Blissful Ignorance Is Not An Entitlement.

Last week, I received a call late in the evening. There was no water in the taps in the north-west corner of the town. The caller added people had been running their sprinklers for hours and the water was running down the streets to the catchbasins. I needed to hear no more.

Forty-five years ago, the town added 750 new homes in my neighbourhood - an increase of more than a third of the town. The same thing happened on another hot summer evening. People turned on their sprinklers and let them run. Soon they found themselves without water in the house. They were stunned and of course, it was all the stupid town's fault.

We were new to the town. Many of us were relatively new to the country. We did not relate the large ball hundreds of feet above us on stilt-like supports to the water that magically ran from the taps. Even when we were informed there was a finite supply from the water tower, we were not convinced the town was not at fault. One of those residents, still indignant at the end of the year, was a candidate in the municipal election. Elections were held annually. It was said she gave the best speech of all the candidates.

People did learn however, and after that first summer, the taps never ran dry again. We observed the watering rules. Our houses were full of children. Babies needed formula, children needed bathing, toilets needed to be flushed. Bottled water was not a commodity. Our water, from artesian wells drawn from deep below the ground, was the best.

This time is similar. Except, we have a reservoir in the ground in the north end of town. The water we are using is from thousands of feet below the ground. It has been carbon-dated. It is thousands of years old. We have many times greater supply and improved water pressure. There are now fifteen thousand homes as opposed to three thousand and there is the internet and email.

Surprisingly though, many people are not better informed than residents of forty-five years ago. Yet, they are just as sure they know who to blame. It is the stupid town and the stupid politicians. It is never, never, never, the people who turn on sprinklers and let this precious resource run in the gutter to the catchbasins, and run and run until the reservoir is dry.

The e-mails that I received are all about rage and abuse and grass and flowers and the cost of it all. Not about being unable to flush toilets, or make baby formula or a cup of tea. One man demands to be informed of the process to install a septic tank and well on his own property.

I know people with wells. They are definitely hesitant to spill precious potable water on the ground to keep their grass green. At times they have to pay for a tank truck to bring water to their wells. Sometimes wells become contaminated and they have to drill new ones always deeper to find potable water.

The town is sending out personal, respectful and placatory e-mails to enraged residents who are demanding additional reservoirs be built.

I do not favour that. Reservoirs cost millions to build. Water costs millions to treat in these post-Walkerton times. I am persuaded it makes no sense to build reservoir capacity and treat a supply of water beyond our needs for twelve months of the year to accommodate a possible need for two months of the summer. So far as I know, there is no way to measure the supply of water from our current source. We are tapping into a source which has been there for thousands of years. It is precious. We need to use it wisely.

I do not support pumping and treating and storing that water beyond our normal needs just because a summer drought is possible but not inevitable. We did not have one last year.

The demand for more capacity is like saying : O.K. thirty students form a gym class and that's the capacity of the gymnasium; we have three hundred students in the school, therefore we need ten gymnasiums and ten teachers because everybody wants to take gym at the same time. No reason, they just want to. Where is the logic in that?

We have sufficient reservoir capacity for ten months of the year for all of our needs. For two months, if there is a heat wave, we need to follow some sensible rules . Three nights of the week, one half of the population waters their gardens and the next three nights belong to the other half. If a sufficient number of ill-informed and uncaring people decide they will disregard the rules, everybody suffers the consequences.

It is an odd thing, in all the e-mail s I received, there wasn't one that complained about not being able to flush the toilet.

Another fact needs to be considered; it doesn't matter how much precious clean water is poured on to the grass, the stuff is destined to dormancy and the appearance of hay in a normal August anyway. We are not living in the rain-saturated environment of the U.K. and the Emerald Isle. We are living at the latitude of the Mediterranean to which people flock from everywhere to enjoy the glorious dry heat of summer and the vegetation particular to that environment.

When you live in a community, you share ownership of its resources, as well as responsibility for good stewardship.