Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

A. Yeah. Then there’s the Columbia, move some of the Columbia water down here
and then there’s towing the iceberg. Well, all the icebergs are going to melt.
Global warming will take care of that as an alternative. I don’t think any of those
big water projects are very likely to happen. The other reality is in large measure
they were driven by agriculture. In order to settle the West, you had to make
farming possible and that was the whole deal. Now we need water in smaller but
permanent blocks for urban populations. You can accomplish more by wise use
of the resource, by conservation, by different kinds of careful management
practices, by learning to drink reclaimed effluent which we will do. I think that is
entirely likely in the future. I think all of those solutions are more feasible when
driven by urban population growth rather than by the old impairment to settle the
West.
Q. Some people don’t want to even drink tap water; you think you’re going to get
them to drink effluent
A. I will say this. The effluent will come out of tap someday, whether they’ll drink it
or still be drinking Evian. My guess is we’ll be having reclaimed effluent run
through reverse osmosis and put in bottles and sold by Coke Cola within the next
hundred years. They’ll be the ones to figure out how to market it.
Interview with Grady Gammage
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