No Water, No Development

After reading the article "Las Vegas Looks Beyond the Colorado To Slake Its Thirst," it struck me that nowhere was the point made about the fact that perhaps enough development has taken place if local agencies do not have the resources to sustain themselves.

I was in Tucson this summer for a meeting and there was talk about determining the depth of the underground water resources upon which they apparently depend. They implied that they knew the top of the water level but not the depth. It is nice that someone has awakened.

There has been a lot of publicity about water shortages in the Southeast, again a high development area that keeps developing. That area is not a desert like the Southwest and if it can have trouble a red flag should be more than visible everywhere. Recently, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article about the need for the states and Canadian provinces that border the Great Lakes to protect that resource from having to eventually provide water to other parts of the country to sustain their continued unrestrained development.

We need a national policy and we need it quickly. An article like the one published in ENR misses the point. It addressed conservation measures but there is no mention of the suggestion that perhaps development should stop. It only described the deals  being worked out so that the area could continue to use more water. What has happened to common sense?

 James W. O'Brien, FAIA
New Brighton, Minn.

Clarification

The Ace Mentor Program

The cover story "Industry Mentoring Links are Becoming Mutually Beneficial"  did not identify the individuals engaged in an ACE Mentor program activity. The photo from p. 35 of that issue is below. The student (left) is Ben Wu, of John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. The mentor is Chuck Whitaker, vice chairman of the ACE chapter in Los Angeles and a principal of engineer Martin Associates Group Inc., also based there.