6
The Yuck Factor

The “yuck factor” is a deeply ingrained psychological thing.

—Alan Kleinschmidt,
manager of water operations,
Toowoomba, Australia

THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO DIE of thirst in Australia.

In January 2008, which is the middle of the Australian summer, a young married couple traveling through the Tanami Desert, three hundred miles northwest of Alice Springs, with the husband’s uncle, gradually gave all their drinking water to the leaking radiator of their Mitsubishi Pajero SUV.

It is hard to overstate, or overimagine, the heat and isolation of areas like the desert the trio were driving through. Daytime temperatures were 106°F. Even the most ordinary road maps of Australia have blunt red-print warnings directing drivers to register their travel through the outback with police agencies, so searches can be mounted quickly if they are overdue, and advising them to carry ample extra water and fuel.

When the trio did not arrive as scheduled in Nyirripi, police began searching. They found the seventy-year-old uncle walking along the road, and they found the disabled Pajero. The uncle told police they had been without water for two days after the SUV gave out. As police continued searching for the young couple, they left water bottles along the road, in case the pair might find them. The next morning, police found the thirty-one-year-old woman, barely alive by the side of the road. They used her footprints to backtrack, and found her thirty-four-year-old husband, already dead, three hundred feet from a dry waterhole. His wife also died, at a medical clinic.¹

In January 2007, the Australian reported the deaths of two men with a few restrained paragraphs that seem to contain a novel’s worth of storytelling, irony, and regret:

He could meld into the harsh Australian landscape like few others, but it was a simple flat tyre that caused the death of legendary bushman and celebrated Aboriginal artist Nyakul Dawson on an isolated outback track.

The 69-year-old and his nephew, Jarman Woods, 45, died on Dog Fence Road, on the western extremities of the Nullarbor Plain, just days before heavy rains drenched the desert country they had crossed without incident countless times.

Accustomed to the remote backblocks of western and central Australia, Dawson and Woods did not even take the necessities normally packed into the back of any car on such a potentially dangerous journey. …

Dawson’s body was discovered 15 meters from [their] early-model Toyota Land Cruiser, lying under a blanket. It appears Woods covered his uncle, then wandered off for help, only to perish a little more than 3 kilometers south of the broken-down car. He had died under a makeshift shelter.

Police suspect that the pair got into trouble after they left the Aboriginal community of Coonana when the vehicle’s back-left tyre went flat and the men drove on until the wheel studs snapped off. It is possible they did this because their spare tyre was also flat.²

They drove until the wheel studs snapped off; they walked until they could literally no longer stand the heat; then they lay down and died of dehydration.

Later that same summer, in March 2007, the drought had become so severe that camels in Australia’s Northern Territory were dying of thirst.

In April 2005, two migrants heading north through Western Australia to catch up with fruit-picking season broke down in their thirty-one-year-old Land Rover. According to police, the men had no extra fuel, no tools, no two-way radio, no detailed map, and just twenty liters of water. The men trekked nine miles, round-trip, out from their vehicle in search of water, and back. A detailed map would have shown them a working well five miles from their vehicle, in the opposite direction they had walked. Again, the desolation of the area where the men died is startling. The men, found beneath the Land Rover, along with their dog, had been dead a week before a jackaroo—a ranch hand—driving along the road found the Land Rover. There had been no other drivers for a week. The jackaroo had to travel a day before he reached a community where he could summon police.³

But Australia is so wild and so dangerously dry, it is possible to die of thirst even when you have cell phone coverage. In a devastating event that triggered national headlines and a coroner’s inquest, a Sydney schoolboy out for a three-day hike with two friends in the Blue Mountains, just a few miles from Sydney’s western suburbs, in the summer heat of December 2006, got separated from his friends. Despite seven increasingly desperate calls to Sydney’s emergency services—triple-0 in Australia—no one was dispatched to rescue seventeen-year-old David Iredale. In the calls, operators insistently asked Iredale for a street address they could send an ambulance to. At the inquest thirty months later, his calls were so harrowing that his parents left the courtroom to avoid hearing the tapes. Although experienced hikers, he and his schoolmates only carried four liters of water each, expecting to find water in the wilderness rivers, some of which Australia’s extraordinary drought had dried up. Before he died, Iredale told the operators he had gone seventeen hours without water, in hundred-degree heat. It took searchers eight days to find his body.⁴

Of course, at some level, there is only one way to die of thirst, in Australia or anywhere: to run out of water. What connects the recent dehydration deaths in Australia is that each started with a small misjudgment, a minor instance of poor planning, an all-too-human moment of overconfidence. Most of the time, such moments aren’t fatal. But running out of water is like slipping off the edge of a cliff—it’s hard to be saved.

Australia is a country where the cities themselves have begun running out of water during the last ten years—a place that has discovered how quickly an elaborate system for gathering and providing water can become inadequate, or even irrelevant. Australia is also living through something completely new—the division and damage that sudden water scarcity can do to the shared sense of values, to the politics, of a community.

Back when the people of Toowoomba, in the state of Queensland, thought things were bad—when it hadn’t rained in five years, when the city’s reservoirs were down to 34 percent full—they came together in their desperation to try a drought-ending strategy people have tried for five thousand years.

They turned their eyes and their voices heavenward, and they prayed for rain.

On Thursday evening, April 22, 2005, hundreds of people packed the soaring, cathedral-like sanctuary of St. Luke’s Church, including Ian Macfarlane, the local member of Australia’s national parliament, community leaders, and ministers from a half-dozen churches.

Reverend Herman Ruyters asked the crowd if they had brought their umbrellas.

City councilor Joe Ramia said the levels in the city reservoirs were extremely worrying to the council. “The dams we have built seem to me to be in the wrong place.”

The Reverend Edgar Mayer, of Living Grace Church, offered God a two-for-one deal. “If it is our sins that caused the drought,” he prayed, “then please wash our sins away with your rain.”⁵

That evening’s prayers were not answered—not then, not by the following April, or the next, or the next, not even four Aprils later, by April 2009. It was impossible to know on that Thursday night, but Toowoomba’s water troubles hadn’t even begun.

Toowoomba, which deservedly calls itself the Garden City, is the kind of place Americans often seem nostalgic for. It is a classic small town, with a prosperous main boulevard—Margaret Street—lined with boutiques, theaters, cafés, clubs, and restaurants serving everything from pub food to Indian and Thai. Downtown is surrounded by a grid of neat, well-kept homes that seem transplanted from 1960s Fort Lauderdale—one-story bungalows, with low rooflines and yards planted with plenty of flowers. Toowoomba is friendly, and despite the fact that Australia’s decade-long dry spell has turned much of the landscape from green to khaki, it takes fierce pride in its annual Carnival of Flowers, started in 1949. Toowoomba is regarded as a conservative corner of Australia—more like Birmingham, Alabama, than Austin, Texas—and it’s not unusual for people here to go to church on Sunday, a habit that is considered a curiosity in the rest of Australia. In 2008, Toowoomba was named Australia’s “tidiest town.”⁶

Toowoomba is snug without being insular. It has a university—the University of South Queensland—and has become home to a handful of sophisticated private boarding schools where students from rural families can get a better secondary education than in the outback. Half the high school students in Toowoomba are from out of town.

The most curious thing about Toowoomba, in fact, is its name—which is only odd to outsiders. Many smaller towns in Australia have Aboriginal names—Toowoomba seems to have been derived from tawampa, an Aboriginal word for swamp.⁷

In Australia, in fact, Toowoomba is not an unusual place. The rural landscape here has not been homogenized by big-box stores, and even the smallest towns have thriving main streets with locally owned toy stores, restaurants, and women’s dress shops. Nor is Toowoomba, with a population of about 120,000, considered small by Australian standards. Indeed, except for the capital at Canberra, Toowoomba is Australia’s largest inland city.⁸

Toowoomba perches atop the Great Dividing Range, a line of low mountains that runs up Australia’s east coast, as the Appalachians do along the east coast of the United States. It is one of Australia’s highest cities—with an elevation of 2,100 feet. The mountain views are panoramic. One of Toowoomba’s most distinctive features is one of absence. It is the rare major Australian city with no dramatic water in its geography. It has no river, no bay, no lakes, no oceanfront. Dousing rainfalls, captured in three city reservoirs, historically provided the water Toowoomba needed.

