There Goes the Southwest

McGuire said she can see nine oil wells from her back porch, and there are dozens of RVs parked outside town, full of oil workers.

But soon after the first frack trucks pulled up two years ago, the well on McGuire's property ran dry.

No-one in Barnhart paid much attention at the time, and McGuire hooked up to the town's central water supply. "Everyone just said: 'too bad'. Well now it's all going dry," McGuire said.

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"The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes," she said

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Ranchers dumped most of their herds. Cotton farmers lost up to half their crops.

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Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.

Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.

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In Texas alone, about 30 communities could run out of water by the end of the year, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Nearly 15 million people are living under some form of water rationing, barred from freely sprinkling their lawns or refilling their swimming pools. In Barnhart's case, the well appears to have run dry because the water was being extracted for shale gas fracking.

  The Guardian

Not that they may have eventually lost it to the cotton croppers. They were sucking up an inordinate amount of water on their own, I feel safe in saying after having seen the cotton industry in California up close during my Ag education days. And big cattle ranches no doubt suck up a good portion as well. But hey, water shortages are merely going to be a thing of the future and the rights to it will all be transferred to large corporations, so your grandchildren are going to have just one more reason to curse you for what you’ve left them. If they have the spittle to work up a curse.