Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

• • •

  “IF YOU HEAR A WHISTLE, get under the car,” the IDE engineer Elisha Arad said when he, Rafi, and I set out for Ashkelon. The Palestinians had just begun firing their first Grads, 170-millimeter rockets with enough range—8.6 miles—to reach Ashkelon from the Gaza Strip. The day before, a school had been hit, and a pair of tractors was needed to dislodge the rocket from its crater.

  “We give them water; they give us rockets,” Rafi complained. This was true but incomplete: In the previous month’s offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which the Israel Defense Forces called Operation Cast Lead, Israel had damaged eleven wells, twenty miles of water networks, and more than six thousand rooftop water tanks. It then kept the borders locked down, which had the effect of keeping pumps, pipes, and cement out of Gaza—and making repairs impossible. A year after the operation, ten thousand people would still be without access to the water network, and Gaza’s principal aquifer would turn saline. Palestinians would begin tapping into Israeli pipelines, and Israel would crack down on what was termed water theft. In Israel, per capita water consumption was 280 liters a day; in Gaza, it was 91 liters—below the 100–150 liters the World Health Organization says is necessary. Elisha suggested that Hamas hadn’t hit the Ashkelon plant because it didn’t want to: The plant was producing the water everyone needed. Rafi suggested it was because members of Hamas were bad shots.

  Our SUV rumbled down an empty freeway into the Negev, past a plantation of cacti and a strange outpost of ten-year-old prefab homes in the sand, populated by Jewish settlers who’d relocated there from Gaza in a political tussle my hosts remembered little about. Elisha, a sixty-year-old who had a bald head and, when asked a question, a single, deep furrow in his brow, told me about the Dead Sea: It was supposed to be replenished by the Jordan River, but the National Water Carrier kept carrying water elsewhere. “Now it’s dying, literally dying,” he said. “It’s losing one meter a year. We will face no water in twenty years unless supply is given.” He claimed no one bothered to conserve: “Agriculture pays ten times less for water. If he pays ten cents, while I pay a dollar? Of course then he doesn’t care.”

  Around a corner, just before reaching the desalination plant, we caught sight of a blimp hovering over the border with Gaza: a sentry system for rocket fire. “It gives the alert in the townships,” Elisha explained. “It gives people time. Time, let’s say, to find a shelter.” Silent, all seeing, futuristic, the blimp must have looked oppressive to those on the other side of Israel’s walls. But on this side it was comforting. The country’s approach to drought—so many carbon emissions from so much desalination, a detriment to the world, in exchange for endless water, a boon for Israel—was similar, I thought. What made sense within the borders of one nation, especially one surrounded by enemies, would not always make sense outside it.

  The desalination plant shared a site with an eleven-hundred-megawatt, coal-fired power plant, the largest in Israel. It was a location chosen not for cheap electricity but for the chance to minimize environmental impacts: The coal plant discharged hot water; the desalination plant discharged hypersaline brine. When the streams were mixed, each was diluted. “Now the fish are suffering . . . but, uh, less,” Moshe had told me. The seventeen-acre facility was sprawling, eerily empty, staffed by just forty employees who took turns working eight-hour shifts, almost alone in an automated future.

  Under a low-slung sky of cumulus clouds, we put on yellow hard hats. The Mediterranean was dark green, but the buildings were painted ocean blue. Elisha led us from one to another, from the settling ponds to the pretreatment pumps to the carbon filters to the synthetic filters. The plant used reverse osmosis, a rival process to Zarchin’s first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by a Jewish chemical engineer in Southern California, then perfected in the 1970s at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Its main hangar was dominated by a quadruple array of reverse-osmosis membranes—forty thousand of them, arranged end to end in eight-inch pressure tubes. Everywhere we walked, I heard a rush of water. Outside, concrete bomb shelters were spaced every few hundred yards. “If you are within zero to 4.5 kilometers of Gaza, you have fifteen seconds,” Elisha said. “If you are within 4.5 to 10 kilometers, you have thirty seconds.” We were within zero to 4.5 kilometers. We stopped at a control room, and there, sticking out from a blue holding tank, a faucet appeared. Elisha produced a cup. The water tasted pure, perfectly natural, and after we all downed a first round, I had a second.

