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Cool special I caught on PBS tonight (not sure it was new or not) about Peak water.

Wired Science . Peak Water | PBS

Two of the fastest-growing cities in the United States - Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada - are smack in the middle of the desert. While there's plenty of land to build houses on out there, the same cannot be said of another commodity : water. With hundreds of thousands of new residents moving to those areas every year, scientists are warning that they may soon hit "peak water" - the point where there just isn't enough of the wet stuff to go around.

Massive-scale engineering is the only thing that makes it possible for so many folks to live in such an arid environment in the first place. The Hoover Dam, built on the Colorado River near Las Vegas in the 1930's, created Lake Mead, the nation's largest artificial body of water. The lake now provides water to Arizona, California, Nevada and northern Mexico - but after several recent years of drought, on top of ever-heavier demand, it's seriously depleted.

To keep its taps flowing, Phoenix has come up with a 50-year water management plan. One part of the strategy is conservation. By enforcing strict plumbing codes and restrictions on watering large turf facilities, in addition to providing low-flow toilets to low income households, the city has cut the amount of water each resident uses daily from 267 gallons in the 1980s to 198 gallons today.

But Phoenix isn't just cutting the amount of water it uses; they're also storing gigantic quantities of the stuff in an underground waterbank. Water from the Colorado Riveris pumped through canals and delivery channels into an interconnected set of aquifers lined with sand and gravel, creating a vast subterranean lake. Engineers control the flow in and out of this complex with a system of computer-controlled gates.

It's an exemplary system, but unfortunately it's also an exceptional one. Few other Southwestern cities are so well organized, hydrology-wise. WIRED SCIENCE takes you on a guided tour of Phoenix's water woes - and introduces you to some of the desert-dwelling folks outside the city with even bigger problems. And if that's not disturbing enough, check out Worldwide Water Worries for a look at other areas around the world where serious water shortages are already a dangerous reality.