But by the time of the April 2005 prayer service, Toowoomba was already distressingly short of water—watering lawns was already forbidden, and the steep, normally submerged sides of its reservoirs were overgrown with grass. Toowoomba needed to find some water.

Rosemary Morley, a cheerful, matronly, lifelong Toowoomban, remembers precisely the moment when she learned that the city had, in fact, found a large, renewable source of water. It was the moment she began to view Toowoomba water with suspicion, and the moment when that suspicion took over her life.

“We had a ladies’ club,” says Morley. “We met once a month”—about forty women, ages fifty to seventy. For the May 2005 meeting, the speaker was Dianne Thorley, Toowoomba’s popular mayor. Mayor Di, as she was known, had just won a second term with 67 percent of the vote. Mayor Di is not exactly a women’s club–style politician. She looks like a female rugby coach, and she talks like the foreman of an Australian copper mine— punctuating her speech with “shit” rather than the watered-down “bloody.” A self-made woman—she started out cooking in pubs, eventually starting her own catering company in Toowoomba—Mayor Di has no college, but at one point in a varied work life she did work in an abattoir.⁹

That afternoon at the ladies’ club, Mayor Di talked with gusto about the amazing new source of water the city had discovered, the answer to the devastating lack of rain, a kind of perpetual fountain of renewable water. Toowoomba was going to recycle its wastewater back into drinking water, using advanced technology. Right there at the monthly meeting of her ladies’ club, Rosemary Morley learned that the best hope for Toowoomba’s water future was in her own toilet, as she flushed it.

It was Mayor Di’s first public discussion of the sophisticated recycling plan that she and the city’s water managers had been working on for six months. She talked with the enthusiasm of someone unveiling the solution for an intractable problem, a solution so obviously persuasive it will carry everyone along.

“She held forth for an hour,” says Morley. “She was so animated, she was so excited about it. ‘You’re all going to drink from the sewer!’”

The mayor made it clear the decision had been made: Recycled water was the future, the only way to refill Toowoomba’s reservoirs.

The reception among the women’s club? “The ladies in that room were dumbfounded,” says Morley. Herself included. Morley is a grand-motherly sort. She and her husband run a house-painting business (“I’m the office end of things”). She left school at age fourteen, but she was also the first woman to be elected president of Toowoomba’s chamber of commerce. Her approachable manner disguises an unyielding resolve, and a firmly held worldview. Rosemary Morley grew up drinking rainwater, and her house is set up so she and her husband can still do that if there is enough rain to fill her home’s water tanks. She is deeply suspicious of both government officials and scientists; drinking sewage sounded like an idea that could only come from a conspiracy of those two groups.

“I came home from that meeting and my reaction was, How can you go forward with a project like that without running it by people? I thought, This is such a sneaky thing. There must be something about it that’s funny.”

What was happening in Toowoomba—a steady disappearance of the water supply that had been unfailing for a century, a desperate search for a way to replace that water—was not only not unusual, it was typical. Water scarcity was turning into Australia’s most urgent issue, from Brisbane in the east to Perth in the west.

The change in Australia is both simple and startling.

Australia has built an entire way of life that assumes a certain availability of water—from the way homes are laid out and the way people spend their free time, to the way the nation raises its food and runs its cities. For a hundred years, those water levels, those water assumptions, were unthinkingly reliable. The Toowoomban economy requires that level of water, the Australian economy requires that level of water—the farmers and the factories, the backyard flower beds and the swimming pools. Every economy in the developed world, in fact, operates exactly the same way—that’s why both Atlanta and Las Vegas are so nervous about falling reservoir levels. Water is not simple to supply in the first place, but replacing the supply everyone has built their lives around is much more difficult.

And Australia’s water has disappeared, with stunning speed and almost unbelievable thoroughness. In the last ten years, the rainfall that fills Australia’s rivers, its reservoirs, and its aquifers has simply not come. Australians refer to the last decade as the “Big Dry.”¹⁰

The change is so dramatic that the man in charge of supplying water to Toowoomba, Kevin Flanagan, knows every time it has rained for the last twenty years. “March 1999 was the last time our dams were full,” he says. “We’ve had just ten significant rain events in the last twenty years; they account for all the filling of the dams.” None of those rainfalls came between 1999 and 2009.

“The last ten years have been an absolute horror—nonstop downslope on the capacity of all three dams.”

Australia has had to remake habits and priorities to adjust to a new water reality. There’s no reason the same shifts in water availability can’t overtake anyplace on Earth.

That’s why understanding the experience of Toowoomba, and of Australia, is so important. They are a window to the future for the United States and the rest of the developed world.

Australians have had to do three things simultaneously—tackle the complicated engineering and public policy issue of replacing vital water that is suddenly absent, while persuading people to live with less water; and develop a politics of water, a way of making expensive, high-stakes decisions about a topic that has historically been left to engineers and water bureaucrats.

The complexity of the technical decisions makes the politics of water difficult; the politics of water has often frustrated leaders’ ability to make the water decisions they thought were best. The story of the effort to solve Toowoomba’s water scarcity problem perfectly illustrates that as challenging as the technical issues are, the politics of water is both more challenging and ultimately more important.

Because the politics of water involves two issues that most developed countries have little experience with, but that turn out to be highly emotional: who gets water, and what kind of water they get. Despite the utterly carefree attitude most people in the developed world have about their daily water, we turn out to have complicated feelings about water, and to hold fiercely to them.

Although Mayor Di didn’t realize it, the battle over Toowoomba’s water future, which would dominate the town for the next sixteen months, started at Rosemary Morley’s women’s club meeting, with the mayor’s cheerful enthusiasm for drinking recycled wastewater.

What Mayor Di didn’t appreciate that day in May 2005 was that she was introducing a whole new way of thinking about water. She wasn’t being “sneaky”—to use Morley’s word—in the least. But Mayor Di didn’t seem to grasp that people might have different attitudes about water, and about what kind of water is wholesome.

The months-long debate over Toowoomba’s water-rescue plan fractured the town, the way high-pressure groundwater fractures rock, unleashing anger, distrust, and contempt that haven’t faded four years later. And even in a country that now debates water policy as readily as economic policy, the water politics of Toowoomba became a national spectacle in Australia, entangling even the prime minister’s office.

Mention the town, and Australians smile and shake their heads—oh, those wacky Toowoombans. But there is no cartoony comfort in the story of Toowoomba, either for Australia or for the rest of us. It is a complicated cautionary tale that illustrates how water abundance can smooth over very different, often conflicting, views of water.

In retrospect, that was all evident at that first women’s club encounter—evident, if not obvious. Mayor Di’s rough-hewn glee at the prospect of using technological alchemy to turn dirty water into drinking water, running smack into the utter disbelief of a room of ordinary women, who couldn’t quite absorb the idea that their city would pump the sewage right back into the reservoir, no matter how many fancy filters it went through first.

Di Thorley went on from the women’s club to the formal announcement of what was called Toowoomba’s Water Futures project (“keep our future flowing”), officially unveiled July 1. The story in the next day’s Toowoomba Chronicle newspaper was headlined with stark simplicity: “The Plan to Save Our City.”¹¹

Waterwise, things got grimmer in Toowoomba through mid-2005. Dam levels fell below 30 percent, water restrictions banning any use of outdoor hoses took hold, Bunnings—an Australian version of Home Depot—sold out of watering cans, and Toowoomba empowered four water cops to enter the backyards of residents, without warrants, if the cops suspected violations of water rules. The main worry seemed to be that Mayor Di’s recycling plan wouldn’t move fast enough. It wasn’t due to come online until 2009—four years away, with the dams down to a three-year supply of water.¹²

Rosemary Morley, meanwhile, was so appalled by the details she read from Mayor Di’s formal unveiling of the recycling project that she immediately set about organizing opposition, forming a group called CADS— Citizens Against Drinking Sewage (or Citizens Against Drinking Shit, depending on the audience). What especially aggravated Morley was Mayor Di’s insistence that the decision was made, that the city’s staff, scientists, and leadership had considered all the water options, and this was the only viable one.

“No consultation, no debate,” says Morley. “That’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

THE SPEED WITH WHICH Toowoomba’s water problems came upon it is almost hard to grasp—its reservoirs overflowed in March 1999 and were still 80 percent full at the end of 2001. Less than four years later, the city was praying for rain. Its vulnerability is all the more striking because it seemed relatively invulnerable—with regular rain, and three reservoirs scaled to hold ample supply.

