Aerial.America.S07E01.On.the.Water
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00:00Water.
00:05Its power shaped some of the most famous features of the American landscape.
00:12Water also shaped the American story.
00:16First, it guided our growth.
00:19But waterways were the highways.
00:22Then we began to guide water with colossal engineering and an air of American destiny.
00:33But the future is not clear.
00:37Water is a finite resource and an increasing threat.
00:42Can we design a future that leaves us with enough and keeps us safe?
00:50Can we get a unique view of America, past, present, and future,
00:56through the lens of an irreplaceable resource?
00:59Water.
01:20Music
01:37Before there was ever a United States of America, there was simply a continent.
01:43It was molded over millions of years, much of it sculpted by water.
01:56Rivers often start with a trickle of snowmelt and finish with a flourish into the sea.
02:04They carve pathways through every kind of geography.
02:08Some of water's work is ancient.
02:11The Colorado River is about four million years old, but it cut through two billion years of rock.
02:21The Grand Canyon is one of the most dramatic examples of water's artistic prowess,
02:27big enough to see from space.
02:36Broader strokes are made by glaciers.
02:39Massive rivers of frozen water that flow in super slow motion.
02:57They advance and recede over centuries to sculpt widescreen landscapes on a grand scale.
03:11One such vista is Yosemite in California.
03:17Imagine the valley filled to the brim with a frozen blue-white glacier,
03:22with Half Dome and the top of El Capitan poking out of the ice.
03:29It took 30 million years for glaciers to broaden and deepen the valley into what it is today.
03:36But some glacial carving is geologically brand new.
03:43Just 10,000 years ago, ice sheets receded northward from what is now Chicago.
03:52Meltwater filled in the basins carved by the retreating glaciers.
03:56The Great Lakes were born.
04:01And they now contain 20% of the accessible freshwater on Earth.
04:14Another feature of the young continent was wetlands.
04:19The Everglades was a vast, slow-moving river of grass,
04:2360 miles wide and 100 miles long, meandering through South Florida.
04:31It contained an ever-shifting patchwork of ecosystems, with nature reshaping it in short order.
04:42It may have looked different from one year to the next, even before humans tried to reshape it themselves.
04:55The Mississippi Delta was another fluid landscape.
05:01Over thousands of years, the river carried sediments downstream and created almost 10,000 square miles of land,
05:09half of them wetlands, on the Louisiana coast.
05:18But some of the most important water was invisible.
05:23Underneath the Great Plains is one of the world's largest supplies of underground water, the Ogallala Aquifer.
05:31It lies under portions of eight states, from South Dakota down to Texas.
05:38Over millions of years, rain and snow filtered down through the Earth, drop by drop, building up into a secret stash of fresh water.
05:48If pumped out all at once, it would cover all 50 states a foot and a half deep.
05:57This is the legacy of water inherited by humans when they first wandered onto the continent.
06:05It has shaped the American story ever since.
06:13Today, Alaska is the farthest state you can drive to, the end of the American Road.
06:28Thousands of years ago, it was a gateway, the beginning of a new continental journey.
06:40Siberia and Alaska used to be connected by the Bering Land Bridge.
06:44About 20,000 years ago, explorers from Asia trekked into the American continent.
06:52Over time, the migration splintered and scattered in every direction, geographically and genetically.
07:00Hundreds of tribes evolved, creating new languages, new cultures, new ways of adapting and living in a land now known as the Lower 48 States.
07:17In the Pacific Northwest, the Salish people thrived on the rich waters of the coast and feasted on the salmon runs up the Columbia River.
07:27The Columbia supported many other tribes, including the Colville, Nez Perce, Spokane, and Yakima.
07:37Farther south, the Colorado River was the lifeline of the desert Southwest.
07:44Tribes like the Fremont, Anasazi, and Hohokam lived off its life-giving flow.
07:55The Ohio River sustained tribes like the Osage, Omaha, and Shawnee.
08:03The Mississippi River saw the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Ojibwe.
