Over half of the Earth's population do not have access to water that is safe to drink or is reliable. They don't have a tap that they can go to and turn on and get drinking water that they can feel confident in. We are very, very lucky that we can just turn on the faucet and it will come out and it's safe and it's clean and it's clear and it's reliable.
How fortunate we are to have this incredibly high quality drinking water. That's something that I tell my children about. You're so lucky that this is not a problem for you.
We have two highly protected drinking watersheds, which is not normal across the world or even in the U.S. It's not something typically that people probably think a lot about. Water is sacred. That's very common.
One phrase used in Indian country, and we couldn't do anything without water. What my teachers called it was the source. The source for virtually everything.
It was the source for life. Located just 35 miles east of Seattle, nestled in the Cascade Foothills, lies the Cedar River Watershed. The Cedar River watershed in its entirety extends from the crest of the Cascades all the way down to the mouth of the river at Lake Washington. The Cedar River Municipal Watershed is about two-thirds of that. It's 90,000 acres of land that is owned by the City of Seattle and its primary purpose is to provide clean, clear, reliable water to the people of Seattle.
There are two primary sources of water supply. The Cedar River Watershed and the Tolt River Watershed. The Cedar provides two-thirds of the water and the Tolt the other third. Back in the late 1880s, Seattle was getting its water locally from wells and springs that came out of the hills.
Located at what is known today as Spring Street was a natural spring. That, along with water from Lake Washington, fed the city's water through a series of pipes. The Seattle Fire was the singular event that created the water system. The Great Seattle Fire in 1889 got started.
There were firefighters then, and they had a way to hook up their hoses, but when they got to the fire, they hooked up one hose, and of course that provided plenty of water, but then the next fire engine showed up, and they hooked up a hose, and that divided the pressure in two, and then the next one divided in three. So pretty soon, there was just not much water coming out of the hose, and they could not put the fire out. And so literally all of downtown Seattle burned to the ground.
After the fire, of course, everybody recognized that there were multiple benefits to having a pressurized water system and having it far away from the city where people were living and the waste was going directly in the water and then you take your water from the place where your waste water goes and that's not good. So the Cedar River had been identified previously as a really good source of high quality clean water. And it was up in the mountains. And of course, the way to get a high pressure system without having to spend any money at all is to use gravity.
Mayor Robert Moran, along with city engineer R.H. Thompson, had been trying to get the citizens of Seattle to vote for a new, more reliable source of water from the Cedar River that used gravity instead of pumps. Once the fire was put out, the public voted a month later, an overwhelming 1,855 in favor to 51 against for the new water municipality.
In 1889, they authorized bonds to be sold to build a water system. So things that they needed to do was to acquire land. They had to build an intake.
They had to build a water storage dam up in the watershed itself so that they could hold enough water that it could then be a little bit higher than the natural lake level so that it would flow year-round. And then they had to build a pipe from the intake, which is at Landsberg, all the way into the city about 40 miles away. They built a wood stave pipe, a big pipeline that carried water that was finished in 1901. And then, of course, you also have to build all the in-city infrastructure. So you have to have reservoirs in the city, so you have to acquire that land and build the reservoirs, and then you have to have the pipes that connect the reservoirs to people's houses.
So all of that had to happen between 1889 and 1901. It was a fairly quick turnaround. They had to get easements and right-of-way to put the pipeline through the city of Renton. They had to figure out where to put it. It had to be able to be put around things, and they had to condemn houses. Do all the things that happen when you put in new infrastructure where people already live.
By 1901, the first water was delivered to the citizens of Seattle from the Cedar River. After 1901, much of the land in the watershed was not owned by the city, and it was owned by several large companies that were extracting resources out of the watershed, and there were also smaller homesteads. Some of them had shingle mills, some of them had their own little logging operations, some of them were farming.
So there were timber towns, the town of Barnston was one of them, quite large. And then there were the Clay and Coal Company town, the town of Taylor. Hundreds of people living in these towns. The company controlled everything. The company owned the houses.
