Water for The Big City

We live out in the boondocks with the usual dirt road and overhead power lines, accompanied by the not-unexpected benign disregard from county and State, not an ungood thing... generally.

Nothing much happens out here. Sometimes a kid in his souped-up truck races by, stirring up clouds of dust and exceeding the speed limit by double on our unpatrolled road. The mailgirl (mail girl?) will make her way down the road, lurching from mailbox to mailbox, always in such a hurry that she never manages to close the boxes - after she's finished stuffing them with unwanted advertising fliers that meet their deserved fate in garbage cans all along the road.

So it's quite an event when lots of semi trucks start lining up on the road loaded with 40" water pipes.


(click on photos to enlarge)

Turns out the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex needs more water for their expanding bedroom communities, so they are reaching out into the countryside looking for those rural reservoirs that service the smaller towns.




Soon, those big 40" pipes will be buried and forgotten, until the water wars start. Then, all those little-town citizens will discover that their water rights were sold by their mayors and city councils, signing contracts whose fine print will state that the big city always has priority on the water.

Of course, all those little-town Mayors and council members are not so stupid as not to know about the fine print, but they are banking on the hope that another drought big enough to stop the reservoir-filling rains will never happen again.

And besides, all those under-the-table back-pocket "considerations" they got from the big city movers and shakers were too good to pass up.

And, what the hay, all they have to worry about is a few countrified buttcrack bubbas that they can out-talk any ole' day of the week.

Piece of cake, Mayor, piece of cake.