Seattle's Cool, Clear Water Is Star of Waterlines

Someone doesn't want you to know about Seattle's water supply--they yanked an interpretative display off the wall of the Volunteer Park Water Tower. But someone else does want you to know: his name is Stokely Towles, which we half-consider to be made-up. He describes his Waterlines installation (also at Volunteer Park, in a trailer on the road between SAAM and the Conservatory) like so:

Where does tap water come from? How did it get here? Will there be enough? To answer these questions I traveled within the world of Seattle Public Utilities to speak to members of the organization who work with water. I also explored ancient Mesopotamia (home of King Hammurabi's water rules), and made side trips to the land of "virtual water."

The trailer is both an exhibit and performance space, and sits in the park through July 19. (Times and dates are here.) Besides the above poster detailing the water system, there's another one that charts "rat in the toilet" complaints and there are more of those than you'd think. Yikes!

We can't remember exactly when we first heard about what's now called "peak water." A professor at Seattle U had been studying the drawdown on aquifers in the Southwest and Midwest, and he came back spouting numbers that were hard to believe. But we lived in the Northwest. Water scarcity was not an issue, we thought. We were wrong.