A tell-tale ring

The white horizontal stripes on the arid land around New Mexico's Elephant Butte Lake come to mind as one watches a BBC news segment airing in Europe about the driest Spanish winter in 60 years.

Coming out of that winter, the BBC correspondent says in the piece, one of the main reservoirs furnishing water for the 5 million people of Barcelona is at 18 percent capacity. Not only are its lakeside rocks striped with a bathtub-type ring, a medieval city flooded by the reservoir in the 1960s is newly exposed.

The point of the story: Barcelona is being forced to ship in water from elsewhere to meet the needs of its citizens, an action scientists are predicting many other European cities will be forced to follow, the BBC report says.

I write this as I wait for a driller to sink a new well for our household in the mountains east of Albuquerque. For more than 32 years, a 250-foot depth has been sufficient, although at one point a new pump was needed to keep a decent flow. The new well will go 100 feet deeper.

Our neighbors report they will be dropping their existing well to the same depth. The well driller says he's given similar news to 12 families in the area this spring -- and he's not the only driller working the area.

print Share

Register or log in to rate