James:
I live in Prescott, Arizona about 80 miles north of Phoenix. We are at over 5,000 ft. altitude, in the mountainous high desert, where the temperatures are usually about 20 degrees F lower than down in the valley. The local creeks still have some water flowing in them from the rain and snow we received this past winter, but the flow is now down to a trickle and they will cry up completely soon. We actually get some decent rain storms during the local monsoon season, usually around July, but we’re not allowed to trap it in reservoirs because it’s all spoken for. Like they say around here, “Whisky is for drinking; water is for fighting.”
Most of “our” water either flows down to the major population centers to the south, or sinks into the ground to recharge the local water table. We have an aquifer a few hundred feet down, but it has been slowly going down over the last few years as a result of population growth (that’s what we get for being one of those “best places to retire”). There are some farms with greenhouses in the area that are fed by wells, but they cannot produce enough to feed our local population. We get no water from outside like Phoenix does from the irrigation canals that have been built to carry water from the Colorado River.
Yesterday I drove my wife down to Phoenix to catch a plane, and we noticed a huge traffic jam on the northbound side of the I-17 where a small brush fire had briefly closed the highway to traffic the day before. This was on the part of the hill where the signs tell you to turn off your air conditioning to prevent overheating while going up a long, steep grade, and the semis move along at about 10 mph. We looked at each other and said, “Those people are all going to die when the Schumer hits the fan.” Down in Phoenix, the temperature was already in the 90s, and everyone had their AC cranked up to the max.
I used to live in Phoenix when I was a kid back in the 1950s, and can remember what 116 degrees in the shade feels like. Back then the population of the valley was about 10% of that it is now, and it was a pretty nice place to live. Our subdivision was in what had, until recently, been a lemon grove, and they’d open the gates from the local canal to flood our lawns twice a month to keep the grass green. The irrigation canals were originally built to bring water to feed the citrus groves and cotton fields that have been largely replaced by mile after mile of suburban sprawl. If the grid ever goes down for any length of time, millions of retirees are going to discover that the desert really is uninhabitable, and they aren’t going to be able to live there after the air conditioning and water pumps stop running. So, where are they all going to go?
Like you said in a previous post, towns like Prescott and Sedona will quickly become free-fire zones in a TEOTWAWKI situation. If the grid goes down we will have it marginally better than the hordes down in the low desert, but even this area can naturally support a population of only a few thousand, like it did back when Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday lived here. In the event of a mass exodus from Phoenix, we may have to put up road blocks at the strategic choke points on the few roads leading into town, and tell the golden horde to try to keep going on up to Flagstaff. Sorry, no vacancy…
If you go further north up towards Ash Fork and Williams and the other old railroad towns along old Route 66, they have to actually truck water in because they can’t even get it out of wells up there (this explains why the population density is so low in that area). If you’ve ever driven on I-40 between California and Texas, you’ll quickly realize that in a real TEOTWAWKI scenario most of the people who live in the Los Angeles area are going to be lucky to get through the Mojave Desert, let alone to the Colorado River.
Those who make it that far will still have to cross hundreds of miles of high desert in Arizona (before they get to even more desert in New Mexico…). It’s easy to imagine tens of thousands of broken down cars along the Interstate between Needles and Kingman and Seligman and Ash Fork. The southerly routes along I-10 and I-8 in the hot low desert will be even worse. Look at your road atlas and try to imagine how many suburbanites are going to end up dead before they get to a gas station that still has gas, let alone to any place that has enough water.
It’s almost enough to make you want to move back to Missouri or Minnesota or somewhere else where water actually falls from the sky on a regular basis. Regards, – Robert L.