Toowoomba has an unusual water challenge. Because it sits at the top of a mountain ridge, all of its water runs away from it. The city, in fact, sits at the headwaters of Australia’s great river, the Murray. There is an aquifer beneath Toowoomba, but the aquifer is falling and use by cities is sharply regulated. Although it’s relatively small, Toowoomba owns all its own waterworks—the reservoirs, pumping stations, and water treatment plants.

Starting in 2006, after the dams fell below 20 percent full and level 5 restrictions were triggered, it was forbidden in Toowoomba to use city water to do any outside watering—even sprinkling an urn of flowers with a watering can.

In the office of Kevin Flanagan, Toowoomba’s director of water and wastewater services, there is a tall potted umbrella plant, its stems and leaves dried brown and crackly. The plant’s big plastic pot bears a handwritten sign: “Level 5 water restrictions are in force in this office. Walking the talk.”

“That plant’s been dead almost ten years,” Flanagan says with just a trace of a smile. He figures to get a new one when it’s once again legal to water your lawn with city water.

Kev Flanagan is smart and a bit impatient, a technocrat. At fifty-six, he’s youthful and energetic. A bluff Irish Catholic—one of seven children, married father of four, grandfather of three—Flanagan is an engineer, a pipes-and-pumps man. He’s been in the water business thirty years, and he knows how to watch the rain, the reservoirs, the aquifers. His job as director of water services for Toowoomba is rarely a position of public renown.

Whatever his critics think of him—the opponents of drinking recycled water took to referring to Flanagan derisively as “Kevvie”—Flanagan conveys a visceral sense that it is his responsibility to make sure water always flows when Toowoombans turn on the kitchen tap.

“I invented the idea of bringing recycling to Toowoomba,” says Flanagan. Given the level of scorn that the plan, and Flanagan personally, have been subjected to in the last four years, insisting that the idea is his is a small act of courage.

“It was November 2004. There hadn’t been any significant rain for five years. I was talking to a coal mine about supplying them water. They wanted water from our wastewater treatment plant. I thought, Shit, we have nine thousand megaliters coming from the wastewater treatment plant [a year]—if we can clean it up for the coal mine, why can’t we clean it up for us?

“At that moment, our supply was grim. I was worried. The options were very limited.”¹³

Of course, cleaning water so it can be used to wash coal is very different from cleaning water so it can be used to rinse your toothbrush. Flanagan envisioned taking the city’s wastewater—everything collected by the sewers—through a series of filtration and disinfection steps similar to those used, for instance, by the folks at IBM’s Burlington microchip plant.

The water would go through Toowoomba’s regular wastewater treatment plant, Wetalla. The effluent from Wetalla—which now goes into a creek, and eventually to the Murray River, where farmers use it for irrigation—would instead be routed to a new advanced wastewater treatment plant (AWTP).

It would go through ultrafiltration, which takes out particles and bacteria; it would then go through reverse osmosis, the process by which seawater is turned into drinking water around the world. Reverse osmosis removes almost everything else—viruses, pharmaceutical residues, salts, and minerals. The water would have been blasted with UV radiation for a final dose of disinfection. Toowoomba’s water purification factory would then have pumped its product, what is called “six-star water” in Australia, on to Cooby Dam. Six-star water is so clean it actually has to have some minerals added back at the end of the process so it doesn’t leach nutrients from the bodies of people who drink it.

The blend of Cooby Dam and recycled water would eventually have been pumped to Toowoomba’s Mount Kynoch drinking water plant, where it would be put through conventional drinking water treatment, including another set of filters and chlorination. The whole cycle is called indirect potable reuse (IPR)—cleaning the wastewater back to drinking-water cleanliness, then mixing it with the routine water supply.

The purified water would have been far cleaner than the reservoir it was pumped into. Cooby’s surface area is 750 acres when it’s full, and it drains an area of sixty square miles, the size of Washington, DC. Every kangaroo or koala that pees or poops in the forest around Cooby has its waste washed into the reservoir, assuming it rains. The debris from every decomposing possum carcass is eventually flushed into either the ground or the reservoir. Cooby is simply a lake, open to every bird flying overhead, every insect (dead or alive), every cascade of leaves from trees, everything washing off lawns and farm fields and nearby roads, from sheep dung and pesticides to leaking motor oil and the tiny particles as car tires wear away.

More remarkable still, the recycled sewer water coming out of the new water factory would have been cleaner than the water coming out of Toowoomba’s taps—simply because the technology at Mount Kynoch wasn’t designed to turn koala pee into ultra-pure water, as the proposed AWTP would. People who were nervous about the recycled water should have been really nervous about their routine Toowoomba tap water.

Kev Flanagan knew all that, of course. Water professionals know the good news about water: You can’t really hurt it. These days, you can take water that is as dirty as you could possibly imagine, and clean it to whatever level of purity desired. There are no technical issues, just questions of effort, energy use, and expense.

Convincing people that the water really is clean is much more difficult, and much less scientific. This is the “toilet to tap” conundrum.

The condoms flushed away, the stagnant water from the vase of roses that stayed too long, the washing machine water from the dog’s bath towels, the sour milk poured down the kitchen drain, the deceased goldfish given a toilet-bowl funeral—you can clean all that out of the water, no problem. But no matter how crystalline the water itself, you can’t filter away the images of where it comes from.

As with many other things in modern society, we are more comfortable in ignorance. We don’t really want a vivid picture of where our hamburger comes from, we don’t want to meet the Bangladeshi who made our cheap blue-jean skirt.

We want a comforting mental and physical distance between the last time our water was dirty and the moment we use it to stir up a pitcher of iced tea. It’s easy for water professionals who live every day of their careers with the reality that while there is plenty of pure water, there is no fresh water—our water was Tyrannosaurus rex pee and dirty snow at some point, because there is no other water. For ordinary people, though, our consciousness of water doesn’t even include a willful forgetting about its source, as it does with the hamburger. We really don’t know where our water comes from, just that it needs to be “fresh” when we fill the ice cube trays.

Flanagan says now that he understood this: “I was fully aware of the issue [for residents] of the safety of the water, and of the need to handle that right.”

Even Mayor Di, who would ultimately lead the recycling campaign with unvarnished enthusiasm, started out skeptical of Flanagan’s solution.

“She wasn’t negative,” says Flanagan. “She was cognizant of the fact we live on top of a mountain. Any water source to come to Toowoomba is very difficult to get, so if you’ve got your own water here already, why not recycle it and reuse it? She was skeptical of it. We had to prove it to her.”

No one in Australia was then using the kind of water recycling system Flanagan envisioned. So Flanagan and Thorley together visited cities in the United States with experience recycling water. They went to Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, where treated effluent has been flowing into the Occoquan Reservoir, and back into the water supply of one million people, for thirty years. They visited Orange County, California, where the world’s largest wastewater recycling system was then under construction—Orange County’s plant now produces 70 million gallons of highly purified, recycled water every day, ten times Toowoomba’s total daily use.

Orange County designed an elaborate public education process while its plant was being built—and it uses precisely the technology Toowoomba proposed, except for one final element. Orange County pumps its finished water into an underground aquifer, rather than a reservoir. The water comes back into Orange County’s supply by tapping the same aquifer. Water professionals typically refer to the final steps in making water palatable for people as “polishing”; in terms of the mental polishing recycled water requires, it turns out people like their water to disappear into the ground for a while, or into a huge river, rather than simply sit in a quiet reservoir.

Flanagan and Thorley also visited Singapore’s world-famous NEWater operations. Singapore uses the phrase “used water” instead of sewage, and brands the purified wastewater as NEWater. In a subtle but smart positioning move, most of the earliest NEWater customers are high-purity users like technology factories, whose cleanliness standards are far more stringent than those of the average thirsty jogger. Singapore is introducing NEWater into the drinking water supply very gently—1 percent of daily drinking water comes from recycled “used” water, set to rise to 2.5 percent by 2011.¹⁴

“My thirtieth wedding anniversary was January 4, 2005,” says Flanagan. “I was looking at recycled sewage plants.” But the visits did the trick. Flanagan came back confident that his idea would work. And Mayor Di, says Flanagan, having seen the technology in action, came back gung-ho.

The story in the Toowoomba Chronicle about Mayor Di’s “plan to save our city” included not a word of skepticism about the technology or a sentence of dissent from anyone in town. Indeed, leaders lined up to support the idea. In the course of applying for federal funding for the A$68 million (US$56 million) water factory, Toowoomba’s city council approved Flanagan’s plan 9–0. Peter Beattie, then governor of Queensland, endorsed the plan. Most significantly, Ian Macfarlane, the member of parliament from the area that includes Toowoomba, enthusiastically endorsed water reuse, reassuring voters that “this water is … going to be better quality than what we’re currently drinking.”

In most places, that would have been it. Toowoomba’s funding application would have been approved, design and construction contracts would have been let, the water plant would have been built, the water would have been tested, and by the end of the decade Toowoomba would have had a climate-independent source of water—along with a new tourist attraction, because the water factory was planned to have a center where visitors could watch water being purified just as Singapore’s NEWater facilities do.

Instead, Toowoomba was heading into a whirlpool of a year unlike any in its history.

CLIVE BERGHOFER, the richest man in Toowoomba, the 118th-richest person in all of Australia, dropped out of school at age thirteen.¹⁵ “I could barely read or write,” he says with a lopsided smile of perverse pride. He went on to become a real estate developer, and has built huge swaths of Toowoomba. He claims to have named four hundred streets in the subdivisions he’s rolled out, including a short lane called Berghofer Street.

Berghofer, who is now a cantankerous seventy-four years old, spent almost two decades on the Toowoomba city council, the last ten years of that as mayor. He, too, worried about possible water scarcity back in the mid-1980s—he presided over construction of the city’s largest reservoir, Cressbrook, almost twice as large as the older two reservoirs combined. He is so well known that Toowoomba’s newspaper can refer to him in headlines simply as “Clive.” Five recreation venues in Toowoomba bear Berghofer’s name, as does the intensive care ward of the local hospital.¹⁶ He is easily Toowoomba’s most influential resident, and he shares with Mayor Di a willingness to speak his mind.

Within weeks of the announcement of Thorley and Flanagan’s recycled water plan, Berghofer came out against it. “It’ll kill this city,” he said. “It’s an absolute disaster.”¹⁷

Berghofer, a tough-as-rocks Australian, gets squirmy about recycled water.

“If I die, they run all those fluids through me, they drain me out before they put me in the coffin—that stuff goes right into the sewer. Hospitals, funeral homes—all that material goes right into the sewer.

“They claim you can’t get all the hormones out of the water. We don’t know what that will do. It might take two generations to find out. The fish are all turning female.

“It’s like smoking. It’s bad for you, but you’re not going to die when you take the next cigarette. You might never die of smoking. But we know it is bad for you.

“Why would you drink recycled water if you didn’t have to?”

Berghofer dubbed supporters of the city’s Water Futures plan “sewage sippers.” He said his beloved Garden City would become known nationwide as “Poowoomba” and “Shit City.” Opponents of water recycling took out newspaper ads telling readers, “You deserve fresh water” and urging residents to “think for yourself.” Resistance to drinking recycled water is known in the water trade as “the yuck factor.” Berghofer, and Rosemary Morley’s CADS group, experienced the yuck, and also plumbed it.

Mayor Di, Kev Flanagan, and the supporters of the recycled water technology were deftly outmaneuvered by Rosemary Morley and her opponents, not once but twice. The opponents were better at the politics, and better at the populism.

The very first public CADS meeting organized by Morley featured as its main guest speaker a well-known Aussie antirecycling character named Laurie Jones, a plumber from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Jones has no formal scientific or water treatment training, except, as he says, “I am a licensed plumber and drainer and I know what goes into a sewer.”¹⁸

Jones has focused his online research on micropollutants in wastewater—hormone and pharmaceutical residue left over after basic sewage treatment, how those chemicals feminize fish and might feminize Toowoomba’s men if they were forced to drink recycled water.

That meeting, which drew five hundred Toowoombans, including both Clive Berghofer and Mayor Di, was presided over by Snow Manners, a patrician entrepreneur who became Morley’s partner in dedicated opposition to the recycling plan.

“Laurie Jones had a lot of extreme stories,” says Manners. “He told us [that the men] would grow breasts, that our testicles would fall off.” Not a particularly scientific approach, but an undeniably memorable one.

Asked at the meeting if the recycling plan was open for debate or reconsideration, Mayor Di told the crowd it was “nonnegotiable.” She was booed.¹⁹

“It got boisterous,” says Manners.

The images, the questions, the language of the opponents were so vivid that three years later, with almost no prompting, ordinary Toowoombans volunteer them back. “The hospital washes blood down the drain,” says the waitress at one of Toowoomba’s Italian restaurants before serving dinner. “I don’t want to drink that.”

In the wake of that first CADS meeting where Toowoomba’s testicles were put on notice, Rosemary Morley organized a petition drive to bring the recycling plan to a halt. By early October, just seven weeks after the public meeting, she had collected 7,048 signatures on petitions opposing adding recycled water to the dams, more than 10 percent of Toowoomba’s electorate.²⁰

Morley didn’t present those petitions to Mayor Di—she took them straight to Ian Macfarlane, the federal member of parliament who just two months earlier had called the recycling plan “bold,” and said he was “proud to push its merits.” In the face of the petitions, and what he said was an overwhelming volume of calls and letters to his office, he pirouetted, meeting with Mayor Di to tell her, “Given information I have obtained from independent sources, I am currently unable to support recycled effluent being discharged into Cooby Dam.”

Months of behind-the-scenes political jockeying ensued; what happened next took official Toowoomba by stunned surprise. The following March, the Australian federal government said it would pay for the new advanced water purification plant—but only if the people of Toowoomba endorsed it in a referendum. That kind of contingent federal funding was unheard-of in a century of Australian history. What’s more, it’s not clear that any community anywhere has ever voted on whether to include purified wastewater in its drinking water supply—certainly residents in Singapore, Fairfax County, and Orange County never did.

The referendum provided political cover. Water is one of the top two or three political issues across Australia—depending on recent rainfall and the economy. Rather than be accused of forcing Toowoombans to accept poo-water, the national leadership would let Toowoombans themselves decide.

And so what should have been a rational, careful conversation became a raucous political campaign. “We knew we were pretty well stuffed once the referendum was in place,” says Kev Flanagan.

The referendum was announced in late March, the vote was set for Saturday, July 29, 2006—the recycled water campaign lasted all of April, May, June, and July.

The city produced a full-color, forty-page book explaining the reasoning of the recycling project, with graphics of molecules and filter barriers, pages of text explaining the technology, photos of water in every possible mood, and many pictures of children. Clive Berghofer paid to have an eight-page newspaper written, printed, and mailed to every home in Toowoomba with the front-page headline “Clive Says ‘NO,’” above a photo of a churning tank of raw brown sewage, with the caption “Is this our city’s future?”

Three members of Toowoomba’s city staff did nothing for those months but explain and promote the water plan—Mayor Di, Flanagan, and Flanagan’s chief deputy, Alan Kleinschmidt. Flanagan and Kleinschmidt were relieved of their routine duties to concentrate on the referendum full-time.

Mayor Di, says Flanagan, lived up to her reputation. “She was rough as guts,” he says. “She was a first on the desk. ‘You’re going to drink it, and if you don’t like it, you can drink bottled water!’ That was her style. Sometimes I had to say to her, ‘Di, today you’re a diplomat.’”

The science itself was hard—hard to present, hard to grasp, hard to be quickly comfortable with. Proponents started out saying that the purified water would have nothing left in it—the barriers were finer and finer, and in the end, only water molecules would be able to dance through. But while that’s mostly true, it’s not quite true. The purified water does have infinitesimal amounts of things in it—some that slip through the barriers, some that are the result of the purification process itself, but in quantities so small they are measured in parts per trillion.

For instance, some tested samples of sewage water purified in Queensland using the Toowoomba process contained a bit of acetaminophen— the active ingredient in Tylenol. How much? If 685 people drank two liters of that recycled water every single day of their lives, and all 685 lived to be a hundred, then on their hundredth birthday, the day they had together drunk 50 million liters of water, they would have at last consumed a single adult dose of Tylenol—collectively.

So the water in question didn’t contain no acetaminophen, but an infant running a fever gets more in two doses than you’d get in a hundred years of drinking recycled water.

Some tested samples of the purified water contained bisphenol A (BPA), one of the most controversial industrial chemicals, a substance whose risks to health are unclear. How much bisphenol A was in the water? The analysis found 10 nanograms per liter. That’s not nothing. But in the course of a normal day, a typical person consumes 2,300 nanograms from all kinds of other sources—food containers, plastics—so the tiny amount in drinking water doesn’t change your exposure to BPA. Drinking 20 liters (5 gallons) a day of recycled water, which is impossible, would only add 10 percent to your BPA exposure.²¹

In any meaningful measure of reality, there was nothing in the purified water but water. In scientific terms, there were some molecules of other stuff.

But the difference between “nothing” and “virtually nothing” is the difference between security and anxiety. In a heated political campaign, it’s the difference between trust and suspicion.

“I heard things like, ‘A nurse has told me they can’t get the hepatitis C virus or the AIDS virus out of the water,’” says Flanagan, shaking his head. Both HIV and hep C virus particles are five to ten times larger than the pores in the very first filtration barrier; they are 500 to 1,000 times larger than the holes in a reverse-osmosis membrane. For those worried about blood, hospitals in Toowoomba are forbidden to flush bloody waste into the routine sewer system—but even if they did, blood is organic. The first wave of routine sewage treatment destroys blood. And blood cells are 60 times the size of the HIV virus—60,000 times the size of the pores in the filters.

But what if the nurse your friend knows is right, and the water officials are just saying whatever is needed to get their water recycling plant? Toowoomba became a swirl of urban legend that was moving far faster than any ordinary person could keep up.

“There are some people who are genuinely afraid. They can’t get their heads around the idea that it is possible to drink our effluent,” says Peter Swannell, an engineer who had been president of the University of South Queensland in Toowoomba. Swannell was a vigorous public supporter of the recycled water plan. “It does require education to get used to it.” Of Berghofer, Swannell says, “The guy is unshakeable in his misunderstandings.”

The unnerving thing, in public policy terms, is that the opposition campaign was as much about perception as about facts—and in that sense, the debate, the campaign itself, became a kind of negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

Clive Berghofer seemed to relish saying that people would come to know Toowoomba as “Poowoomba” or “Shit City.” But those terms rarely, if ever, occurred in the media unless he was the one using them or inspiring someone else to use them.

“The fear of recycled water is reasonable,” said Berghofer, “not because it would hurt you—it might hurt you. … Is it safe? It’s all a matter of perception.” In fact, whether recycled water is safe is not a matter of perception. It’s a matter of science, a matter of reality.

The opponents had one final political masterstroke. As the campaign wound toward election day, the opposition ads and flyers positioned the no vote as a way for Toowoombans to keep their water options open.

“No gives you options,” shouted one print advertisement. “Yes = drinking recycled sewerage. No = putting all options, including recycling, on the table.”

It was, truly, brilliant. No was a better version of yes than yes.

What the supporters of recycling failed to do was two things: They failed to enumerate the costs, even the dangers, of voting no with anything like the vividness with which their opponents painted the costs of voting yes. And they failed to find a good-humored way of pointing out to people that if you insist on thinking of it this way, every drop of water on Earth is “poo-water,” because the water has been around longer than life itself, so every creature that has ever lived on Earth has done its version of pooping into that water, whether it comes from Cooby Dam or the springs at San Pellegrino.

It’s all recycled water—it’s just a question how big a gap in time and space and imagination has opened.

In the end, Alan Kleinschmidt and Snow Manners had a very similar thought, from very different perspectives.

“The ‘yuck factor’ is a deeply ingrained psychological thing,” says Kleinschmidt. “As a water industry, we’re partly to blame for that. All of the advances we’ve made in the last hundred years in public health are really about separating the water and the sewage.

“Now we’re telling them to forget all that. That’s hard.

“Of course, we’re not really telling them to forget it—we’re moving the separation to the molecular level. But still …”

Snow Manners is blunter. “The reason Toowoomba erupted was, they were attacking the fundamental values here,” he says. “They came up with a proposal that attacked the core values of Western suburban life: You go to the sewage plant to get your water.”

It drizzled most of the day before the election—but not enough to run in the gutters. Rosemary Morley predicted that the rain would get the opponents 5 percent more votes.

They didn’t need it. In what was perhaps the first ballot of its kind anywhere in the world, Toowoombans voted against drinking purified recycled water, 62 percent to 38 percent.

In defeat, Mayor Di got it right. “The community didn’t trust their mayor and their council,” she said. “They believed that I would put their families and themselves at risk.”

Clive Berghofer merely harrumphed. “I’d like to have seen [the vote] a bit higher than what it is, to prove that we’re not idiots in Toowoomba.”

Toowoombans may not have been idiots, but their acrimonious debate and vote provided no answer, no deliverance. It provided no water. After the votes were counted, Toowoombans were simply a year deeper into their water crisis. By the end of 2006, the year of the referendum, Toowoomba’s dam levels had fallen to half what they were at the time of the prayer service in April 2005. Kev Flanagan still had to solve the problem of how to get water to Toowoomba.

TOOWOOMBA’S PROBLEMS are simply a miniature version of the crisis every major city in Australia has gone through in the last decade (except Darwin, on the relatively lush north coast).

The details of how the water is disappearing vary, and the details of the politics vary, but every big city has run dramatically short of water—and all at the same time: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth.

The result has been an urgency about water issues in Australia, and an immediacy. Every state in Australia now has a cabinet-level minister for water or climate change—or both. Australia’s federal government also has a cabinet minister for water, the same rank as the minister for defense. And in the last four years, Water Minister Penny Wong has gotten as much media attention as the defense minister.²² Water is a topic of daily conversation, debate, worry, and speculation. Water scarcity, water restrictions, and plans for finding more water are written about in Australia’s major newspapers virtually every day. The weather pages feature color charts and graphics that show how much water residents have used—total water in the last twenty-four hours, per capita use, how much water remains in a city’s reservoirs. The figures are updated each day.

Australian officials at all levels are scrambling to find new sources of water and frequently promoting desalination and recycling because, while expensive, they are “climate independent,” their success doesn’t depend on rain. Officials are also trying to instill new habits of water use. The changes are coming fast, because there is no choice. And the consequences are being felt in every corner of Australia—not least because of the astonishing cost that no one anticipated, a cost to try to rescue the water status quo and the advanced economy it supports.

Australia’s state and federal governments have embarked on a A$30 billion effort to reimagine and rebuild the nation’s water system. The A$30 billion is far more dramatic than it first appears. For while Australia is physically the size of the United States, it has only about as many people as Florida. Imagine if the United States consisted of only the people who lived in Florida—and the rest of the country was empty. That’s Australia. The country’s spending on water projects comes to A$1,500 for every Australian—the equivalent, in the United States, of $400 billion, half Barack Obama’s entire economic stimulus program. Just on water.²³

This is what water scarcity looks like, this is what the impact of climate change looks like, in a developed country where the economy, the per capita GDP, even the movies, music, and pop culture, are very much like that in the United States. There is no debate about the “reality” of climate change in Australia. It is as real as 2009’s global economic crisis. In Australia, climate change, like the economic downturn, is big, moving across the whole landscape, impossible to either ignore or redirect. And climate change, like the economic downturn, can be startlingly immediate, even intimate.

In Perth and Melbourne, in Adelaide and the farm towns along the Murray River, the adults may hope that it will one day rain again, but in all those places, by 2009, kids entering their teens had never known a year when it rained like it did in the twentieth century.

Australia has always had a watery spirit, despite a climate of legendary dryness. Eighty-five percent of Australians live within a strip just thirty-one miles wide along the country’s coastlines. Half the nation’s homes are eight miles or less from the ocean.²⁴

Riversides, bays, waterfronts, and beachfronts are so present in the daily life and the daily landscape of Australia’s major cities—in Perth, in Adelaide, in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane—that it can be easy to forget how precariously dry Australia is. Australians live at the water’s edge precisely because most of the country is so parched.

