Brazil Drought: Fighting over puddles, drilling for water in basements

2015: Financial Times, March 3:  Sao Paulo residents drill under  homes as drought cripples city 

2014: "The standoff in a nation with more water resources than any other country in the world portends further conflicts ..."

Water War Amid Brazil Drought Leads to Fight Over Puddles 

by David Biller and Vanessa Dezem Baida

Bloomberg BusinessNovember 25, 2014

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s Jaguari reservoir has fallen to its lowest level ever, laying bare measurement posts that jut from exposed earth like a line of dominoes. The nation’s two biggest cities are fighting for what little water is left.

Sao Paulo state leaders want to tap Jaguari, which feeds Rio de Janeiro’s main source. Rio state officials say they shouldn’t suffer for others’ mismanagement. Supreme Court judges have summoned the parties to Brasilia for a mediation session this week.

The standoff in a nation with more water resources than any other country in the world portends further conflicts as the planet grows increasingly urban. One in three of the world’s 100 biggest cities is under water stress, according to The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based nonprofit.

“It’s unusual in that it’s two very large cities facing what could be a new, permanent conflict over the allocation of water,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a research organization in Oakland, California. “It’s a wake-up call that even places we think of as water-rich have to learn to do a better job of managing what’s ultimately a scarce resource. Nature doesn’t always cooperate with us.”

While Rio has so far remained mostly unaffected by the country’s worst drought in eight decades, that’s not the case for its neighbor to the south. More than half the Paulistas in a Datafolha poll last month said they had been without water at least once in the previous 30 days.

Resisting Restrictions

Even so, Sao Paulo has resisted restrictions that states like California have enforced, including prohibiting restaurants from serving water except when asked and allowing homeowners to water lawns only on specified days.

Walk around Sao Paulo’s main financial district and it’s common to see shop owners hosing sidewalks and vehicles waiting at car washes. In other parts of the city and state served by different reservoirs that are all but used up, water has already been cut off for days at a time.

[...]
[END Bloomberg report]

Northeast Colombia Drought 2014

After riots, a severely drought-stricken region in Columbia got food and water aid, government promises and, of course, two new wells for a "popular Caribbean tourist city long affected by drought and lack of potable water." For many years it was a major commercial marijuana growing area and major transhipment point for marjiuana smuggled into the USA. It's just that nobodyexplained to the Indians growing the crop that large scale marijuana cultivation on a peninsula is slow suicide. Now the Indians know.  

http://colombiareports.co/colombia-unveils-two-new-wells-drought-striken-north/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-28754687

http://colombiareports.co/relief-comes-525-starving-children-drought-stricken-northeast-colombia/

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Prolonged Severe Drought Across Central America Created Food Crisis Last Year

Bad droughts have struck the region before but as the decades roll along the population, both human and livestock, grow by leaps and bounds while the water supply shrinks faster and faster and industry and agriculture make bigger and bigger demands on water. Same story of course all over the world, but we're seeing a convergence of water shortage-fueled disasters.....

2014: "While In El Salvador crops have been lost in two-thirds of the country"

Dought Hits Food Supplies Across Central America
Associated Press via ABC News
August 21, 2014

Central America is having one of its worst droughts in decades, and experts warned Thursday that major farm losses and the deaths of hundreds of cattle in the region could leave hundreds of thousands of families without food.

The agricultural losses are largely in corn and beans, basic staples of the region's diet, the United Nations' World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a joint statement.

"The impact of the prolonged heat wave is having on nutrition and food security in parts of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua is very worrisome," the agencies said.

The food agencies said the situation needs to be addressed immediately or what is already a food crisis could worsen in the coming months.

In Guatemala, about 170,000 families lost almost all of their crops, while in El Salvador crops have completely been lost in two-thirds of the country.

In Nicaragua, where the drought has killed more than 2,500 cattle and left 600,000 people in a state of malnutrition, the government is asking international food agencies to help it feed 100,000 families in parched areas.

Nicaragua's Institute of Territorial Studies says it is the worst drought since 1976. Prices for corn and beans have quadrupled since May In the country of 5.9 million people.

"There are communities that have no water to drink because of the drought, much less to grow food. We're letting poor people die of hunger. There isn't (food) production or assistance," said the Rev. Elias Barrera, director in Nicaragua for the Roman Catholic charity organization Caritas.
[END REPORT]
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India's Worsening Water Crisis. Can the Andhra model be extended with success?

"The 2030 Water Resources Group, made up of private companies, argues that the “water gap” (between insufficient supply and excess demand) in Asia will only close once countries limit the water-intensity of their economies."

India's Worsening Water Crisis

By Ram Mashhru

for The Diplomat
April 19, 2014

In northern India, groundwater supplies are being depleted faster than natural processes can replenish them. According to The World Bank, India is the largest user of ground water in the world, after China. If something is not done soon, an estimated 114 million Indians will soon face desperate domestic, agricultural and industrial shortages.

What is causing this? “Human activities”: primarily wasteful water use (mainly agricultural over-exploitation), a lack of sustainable water-management policies and insufficient public investment. These failings have each been exacerbated by rapid population growth, increasing population density and climate change.

South Asia is a desperately water-insecure region, and India’s shortages are part of a wider continental crisis. According to a recent report authored by UN climate scientists, coastal areas in Asia will be among the worst affected by climate change. Hundreds of millions of people across East, Southeast and South Asia, the report concluded, will be affected by flooding, droughts, famine, increases in the costs of food and energy, and rising sea levels.

Groundwater serves as a vital buffer against the volatility of monsoon rains, and India’s falling water table therefore threatens catastrophe. 60 percent of north India’s irrigated agriculture is dependent on ground water, as is 85 percent of the region’s drinking water. The World Bank predicts that India only has 20 years before its aquifers will reach “critical condition” – when demand for water will outstrip supply – an eventuality that will devastate the region’s food security, economic growth and livelihoods.

Analysts fear that growing competition for rapidly dwindling natural resources will trigger inter-state or intra-state conflict. China and India continue to draw on water sources that supply the wider region, and a particularly concerning flashpoint is the Indus River Valley basin that spans India and Pakistan. The river’s waters are vital to the economies of areas on both sides of the border and a long-standing treaty, agreed by Pakistan and India in 1960, governs rights of access. But during the “dry season,” between October and March, water levels fall to less than half of those seen during the remainder of the year. The fear is that cooperation over access to the Indus River will fray as shortages become more desperate.

Public health is also seriously at risk. The demand for safe drinking water in India is already high, and the situation will only grow more acute as levels drop further. The World Health Organization reports that 97 million Indians lack access to safe drinking water, while 21 percent of the country’s communicable diseases are transferred by the use of unclean water.

In their 2013 Outlook Report, the Asian Development Bank calculated India’s water security based on household, economic, urban and environmental needs, and concluded that India’s water prospects are “hazardous.” According to the report, a comprehensive and immediate program of investment, regulation, and law enforcement is necessary. Private-sector groups agree.