  • • •

  BACK IN TEL AVIV, I had a series of meetings with other water entrepreneurs, each hawking his own techno-fix. Israel was, to borrow a phrase, the “start-up nation,” but this was the embodiment of another trend: Export-ready water technology seems to emit most readily from water-strapped countries—Israel, Singapore, Spain, and Australia—whose backs are up against the climatic wall. In Israel, traditional cloud seeders were still legion, but one group of researchers also proposed covering a two-thousand-acre expanse of the Negev with black heat-absorbing material to create an artificial heat island, thus inducing downwind rains. In a high-rise downtown, I sat with executives at a firm called Whitewater whose founder had once helped Domino’s Pizza penetrate the Israeli market. It had close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and its approach was distinctly Israeli: It helped secure nations’ water supplies from contaminations and terrorist attacks.

  My final meeting was with Dr. Etan Bar, a wiry, obsessed environmental-engineering professor from Ben-Gurion University. He had just patented a new way to battle drought, one so seemingly revolutionary—and profit oriented—that I wondered if he could become the next Alexander Zarchin. On what would be the rainiest day of the year, we met in the lobby of the Tel Aviv Sheraton along with two of his marketers, Yitzhak Gershonowitz and Levi Wiener. “You know,” said the latter, almost immediately, “necessity is the mother of invention.”

  Dr. Bar sat back and excitedly detailed his creation. “To take humidity in the air and turn it into liquid water,” he said, “this process is known even from the Bible times.” At the beginning of winter, Jewish people would say the prayer for rain, Tefilat Geshem. But at the beginning of the dry season, at the start of Passover, they would say the prayer for dew—Tefilat Tal—for dew was considered a gift from God. “In the southern part of Israel,” Bar said, “you can see ancient fields that were all irrigated based on dew, condensation of the air’s humidity.

  “You can believe or not that the globe is influenced by carbon dioxide,” he continued, “but the bottom line is that it is being more and more hot, which means two things: There is more evaporation from the sea, because the water temperature is higher, and humidity on Earth cannot be condensed because the air temperature is higher.” In tropical countries that once had “rain almost every day, 365 days a year,” the rainy season was no longer so rainy. “You’re walking around in a smog,” he said, “because the humidity is there, but the rain is not. Everybody knows these facts.”

  Dr. Bar had designed a box that he said solved the problem, mimicking an ancient God: It sucked in air and spit out water. He outlined the steps: First, air is drawn across a desiccant that absorbs water vapor but not pollutants. Next, the desiccant is heated up, releasing the water into a vessel containing a much smaller volume of air. Finally, the heat is pulled out, to be used again in the process, and the vapor cools and condenses. “That’s all,” he said. “It’s very simple. It’s really simple. It’s a filter that filters water from air. That’s all.” He claimed he only needed investors.

  “Levi said that necessity is the mother of invention,” he continued, “but I . . .”

  “You don’t believe so?” asked Gershonowitz.

  “No, I don’t believe so,” Dr. Bar said. “I think that market needs are the mother of invention.”

  “If there’s a market for anything,” he said, “it’s water. Nature is working for us. Nature is our best PR. Why? Because there is no water! Look at Cyp
rus. In Greece, it is the same. In Ivory Coast, no rain at all anymore. And I’m not talking about desert regions. I’m talking about places where they used to have a lot of water.” Gershonowitz and Wiener nodded enthusiastically. “In 2020,” Bar continued, “about one-third of the world’s population will have no access to secured freshwater. The average water consumption globally is between fifty to a hundred liters a day. So now multiply that by 2.5 billion people! That’s all you need. If you ask, what’s a market potential, that’s a market potential!”

  PART TWO

  THE DROUGHT

  I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

  —John Galt

  FIVE

  TOO BIG TO BURN

  PUBLIC FIRES, PRIVATE FIREFIGHTERS

  The first light we ran was at Main Street and Jamboree Road, near the Hyatt, and we ran it mostly because we could. Chief Sam flicked on his siren, and eighteen lanes of traffic froze in place. We nudged into the intersection. We accelerated. We swerved. We accelerated again. Our red Ford Expedition, topped with red lights, emblazoned with the word “FIRE,” shot onto the 405, tires screeching. Car after car pulled over to let us by until, as we merged onto I-5, some idiot in a Civic didn’t. “Look at this guy,” Chief Sam muttered, and then he cut into the median to race past him.

