Olympics suck up China’s already scarce water
Changgucheng, China – Three years ago, local government officials told farmers in this village of 7,00 residents to stop using water from a reservoir near their wheat and corn fields. If they needed water, the farmers were told, they would have to dig a well.
“They said there wasn’t enough water,’’ Jia Jianguo, 60, recalled.
At their own expense, the farmers dug a 90-foot well. But even though the new irrigation system worked fine, the locals have been forced to pool their meager resources each year that the water recedes to keep their crops alive. The well is now 135 feet deep and the groundwater is seeping away as fast as the province’s increasingly scarce water supplies are being channeled some 100 miles southwest to the thirsty capital of 15 million, Beijing.