The company owned the store. The company gave you scrip. They paid you in scrip, which you went to the store to use, and then they made profit on that. But it was a great environment. The stories we have, you know, people loved living out here.
There was a town here in Rattlesnake Lake, the town of Moncton. It was actually a railroad town, so there was a rail station right here and an electrical substation that helped to power the trains as they went up and over the pass. This town had houses and a hotel and a restaurant and a saloon and a grocery store and a school, and there were a little over 100 people living in this town at the time. In 1915, Seattle City Light power demands grew. Needing more water, a dam was built on the Cedar River.
As the water backed up at the dam, the unforeseen problem of seepage into a glacial moraine migrated to the town of Moncton, where the water table started to rise up 6 to 12 inches each day. Eventually, all the buildings and wood sidewalks were floating and underwater. The water...
crept up and it crept in the front door and it filled up the first floor of all the houses. And this happened over a period of weeks. So it was rising by 6 inches to 12 inches a day, rising up, and then eventually the houses began to get lifted up by the water, and pretty soon what we had was a lake filled with houses floating around. Now we have a lake that also goes up and down in conjunction with the water levels behind the dam.
So if the level in the lake is low and behind the dam is low, then the level in Rattlesnake Lake will also be low. So you can always get an idea about where our reservoir level is by looking at Rattlesnake Lake. The city of Seattle was very strategic starting a century back in buying up the land areas that form our watersheds. Beginning with those watersheds and our water supply being snowmelt and rainfall that isn't impacted by upstream discharges of industrial processes, agricultural runoff, those are aspects that many... systems in the U.S. do have to contend with, their treatment plants need to be geared up to deal with those.
Seattle's very lucky in that way that we just start with something that is awesome to begin with in terms of quality. Yes, we still have to treat water to meet drinking water standards. The Safe Drinking Water Act requires that large municipalities either provide treatment or have a very specific water protection plan in place.
There are five other large cities in the country who have unfiltered water systems. New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Tacoma, and us. Ours is sort of special.
We're the only ones who have what's called a limited alternative to filtration. Most surface water supplies are required to filter their drinking water. What we have said is that actually doesn't make sense for the cedar because it starts with such high quality, low turbidity, that the treatment we need is different. With river water, there's two things you really have to do. One is you have to screen it.
Then you need to disinfect it in some way. Chlorine is the most common and most effective one that we have at this point. It's the most economical.
Once water leaves Chester Moors, it flows downstream in the Cedar River, roughly six miles or so, to an area called Landsberg. Fluoride and chlorine is added at Landsberg before the water travels to Lake Youngs. At Lake Youngs, it's treated with ultraviolet light and ozone. And then we also add additional chlorine at that point in time to make sure that anything that might be in the pipes between the treatment and your faucet is going to also be disinfected.
Not a lot of change to the water, but it ensures microbially that it's safe to drink and produces an awesome finished product. As a water resource manager in Seattle, we have four objectives that we are focusing on. We have the objectives of water for people and water for fish and stream flow resources.
We also have the objective... of flood management. The fourth objective of trying to provide water for hydro generation units at the Tolt and Cedars.
We do talk with and work with the Army Corps of Engineers that operate the Ballard Locks. They will want to know what we're putting out in the way of water so that they can make their adjustments. We measure the flows coming in. We look at forecasts for rain, storms, snow. And we then adjust the reservoirs and the river flows to meet our multiple objectives.
It's a fairly constant activity. If we're trying to meet water supply for people and fish, sometimes those objectives are in conflict. And if we're trying to protect the fish reds and avoid flood, well sometimes those objectives conflict. So we're trying to do what we can to strike the right balance. We manage our supply for people, for 1.3 million people in the Seattle area, but we also manage it for fish and salmon species that migrate through particularly the cedar.
Cedar River is one of the major spawning rivers in the region for a number of species of salmon, including the largest population of sockeye salmon. So if we're going to step into a watershed and start to take water, if we want to have the water for people and water for fish, we have to be fairly thoughtful about how we try to put that together. We got into the discussions in the 1990s. We were all focused around what's the minimum amount of water you need in the river for all those things, for spawning, for incubation, for rearing. And as we got farther into the discussions, we began to realize that that's just part of the puzzle.
