According to this month’s Smithsonian Magazine, the world’s earliest documented water war happened 4,500 years ago, when the armies of Lagash and Umma, city-states near the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, battled with spears and chariots after Umma’s king drained an irrigation canal leading from the Tigris.
The story carved into an ancient stone cylinder notes that stress (or conflict) can encourage compromise and ends on this note: “The world’s first international water treaty, a cuneiform tablet now hanging in the Louvre, ended the war between Lagash and Umma.”
On May 30, I attended the Spring River Summit in Joplin held by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources as part of the Our Missouri Waters initiative, a holistic approach to protect water resources. The initiative is based on the premise that we all need to understand and protect our waters to ensure a positive future with the help of citizens, landowners, communities and industry leaders. One of the keys to this approach will be managing our shared water resources at the local watershed level. The watershed-based approach teaches an understanding of the roles, priorities and responsibilities of all partners and citizens.
The Spring River watershed is challenging in that it starts in Missouri, flows into Kansas and makes its way into Oklahoma and Grand Lake.
During the journey through Missouri, the water encounters heavy metals in old lead and zinc mining areas, nutrients and other pollutants from point source (mostly municipal treatment plants) and nonpoint source (stormwater runoff). During the summit and on a tour the day before, we saw and heard about the efforts and projects in Missouri to keep those waters clean.
One project is a vast Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site that is part of the Tri-State Mining District covering 2,500 square miles. The mining of lead and zinc in Jasper County alone generated 150 million tons of waste, of which 10 million tons still remain. The multimillion-dollar remediation project buries the waste material that is then capped with clay and topsoil and planted with native grasses.
Another project, funded by federal stimulus dollars, allowed the city of Caterville to build a 1,700 gallon per minute sewer lift station and to close the peak flow storage lagoon, an outdated and potentially hazardous site. The $1.39 million cost covered engineering and construction.
Gail Melgren, executive director for the Tri-States Water Resources Coalition, talked about how the Joplin area could run out of fresh water in just a few years. She said the various plans under consideration are to bring water from Table Rock, Stockton and Grand lakes or even to build a new reservoir. I would welcome Table Rock Lake becoming a source of drinking water because that designation allows for a greater protection of water quality. One only has to look to the first lake in the White River chain, Beaver, to see how that designation allows for greater protections. Currently, one in eight people in Arkansas drink Beaver Lake water.
One of the hurdles to pulling water from Table Rock is there is not a drinking water allocation, and it would take an act of Congress to reallocate. If the reallocation came from the existing allocation for power generation, water customer fees would have to include paying Southwest Power Administration for the cost of that water.
I find it interesting that Oklahoma will not even consider allowing Missouri to pull any water out of Grand Lake and bring it back to its point of origin for drinking water purposes. How better to encourage your upstream neighbors to keep the water clean than by allowing them to drink it.
But as always, politics enter in, and Oklahoma and Texas are currently in a lawsuit over water, and allowing Missouri to take water out of the state could impact that lawsuit.
Before we get to the point of “leaving dead soldiers on the bank of the canal,” let’s gather up some clay, form a tablet and write down how we are all going to get along, share our waters and keep them clean.
David Casaletto is president and executive director of Kimberling City-based Ozarks Water Watch, a nonprofit water quality organization. He can be reached at dcasaletto@ozarkswaterwatch.org.
