Water Supply
In reading letters (Jan. 11) from Carl Boronkay of the Metropolitan Water District and others on the water shortages in Southern California, it is obvious that some of the Great Lakes region’s bountiful fresh water should be piped to the upper basin states.
This could soften the competition between that area and California for Colorado River water. For decades the Southwest has sold affordable gas and vegetables to the Midwest. It has also been a refuge for weaklings who cannot hack the frigid winters and muggy summers which cause our verdant landscape. This emigration has kept our area from becoming overcrowded. So, watching the Saint Joseph River flow past my home, towards Notre Dame du Lac in South Bend, on its way to Lake Michigan, I feel that sharing this fresh water is a fair part of the solution to the Sunbelt’s thirst.
Where steel mills once stood in southeast Chicago could be the wellhead for some aqueducts fanning out towards Dallas, Denver and Phoenix. The steel to make these aqueducts, from the carcinogenic-plagued Pacific Rim, would keep California ports busy. This could be the public works project for the 1990s, rivaling the interstate highway system in magnitude, lessening the Sunbelt’s dependence upon snowfalls in the Rockies and the Sierra.
After all, we are one nation and you should be welcome to some of the water as long as you don’t forget where you got it.
TERRY DeSHONE
Elkhart, Ind.
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