The 2030 Water Resources Group, made up of private companies, argues that the “water gap” (between insufficient supply and excess demand) in Asia will only close once countries limit the water-intensity of their economies. In Indian industry, dam construction for hydropower plants and large agribusiness landholdings account for the majority of the country’s water demands. 

Parts of India have pioneered successful solutions. The southwestern state of Andhra Pradesh has introduced a highly effective program of self-regulatory water use. Community water-management schemes and awareness campaigns among farmers have seen levels of water consumption fall significantly.

The “Andhra model” provides a set of easily replicated and implemented programs for the consideration of other state governments in India. Self-regulation is a vital short-term solution. For India to be water secure, it would need to ensure long-term access that is affordable, equitable, efficient and sustainable. Major industrial, agricultural and domestic water reform is therefore necessary.

[END REPORT]

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Desalination Mirage

The following passages are from John Vidal's slambang razzledazzle February 19, 2011 report for the Guardian, What does the Arab world do when its water runs out? The report, still as fresh and important as when Vidal gathered data for it, is worth reading in its entirety, although here I'll focus on just those passages relating to desalination. 

Before launching, howevrer, I do want to mention that Vidal was covering so much ground that he couldn't drill down, if you'll pardon the expression, into every situation he outlined without making the report book length. But this means he completely omitted all the bad news related to the following practice he mentioned:

The more drastic response to the [water] crisis is to shift farming elsewhere and to build reserves. Saudi Arabia said in 2008 it would cut domestic wheat output by 12.5% a year to save its water supplies. It is now subsidising traders to buy land in Africa. 

The Saudi government sure as hell is buying up African farming land through proxies. It's called "villagization," which takes a prize for Orwellian language.  Villagization is exactly the opposite of what it sounds like; it's displacing African farmers from their villages to make way for foreign-owned agribusiness.

Saudis aren't the only ones doing this; Indian agribusiness is also engaged in villagization in Africa. This isn't even talking about China's agribusiness scooping up huge chunks of Ukrainian farmland or the Saudis having turned fertile regions in Pakistan into their plantation-- while many Pakistanis go hungry and thirsty.

Villagization is a kind of pussyfooting plantation colonialism made possible by hardscrabble governments corrupt as the day is long being bought up by the foreigners.

But it could be the scandals that started bringing villagization to public attention happened before John Vidal researched for his report.  In a later post I'll look at one of the scandals, which got so stinky it couldn't be covered up any longer. For now, and for readers who think desalination was a viable answer for chronic water shortages:

Meanwhile, says the UN, farm land is becoming unusable as irrigation schemes and intensive farming lead to waterlogging and desalination.

Some oil-rich Arab countries are belatedly beginning to address the problem. Having drained underground aquifers to grow inappropriate crops for many years, they have turned en masse to desalination. More than 1,500 massive plants now line the Gulf and the Mediterranean and provide much of north Africa and the Middle East's drinking water – and two-thirds of the world's desalinated water.

The plants take salty or brackish water, and either warm it, vaporise it and separate off the salts and impurities, or pass it through filters. According to the WWF, it's an "expensive, energy intensive and greenhouse gas-emitting way to get fresh water", but costs are falling and the industry is booming.

 Solar-powered plants are being built for small communities but no way has been found to avoid the concentrated salt stream that the plants produce. The impurities extracted from the water mostly end up back in the sea or in aquifers and kill marine life.

Only now are countries starting to see the downsides of desalination. Salt levels in the Arabian Gulf are eight times higher in some places than they should be, as power-hungry water plants return salt to an already saline sea. The higher salinity of the seawater intake reduces the plant's efficiency and, in some areas, marine life is suffering badly, affecting coral and fishing catches.

Desalination has allowed dictators and elites to continue to waste water on a massive scale. Nearly 20% of all Saudi oil money in the 1970s and 80s was used to provide clean water to grow wheat and other crops in regions that would not naturally be able to do so.

Parks, golf courses, roadside verges and household gardens are all still watered with expensively produced clean drinking water. The energy – and therefore water – needed to keep barely insulated buildings super-cold in Gulf states is astonishing.
[...]

Actually desalination has allowed everyone who uses it, not just dictators and elites, to waste water on a massive scale.  It's just that elites created a big mirage in the desert out of desalination.

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USAID and Monsanto in India

The debate over the safety and utility of genetically modified seeds is only one part of the issue.  This article suggests that rent-seeking behavior is now completely out of control on a global scale.

Criminalising Dissent in India against GMOs and Monsanto

by Colin Todhunter

Global Research

June 20, 2014

Before being voted out of office this year, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance administration sanctioned open-field trials of 200 GM food crops in India. Monsanto’s shares rocketed as a result (1). This decision prompted Rajesh Krishnan of the Coalition for a GM Free India to state that government was against the interest of citizens, farmers and the welfare of the nation. Instead, it has decided to work hand in glove with the multinational GM seed industry that stands to gain immensely from the numerous open field trails of GM crops.

Filmmaker Mahesh Batt called Minister Moily, who sanctioned the decision, a “corporate mole” and the Coalition for a GM Free India and Greenpeace condemned Moily’s action as “unscientific, anti-people and reeking of vested interests.”

Moily’s decision was set against the backdrop of the Supreme Court appointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) recommending a ten-year moratorium on GM organism approvals till scientifically robust protocols, independent and competent institutions to assess risks and a strong regulatory system were developed. It recommended an indefinite stoppage of all open field trials of GM crops. The Committee insisted that the government bring in independence, scientific expertise, transparency, rigour and participative democracy into GMO regulation and policy.

Environmentalist Aruna Rodrigues points out the risks and drawbacks of GMOs by stating that there is increasing evidence of the health and environment risks from these crops; GM yields are significantly lower than yields from non-GM crops; and pesticide use, the great ‘industry’ claim on these GM crops, instead of coming down, has gone up exponentially. Rodrigues argues that in India, notwithstanding the hype of the industry, the regulators and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), Bt cotton yield is levelling off to levels barely higher than they were before the introduction of Bt (2).

Rodrigues wants to know where is the advantage and why are we experimenting given all the attendant risks. We have hard evidence from every UN study and particularly the World Bank-funded International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge and Science for Development Report, which India signed in 2008. She adds:

“The IAASTD was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed. The report states we must look to small-holder, traditional farming (not GMOs) to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable. Governments must invest in these systems. This is the clear evidence.”  [...]

Plenty more -- plenty -- in the report.  

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A look back at the Snowden Effect

Snowden effect: young people now care about privacy

CyberTruth 
Byron Acohido, USA TODAY 

November 13, 2013

Results of a Harris Poll released this morning show four out of five people have changed the privacy settings of their social media accounts, and most have made changes in the last six months.

What's more, the poll, commissioned by anti-malware vendor ESET, reveals clear evidence that, contrary to what some believe, young people actually do care about the privacy of their online personas.

The ESET poll is that latest proof point of what could, at the end of the day, take hold as a tectonic societal shift: the return of privacy as a social norm. Call it the Edward Snowden effect.

[...]

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Stop bad water management! Drive a Prius!

