Droughts and growing population leading to drastic drinking water measures

The snowpack here in the Puget Sound area is bad enough, but in California the snowpack is at five percent. That’s 95 percent less than what would be considered normal, which makes this the worst year since the drought started in 2011.

It’s so bad that researchers at the University of Minnesota, who analyzed tree rings that date back to A.D. 800, were unable to find any three-year period when California’s rainfall has been as low and temperatures as high as they have been during the last three years.

Related: Dave Ross’ original drought song

And so California homeowners will be forced to cut water use 25 percent.

But this is not just a California problem. The drought stretches across the Southwest to Texas, and it’s going to force a change in where a lot of Americans get their water.

“The people are moving to the South and the Southwest. It’s exactly where the water isn’t and where it’s not going to be in the future,” said David Sedlak, a Professor at UC Berkeley and the author of Water 4.0.

He said the way the population is moving, even a 25 percent cut won’t be enough.

“If you tell me that we can solve this problem of inadequate water supplies purely by conservation, I’ll tell you that population growth is working against us.”

He has a YouTube lecture where he invites his student to drink some of the water of the future – what he calls Water 4.0.

“How many of you think it’s disgusting to drink sewer water? Willing to do it? You know I have some in my bag here,” he proposed to the audience.

That’s what’s coming. Sedlak said there will be a water crisis in this country in 30 years because of climate change – regardless of what’s causing it – and that the only practical way to deal with it is to turn sewage treatment plants into resource recovery centers.

The No. 1 resource?

“Water is the most valuable thing in sewage. And you may have heard about non-potable water reuse, this idea that you could take water from the sewage treatment plant and use it in the power plant for cooling, or use it on the highway median for growing the grass or send it to a golf course,” Sedlak said. “But I’ll tell you that the direction that we’re most likely to go in is potable water reuse – we’re going to take water from the sewage treatment plant and we’re going to make it our drinking water supply.”

By the way, you probably have tasted Water 4.0 if you’ve visited a certain California theme park.

“Today, somewhere around 50 million gallons per day of waste water in Orange County is recycled and some of it gets piped up to Anaheim and goes into a place called the Anaheim Lakes. It percolates through the lakes and becomes the local groundwater supply,” he said.

So, Tomorrowland is already here and from what I understand, it tastes surprisingly drinkable.