How Tucson, Arizona is facing up to a 1,200-year drought
BBC Future, October 2022
In front of Val Little’s one-story, adobe home near downtown Tucson, in southern Arizona, a small but proud sign stands in the lawn. It reads: “This house harvests the rain.”
Every couple of months, 68-year-old Little climbs up a short ladder to clear the leaves from her home’s gutters. “They always clog the little hole where the water goes through,” she explains, referring to the opening between the gutters and the downspout.
The downspout funnels the rainwater that falls on her rooftop into a 1,300-gallon (4,900-litre) plastic cistern in her backyard. She has two of them, and in late September both were almost full, fed by the abundant summer monsoon rains.
“I’ve never seen my tanks less than half full,” says Little, who sprinkles the harvested rainwater on her vegetable garden and also uses it to cook, drink and irrigate her fruit and shade trees outside the monsoon season.
Little is not alone. Over the past 15 years or so thousands of residents across Tucson, a mostly parched desert city where barely 12 inches (30cm) of rain falls in an average year, have turned to rainwater harvesting to meet some of their household needs. They joined the city’s drive to embrace the practice as part of its suite of water conservation initiatives.
As a growing number of towns and municipalities in the western United States and around the world are faced with rapidly dwindling freshwater supplies, experts say Tucson’s rainwater push may hold valuable lessons about how a city can balance the water budget and increase resilience.
[Continue reading on BCC Future]