I'm discovering it's hard to find a news report or editorial on water shortages in the Middle East that doesn't veer into a discussion about climate change.  If the hot air merely contributed to global warming I'd be philosophical. But governments and international organizations that have bought into initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint have taken up a straw man argument that goes like this:

A. There's a water shortage.

B. Drought caused the shortage.

C. Climate change caused the drought.

D. Therefore, we must address climate change.

E.  Thusly, we must reduce the use of fossil fuels.

  

What does that very dangerous chain of reasoning have to do with people in say, Syria, knowing so little about water management that the water table falls below the reach of their well-digging drills?  What does it have to do with not including the evaporation rate in discussions about rainfall statistics? 

I could list hundreds more examples but why bother?  Climate changers look at every plea for sane water management as stealing thunder from the important issues. 

Meanwhile even the most simple tactics for conserving water go ignored.  Which is to say climate changers are helping set billions of people and their livestock on a course to die horrible deaths for no good reason. 

But look on the bright side: billions fewer, right there is a reduction in the carbon footprint.

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Questionable ethics of America's legal marijuana sales model

Beau Kilmer, the co-director of RAND Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center, nailed it in an editorial published in the New York Times in January 2014:

Legalizing the large-scale commercial production, distribution and sale of marijuana, Colorado and Washington states have created an unprecedented situation. Contrary to many people’s assumptions, not even the Netherlands has gone this far. ...  Instead of starting with an approach that lent itself more easily to public health protections, voters in Colorado and Washington jumped right to a market model similar to alcohol.

For some strange reason American marijuana legalization advocates don't like to talk about Portugal, even though the country decriminalized marijuana more than a decade ago.  Maybe the reluctance has to do with the fact that the country never actually legalized marijuana use. Instead, the government treats marijuana use, and the use of other banned chemical substances, as a disease.

So while Portuguese citizens can still be arrested for use of the banned substances, they aren't referred to the criminal justice system. Each person's case is studied by a panel of legal experts, psychologists, and social workers. Then a treatment program tailored to the individual is developed.

In this way the country halved drug addiction in the population within the space of a decade. 

Of course Portugal is a tiny country with a tiny population -- little more than a million people -- whereas just one small state in the USA, Delaware, has a population size that approaches Portugal's.  This means the United States has a drug addiction problem that dwarfs Portugal's. Just the number of documented heroin addicts in the USA is more than the entire population of Portugal.
  
Yet there's no question that Portugal took a public health approach to dealing with substance abuse and that it's paid off.  And they did it while decriminalizing use of the substances -- a vaunted goal of Americans who advocate marijuana legalization at the state and federal levels of government.

Whatever public health programs the marijuana-licensing American states have adopted to deal with addiction to marijuana are ad hoc affairs, tacked on after marijuana became legalized in the states -- after marijuana became legally available through a large number of outlets, after Colorado and Washington states officially acknowledged that marijuana was addictive for a large number of users.

And these states jumped straight to a marijuana retail distribution model that didn't actually occur with alcohol until fairly recently in the USA, which was to make marijuana available through many sales outlets.  I think by about 2012 there were more "medical" marijuana dispensaries in Denver, the capital city of Colorado, than Starbucks coffee shops.

But looking at the alcohol sales model in the USA, for decades after alcohol prohibition ended alcohol was only available in special sales outlets.  Today in the USA beer and wine can be bought at convenience and grocery stores and 'big box' retail stores that sell groceries.  Yet American law enforcement officials trace the rise in teenage alcohol abuse to the product's wide availability and see marijuana use among young people following the same trajectory.

So if the rationale for legalizing marijuana in the USA is chiefly compassion, the people who've translated this impulse into a business model have had a strange way of helping those Americans who are most vulnerable to the downsides of using mind-altering drugs.
    
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"Did dinosaurs create the flowers in the fields?"

That was John Batchelor's startling question to paleontologist and dinosaur expert Anthony J. Martin during their discussion one Friday night toward the end of January about Martin's book, Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by their Trace Fossils, which clearly had enchanted Batchelor.
 
I've never had any interest in dinosaurs -- it was more than a decade after it premiered that I took time to watch "Jurassic Park."  But Martin sounded such a happy man, so happy to be spending his life studying dinosaurs, in spite of myself I listened to the interview.

Finally, though, I said, "All right, enough about dinosaurs." 

I was just about to switch off the radio when Batchelor popped out with that question.  So then I had to wait through the station break to learn whether dinosaurs had created the flowers in the fields. I'm glad I mustered the patience.  In ways I could never have imagined dinosaurs have shaped our world. 

Someday, on a dreary snowy day when I'm suffering from cabin fever, I will search for the podcast of the interview and listen again.  Come to think of it, I'll buy the book and tuck it away for a gloomy day. 

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The Two Immutable Laws

One is the first law of large-scale systems design, as Guru David explained it to me several decades ago: The more a system is utilized, the faster it will break down.  Thus, the paradoxical fact that the very success of a system sows its failure. 

People who design large-scale transport systems such as bridges are very much aware of the law. So they build as many fail-safes into the design as they can in the attempt to ward off a sudden, catastrophic failure of the system.

The other law was explained to me decades ago by a World Bank economist. 

When I asked if the World Bank ran the world he replied that no, it was the IMF that ran the world; the World Bank fixed the world.  But when I then asked how he'd characterize the Bank he replied that it was juggernaut. Sensing a paradox I asked how he squared an engine of destruction with the world's Mr Fixit.

He replied, "Because it's not possible to fix anything in this world without breaking something, somewhere down the line."

The World Bank, he added, had produced proof that this observation was an immutable law.  He was speaking the truth. If the Bank collected reports on every one of the projects it's funded, and published them as a series of volumes, this would be humanity's Book of Bitter Wisdom.

The smartest people at the World Bank are very much aware of what could be termed the Fixit Law.  This is because they've studied hundreds of Bank project reports covering a boggling array of situations. And so they counsel governments that seek development loans from the Bank: break down the big complicated projects into simple little projects.  This way, when a project inevitably generates problems you didn't factor into your calculations, at least you'll have a shot at limiting the damage.

So if one removed human nature from the picture and allowed designers of large-scale systems and the smartest people at the World Bank to run governments, this world could be as close to paradise as it's possible to get on Earth.   

The catch is that just as human nature has never seen a law it doesn't try to outwit, so it hasn't made an attempt to outwit an immutable law that it hasn't screwed up. This explains the many pages of a contract between municipal governments and firms they hire to build big structures, like a bridge.  All the legal language from the construction company's side boils down to saying, 'If you don't conduct timely inspections and repairs for this structure once we've built it, first of all you're going straight to hell and secondly we're not liable.'

Yet no attorney, no sane person, would think to factor in the possibility that, say, some asshole in a governor's political organization would decide to get revenge on a politician by bringing traffic on one of the world's key transport arteries to a crawl, creating the mother of all gridlocks. This actually happened.  Reference Bridgegate.

This suggests there could be a third immutable law in existence, but I don't want to attempt to figure out how it might be worded.

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The Wells of Beirut

"Throughout history, countless songs and poems have celebrated Lebanon’s sweeping and picturesque landscape: snow-capped mountains overlooking a pristine Mediterranean, wandering rivers dividing bustling cities and towns, and mounds of colorful fruits and vegetables on fertile spring-fed lands."
-- From Water in Lebanon:  Matching Myth With Reality

Given its huge water problems these days Lebanon has been saved from a fate worse than death by the collapse of its offshore oil and gas dreams because offshore drilling takes a lot of water the Lebanese can't afford at this juncture in their history.  Yet there's nothing like the prospect of fast wealth to addle the human brain.  Those people thought they were going to get rich.

Same with the Cypriots, by the way, which helps explain why the Cyprus government took leave of its senses and made huge loans to Greece with money it didn't have. Reality finally intervened.  France's Total came up dry in its explorations off the Cyprus coast, in a block that's right next to Lebanon's, and also the price of oil and gas took a dive.  This led to hand wringing among energy experts in those countries but drill down into Lebanon's water problems to see that instead of mourning the loss of a pipe dream Lebanese should be thanking their lucky stars.

However, the World Bank was miffed.  Lebanon's government, also counting their chickens before they were hatched, signed onto a comprehensive Bank plan to solve a chunk of the country's water problems.  After the offshore oil and gas dreams went up in smoke: cancel the plan!  Those plans cost real money and a lot of manpower to put together.  To blow off steam the Bank told the unvarnished truth. From a news report last year at Al-Hayat:

The [Lebanese] government looked into several promising projects to provide a sustainable water supply for the capital and develop the water network.
[...]
Yet these were all vain attempts. According to a World Bank study, the [project failed due to] the concerned authorities’ lack of administrative competence, their negative competitiveness and their overlapping responsibilities and interests — especially between water departments and the Council for Development and Reconstruction.

If the criticism sounds familiar to American readers, reference California's hydropolitics, which were aired in great detail as the catastrophic drought deepened in the state last year. Change the names and locales to find striking parallels not only between California's water crisis and Lebanon's but between all present water crises the world over.

So we've seen this movie before: A region with inadequate water infrastructure and lousy water management gets hit with a big drought. Then there's an uproar about fixing the problems. Then it pelts rain or the snowpack for that year is good and everybody goes back to worrying about something else. Until the great casino in the sky stops favoring human procrastination.

That's what happened last year in Lebanon. On August 24, 2014, Al-Hayat reported on a severe drought in progress in the country (see the Al-Hayat link above). Less than two months later Lebanon's Daily Star headlined a report Rainy week douses Lebanon drought fears.

The same kind of bureaucratic foot dragging and infighting found in California hydropolitics, and the same astounding ignorance, has made Lebanon increasingly dependent on the weather's moods. The difference is that the United States is a huge and wealthy country; other U.S. states can absorb those Californians fleeing a drought that just won't go away. Lebanon, according to Al-Hayat "the fourth richest country in water resources in the Middle East and North Africa," is a tiny country of 4 million people that now hosts many Syrian refugees.
 
Last year, by the time the number of refugees passed the 1 million mark, the country was plunged into a drought -- a severe drought of the kind not seen since 1932.  This meant 27 percent of the Syrian refugees were without potable water, therefore forced to drink unfiltered water -- and tensions rose between drought-stricken Lebanese farmers and the refugees.

Ironically the refugee crisis finally focused Lebanese and the international aid community's attention on the country's water management issues.  An international organization called ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development) announced in an undated Internet press release that it was constructing

10 reservoirs in the district of Mont Lebanon, home to over 200,000 thousand refugees, over the course of 2014. Through the support of UNHCR, these reservoirs have been designed to meet the water supply gaps in vulnerable communities, ensuring that both Syrian refugee and Lebanese families have sufficient access to safe drinking water.

But in a chilling parallel to California's situation, the widespread digging of private wells in Beirut  is generating huge problems.  According to another missive from someone at the World Bank (see above link for Matching Myth With Reality):

Over 20,000 illegal groundwater wells have also been dug across the Greater Beirut and Mount Lebanon area alone. It is where over half of the Lebanese population lives, works, and endures the dramatic winter floods, polluted sea waters, and either poor quality or highly expensive water

Why polluted?  The usual: untreated industrial and human waste dumped off the coast, etc.  But the worst news for the present is that the unrestricted and unmetered well-digging carries the most severe penalties, as those who followed the California water crisis know. From an August 24, 2014, report by Sophie Cousins for Al Jazeera English headlined Lebanon skeptical of 'save water' effort:

Aside from the [water] awareness campaign, the [energy and water] ministry also has said it would dig more state-owned wells and erect more dams "where possible". The new wells are expected to produce between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic metres of water per day.

But Lebanese water resources expert Claude Tabbal, who has worked on water projects in partnership with the United Nations, said that digging new wells was not the answer to the water shortage.

"Digging more wells is particularly dangerous [in coastal places] like Beirut and all other cities on the coast because the practise and over-exploitation of wells leads to the abstraction of [an] excessive amount of water, putting pressure on the aquifer and leading to seawater intrusion and the degradation of the quality of water," he told Al Jazeera.

"This is confirmed by the elevated total dissolved solids and chloride levels in well water samples. Today, everybody in Beirut is complaining about the salty taste of water [from] the tanks."

This reality is evident in the seaside suburb of Hamra, one of the commercial hubs of Beirut. "Hamra has had water shortages throughout the summer, but at my house we haven't because we had a well underneath," said an AUB student who lives in Hamra, who did not want to be named.

"If you don’t have a well underneath your apartment block then you’re [out of luck]; If you run out of water, you order a roof tank. But our groundwater is so salty because we’re now hitting the seawater. It’s gross," the student said.

Nadim Farajalla [associate professor of environmental hydrology at the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the American University of Beirut (AUB)] said this was occurring because wells are being pumped at a higher rate than the recharge rate from snowmelt and other filtration in coastal aquifers allows, meaning that seawater is entering the wells. [...]

What happens if the recharge rate collapses from a sustained lack of rain and snowfall?  The same thing that happens to estuaries when they're overwhelmed by seawater.  The same thing that happens to a well when its water level drops to a certain point.  The water becomes so toxic it can't be drunk by man or beast or crops.
  
The doomsday scenario hasn't descended on Lebanon; the country is home to at least 15 aquifers and several rivers, and as a long as the snow and rain keep returning Lebanese can avoid the worst. This doesn't mean they can avoid the next to worst.
     
Nowhere in the dozen reports I looked at on Lebanon's water issues did I find mention of land subsidence in and around Beirut or anywhere in Lebanon, but it must be happening in Beirut given all the wells dug there and the city's burgeoning population.  The big question would be the rate at which the land is sinking. 

Land subsidence occurs when "large amounts of groundwater have been excessively withdrawn from an aquifer," generally by overzealous well digging. An aquifer, to refresh memories, is "an underground layer of permeable rock, sediment, or soil that yields water."