And that's a very important part of it, the base flows, if you will, but there are a whole bunch of things that water does for the habitat. The Cedar River once flowed into the Green River and then the Duwamish. But in 1917, the Army Corps of Engineers determined that they needed that water to build the Ballard Locks. The Cedar River flow was then diverted to Lake Washington, through the Montlake Cut, continuing to the Ballard Locks and into Puget Sound. The fish who for millennium had been swimming up the Duwamish in the green into the cedar were suddenly faced with well there's no cedar there and yet they found a way through the locks and through Lake Washington to come back to the cedar.
In 1901, you know, we had built our diversion on the Cedar River, and that was a blockage to salmon. And that's because they die after they spawn. And so tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of carcasses in your drinking water, decaying and decomposing and animals are coming in, really can degrade the water supply.
And so for... A hundred years, the city basically prevented salmon from getting into the drinking water supply. There are a lot of people downstream that depend on this watershed. There's a compromise, so the salmon can only return so far without compromising.
the water quality. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the city said we need to manage our risk around endangered species, and we know the Chinook are going to be listed, and they are in the Cedar River, so we negotiate. negotiated with federal agencies to come up with a plan to allow some of the salmon who spawn in the Cedar River to get back into the municipal watershed.
And those would be the salmon that were there before we built the dam. There's one species of salmon, the sockeye, that were introduced in the 1930s that are not native to the Cedar River. Those are still kept out, but we allow the Chinook and the Coho and the Steelhead into the drinking water supply because their numbers are low enough that it's not thought to have a negative impact on the drinking water supply.
And this has been very successful in sustaining the levels of these runs, you know, which are struggling. I mean, honestly, they're struggling even with our help. We do have a hatchery at Landsberg that mitigates for the blockage of salmon into the drinking water supply. We have another method of helping to sustain that population, and it's very important to the native tribes and to sport fisher persons. Salmon are one of the staples of food source for Puget Sound native tribes.
Salmon are one of those creatures that have a home. Cedar River is home to sockeye salmon, king salmon, and there's another species. English, you call it kokanee, but in our language, we call it elosh, or the little redfish, which is a landlocked sockeye.
It doesn't migrate to salt water. It stays in fresh water. And it lives here in the Cedar River watershed. It's still here, but not in the numbers that it used to be historically. In the early 2000s, the city was working on this habitat conservation plan, and part of that involved committing to providing water flows for fish outside of the municipal watershed all the way down into Lake Washington.
There was a certain amount that we were going to commit to that we would not be able to use for drinking water, and the Muckleshoot Indian tribe felt that we could do more. And so they basically went to court to contest the amount of water that we were going to provide. Mountain Ridge.
All the way down to its confluence to Lake Washington, this watershed has taken care of members of our village for thousands of years. And we depend upon those resources to stay alive historically. But now we depend on those resources to remind us of who we are and where we come from.
We negotiated a settlement agreement which guaranteed water for fish that met their needs and of course met our needs and also allowed them to exercise their treaty rights to access the watershed for hunting and gathering and for ceremonial purposes. There are a number of places here in the watershed that provide us Puget Sound natives special places. It'd be equivalent to going to church.
Those things that the watershed possesses that allow us to be Indian, to remind us about who we are and where we come from. In 1992, it was spring and the city was starting to fill up the reservoir from the snowpack, but it was a very low snowpack, so they were filling a little bit early, trying to capture some of the rain. The weather people came on and said, hey, there's a big storm coming in. And you better get ready for it. So we looked at the potential for flooding downstream.
We decided at that point to release about 6 billion gallons of water to make room for the storm. And the storm never really materialized. But it wasn't a big concern because, of course, you know, it rains in the spring in Seattle.
But then it didn't rain. And there was no snowpack. We were afraid that we were going to, you know, literally run out of water.
So we instituted... mandatory water restrictions on people and people were very unhappy about that. It was a difficult summer. We impacted the lives of many people in the region.
