WATER is amazing. We wash in it, drink it, flush toilets with it, cook with it, feed plants with it and we use it to swim, fish and sail. We squirt it at burning buildings to douse the flames, fill car radiators with it to keep our engines cool and, occasionally, convince small boys to use it behind their ears to make them look less like child chimney-sweeps.
Heretics put it in their malt whisky, while some major breweries just dunk a few hops in it and call it beer.
We are spoiled in Scotland by complacency about our water. We turn on the tap and it emerges clean and cool. In many parts of the third world it’s a very different picture, though, where it’s scarce and heavily polluted. The water of life is often, tragically, the water of death.
One certainty about water, though, is that we can’t live without it. Today, incredibly, we are coming close to it in places, however.
A few months ago, we faced the daily chore of digging our way to work as the relentless snow that lasted from December until April smothered us in multiple layers of white stuff up to 4ft deep. Had there been any significant wind, too, the drifts would have buried all but large birds and very tall stilt-walkers.
When it melted, millions of gallons of fresh water turned rivers into torrents and sent floodwaters pouring down from the mountains, ruining many a lounge carpet along the way. It’s strange how a gentle, crystal-clear stream becomes the equivalent of a disgusting sewer pipe in a few hours of flooding.
Even before the winter, the torrential rains of early November that turned much of Stonehaven, Huntly, Insch and other areas into passable imitations of Atlantis brought us so much water that we couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough.
That said, if you have a vegetable patch you might notice that all is not well now. In mine, lettuces that usually look like Charles Atlas resemble the wimp that gets sand kicked in his face. My cabbages are flaccid; my broccoli is drooping; my spinach has bolted, and my peas wouldn’t pass a Birds Eye audition. All are desperate for a good long drink.
Should this dry spell continue, we could soon be in serious trouble. Many parts of England are experiencing severe water shortages while, here, parts of the Borders and Ayrshire are drying out rapidly. In Mull, the water situation is becoming acute.
Last week, Scottish Water said that rainfall across parts of the UK since the new year had been at its lowest level since 1964. It’s a common refrain in these confusing days of climate change. What I would like to know, then, is where the heck the millions and millions of gallons of fresh water that blanketed the country a few weeks ago have gone?
Across the north and north-east, I see houses being built at a scary rate. Not a single green field is safe now, it seems. I have yet to see a major new reservoir being built to provide water for all these thirsty new homes and businesses, however.
I’m no water engineer, but it seems daft that we allow so much surface water to run away uselessly to waste when we could be capturing it and storing it to use in drier seasons.
Aberdeen, for example, has no reservoir. Its water comes direct from the River Dee via treatment works at Invercannie, near Banchory, and Mannofield, on the city’s outskirts. If the river runs short of water, Aberdeen will be parched.
Scottish Water is investing many millions in improving our water quality, it says, but no one seems to be ensuring there is enough water stored to meet our growing needs. The main aqueducts from Invercannie to Aberdeen were laid in 1866 and 1924 and no new surface reservoir has been built in the north-east in the past century, despite the population exploding in that time. That’s scandalous.
New reservoirs would provide wildlife sanctuaries and valuable leisure assets, and storage facilities to capture some of that immense volume of water that fell on us last winter.
Consumers should conserve water, yes, but the authorities should do much more to store it in greater quantities, too. I have a water butt in my garden to catch rainwater that I can then use when it’s not raining. Simples, as the meerkat would say.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem the Rime of the Ancient Mariner contains these famous lines:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The executive boards of our water authorities should shrink if they can’t get it right. If they succeed, I’ll happily buy them a drink.
Bottled water, of course.