So it's not only that aquifer water becomes brackish and even toxic if it can't be recharged or replaced fast enough; it's also that the land over the aquifer starts sinking -- and the more pumping, the faster the land sinks. That's why California's San Joaquin Valley now has huge infrastructure problems -- roads, irrigation pipes, canals, buildings, you name it.  The structures are built on land that's been sinking so fast and so much (about a foot a year during the past few years) that it's useless to do repairs on the infrastructure because as soon as they're done, the land has sunk again.

I note that Nadim Farajalla, the associate professor at AUB who spoke to Al-Jazeera, did mention subsidence in passing in a presentation (PDF) to a climate change conference in 2012, saying that land subsidence is a key problem for the northern coastline of the Nile Delta. 

Moving along -- subsidence and undrinkable groundwater are just the windup. Here's the punchline. From a July 28, 2014, Inter Press Service report headlined Drought and Misuse Behind Lebanon's Water Scarcity:

Sheik Osama Chehab, in charge of the Osman Bin Affan Mosque [in Beirut], explains that 20 years ago water could be found three metres under the ground surface.

“Yesterday,” he told IPS, “we dug 120 metres and did not find a drop.”

 ********

Will All-Night Pizza Deliveries Continue in Cairo During Armageddon?

We have it on authority from Islamic State guys who talked with The Atlantic's Graeme Wood over Viennese coffee and pastry that the final battle between good and evil will be fought in Jerusalem or a town in Syria or maybe somewhere else. The details will probably jell the closer we get to the big battle.  But with regard to the end of the world, at least in the Middle East, some of the biggest questions right now are whether Armageddon will interfere with Foreign Direct Investment in Egypt and pizza deliveries in Cairo. 
 
The questions point to a vise which has become readily apparent only in the past couple years, I think, as it's started to tighten.  While Egypt isn't the only country that's caught it's an important case, so I'll summarize the two sides of the vise:  
  
FDI and Water Stress

The new administration in Egypt is trying to woo direct foreign investment. The problem is that the investors aren't interested in backing bingo parlor startups or any other business that isn't a water hog.

Traditional World Bank-IMF thinking, which is accepted by mainstream economists, is that to develop, the poorer countries need to diversify their sources of foreign exchange. In Egypt this means less dependence on tourism and fees for international ship traffic through the Suez Canal.

Yet alternatives invariably translate to a greater strain on the country's water resources, which are already so strained that in 2012 the Global Post seriously asked whether the country would run out of water by 2025.

The World Bank is now very much aware of the problem in water stressed developing countries, and that's probably true for all the major development banks. If they didn't get it before, the data coming from GRACE during the past couple years has been the reality check.

For at least two decades a great deal of focus was on creating sustainable energy sources in the developing countries: how could they put development on a strong industrial base without sustainable energy? But as it happened everywhere else in the world, including the United States, not enough attention was put on creating sustainable water sources.  That's because everyone was wildly overestimating the world's groundwater resources -- estimates built on nothing but blind guesses. The GRACE satellite system has removed the guesswork, but this kicks the struts out from under all traditional economic prescriptions for developing countries -- for development, period.

In theory a way around the problem is for governments in the developing countries to demand that foreign companies setting up shop contribute to helping build up or repair the country's water infrastructures. And insure that their water use in the country is sustainable.

But right now the theory is running into the fact that economists, development specialists, etc., are having to go back to square one and refigure in the face of water realities. Eventually, water shortage crises will force an entirely new concept of development and FDI on governments, investors, and global corporations, but fast diminishing water resources won't wait for these people to get their heads together.

Energy Subsidies and Water Stress

During his 2014 presidential campaign Abdel Fattah el-Sisi exhorted Egyptians to start working harder and get up at 5 AM. 

5 AM? In the morning? I think Cairenes are just getting to bed at 4 AM.  Cairo is the city that never sleeps; it's been like that for a long time but not like this era, in which sleeplessness is served by a huge variety of businesses that use a lot of (heavily subsidized electricity, fuel, and water). It's routine for the many
government employees in Cairo, who can afford to arrive fashionably late for work, to eat the evening meal around midnight or later. And many Cairenes actually do work hard running restaurants and coffee houses, and making pizza deliveries across the city at all hours that were ordered via cell phones.

But when el-Sisi became President last year one of his first acts was to cut back on the government's massive fuel subsidies.  This was met with cheers in many quarters including the IAEA.  It's dawned on people involved with energy conservation issues that it makes no sense to call for cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions while governments subsidize increasingly profligate use of fossil fuels.

The original rationale for the subsidies was to provide the poorest with basic fuel needs.  The catch turned out to be that the measure of "poorest" and "basic" kept expanding over the decades. And it turned out that the well-off in Egypt were the biggest beneficiaries of the subsidies.  (The situation has been the same in virtually all developing countries with heavily subsidized fuel.)

Yet there's a hidden downside to cutting back on fuel subsidies.  There is no question that the subsidies exacerbated the fast rate of water depletion in countries across the MENA, as Shanta Devarajan, writing at a World Bank blog, emphasized in November 2014 (Corrosive Subsidies in MENA).  So, on paper, this is the perfect time to cut back of fuel subsidies because the price of oil and its byproducts have more-or-less permanently retreated from their highs. 

But cutting back means that even with lower oil prices, it can become more expensive to look for water.  Why?  Because as water sources become scarcer, drilling has to be done at increasingly deep depths. With every foot down, the price for drilling gets increasingly expensive.  This is what killed many farms in Mexico during the catastrophic drought in the country in 2012.  Farmers couldn't afford to drill down to the water.
  
That's not the trickiest part of the fuel subsidy vise.  As more people obtained disposable income in the latter part of the 20th Century thanks greatly to increased global trade, they took up lifestyles that fuel subsidies were never meant to address. The same with electricity and water subsidies.

Again, this situation isn't limited to Egypt; it's across the board.  People have been upgrading their lifestyles and the disposable income in increasing numbers. So it's not just bad water management or the big population numbers that worst against stretching water resources to serve the larger numbers.  It's the growing percentage of people who can buy things that even half a century ago very few could afford -- or things which didn't even exist in that era -- and buy them in larger and larger amounts.  All those things are also 'virtual' water.
  
In Cairo the ways in which the subsidies came to be used -- say, to open a restaurant or start a fast food delivery service -- led to a galloping increase in the use of fuel, water, and electricity.  This in turn led to more and more people basing their way of life on runaway use of water and virtual water for nonessentials, many of which need to be rapidly replaced, further skyrocketing the use of water.

The climate and water resources of say, the American northeast mean that the huge population in New York City can still get away with an all-night lifestyle and with buying more and more highly disposable stuff, whereas Egypt's climate and water resources don't allow Cairenes to do the same.
 
So while the basic reasoning behind cutting back on fuel subsidies is sound, this isn't addressing the central issue for the world's most water-stressed countries, including Egypt. The 2012 Global Post report mentioned that Egyptians still have plenty of drinking water, and quoted an observer who noted that Egyptians "see the Nile flowing and think everything's fine" with the country's water supply. (The same for the many Californians who said that the state actually had plenty of water so why the hysteria about a drought?)

So what else is new about human nature?  Generally there's only one shot at explaining really complicated issues to the public before a disaster has to do the explaining. That's because if we don't understand an explanation the first time around or conclude it's an exaggeration, we tend to discount the attempted clarifications that follow.