The region did really a phenomenal job in managing a really difficult time. Everybody participated and pulled together. You know as it got further and further in the fall we were worried about water for salmon and you know water for people and then all of a sudden it rained and the reservoir filled up.
Seattle provides drinking water not just to ourselves but to most of urban King County has grown by 80% since the 1950s and yet we are not using more water than we were back then. Even though population has been growing water use has been going down. We developed a conservation potential assessment for the first time in the utility in 1998. So we would manage demand through existing supplies by way of conservation.
And that was pretty... It's pretty radical stuff. No major city in the United States that I know of had proposed to manage future demand entirely with water conservation.
The result has actually been good because we are more aware and more responsible for the natural resources. If we need people to save water in Seattle, they can do it and they can do it very, very well. The Northwest is fairly unusual in that we have very strong seasonality of precipitation.
So the driest month gets just a tiny fraction the amount of rainfall that the wettest month gets. And so that seasonality is a big part of what challenges our water supply here. And that's why snow is so important, because snow provides some of that sort of backfill, providing water in those dry months.
What we think will happen is by the end of the century, so 50, 75 years from now, we expect the snowpack to decline because of the warming temperatures. By the end of the century, there will not be skiing at Snoqualmie Pass anymore. I mean, that will be history.
We'll still develop snow during the wintertime, but the snow level will rise and we'll have less snow in the mountains. We're very different than many other places like the Southwest United States. Climate change will not take away our water. We will still have water.
Seattle's very fortunate to have a pristine source of water in the Cedar River and South Fork Tult watersheds. You know, the snow that falls on the trees and the bushes and then melts and runs down in the river, it's, you know, very clean and abundant. The threat that climate change poses is in reducing that snow reservoir and changing the amount and timing of runoff. But if the rain pattern is the same but it's not coming down as snow, well that changes how you operate, changes what you start, when you start having to capture water, when you have to release water.
When do you start storing water for the summer and into the fall? We're going to have to start developing the new protocol, the new operations for those kinds of conditions. Part of our group is working on 40 separate global climate models and trying to take the hydrology that results from those and take a look at what the impacts of the full range of effects are on our system.
They can look ahead to 2050 and say, well, you know, the climate guys say it could warm up anywhere from this to this, and the precipitation in different seasons could go up or down by this amount. And we plug all those scenarios into our models, and we sort of get a range of what a difference it will make, both for our water supply and also for the demand down in urban areas. Water utilities have always had to plan for population growth and trying to estimate how the average consumer will change their water usage under certain circumstances.
The consumer deciding whether to water his or her lawn. to the conveyance system, the pipes and the reservoirs and so on, to the reliance on snow as part of the storage, and how the whole system from headwaters to tap behaves in a warm, dry summer versus a cool, wet summer. You see certain phenomena play out and you can't always attribute that to climate change, but it may be an indication of a very plausible future that we can expect under climate change.
It's really important to think about this issue where you are, because water, while it's a commodity, it doesn't have that same portability as like oil or whatnot. There's not a global trade for water at this point. We're not having to make large new investments to deal with the impacts of climate change on water supply.
But that could change. They say that water is the next oil. It's the next crisis.
That being able to deliver clean, clean, reliable water in the quantities that are needed for the communities that we serve is going to be very, very difficult. Even in our country, there are cities, large cities, that are drawing on aquifers underground that are prehistoric aquifers. They're not being replenished.
And so the city of Phoenix and Tucson and others around the country are running out of water, and there's nowhere to get that water. Because of the foresight of... you know, people 100 years ago, setting aside a watershed, protecting that watershed. We have many reasons to be grateful for living here and with the water supply infrastructure that we have.
This is the place where you get your drinking water. This is the place where fresh air comes from. This is the place where you take a shower. When you go to the restroom, when you give the dog some drinking water, this is where it comes from.
When you water the garden, when you wash the car, this is where it comes from. Water is going to become a struggle all over the world and it's there now. It tends not to get publicized as much as other geopolitical issues, but it is there underlying so much of what becomes the source of conflict in different parts of the world. We have a huge responsibility to ourselves, our community, and to our future to take care of this resource. Thank you.