Clean Water

Saturday night, the St. Louis area experienced some terrific thunderstorms. Three interstate highways had to be closed for a time because of flooding – I-55, I-70 and I-64/40. The rain gauge outside out kitchen window had been empty at 10 p.m. Two hours later, it showed three inches of rain had fallen.

That’s more rain than parts of Texas have seen in a year. The cotton-growing season has been pretty well devastated there. The Ogallala Aquifer under the central plains is being depleted. I don’ want to be an alarmist about this, but agriculture requires 70 percent of the fresh water consumed each year.

With all of our weather problems, though, we are still vastly better off than many parts of the world, places like Somalia and Chad and Nigeria and countries in Asia where many children have never known fresh water. Some 42,000 people die every week for reasons clean water could help cure, and 90 percent of those people are children.

We don’t have to sit idly by and watch children die. We can do something.

Matt Windley over at Becoming Last has been rounding up bloggers during the month of June to help raise awareness and funds for clean water. He’s been blogging himself virtually every day this month to do just that. There are a lot of things we can do – together and individually – to help:

• Give. The site to do so is here. I’ve done it, or I wouldn’t ask you to consider it as well.

• Blog. If you’ve got a blog, consider a post about water and the Clean Water campaign.

• Tweet. Follow @becominglast on Twitter.

• And share. Tell your friends.
Those 42,000 people – and those children – don’t have to die. We can do something. And if we can do something, we should do something.