Australia, whose land area is almost the same as that of the continental United States, is by far the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Rainfall across Australia is highly variable, but averages just eighteen inches, less than falls in Flagstaff, Arizona. What makes Australia so truly dry compared with other places, though, is a topography and a climate that mean very little of that rain ends up as runoff in Australia’s rivers. The dry landscape absorbs or evaporates rainfall quickly and thoroughly. Just 11 percent of Australian rainfall becomes runoff. The average rainfall in North America is only 20 percent higher than in Australia, but the runoff is 52 percent, so five times as much rain ends up as runoff. In wet times, the combined flow of all Australia’s rivers is just half the flow of the Mississippi River alone.²⁵

After a century and a half living in such a climate, Australians understood their relationship to rain, water, heat, and drought. Or they thought they did. In the last decade, the Big Dry has laid hold of the whole continent, withering an already arid country. Today, whether suburbanite or farmer, politician or factory manager, water scarcity touches the life of every Australian every day in some way.

Perth, Australia, sits at the far western edge of the country—in about the spot San Francisco does in the United States, and with the same spirit of independence and informality. With a population of 1.5 million, Perth is capital of Western Australia, a single sprawling state that is bigger than the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy combined.²⁶ The Swan River winds through downtown Perth, wide and placid, with a miles-long greenway along its banks crowded with runners, skaters, strollers, and bikers. Perth is just eleven miles upstream from the Indian Ocean and the artsy, relaxed beachfront town of Fremantle.

In the last thirty years, Perth’s average annual rainfall has fallen by 20 percent. But because dry ground drinks up sparse rainfall more readily, the 20 percent drop in precipitation has led to a 75 percent drop in the water running into Perth’s dams. Since 1980, Perth’s population has doubled; the water flowing into its reservoirs has dropped to a quarter what the city depended on.²⁷

Even as Perth scrambles to build its second desalination plant, officials have sought to permanently alter the community’s water culture. Perth’s residents are famous for their English-style gardens—the city has vast carpets of suburban single-family homes where, like Toowoomba, the cultural devotion to gardening is at odds with the Mediterranean climate. Now residents are only allowed to water their gardens two days a week, and always before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m. Sprinklers are banned during Australia’s winter months, from June 1 to September 1. The watering rules aren’t drought restrictions—they are permanent.

It was Perth’s water problems that inspired the renowned Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery to predict, in June 2004, that Perth could become uninhabitable. “You don’t want to lead people to despair, and it’s not too late, but there is a possibility Perth will become Western civilisation’s first ghost metropolis,” Flannery said. “I think the chances are that, in the next fifty years, Perth will face challenges it simply won’t be able to overcome.” In Perth’s major newspaper, that prediction appeared under the headline “Perth Will Die, Says Top Scientist.”²⁸

The Big Dry hasn’t just imposed an era of water austerity. Scarcity has quickly shown that Australia’s water systems weren’t set up to decide who should get water when there wasn’t enough for everyone—the Big Dry was quickly causing water conflict.

Adelaide, the bustling commercial center that sits in the middle of Australia’s southern coast, depends for most of its water on the Murray River, which runs east of the city. The lack of rain had reduced water in the Murray River so dramatically that Adelaide’s core drinking water supply was at “extreme risk,” as a 2009 report put it. The condition of the Murray also created friction between the thousands of rural farmers upstream who tap the river to grow Australia’s food, and Adelaide’s urban residents, a conflict that isn’t just about water, but quickly becomes about culture, politics, and economics. Whose community, whose work, is more important? Water scarcity that comes on quickly often seems like a zero-sum game—water that farmers use is water that doesn’t make it to Adelaide’s spigots—and the rivalry over water quickly becomes an argument about priorities, values, and lifestyles.

The water restrictions imposed in Adelaide cut water use enough that residents saved the equivalent of the output of an entire desalination plant, which would have cost A$1 billion. Still, Adelaide’s officials are so worried about the future of both the rain and the river Murray that they not only had a desalination plant under way in 2009, they decided to double its size before construction on the first stage had even begun.²⁹

In Melbourne, the daily water culture has been revolutionized. Melbourne is a hip and cosmopolitan metropolis of three million people; it sits along Port Phillip Bay, and the Yarra River arcs through the middle of the city. You can run and bike for miles along seaside and waterside paths, and some of the city’s most popular neighborhoods are right on the edge of the bay, with an air of 1960s Miami Beach. Despite the daily presence of water in the city landscape, the total water in Melbourne’s ten reservoirs in mid-2009 was lower than it had ever been—down to sixteen months of drinking water, after twelve years of low rainfall. Residents are exhorted to “Target 155”—use only 155 liters of water per day per person, 41 gallons, about what an American would use with a single bath.

If you own a swimming pool in Melbourne, starting in 2008 you could only legally fill it with drinking water using a bucket, and then just to keep the pool from cracking and popping out of the ground. Hose filling was forbidden. It became popular for high-income people to truck in water from outside Melbourne to fill their pools. A seven-thousand-gallon tanker cost a swimming pool owner A$1,600 (US$1,350)—23 cents a gallon. A backyard pool requires two tankers to fill.³⁰

But in the twelve years of the Big Dry, Melbourne residents have transformed their individual water use. They’ve gone from using 358 liters per day—95 gallons, typical for someone in the United States—to 143 liters per day (38 gallons). Melbourne residents have changed their daily routines in ways that have allowed them to eliminate 60 percent of their water use.³¹

To try to guarantee a climate-independent supply of water, Melbourne, too, has laid plans for a desalination plant, Australia’s biggest, at a staggering cost of A$3.5 billion (US$3 billion). Said the premier of Victoria, the state of which Melbourne is the capital, “We don’t want to be a ‘pray for rain’ government.”³²

For Australians, the most potent symbol of the Big Dry is the emptying of Australia’s great river, the Murray, which winds through the heart of southeastern Australia. The Mighty Murray, as it is known, occupies a place in the Australian imagination akin to that of the Mississippi for Americans. The Murray is a character and a setting for Australian stories; its early exploration and its use by paddle wheelers to move people and goods are a central part of Australian history. The Murray River runs for 1,591 miles, and with its main tributary, the Darling River, the Murray-Darling Basin drains one out of every seven acres on the continent. In the Big Dry, the Murray River has gotten so low that in 2007, 2008, and 2009, it simply ceased to flow.

More than simply a symbol, the Murray is a vital economic engine for Australia. It waters farmland that produces 30 percent of the country’s agriculture—a basin productive enough, by itself, to feed every Australian. But the combined total flow in 2007, 2008, and 2009 was little more than half what a single typical year is.³³

The results for Australia’s breadbasket have been devastating, both in terms of the amount of food produced, and socially. More than 100,000 fruit trees in the region have been allowed to die because there is no water to sustain them. Australians used to chart their nation’s economic success by counting sheep—“Australia rides on the sheep’s back,” the old saying goes. The number of sheep and lambs being raised in 2009 was the lowest since 1920. The rice harvest in 2009—Australians grow a huge amount of rice, most of it in the Murray basin—was just 5 percent of the typical year. And 2009 was three times the size of 2008, when the rice harvest was 1.6 percent of normal.³⁴

Australians fear that a whole way of life is being hollowed out by the Murray basin drought—farmers are lining up to sell their water rights back to the federal government, effectively cashing out of farming, and depopulating farm towns north of Melbourne and east of Adelaide. Without irrigation rights, a piece of farmland is worth almost nothing.

Everything about life in Australia—business, leisure, food production— assumes a level of water availability that was backed by a hundred years of history and infrastructure. The dams are in certain places for a reason; the farms are in certain places for the same reason: there was water there. In the last ten years, shifting rainfall patterns have seemed to make a mockery of those choices. The water in many of Australia’s reservoirs is so low that the construction roads used to build the dams are now visible.

Indeed, in 2010, even as rain in some parts of Australia allowed a slight easing of water restrictions, it was clear that in terms of water—use of water, perceptions of water—life has been permanently altered. In the state of South Australia, home to Adelaide, Water Minister Paul Caica said he fully expected to make the drought-inspired ban on lawn sprinklers permanent.

“I used to like running through sprinklers as a kid,” he said. “My kids liked running through sprinklers. But what we’ve got to realize is … we all have a responsibility to use that water effectively, and [sprinklers] are not an effective way of using water.”³⁵

It would be as if the governor of Texas had announced that he never expected to see lawn sprinklers legal in that state again.

“The message of our experience is very clear,” says Ross Young, who spent eighteen years with Melbourne’s water utility and now heads an industry association of Australia’s large water utilities. “Once climate change hits, it hits at a pace and a level of severity that no one ever predicted in the climate models.”

