Water!

Water.

It used to be an adjective for something common place. "He would drink Pepsi like it was water." These days Governor Easley would trade you a gallon of Pepsi for a gallon of water straight up.

This drought has been rough. In the mountains, tree growers were sweating the fraser fir harvest. Towards the coast it was corn and soybeans. It was a little bit of everything else in between.

Now it's water use restrictions as reservoir levels get perilously low in some communities. Ask a well digger about his business and he'll tell you he has to bore deeper and deeper to hit water these days.

Here's the most vexing part of the equation: North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the country. That growth keeps the economy humming. It also means more people are competing for a share of the same amount of water. Growth fever sometimes induces us to do some rather illogical things. While the Governor is asking us to cut our water use in half, they used 1.2 million gallons of water to fill three new private swimming pools at an aquatic center in Cary this week.

Mother Nature may help even us out... eventually. She usually does. However in fast-growing North Carolina we may do well to get serious about advancing desalinization technology. There's a lot of water in that ocean alongside our coast.