Drought Striken States Eye Great Lakes Water

I’ve talked about water a lot on this blog. It’s the “next” oil.

Who has it and who doesn’t? Eventually, this will become the defining question of our time.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that with millions of people living, literally, in the desert in places like Las Vegas, that there will be a water crisis there sooner rather than later.

The drought in the Southeast seems to have abated (for now.) But for how long? The lakes are still low in the Atlanta region.

Where will you want to live when the the you-know-what hits the fan?

These cities will be at the top of the list:

Chicago
Detroit
Cleveland
Buffalo

Yes, Buffalo will rise again from the dead. As I’ve also said before, there’s a reason these cities were built in the first place in their current locations- access to ports and water.

The Great Lakes Basin makes up the states, and Canada, that surround the Great Lakes. Only, the water from the Great Lakes aren’t available to everyone.

If you live in downstate Illinois, for example, you are not considered in the “basin” and cannot tap Lake Michigan for water.

The designation is restrictive enough that many of Chicago’s suburbs were originally excluded from the “basin” but because of a loophole many years ago have now been able to tap the lake.

That won’t be allowed to continue.

Already you have haves and have nots. From the Chicago Tribune:

“The realistic fear for the Great Lakes comes from within the region,” Glennon said, pointing to communities with polluted drinking water, such as the western Milwaukee suburbs of New Berlin and Waukesha, which have a clear interest in the water compact being approved.

“We’re kind of the poster child of Wisconsin,” quipped Jack Chiovatero, mayor of New Berlin.

Here’s why: New Berlin straddles the Great Lakes Basin, with about one-third of its 38,000 residents receiving water from Lake Michigan, and the remainder getting drinking water from wells contaminated with radium. The Environmental Protection Agency has ordered the city to either clean up or find a safer source of water. Either solution is expensive.

Water rights in New Berlin are pretty much divided by Sunny Slope Road. If you live on the east side, you get Lake Michigan water, and whatever you use is eventually returned—after treatment—to the lake. If you’re on the west side, you don’t get lake water because without a means to return it, it works its way toward the Mississippi River. This is a situation the water compact is intended to prevent — draining the Great Lakes of water that will never be returned.

“If you have a thousand straws sipping into the lake,” Brammeier said of communities outside the basin, “we don’t want to go there because that could have an impact.”

Chiovatero, who lives east of Sunny Slope Road, said the city has set up a means to return lake water that goes to the west side. The water compact would create the legal rules to do that.

A trickier situation exists in rapidly growing Waukesha, a suburb to the west that is outside the basin and, like New Berlin, has unacceptable levels of radium in its drinking water. Mayor Larry Nelson said that “Great Lakes water is the best environmental option” for the city.

Obtaining it will require Waukesha to establish a way to return the water it uses to Lake Michigan. “If we decide to move forward,” Nelson said, “we intend our application to be a role model for other [communities] to follow.”

The most valuable real estate will be those already within the basin- and that includes the cities listed above.

Detroit and Buffalo will see a resurgance? I know- you’re laughing.

Mark my words.

Those glistening lakes are worth their weight in gold.

You know what they say about real estate: location, location, location.