Drought Could Force An Entire City to Evacuate This Year
How to prepare for when it happens to you.
Sometimes, you read something that validates your darkest thoughts about the climate crisis. The validation brings little comfort when the news sounds so bad you wish you were wrong, that you were just some fearmonger after all.
Today, it's that kind of news.
Drought could force the city of Tehran to evacuate by the end of the year. We're talking about mass evacuations. It's rare for the president of a country to speak with such frankness. You can watch the statement here.
Over the summer, their water reserves reached their lowest point in a century. It's only gotten worse since then. Over the last hundred years, Tehran's population has swelled from roughly 250,000 to nearly 20 million. Imagine stretching a water supply that was barely enough for a couple of hundred thousand people to cover millions. It's a crisis. And while overuse of reservoirs, bad infrastructure, and corruption have made things worse, name a major city that doesn't have these problems.
They've already started cutting off water for residents at night to conserve water. Pipes have gone dry in parts of the metropolitan area.
In less than two weeks, they'll run out.
From a story at ABC News:
“If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran,” President Masoud Pezeshkian was cited as saying on Thursday by the SNN.ir semi-official news agency."
Major news outlets are giving this story some attention, but not nearly enough. Cities around the world have faced severe droughts this decade, but when a president openly talks about evacuating a city of 20 million, we've crossed into a new era. Sure, Iran is known for stretching the truth, but western media is always quick to call them out. This time, that's not happening. This time, it's for real.
And of course, I'm not the only person asking where 20 million people evacuate when an entire country is running out of water.
Rains might save Tehran, like they saved Mexico City. It won't be the end of their water problems, not even close.
This kind of crisis will start hitting American cities soon enough, especially in the western states, where Dust Bowl conditions have already started to return. I've spent a lot of time researching what's in store for the world over the next decade, and how we can prepare for a time when our government doesn't even bother to try and evacuate us, because they're too busy remodeling bathrooms and throwing parties.
Here's what I've learned:
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