It is the exact reason I chose to live in a water rich part of the country/world. I live in an arid area for awhile and to me it just seemed like a death trap, your life is nearly 100% dependent on local infrastructure operating correctly and what little water resources you have not being bought up and sucked up by some large corporation to grow and sell some specialty crop.

Me too. Moved back to Seattle after spending years in San Jose partly because I didn't want to deal with decades of drought.

Speak for yourself there. I know that CO has been in a drought more often than not this century:

https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/colorado

Having lived in CO + TX (both states that get 'water restrictions'), never once did I worry about not having water to drink or bathe. They usually just ask us to conserve water and not water lawns so heavily in the summer. Not really comparable to countries where you need to plan to acquire and stock water for your family for daily use.

The aquifer under the plains states is expected to be depleted in the next 30 years due mostly to heavy agricultural use. So this could lead to additional restrictions or true rationing.

True, but it seems like it's only a matter of time then.

What can you call a chronic 20 year drought when it stretches to 40 years?

Agreed. We don't know the consequences of pushing Mountain West aquifers the way we have. There is good evidence we are pulling out more than is replenished and therefore are incurring a deficit.

What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s. Therefore, the material abundance necessary for truly large scale populations to live in comfort has only come to these places in the last 40 years. This has caused a consistent population boom in some places which is not yet tapering and will lead to increased stress on these resources.

Fortunately (except for lawns and the like) water isn't destroyed or lost. Cities can take the output of their sewer systems and put it right back into the water towers. No city does that today, but only because the thought grosses people out, the water is safe and clean enough that they could.

We don't do it directly, but there are certainly municipal water supplies that are downstream of other town's waste water treatment plants.

I wonder if anyone has done an estimate of water losses in a home/day to evaporation (e.g. toilet bowl evaporation, humidifiers, drying laundry, drying dishes, etc.).

R/O is expensive. Tons of opportunities in the average home for re-use. Can use that shower/sink/laundry/dish water for toilets. A selective automatic bypass system could save the (mostly soapless) water to replace plant/garden watering (though that’s evaporation!).

A fairly large amount across a whole city, but compared to the amount of water run down the drain after use not a lot. Makeup water is needed for sure. However watering the lawn is one of the few that are significant enough to matter.

At a cost, cheaper to just get fresh water I would imagine

In the US at least if you are not treating it to drinkable the epa will stop you. Though where the epa tests is important, some times that means after it percolate through soil.

You do loose some of the bacteria, minerals, and trace elements though. But then again, those can be put back in with some ease. The problem comes when, like in Flint, the government decides to do really dumb stuff. I would not put it past some idiotic council to just pump raw sewage back into the water supply to save a dollar.

>What's more, we tend to think of the "West" as "won" but these states are mostly still growing as part of the American Westward expansion. A lot of Western State land only became easily accessible with the completion of the interstates in the 1960s 1970s and even 1980s.

On the one hand, this is true in a literal sense. On the other, there are as many people (~20M) in the SoCal triangle southwest of the Transverse Ranges as there are in the remainder of the Colorado and Great Basins (NV+AZ+UT+CO = ~20M) combined, yet we continue to ship water from Lake Mead and Owens Lake to Los Angeles. Improving the situation in California would take a lot of stress off of everyone else.

A liberal conspiracy /s

Flint Michigan, probably doesn't take their water for granted.... It's still not fixed. We've just all forgotten about it, and I read there's a lot of similar issues nationwide in other water jurisdictions because of fracking.

> Just as you said, even the well off have to fill up their water tanks daily and hope they don’t use it all up.

I thought this was a deliberate approach: the city would round-robin supply water and if you’re wealthy, you fill your tanks when it’s your turn, and if you’re not, you do all of your water consumption during those periods.