Dead Pool

"We are mad, not only individually but nationally.  We check manslaughter and isolated murders, but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

 Dead Pool may mean different things to you, depending on your age and taste in entertainment.  It could be an old Dirty Harry film from 1988 starring Clint Eastwood.  

 Dead Pool could also be a 2006 film character from the Marvel Comic Book universe.

 Back in reality-land, "Dead Pool" is also a term in water management.  It's the point at which the reservoir behind a dam has fallen so low that it's below the level at which the dam can release any further water downstream.

Which brings us to the topic at hand.  The Southwest US is grappling with a 1200 year drought that is likely to cause a tremendous amount of dislocation for a lot of people who depend on that water.

You might think that people would have cut back dramatically in their water use in the face of such a historic drought.  You would be wrong.  Residential customers, who use just 10% of all the water in the US west, have borne nearly all of the water rationing.  They've given up their lawns, which admittedly aren't a practical use of scarce water.  Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be saved when we are discussing cutting waste out of just 10% share of the water.

Farms, which use 60-80 percent of the water, have until recently, cut back nothing.  A few coastal towns are in dire straits.  They cannot drill freshwater wells and draw down their aquifer, because seawater will migrate into the freshwater aquifer and ruin it.

And with that introduction, I'd like to share this rather alarming video: