Does anyone believe Lew Weaver fully realized what he was in for when he proposed his bottled-water operation near Creston? I used to think the Chinese had the lock on water torture – seems I was wrong.
Let me start by stating my dislike for “bottled-water culture.” For me, gallon jugs or plastic blivets of regular or distilled water work just fine, as does the Kalispell city water I’ve enjoyed since 1975. Seriously, who in their right mind would bother with Evian, Perrier, or ripoffs like Beverly Hills designer water – six bucks each? Suckers, of course – lots of them.
But there’s nothing wrong with most bottled water. Bottled Water Market (BWM) pegged U.S. consumption at 11.7 billion gallons for 2015, 36.3 gallons per person, $15 billion in total sales for what the industry proclaims a “healthy alternative to other packaged beverages.” Hey, beer is healthy!
To give those big-seeming numbers some proportion, public water systems in the U.S. produce a billion gallons per hour. And overall, bottled water hits U.S. shelves at an average of about $1.29 a gallon.
Turns out the imported and/or yuppie waters getting our attention make up only 1 percent of the gallonage total. This makes perfect sense, as water is heavy, with inherently high shipping costs. Further, because most bottled water is low-priced, BWM explains that bottled water is shipped “within an average radius of 300 miles” from the bottling plant. That dovetails with a couple other commodities I’m familiar with, rail-shipped gravel, and logs on trucks. Both of these have a viable “haul radius” of less than 250 miles under normal conditions – meaning those stupid-high prices for special Greenlandic or Swedish or French water pay mostly for fuel and marketing – not water.
Now, let’s change gears as to whether Mr. Weaver’s plant will suck Many Lakes dry, or render the Flathead stonefly extinct, or dry Kerr Dam. We’ll need to fire up a calculator – remember those? Mine is 30 years old, still on its first battery, and cost 70 bucks!
Mr. Weaver has a 710-acre-feet water right he wants to bottle. An acre covers about 44,000 square feet, and a cubic foot of water is 7.48052 U.S. gallons. Clickety tickety click – we get 31,240,000 cubes, or 233,691,440 gallons.
Now, how much is that really? Well, in 2015, Kalispell city water produced a record of about 1.49 billion delicious gallons from its multiple wells – did anyone notice?
Put another way, if Mr. Weaver could stand up a big cube of water, it would be about 315 feet tall/long/wide, a big, wet Borg. Converting Weaver’s Water Borg into cubic feet per second, or cusecs, the Flathead River runs a mean discharge of 5,680 cusecs at Columbia Falls. Creating this Borg from the river would therefore take 1,775 seconds, or (tickytick), a half hour. With 8,760 hours in the year, that doesn’t seem like so much, does it? Nope, not when the average draw over the course of the year is around 10 cubic feet per second – in theory.
In reality, Mr. Weaver probably won’t use all that water. Remember the haul radius and average price of most bottled water? Without some really clever marketing hook – like branding the product “Stonefly Killer” for its alleged shallow-aquifer impacts, the market lies pretty much between Spokane and Butte. That’s us. Say there are a half-million people guzzling 36.3 gallons a year each within that market basket, which Stonefly Killer somehow monopolizes. Total, wildly optimistic foreseeable annual demand? Eighteen point one five million gallons – and on the bright side, most of what gets sold in the Flathead to hydrate our outdoor lifestyles will get tinkled right back into the shallow aquifer, or at least Ashley Creek.
I must ask – are we really contemplating amounts of extracted water that pose any true threat to either the deep or shallow water resources of the Flathead? Or is this just a narrative from those mainly motivated by concerns that have nothing to do with water?
I think the latter – so I’d like to suggest that bottling-plant opponents reveal their true motives rather than subject Mr. Weaver and the rest of Flathead County to any more political water torture.