The Bill Collector Arriveth

So is President Sisi's approach  the best? Cut out the long-winded explanations; just tell people to get to bed early so they can get up at a smart hour for doing things in a desert climate. The stumbling block to common sense is that Cairo's nightlife is now integrated with a large number of jobs.  The same can be said for the daytime life in desert cities across the Middle East, which imitates lifestyles in big cities, such as London and New York, which aren't located in a desert climate.
 
To wrap it up, megapopulations across the Middle East want a way of life they thought they could afford through oil and gas wealth (and in Egypt's case, control of a key trade route).  Now they're going to learn that they can't afford the water bills for that way of life. 

The problem is that the water bill collector is already at the door. From Shanta Devarajan's post:

At 500 cubic meters per capita per annum of renewable water, MENA is the most water scarce region in the world.  Renewable water resource availability is below 30 cubic meters per capita per annum in Kuwait, UAE and Qatar, followed by Yemen.  Only a few countries in MENA, such as Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, have more than 1,000 cubic meters per capita. Renewable water availability has also been declining over time, with a rate of decrease of 35 percent over the last decade. For some countries, such as UAE and Qatar, the rate of decrease has been as high as 75 percent.

Even more troubling, the ratio of water withdrawn to availability is highest in MENA, amounting on average to just below 400 percent. In other regions they range from 6 to 54 percent. Countries such as Egypt and Jordan are reaching the 100 percent threshold. Lebanon, Morocco and Algeria are the only countries where water withdrawal is less than 50 per cent of availability.

Yet even that grim prognosis doesn't convey the extent of the crisis.  The countries with more than 1,000 cubic meters of water per capita that Devarajan named -- Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon -- have big water stress issues.  Yet these would be small chips next to the specter of millions of refugees from water disaster regions in MENA piling into those countries. 

*********  

Middle East: The Rate of Doom's Approach, Strawberries in the Sand, Weaponized Water

 From a February 2013 report by Alton Parrish for Before It's News (Middle East Running Out Of Water Faster And Faster):

A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea.

The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

Already strained by water scarcity and political tensions, the arid Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers is losing critical water reserves at a rapid pace, from Turkey upstream to Syria, Iran and Iraq below.

Unable to conduct measurements on the ground in the politically unstable region, UC Irvine scientists and colleagues used data from space to uncover the extent of the problem. They took measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites [GRACE], and found that between 2003 and 2010, the four nations lost 144 cubic kilometers (117 million acre feet) of water – nearly equivalent to all the water in the Dead Sea.

The depletion was especially striking after a drought struck the area in 2007. Researchers attribute the bulk of it – about 60 percent – to pumping of water from underground reservoirs.
[...]
They concluded that the Tigris-Euphrates watershed is drying up at a pace second only to that in India.

“This rate is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents,” the scientists report in a paper to be published online Feb. 15 in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
[...]

From Erin Cunningham's April 2012 article for Global Post (Could Egypt run out of water by 2025?):

[...]  But now, to ease over-crowding near the [Nile] river, Egypt’s government is encouraging its swollen population to move away from the Nile and into the desert — which makes up 95 percent of its area. About half of Egypt’s 80 million people live in the fertile Nile Delta north of Cairo.

The government is offering tracts of sandy wasteland at low-cost if settlers pledge to irrigate the barren parcels.

The Egyptian government has managed to boost its tillable land over the last 50 years by one-quarter, using canals to bring Nile water to the desert. But most of those plots were snatched up by commercial mega-farms that churn out cash crops — like strawberries — for export rather than local consumption. In the end, these green desert farms did little to ease the scarcity of food in Egypt.

“The policy for 60 years has been to expand the cultivated surface of Egypt, getting people out of the valley and into the desert,” [Richard Tutwiler,  director of the Desert Development Center at the American University in Cairo] said. “But it’s a different environment out there. The drainage issues are different. And the irrigation, it needs more power. It involves a much higher capital investment that poor farmers just don’t have.”

Blooming the desert requires funds to build modern irrigation systems capable of pumping water, with energy-fueled, pressurized pipes, out of the Nile Valley.

While it helps alleviate pressure on the Nile Delta, experts say the desert irrigation program only reduces Egypt’s ability to conserve water.

“Think about Egypt as kind of a valley. Gravity suggests if you put too much water on your field in upper [southern] Egypt, it trickles back into the Nile, and you can put it back on a field in lower [northern] Egypt,” said Tutwiler, describing the flood irrigation system that originates at the Aswan Dam in the south.

“But if you take the water out of the valley and put it in the desert, it doesn’t go back into the Nile. It’s lost in the sand.”

The article mentions that the canals lose as much 3 billion cubic meters of Nile water each year to "evaporation under Egypt’s hot, desert sun." So it's not just a matter of replacing irrigation canals with drip tape to ward off evaporation because the canals are also used to transport water from one site to others at considerable distance.

From a July 2014 report by John Vidal for the Guardian (Water supply key to outcome of conflicts in Iraq and Syria, experts warn):

The outcome of the Iraq and Syrian conflicts may rest on who controls the region’s dwindling water supplies, say security analysts in London and Baghdad.

Rivers, canals, dams, sewage and desalination plants are now all military targets in the semi-arid region that regularly experiences extreme water shortages, says Michael Stephen, deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in Qatar, speaking from Baghdad.

“Control of water supplies gives strategic control over both cities and countryside. We are seeing a battle for control of water. Water is now the major strategic objective of all groups in Iraq. It’s life or death. If you control water in Iraq you have a grip on Baghdad, and you can cause major problems.Water is essential in this conflict,” he said.

Isis [Islamic State] Islamic rebels now control most of the key upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates, the two great rivers that flow from Turkey in the north to the Gulf in the south and on which all Iraq and much of Syria depends for food, water and industry.

“Rebel forces are targeting water installations to cut off supplies to the largely Shia south of Iraq,” says Matthew Machowski, a Middle East security researcher at the UK houses of parliament and Queen Mary University of London.

“It is already being used as an instrument of war by all sides. One could claim that controlling water resources in Iraq is even more important than controlling the oil refineries, especially in summer. Control of the water supply is fundamentally important. Cut it off and you create great sanitation and health crises,” he said. [...]

As to whether all Islamic State's invasion plans are specifically predicated on gaining control of water sources, I don't know and the Guardian report doesn't indicate although some passages are suggestive of the idea. 

********

The Well

Writing for The Atlantic Graeme Wood explained that the Islamic State is motivated by the desire to restore the Islamic caliphate but is guided by an old End Times prophecy -- their interpretation of the prophecy.  "There are but a few days left," according to the spokesman, as quoted by Wood.

Not that few days. The Islamic State counts their present leader as the eighth caliph and claim there will be 12 or maybe Wood wrote 14 caliphs before the world comes to an end.  But by an interesting irony the world actually is coming to an end -- their world, if one considers their world to be the Middle East.  It's coming to an end quite soon. 

