and he must take care, as William S. Grayle had cautioned him, to project an image of calm, confidence, and control. Grayle had provided Castle and his witness with detailed scripts, which they had thoroughly digested but not memorized in order to preserve the illusion of spontaneity.
“Very well, sir,” said Castle. “Of all the water problems that face the nation today, which would you characterize as the most pressing?”
“No question about it, that would have to be the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer.”
“Kindly explain that, Dr. Garbolotti, in words a layman like me can understand.”
Garbolotti studied his thumbnail.
“To start with, an aquifer is sort of nature’s underground water reservoir, made mostly of limestones, sands, and gravels. This mixture is porous, and the interstices fill with water filtering down through the soil.”
“Water from rains?”
“Rains or runoff. This water can be withdrawn by means of wells, drilled or dug. Now, a few million years ago when the Rockies were as high as today’s Himalayas, the Ogallala was a vast alluvial plain created by silt runoff from the Rockies to the west. Rains and snows and glacier melt fed this plain. For thousands of years this plain, which today underlies the Republic of Texas panhandle northward through Oklahoma, Kansas, western Colorado, Nebraska, and southern South Dakota, soaked up water. During the next few million years, the plain was covered by a couple of hundred feet of soil deposits. Meanwhile, weather patterns changed. Rainfall dropped to less than thirty inches a year, sufficient for grass to support herds of antelope and buffalo but not enough for anything except subsistence farming.
“Then, late in the nineteenth century, sodbusting pioneers drilled wells and found water under that parched land. There was, in fact, a quadrillion–a million billion– gallons of it. They watered their stock, and irrigated their fields, on a small scale. But it wasn’t until after the great drought of the 1930s that they began to mine this fossil water in a big way.”
“Mine, you say?”
“To mine is to extract a nonreplenishable resource such as coal, iron, or water from the earth.”
“But surely, rains replenish the Ogallala’s–ah–fossil water.”
“Unfortunately, very little. The Ogallala is capped with a layer of impermeable stone, and rains run off it right into the sea, along with huge quantities of topsoil. Its farmers have made the plains states the granary of the world, but the day is soon coming when the water will be gone, and the great plains will become a new dust bowl, this time for perhaps another million years.”
“But that’s, that’s–”
“–a fact, sir. It’s a disagreeable fact our fanners and the government that props up farm prices have known for years but refused to face. Back in the 1970s, hydrologists estimated that at the then-current depletion rates, the Ogallala will be dry by the year 2020.”
“Surely things can’t be that bad,” protested the chairman.
“I’m giving you facts,” said Dr. Garbolotti stubbornly. “If you want fiction, call in the economists.”
“But what are the alternatives? Surely there must be some alternative to the depression you are forecasting.”
“Not until we find new sources of irrigation water.”
“And where will we find it?”
“I don’t know. At present there aren’t any.”
The next day Congressman Castle called Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Land and Water Resources Jacob Jonas.
“Do you agree with Dr. Garbolotti’s pessimistic vision of the future for the great plains, Mr. Jonas?” he asked.
Mr. Jonas removed his glasses and made a show of polishing the lenses. He smiled deprecatingly.
“Dr. Garbolotti sometimes gets carried away, Congressman. Actually, two projects, both eminently sound, are waiting only for congressional sanction and funding to solve this problem.”
“Would you kindly describe them for the committee?”
Jonas pushed his glasses onto his balding forehead and opened a file.
“Alternative one proposes a series of canals, lined and covered to minimize losses through seepage and evaporation. They will be constructed by the Corps of Engineers from the headwaters of the Arkansas, Platte, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers to distribute those waters among the plains states. A favorable gradient would allow the water to flow southward and eastward by gravity; unfortunately, that gradient does not exist. Therefore, tunnels will have to be blasted through the intervening Rocky Mountains, intermediate reservoirs excavated, and pumping stations installed to raise the water to higher levels.”
“How long would these canals be?”
“The shortest is 375 miles; the longest, 1,140.”
“And the diameter of these tunnels and canals?”
“The canals will vary according to terrain and subsoil,” said Mr. Jonas, “but the tunnels will be on the order of six meters in diameter.”
“And the cost, in time and dollars?”
Jonas hesitated. As a high-echelon bureaucrat, he felt himself above such grubby details. He consulted his notes.
“Well, Congressman, this is a long-standing proposal. Back in 1970, cost estimates ranged from $3.6 to $22.6 billion. Today, thirty-five years later, because of inflation we would have to multiply the figures by nine, to the $160 to $200 billion range. If done on a crash basis, it would take twelve years.”
“By which time,” said Castle curtly, “the Midwest would become a new dust bowl.”
“That, sir, is a matter of opinion. I myself–”
“You mentioned a second alternative.”
“Yes, sir. NAWAPA.”
“I beg your pardon?”