Supplying clean water has for a century been a fairly straightforward engineering task in the developed world. But as the political fight over the water rescue plan in the city of Toowoomba shows, the politics of water scarcity often turn out to be surprising, emotional, and confounding.

THE TUMULT OF TOOWOOMBA’S yearlong water battle obscures something important, something that connects Toowoomba not just to its much bigger sister cities with water troubles in Australia, but to cities around the world that are nonchalant about water now, but may not be for long.

Toowoomba lacked nothing it needed to tackle water scarcity.

It had good water resources before the Big Dry took hold. It had an energetic water staff that anticipated the problems and searched for solutions. It had a community that was strong and stable, smart and cohesive. It had plenty of money—the federal and state governments stood ready to offer tens of millions of dollars for a well-argued water rescue plan.

What Toowoomba didn’t have was a way of talking calmly and thoughtfully about water. Toowoomba’s public officials really didn’t grasp that water is so personal that tinkering with people’s drinking water unleashes emotions that the normal political process, and the normal political leadership, are not equipped to handle. Recycling sewage into drinking water tapped something primal and disquieting for a lot of Toowoombans. Toowoomba was totally unprepared for the surprising, and surprisingly caustic, politics of water.

For Americans, for anyone with a secure supply of water they never question, the fractiousness of water politics can seem unexpected, even bemusing. But Toowoomba isn’t some oddity—the intensity of water as a public policy issue in the developed world is not to be underestimated. Water issues are often a combustible combination of two things that don’t typically mix—something immediate, like taxes, that touches your life every day; and something intimate, like abortion, that taps your deepest beliefs. Water may be mostly ignored, but when it becomes important, it often ends up being about emotion as much as science or rational policy-making. When water becomes a crisis, when it cascades into politics, our responses are hard to predict, and hard to manage.

Of course, subjecting such technical decisions to a referendum brings democracy into an arena where it is not at its most helpful. We did not vote on the stringing of power lines or the laying of water mains, we do not vote on even major zoning decisions or the routes of highways or the locations of their interchanges. We elect officials to make those decisions, and if we don’t like their choices, we elect new officials.

For ordinary people, the molecular science behind the drinkability of purified wastewater is a leap of faith. You can look at all the multicolored diagrams you want, you can hold reverse-osmosis membranes in your hands, you can listen closely as scientists and engineers explain how UV radiation disinfects anything that slips through. You can read reports reassuring you of the purity of the water, and you can taste the water itself. But in the end, none of that is firsthand experience of the water’s safety. You have to decide you believe what you’re reading and hearing. Drinking any water, but particularly water you might be leery of, requires belief that it’s okay.

What happened in Toowoomba points to a question about water that, in the developed world, we haven’t had to worry about in a hundred years, but is coming back with fresh urgency: How clean is my tap water anyway?

It’s not quite as easy a question to answer as it would seem, and it’s not quite as easy to answer as it once was. The recycled water Toowoombans rejected would have been cleaner than the water coming out of their kitchen faucets every day—the purified wastewater would have been cleaner than the tap water anywhere in Australia or the United States. But the tone of the conversation in Toowoomba meant that the science couldn’t compete with the emotion.

That’s the larger point: If we’re going to manage our water well, and if we’re going to avoid water debates that are emotional, even scary, but not helpful, we need more than good science about how clean our water is. We need a way of talking about what’s in the water that gets beyond alarming headlines about Prozac and Tylenol and birth control pills lurking in the reservoir.

In fact, the debate in Toowoomba really points to a new question about water, what might even be called a modern question: What exactly is clean water? What does it mean to say that water is clean?

Americans are already both suspicious of and nervous about the quality of their tap water. We love to talk about its taste, about whether it’s really safe. In a 2009 Gallup Poll, Americans were read a list of eight environmental problems. The No. 1 issue they worried about “a great deal” was “pollution of drinking water”: 59 percent worried about drinking water “a great deal”; another 25 percent worried about it “a fair amount.”³⁶ (It is precisely this worry that drives the $21-billion-a-year bottled water business in the United States.)

The worry might seem irrational. In the United States and most of the developed world, our tap water is remarkably safe. Clean tap water has contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in our life spans. But two things have changed recently that have shaken confidence in tap water. First, scientists have developed the ability to test for contaminants that are present in only the tiniest amounts—at the level of 1 or 2 or 3 parts per trillion.

What is 1 part per trillion?

Think of it in terms of your own income. Most of us will not earn $10 million in our entire working lives—you would have to earn $100,000 for each of 100 years.

Now, look around you for a penny. You probably don’t have to look beyond your pocket, the bottom of your purse, the drawer in your desk. Pennies are everywhere.

If you earned $10 million in your lifetime, 1 part per billion of that income would be a single penny, out of all the pennies that rattle through your life. So the new ability to test for substances at a concentration of 1 part per trillion is the same as the ability to find a single penny out of a lifetime of $10 million in earnings, not for one person but for 1,000 people. And not just to find a penny, but to find a single specific penny.

Put another way, it’s the ability to zero in on one specific second out of 1 trillion seconds, 1 second out of 31,689 years.

That kind of detection capability is simply astounding. Something that appears as a couple parts per trillion is in the water, but only barely.

That testing ability has allowed us to discover a whole wave of things that we never realized are in our water—almost like the discovery, one hundred years ago, of the bacteriological pollutants in water.

The result this time is a little tricky: Some of the things we’re “discovering” have been in the water all along; others are relatively new. The water itself isn’t dirtier. We’re just seeing the water we once thought was clean in a new way.

That we couldn’t detect the “dirt” ten years ago doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t damaging the environment or human health. The tricky part is that the opposite is also true: The fact that we can detect the substances, their very presence in the water, doesn’t mean they are harmful, or even significant. Just because we suddenly realize there’s stuff in the water we didn’t know was there before doesn’t mean we have to take it out.

We actually don’t know. That is, we don’t know how clean the water needs to be.

One reason we don’t know has to do with the second big change in our water supplies: what we’re putting into the water. We’ve started to wash substances into our wastewater, and into our lakes, reservoirs, and rivers, that simply didn’t exist a hundred or even fifty years ago.

Tens of millions of people now take maintenance pharmaceuticals every day: antidepressants and cholesterol-lowering medicine join birth control pills and blood-pressure medicine, along with somewhat rarer cancer and organ-transplant drugs. The residues of those medicines end up in our urine and in our wastewater. Farms, mines, and gas-drilling operations use all kinds of exotic chemicals, some regulated and some not, that end up in wastewater. And all the products of modern life—from shampoos and detergents to the fire-retardant chemicals that infuse our children’s pajamas—are depositing a faint rainbow of contamination in our rivers, lakes, and reservoirs. Because of the way water works, of course, that means those substances are also starting to appear in the raw water that utilities rely on to supply our tap water.

What we don’t know is if these micropollutants in our water are hurting us, and how.

“It is the difference between what’s detectable and what’s dangerous,” says Shane Snyder, a toxicologist who is codirector of the Arizona Laboratory for Emerging Contaminants at the University of Arizona. Snyder was one of the scientists who helped first discover the micropollutants in U.S. water supplies, and until August 2010, he ran an unusual research and development laboratory for Patricia Mulroy’s Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas.

We have the ability to pollute our water in ways that are new, and we have an ability to detect those pollutants that is new—but our ability to understand their impact on the environment and our own long-term health is seriously lagging.

And, of course, what you don’t understand you can’t effectively regulate. In the United States, the Safe Drinking Water Act, which is updated periodically, requires utilities to test for 91 contaminants, but it was written 35 years ago. Big U.S. water utilities routinely find hundreds of unregulated chemicals in their water supplies, albeit in minuscule amounts. Water systems haven’t kept up with modern technology. They haven’t kept up with our ability to ask questions about what’s in our water, and to figure out what it might be doing to us and how best to neutralize it.

The amounts of most such substances are almost unimaginably tiny, the equivalent, as Snyder puts it, of a single grain of sand in an Olympic-size swimming pool. But many of the chemicals are what’s called “endocrine disruptors”—that is, in animals, and potentially in humans, they have the ability to act like hormones. The very nature of hormones is that a tiny amount can have a significant impact.