And while the prophesied wars might be part of the end times in that region, the most prosaic of conditions, water shortages, will launch the apocalypse in the Middle East.

How soon is quite soon?  From readings about water issues I started last year, my guess would be that after two more years, shortages will be severe enough in parts of the Middle East and possibly North Africa to set in motion a chain reaction that is itself the result of many cumulative effects.

Is there any way to stave off this scenario or neutralize it?  Not that I can see. There are too many factors converging on the basic water stresses in the region to hope that prioritized responses will stop their escalation.  So while most of the factors have a solution(s) when looked at in problematical terms, the interactions of all these created a kind of microclimate or ecology of disaster, if you will.

In folk terms, it's a tangled ball of yarn.

You can pull parts of various skeins out of the ball to see the materials and colors in the tangle, but it wasn't a 'created' ball.  It just happened, through many events that mindlessly, blindly, tangled together into a ball.  There is no way to fix the tangle, not without taking the ball apart.

For this reason it's a waste of time to attempt to fix blame.  Sure, you can go down a list of contributing factors and find many that are blameworthy. But only in retrospect in many cases.  The people in the Middle East have been living on borrowed time always -- ever since the climate in the region changed to arid and semi-arid.  Now time's up.

If they'd had the GRACE satellite system a half century ago, to tell them exactly how much groundwater they had left and the exact rate it was being used up, would that have made it possible to stave off the end?  No. That's because a half century ago they couldn't imagine the present population explosion and many other factors that didn't exist back then, but which arose apart from each other then combined to put intolerable strains on the water systems in the region.

Realize they're not just running out of water in the Middle East; they're running out at an increasingly fast rate. 

Here's just one way among many that this plays out: They've had population explosions before in that region, but they didn't have large government sanitation and hygiene programs until fairly recently, and which use water and of course save many lives and extend life spans, which also uses up water.

In other words, successive generations keep finding more ways to use increasingly large amounts of the water at an increasingly fast rate and extend their life spans.  That last is great from the human viewpoint, but water isn't human. Neither is reality.

The people of those lands who put reality first managed to hack it out for a long time in an unforgiving climate. Remember the scene in "Lawrence of Arabia" where Sherif Ali shoots to death the Arab who drinks from a well that doesn't belong to the Arab's tribe? Lawrence was furious, telling Ali that the man was his friend.
 
Sherif Ali replied, "He was nothing. The well is everything."  
  
********

A Message for Indian Readers

1.  The country that shifts to a focus on water security now, even if this means scaling back on development and trade, will come out on top in global trade and internal economic security by the turn of this decade.

2.  If this focus on water is confined to only a few regions in India, then you're going to see the same basic problem that Mumbai faced with millions of job-seekers from all over India converging on the city. However, it's going to be even worse when these internal refugees are fleeing severe water scarcity. And internal refugees will be competing with huge waves of refugees from S.W. Asia and maybe parts of Central Asia who'll be fleeing water scarcity within about two years. The waves could include people from parts of Pakistan. There will be no way to keep all those refugees out of India -- although I hope the Indian military is war-gaming that scenario.

3.  Add to this an increasing problem worldwide that's even struck here in the USA, as California agribusiness shifted some agriculture from the state's worst-hit drought regions.  Seemed to work at first, as crops were shifted to fertile parts of Oregon and Texas. Then farmers in those parts began running out of water.  This happened within about only two years -- from water abundance to drought.  Turned out the farmers didn't know how little groundwater they had left.

So this could be called 'rolling artificial droughts' or man-made droughts.  Rolling from one nearby region to another. But this sets up conditions for a chain reaction of artificial droughts that engulf more and more land. 
Meanwhile, the people affected by these rolling droughts flee to other regions within the country. But because of modern transportation these internal diasporas can happen very quickly -- and thus, quickly overwhelming the infrastructures in the region that sees the refugees.

4.  These chain reactions can occur more quickly in this era than modern governments are capable of dealing with.

5.  Every aspect of water security should come under close review in every Indian state, including cleaning up water polluted by industrial and agricultural chemical runoffs. I don't know whether governments in all those states or the national government have the capacity for this kind of review or whether any such review done earlier needs updating.

So this could be a crowdsourcing project.
 
6. As to China -- I can't even try to estimate how long they've got left, although I do know from news reports last year that they're facing severe and entrenched water crises in several regions. I also know they waste oceans of water.  So I'd leave them and their river-source bullying to heaven and the Indian military.

I'd focus on asking what you as a private citizen can do to protect and amplify every single drop of water available to India -- even if you can only help publicize the urgency of the situation or do research on water issues for a small region in the country.  But there has to be a tremendous amount of data mining so that financial and human resources applied to solutions are used in the most efficient ways.

Make your start at figuring out how you can best help, and I think help will come to you in this regard.  Why now?  I don't write the scripts; I just say the lines.

*******

Surgery

Last of three surgical procedures this month on Friday.  There will be more procedures, different ones, later this year.  Three different conditions in my right leg, all connected and contributing to each other.  I'll live but there's been a lot of pain since January.  Less pain now, after the procedure on Friday.  At the end of it all I hope to walk normally again after more than a year of being crippled. 

I hid it from people, even my doctor, until I couldn't walk anymore without hanging onto something don't you dare laugh Pundita it's not a damn bit funny.  It was actually two years I hid it. [laughing] Okay, maybe a little longer than that. It was a tactical triumph while it lasted.

What can I say?  Some people are just born hating disorder more than death, but if one doesn't die then eventually one has deal with a lot of disorder that piles up.   

Now where was I?  The marijuana industry.  But first I guess a few words about war. Here we go again.

********  

How to become a Marijuana Grow House Hazard Expert the Hard Way

The situation has only gotten worse since MSN first reported on it, as have the fires in grow houses.  An interesting point from the MSN report is that location is no bar to the dangers from the houses; that's because the indoor growers are making so much money from pot agriculture that they can afford to rent or buy in the very best neighborhoods. After turning a house into a danger zone then fixing it up just enough to fool the innocent buyer, they move to another house and repeat the performance.

There was one article, from years before the MSN one, about the dangers from grow houses that described situations so awful they were almost funny. The article was published in a police journal in Canada and featured anecdotes from police raids on the houses.  There didn't seem to be a licensed electrician among the growers, and their grasp of basic chemistry was tenuous; they got carbon monoxide confused with carbon dioxide as a way to stimulate plant growth. 

I'm sorry I didn't save the article but these two are enough to convey the gist:   

Move over, meth: Marijuana 'grow houses' an increasing menace
By Melinda Fulmer of MSN Real Estate
[January 2011]
A home that was used to grow pot can be a nightmare for a homebuyer, with problems ranging from mold to bad wiring.
When Mikey and Zeina Kostelny found their first home in the suburbs of Altadena, Calif., it appeared to be a buyer's dream, complete with fresh paint, carpet and fixtures.

But that dream quickly dissolved into nightmare after the sale closed in late 2008 as the couple began to discover problems hidden behind its glossy finishes — from mold to gas leaks to bad wiring — all stemming, they believe, from its undisclosed past as a marijuana grow house.