  The traffic died down near Disneyland, but the Santa Ana wind picked up. It was a hot, desert-born easterly that sucked any remaining moisture from the landscape. It funneled through the canyons in gusts, carrying brush, bits of cloth, plastic bags, and clouds of dust. The dust blasted across the freeway, ocean-bound, and our truck, now going seventy-five in the center lane, shook from side to side. Chief Sam, the head of a private army of for-profit firemen, stepped on the gas. He offered me a protein bar. He put headphones in his ears, picked up his BlackBerry, and began making calls.

  A call to his crew: “Right now, Pump 31 should be partnered up or out patrolling. Pump 42 should be teamed up and ready to be deployed. No delays. Just be out and about. A good staging location. Out of bed and get ’em married. Right now.”

  A live call to KTTV Fox 11 News. A call to one radio station. An interview with another (“There isn’t even a fire season anymore. It’s year-round”). A call to yet another: “Hi, I’m Fire Chief Sam DiGiovanna. I’ve done reports for you guys in the past. Do you want anything done this morning on these fires? DiGiovanna. D-I. G-I. O. V. A. N-N. A. And it’s just very simple. Dee. Gee. Oh. Vanna . . .” We were still miles from the fire in Little Tujunga Canyon, only now passing downtown Los Angeles on our way north. Before some of his calls, Chief Sam turned on his siren. When he finished talking, he turned it off.

  On the phone, he identified himself as the training chief at the Verdugo Fire Academy, his part-time job. He didn’t mention the insurance companies he contracted for—least of all American International Group, or AIG, where he ran the firm’s Wildfire Protection Unit. Insurance was the industry that had the most to fear from climate change—it was on the hook for increased hurricane and fire damages—but also, paradoxically, the most to gain: Its market was expanding, especially in places like the drought-racked American West. Insurers were funding climate research just as AIG’s innovations in the financial sector were helping sink the global economy, and Chief Sam and I were driving toward the fire just as AIG was being bailed out by the federal government: $85 billion and counting.

  We left I-5 for Highway 2. A white cloud of smoke was now visible in the distance, somewhere east of Pasadena, and Chief Sam switched on the news. The flames were burning right down to the 210 freeway, the announcer said. Wall Street was having a bit of a rally, up four hundred points. Chief Sam changed the channel to his favorite, Smooth Jazz 94.7, and an instrumental version of the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute” filled the cab of the Expedition.

  The first police line, a diagonal string of orange cones guarded by a single squad car, came after we turned onto the 210. Everyone was being funneled off the freeway, causing a traffic jam, but we accelerated in the left lane. The siren came on again. Chief Sam, a firefighter for twenty-nine of his forty-nine years, dark-haired and barrel-chested, looking official in his unofficial blue uniform and red fire truck, gave a convincing wave to the cop. The cop waved back. I watched the traffic pass in a blur until we crossed the cones and were completely alone. Suddenly everything had the look of war, the scent of smoke. Chief Sam showed no emotion, but he put down the BlackBerry.

  The darkest clouds were chemical, from a fuel that was man-made, toxic—not chaparral, not wood. From a burning mobile home. A burning landfill. A burning panel truck parked on a ridge. Helicopters clattered overhead, dumping white clouds of water that seemed to have no effect. Gusts blew the vapor sideways, with the smoke. On the freeway, strike teams—five-vehicle convoys sent from neighboring cities—rolled by at eighty miles an hour. A semitruck from the Los Angeles County Fire Department passed us, towing a red bulldozer. Traffic signs appeared and disappeared, obscured by the haze. The hills themselves were turning black, and where the vegetation had burned away, the rocks were set free and small landslides littered the side roads.

  The AIG team was waiting at a municipal park in Sylmar, the staging area for the fight against the five-thousand-acre blaze that was consuming Little Tujunga Canyon. Their trucks, Pumps 21 and 23, were red Ford F-550s with orange hoses and chrome panels—just two of the dozen such trucks commanded by Chief Sam. The men were in their twenties and thirties, clean-cut and bored. This neighborhood, though imperiled, wasn’t quite rich enough to put them to work: AIG’s Private Client Group insured and protected only homes worth at least $1 million. They were waiting for things to get worse.

