Valley will be planet’s biggest ghost town
The Sept. 25 Bee reports an astounding 2,500 new wells drilled last year in the Valley, a figure that makes the water crisis tangible to those who aren’t immediately affected. Even in the wettest of years, all these wells deplete our non-renewable aquifer. We are mining this water just as the 49ers mined the gold out of the foothills.
When the 49ers gold eventually ran out, the miners left, and the settlements became ghost towns. Someday the water will run out, too. But, while we can live without gold, we can’t live without water. The 22,000 square miles of the Central Valley will become the largest ghost town on the planet, unable to support, even for a short visit, our descendants.
They might want to pass through as tourists and see the endless fields of dust, the deserted strip malls and the empty housing tracts that evidence the folly of too much living and too much growing in a region that was never set to sustain it.
Greg Lewis, Clovis
This story was originally published October 6, 2016 at 4:54 PM with the headline "Valley will be planet’s biggest ghost town."