"After we moved in, we smelled fresh paint and then another smell," Zeina Kostelny says. An inspection later revealed dangerous Stachybotrys mold throughout much of the house, forcing them to move and foot the tab for more than $42,000 in remediation and repair. Months later, an electrical fire pushed them into an apartment again.

The tsunami of vacant, bank-owned properties in many parts of the country has helped fuel a surge in indoor marijuana production, turning once-empty homes like the Kostelnys' into high-dollar and high-risk pot farms that spell trouble for prospective buyers and neighbors.

"In the last several years, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of grow houses," says Covina, Calif., Police Chief Kim Raney, who has overseen several busts. "It's almost a perfect environment, because you have had a housing market that's upside down, people losing their houses to foreclosure and people trying to find ways to make their mortgage," he says.

Pot house 101

A total of 4,666 marijuana grow houses were busted in the U.S. in 2009, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — just a tiny fraction of the number in operation, experts say.

Most grow houses go unnoticed or unreported, for fear of retaliation from the gangs — many of them Asian — that run them, according to the DEA.

And the houses are often in places you'd hardly suspect, such as gated Florida communities and upscale Georgia neighborhoods — even Beverly Hills, California.

How can growers afford such high rent? It's easy. With only 50 plants in a house, and at least three growing cycles a year, growers can easily net as much as $300,000 a year from sales to dispensaries and buds sold on the black market, says Ron Brooks, president of the National Narcotic Officer's Associations' Coalition.

"Marijuana is so lucrative as a crop," he says, and it carries less prison-time risk than other drugs.

Of course, it's not just the grower taking on risk. Once marijuana-growing operations move into your neighborhood, they bring more danger and more damage than vagrants, thieves or taggers could ever do.

"You've got fire hazards and properties that aren't being well-maintained," Brooks says. "No one's living there, or maybe someone's there who's armed and guarding the house."

The damage they do

Indeed, police say, indoor growing may sound benign, with row after row of bushy pot plants sprouting up under ultraviolet lights, but these operations can devastate properties.

Most grow houses wind up having extensive mold damage because of the irrigation and moisture needed for the plants, says Dennis Rommelfanger, a home inspector with U.S. Inspect in Huntington Beach, Calif., who has seen several of these houses.

Mold is an expensive problem to deal with. It is also one of the hardest problems to accurately assess, Rommelfanger says, especially if the surfaces have been painted over, as they were in the Kostelnys' home.

"We do use moisture meters," he says.

But the reading has to be 20% moisture or higher for him to advise deferring a sale, and he says a home can have mold damage with a lower moisture reading than that.

What's your home worth?

Big-time marijuana growers also cut holes in the ceiling to provide ventilation to their plants and run water lines. Many change the ductwork and rewire the house to accommodate the hot grow lights and other equipment such as humidifiers and dehumidifiers.

And most growers snake wires up to the power line to bypass the electric meter, not only because their work is electricity-intensive, but because high meter readings can tip police off to their whereabouts.

One Pennsylvania real-estate investor, Steve Babiak, commenting on real-estate investor site BiggerPockets.com, recalled a house where growers had cut holes in the foundation to hook up jumper cables to bypass the electric meter.
[...]
[END MSN REPORT]

Fire District Officials Announce New Training for Fighting Fires at Marijuana Grow Houses
Bay City News Service via Patch
February 21, 2014

Contra Costa fire officials are also encouraging residents to report homes showing signs of marijuana growing operation.

As the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District responds to a growing number of fires at marijuana grow houses, the district is turning to new strategies to keep firefighters and community members safe from the unique dangers posed by these fires.

Firefighters risk their lives on a regular basis, Contra Costa Fire Protection District investigator Vic Massenkoff said, but a blaze at a large-scale pot growing operation pose some of the greatest hazards for fire personnel.

District officials this week announced new training procedures for fighting fires at major residential marijuana grows. Firefighters are being educated on how to spot the signs of a grow operation and to fight blazes at grow houses defensively, or outside of the home, rather than heading inside, where the risks to firefighters are often too great.

The fire district is also instructing firefighters to wait until PG&E personnel have turned off power at the house before going inside.

"There's no material possession that's worth the life of our firefighters," Contra Costa fire Capt. Robert Marshall said.

The emphasis during these firefights is also on preventing the blaze from spreading to neighboring homes, fire officials said.

Over the past few years, the fire district has battled about 35 fires at large pot grow operations, fire officials said. Large-scale grows are popping up in communities throughout the Bay Area and statewide, in addition to the nine cities and unincorporated areas of Contra Costa County covered by the fire district.

"It's an epidemic as far as how many homes are being converted to full marijuana growing operations," Massenkoff said.

The problem is so big that a 2011 study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Evan Mills found that some 8 percent of California's energy is consumed by indoor growing operations.  [Pundita note:  Mills conducted the study on his own time]

PG&E can usually spot customers housing a large marijuana grow when the electricity meter shows commercial-level electricity usage, used to power the grow lights, ventilation and humidity systems used to cultivate marijuana, Massenkoff said.

To avoid detection, large-scale growers typically re-wire a home's electrical system so that it bypasses the utility meter, fire officials said. But the rigged electrical systems often fail, sparking fires that can travel quickly through a home's walls and a phenomenon known as arcing, in which electricity travels back and forth between electrical wires and metal surfaces. This makes firefighters responding to a fire at a grow house much more vulnerable to electrocution.

Other hazards usually found at major pot growing operations include barred windows and doors and extra walls built to mask the operation, Massenkoff said.

On Jan. 24, Contra Costa fire crews found many of the typical red flags while fighting a two-alarm blaze at a home on Tampico Drive in Pittsburg that housed a major marijuana growing operation, the investigator said. The house was completely destroyed, and firefighters had to battle the blaze from outside after the home's roof collapsed -- an all-too-common occurrence in marijuana grow fires, Massenkoff said. That fire "was the straw that broke the camel's back," the fire investigator said.

While no fire personnel were injured in the blaze, he said, "the hazards to firefighters became very evident in this fire...we realized it was time to provide new direction to firefighters on how to deal with fires at these types of properties."

Massenkoff said large-scale marijuana grows are usually uncovered when a fire breaks out, but sometimes law enforcement agencies find out about them from suspicious neighbors.

Contra Costa fire officials are encouraging more residents to come forward when they spot the signs of a growing operation in their neighborhood. Fire officials say red flags include barred windows in neighborhoods where no other homes' windows have bars and windows that are shaded at all hours of the day.

Residents should also be wary of new residents who are never seen moving personal items into their home and have frequent visitors coming and going, district officials said. Massenkoff said fire officials are also hoping more criminals are prosecuted when a fire breaks out due to a large-scale marijuana growing operation.

Several suspects linked to grow house fires in Contra Costa County in recent years have been charged with recklessly causing a fire, he noted. However, in many cases, large-scale marijuana growers whose grow houses burn down are able to use their massive profits to quickly purchase or rent a new grow house, Massenkoff said.

Yearly profits from an average grow house in Contra Costa County total at least $1.5 million, he said.
[END REPORT]