  • • •

  THE LITTLE TUJUNGA fire was normal, Chief Sam had told me. This was October. This fit the pattern. He’d explained climate change’s effect on firefighting the previous afternoon at the Hyatt, his favorite hotel, where he’d taken me after my flight landed in Orange County. We’d driven up in a rush, parked his truck in the emergency lane, and marched to the front desk, where he scored me a suite at the government rate. “Can we put the room on my Gold points?” he’d asked. “We’ll, uh, both be staying there.” He gave me a conspiratorial kick under the check-in counter. Then we sat in the lounge, snacking on complimentary wasabi peas. “I just love these things,” he said.

  The wet will become wetter. The dry will become drier. That which burns will burn more often. Whether California’s drought at the time was specifically linked to climate change, scientists could not definitively say, but the state, along with much of the West, was on its way to becoming what the computer models predicted: a dust bowl, and too frequently on fire.

  This fire had broken out after California’s hottest spring in 88 years, its ninth-hottest summer in recorded history, its lowest rainfall in 114 years, its fourth month of government-declared drought, and its second, maybe third, year of unofficial drought. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor at the time, was showing up at rallies of Central Valley farmers, chanting in unison with them: “Ve need vater! Ve need vater! Ve need vater!” Homes would soon be lost to fire simply because the hydrants went dry.

  “When I started in 1977,” Chief Sam said, leaning forward in his chair, “there was a definitive season”—late summer and especially fall, after the hills had been baked dry, after the Santa Ana winds returned. But no more. In April 2008, he said, unusually high temperatures and low humidity fueled a 600-acre brush fire in the Sierra Madre. In 2007, a record twenty-one simultaneous Southern California wildfires had forced a record evacuation—346,000 homes. The second-largest fire in state history, the Zaca, had consumed 240,207 acres and $118 million in firefighting costs—another record. In May 2009, the 8,700-acre Jesusita fire in Santa Barbara would burn 80 homes and force at least fifteen thousand people to evacuate. In Southern California, the two fire years leading up t
o Little Tujunga were the worst two in the last two decades, blackening 1.3 million and 1 million acres, respectively. “With this global warming,” Chief Sam said, “we’re getting fires more often, in different areas.”

  Across the globe, the first decade of the new millennium was a decade of fire: Fire in Alaska and Spain and Siberia and Corsica and Bolivia and Indonesia and British Columbia. In New Mexico and Oregon and Colorado and Texas and Arizona. In the Black Hills of South Dakota and the swamplands of North Carolina. In Greece, the worst fires in half a century during the worst drought in millennia. In Australia, the worst fire in recorded history during the worst drought in recorded history. In Russia, fires so destructive that the president—Medvedev, not Putin—said out loud that climate change was real. The largest fires in Georgia’s recorded history, in Florida’s recorded history, and in Utah’s recorded history. Across the United States, an average of seven million acres have burned each year of the new millennium—twice the 1990s average. Between 1986 and 2006, the number of major wildfires grew by 400 percent, the area burned by 600 percent.

  The effects of climate change on wildfire were not limited to the lack of water or the heat of the hottest days. Early spring snowmelt meant longer growing seasons, eventually more fuel. Higher average temperatures meant summers were effectively longer, and fuels had more time to dry. Warmer winters meant parasitic larvae—pine beetles, spruce beetles, bark beetles, tent caterpillars—could flourish and expand their range, killing vast forests, creating more dead, desiccated fuel. If there is sustained drought, trees can’t generate the chemicals to fend off the pests. In the western United States, spring-summer temperatures had risen just 0.87 degree Celsius since the mid-1970s, but the fire season was now seventy-eight days longer.

  Los Angeles’s meteoric growth, its climb into the wind-buffeted, fire-prone foothills of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel ranges, was also responsible. According to the state’s forestry and fire agency, Cal Fire, 40 percent of California’s 12 million homes were in areas of high or extreme danger. In Southern California alone, the Forest Service had identified 189,000 such homes constructed between 2003 and 2007. In the 1960s, wildfires burned 100 buildings in an average year. In the 1990s, they burned 300. The first decade of the new millennium, it was 1,500. “Normally, we consider the fuel to be trees and shrubs and brush,” Chief Sam said. “But now it’s not just trees. The homes are the fuel.”