The superficially easy solution is simply to filter the substances out of the water. And in purely technical terms, we can of course filter our tap water to whatever level of cleanliness we desire. But to take out substances that appear only in the parts-per-billion and parts-per-trillion range would, with current technology, double or triple or quadruple the cost of cleaning the water. It would dramatically increase the power required (“we don’t have enough power plants in the country to do that,” says Snyder). And it would be premature, if not foolish, on at least two counts. First, 95 percent of the water that utilities provide isn’t used for drinking or cooking, it’s used to flush the toilet, fill the bathtub, and water the lawn. That water doesn’t need to be ultra-purified. Second, we don’t actually know which substances are hurting us, so we’d be spending enormous amounts of scarce money on a public health effort that might not, in the end, improve public health.

For the moment, that kind of purity should be reserved for drinking water, and the way to achieve it is to filter the water you actually drink—at the tap.

That doesn’t require any technological breakthrough. The most ordinary of water filters, an activated-charcoal filter like those found in Brita pitchers, PUR faucet attachments, or the cartridges built into refrigerators, “are incredible at taking this stuff out,” says Snyder. “Almost anything in the water binds to the charcoal—the chemicals, the pharmaceuticals, the disinfection byproducts.” For anyone worried about the quality of his or her tap water, the filters offer an easy and inexpensive margin of reassurance. The only issue, says Snyder, is how long the filters last. They should be replaced every couple months, because their effectiveness fades.

But a Brita pitcher isn’t any way to manage the micropollutants in the long term. Understanding them, and finding a way of explaining their impact to people without scientific training, is one of the critical issues of water policy in the next decade. More and more we will want to reuse our wastewater, because as water scarcity grows, the wastewater that utilities already have will be one of our easiest and least expensive “sources” of water. But that wastewater is precisely where the micropollutants turn up first.

So if we’re going to reuse wastewater successfully—whether as gray water for things like irrigating athletic fields and golf courses, or as a source of fresh drinking water—we need to understand how clean it has to be, to know how to clean it, and to be able to make people comfortable that it is, in fact, clean.

Shane Snyder, whose institute is doing exactly the kind of research the water industry needs, says that rather than try to filter drinking water, it may be much smarter to find ways of removing the pollutants from our wastewater before we release it back into lakes, rivers, and aquifers. The micropollutants, he points out, are not just an issue for people. “It’s not a drinking water problem,” he says, “it’s an environmental problem. Let’s take it out of the wastewater, not just because of human health, but because of environmental health.”

An aggressive and open effort to understand what’s in the water in developed countries, where it’s coming from, and what impact it has, should not only bolster confidence in tap water, it should make possible all kinds of innovative water reuse without getting tangled in the debate Toowoomba put itself through. The very concern that Americans express about the safety of their drinking water should mean there is support for making sure water supplies are well taken care of.³⁷

Even Toowoomba’s Mayor Di started out skeptical about drinking recycled wastewater. But she gave herself the time, along with hands-on visits to actual water purification facilities, to get comfortable with purified wastewater. What she didn’t do was give her constituents the same space to get comfortable—she wanted them to take the water she was giving them on faith.

Water itself doesn’t respond much to the power of belief. “In the last eleven years, we have not had a lot of rain,” says Rosemary Morley. “The city also hasn’t run dry of water. Droughts do end, and when the drought breaks, our reservoirs will fill up, and we’ll be fine.”

“One of these days,” says Clive Berghofer, “it will rain.”

Actually, maybe not.

Three years after the referendum, there had still been almost no rain, and Toowoomba’s reservoirs had fallen to 90 percent empty. The three reservoirs looked stark, scary. A vast reservoir that is 90 percent empty is kind of a spooky place—like standing on the side of an empty Olympic-size swimming pool. Vaguely ominous, even dangerous. An empty reservoir is so big, and so empty, that your immediate thought is, That’s not right— they should fill that thing up.

In fact, after years of uncertainty, in late 2009, Toowoomba was rescued. Twelve hours a day, from dawn to dusk, construction crews furiously laid twenty-four miles of pipe that now connect Toowoomba’s independent water system to the sprawling water grid of the state of Queensland— the water system that supplies Brisbane and its surrounding communities.

To get the pipeline in the ground on a tightly orchestrated nine-month schedule, five construction gangs worked on separate stretches simultaneously. Each segment of the Toowoomba pipeline is a fat black steel pipe forty-four feet long—longer than a typical American yellow school bus. The pipes are lined with a thin layer of black concrete, and the interior diameter is thirty inches. There are 3,600 segments of pipe to be buried and sealed—beneath fields, through the heart of a small town, along a gorge. The pipeline goes dramatically uphill—rising 754 feet from Queensland’s Wivenhoe reservoir to Toowoomba’s Cressbrook reservoir, the height of a sixty-story skyscraper. It’s not a trivial push. When the pumps kick on each day, the water sitting in the twenty-four miles of pipeline angled up the mountains weighs 38 million pounds. (The grade is significant enough that the pipe enters Cressbrook at the base of the dam, not over the side, to save thirty meters of elevation.)

The pipeline is designed to pump 14,000 megaliters of water up to Toowoomba each year, enough water just from the pipeline to supply all of Toowoomba’s present needs. With additional pumps, it could supply 18,000 megaliters.

The pipeline is costing A$187 million (US$156 million)—about A$8 million per mile, with Toowoomba’s water customers paying A$75 million. But the advanced water purification plant voters rejected would have cost A$68 million. And because the feds and the state would have helped pay for the recycling system, Toowoomba would only have had to foot one-third of that cost—A$23 million. So the most immediate cost of the referendum is A$52 million in extra costs to sustain the flow of water to Toowoomba. That comes to A$433 per person in Toowoomba—it’s why the city’s water bills will double over the next several years.

A pipeline from Wivenhoe was one of the ideas considered before Flanagan and the council settled on recycling. It was rejected, in part, on the basis of cost.

Sending the water from Wivenhoe to Cressbrook requires significant amounts of energy. Each day, electric pumps will push 60 million pounds of water up the mountains, equivalent to pushing a train loaded with 400,000 people up the hill. The electricity is expensive enough that the pumps will operate mostly overnight, to take advantage of off-peak utility rates.³⁸

So the Toowoomba pipeline has two costs that would have been smaller with the recycling plant: the electricity to move all that water is a new operational cost that is permanently added to water bills, on top of the one-time capital cost (the recycling plant would have required electricity too, one-third less than the pipeline).

Finally, in an astonishing twist that no one could have imagined before Toowoomba’s tumult of the last four years, the new pipeline will inevitably bring to Toowoomba’s water mains, and Toowoomba’s kitchen faucets, exactly what it has fought to avoid: purified, recycled wastewater. While Toowoomba was debating whether to build an advanced wastewater treatment plant, the big water system on the coast, the South East Queensland Water Grid, spent A$2.5 billion to build three such facilities; together they can purify ten times as much water each day as Toowoomba uses. Those three plants are up and running, using the technology Kev Flanagan proposed, and the highly purified water they produce is being supplied to power plants. The utility Seqwater isn’t using any of it in drinking water reservoirs yet. But Seqwater has been very clear: When Wivenhoe Dam falls below 40 percent full, the recycled water will be piped to Wivenhoe, and from there to Toowoomba.

Meanwhile, Kev Flanagan quietly went ahead and built a new water purification plant anyway, so he could sell Toowoomba’s purified wastewater to the coal mine that originally inspired the idea to use the water closer to home. The new plant doesn’t use reverse osmosis, so it doesn’t produce water of drinking-water quality. But Toowoomba has a twenty-eight-year contract to supply the coal mine with purified water. Right now, the coal mine is buying A$8.5 million worth of wastewater from Toowoomba a year, so after repaying the A$14 million cost of the plant, that contract will yield at least A$200 million for Toowoomba.

“It’s very nice. It gives me a bit of satisfaction,” says Flanagan. “I’m not the dumbest engineer around.”

Mayor Di Thorley served out the remaining twenty months of her second term after the referendum, then bought a tavern in Tasmania, Australia’s island state, 1,400 miles from Toowoomba. The first big newspaper story about Thorley running her own pub opens with her breaking up a fight between two male patrons.

Snow Manners, the cerebral opponent who ran Rosemary Morley’s first public meeting about recycled wastewater, says that, upon reflection, he thinks he could have successfully persuaded Toowoomba to accept the idea—that he could have done what Mayor Di and Kev Flanagan failed to do in the face of his opposition.

“I could have sold it,” Manners says, with slight smile. “I would have used a gradual process. I would have put it in fountains and had goldfish swimming in it, with water lilies.”