Scottsdale, Arizona‘s Office of Communication said the city has stopped selling water to a neighboring suburb with 1,000 citizens amid a drought.
The city claims that it can no longer afford to send water to the Rio Verde Foothills and that it must focus on supplying water to its own residents instead. The crisis has been looming for several years as the lake that supplies most of the city’s water, Lake Mead, continues to dry up.
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“As Scottsdale prioritizes water for its residents under the city’s Drought Management Plan, it will cease allowing city water to be purchased and hauled to Maricopa County residents in the Rio Verde Foothills area on Jan. 1. Maricopa County officials and county residents living in the Rio Verde Foothills area were informed of this eventuality in 2015/16, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022,” an announcement from the Scottsdale Office of Communication read.
The plan to cut off the neighborhood’s water was announced by the Scottsdale government at the end of last year. The announcement added that residents had been warned of the possibility several times in years prior.
“It’s dire,” Cody Reim, a Rio Verde resident and father of four, told the Daily Mail.
“We need water now, we can’t wait a week, and we can’t wait a day. This shouldn’t have happened; we shouldn’t be ten days without water.”
The Rio Verde Foothills consists of 500-700 homes, largely mansions and stucco homes, the New York Times reported. Residents there have had to resort to flushing toilets with rainwater, doing laundry at neighbors’ homes, and lugging water from far away distances.
The situation offers a frightening potential future for many western neighborhoods — including many under development. The drying up of Lake Mead and straining of the Colorado River amid a 20-year drought means that the scenario in the Rio Verde Foothills may be repeated many more times throughout the West.
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“It’s a cautionary tale for home buyers,” Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told the outlet.
“We can’t just protect every single person who buys a parcel and builds a home. There isn’t enough money or water.”