08:13The mighty Missouri River drew the Lakota, Mandan, and Blackfeet, among many others.
08:22The First Nations that gathered around the Great Lakes included the Erie people, the Ho-Chunk, and the Menominee.
08:36Water influenced the migrations and cultures of Native Americans for more than 10,000 years.
08:44But in just a few hundred years, it would all change into a new world unrecognizable from the old, except that water was still a driving force.
08:56America's Atlantic coast is a welcoming landscape.
09:08More than 2,000 miles of shore that beckoned newcomers from Europe and beyond.
09:15By the 17th century, the influx over the Atlantic was in full motion.
09:21There were explorers, visitors, settlers, and slaves.
09:28Certain spots on the coast became the gateways. Their stories and landmarks are world famous.
09:36Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America.
09:41They picked this site partly because it was surrounded by water on three sides.
09:48Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Mayflower pulled ashore in December of 1620.
09:56Many passengers were fleeing religious persecution, but coming to the New World in the dead of winter created a brand new set of challenges.
10:07Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Newcomers were drawn here by waters teeming with cod.
10:14It provided both sustenance for the immigrants and a business opportunity to export it back to Mother England.
10:23Boston, whose first settlers chose a spot on the Chalmette Peninsula, surrounded by Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River.
10:31The peninsula had three prominent hills, and all are still part of the downtown landscape.
10:40And New York City, where the Statue of Liberty eventually welcomed millions.
10:46Famously described by poet Emma Lazarus as,
10:49You're tired, you're poor, you're huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
10:57But America's west coast was not nearly as welcoming.
11:02Two colliding tectonic plates created a mountainous coastline.
11:09Piling winds and steeper slopes created bigger waves.
11:14But when immigration finally did transform this coast, it came in like a Pacific storm.
11:22In the early 1800s, California was a sleepy province of Mexico, populated mostly by Spanish speakers and Native Americans.
11:33But they were completely overrun in 1848 by the Gold Rush.
11:40Fortune seekers raced into California.
11:43Some went across the country in wagon trains on the Oregon Trail.
11:49It still looks pretty rugged today.
11:54Bouncing over thousands of miles on wooden wheels was a hardship that is now etched into the American story.
12:06But at the outset of the Gold Rush, more than a third of the gold seekers took an alternate route, by sea.
12:15They set sail from the east coast, went all the way around the tip of South America and back up the Pacific coast.
12:22Fourteen thousand miles, seven months, on sometimes modest vessels facing countless hazards.
12:32One New Yorker, Alexander Van Valen, set sail in the winter of 49.
12:39Four months into his journey, he lamented the boredom and lack of exercise.
12:44A sailor's life is a dog's life, he wrote.
12:47But now I shudder with a different perception.
12:50A dog's life is far better.
12:54After 200 days, he made it, weakened but ready to grab his share of fortune.
13:02Or so he hoped, along with everybody else pouring into California.
13:10In 1850, San Francisco's population quintupled, and most came by sea.
13:17The harbor master reckoned 62,000 arrived on ships that year alone,
13:22including Americans from the east and Asians from across the Pacific.
13:29As they headed inland, many of their ships were abandoned in what was then called Yerba Buena Cove.
13:37They were used for storage, floating hotels, however a ship could be turned into usable space in a boomtown.
13:45Ships that couldn't be put to use were simply sunk right there in the cove.
13:51Later, it was filled in to make more land.
13:56And that's right where downtown San Francisco was built.
14:02In 2001, workers excavating the site of an old downtown building
14:07discovered the remains of a Gold Rush ship called the General Harrison.
14:12It arrived from Massachusetts in 1850.
14:17Archaeologists had a brief chance to study it before it was covered up again by an 11-story building.
14:26On the Columbia River, bordering Washington and Oregon, a different kind of Gold Rush attracted newcomers.
14:33This time, the lure was salmon.
14:37The supply seemed endless.
14:40In the 1860s, the advent of canning allowed salmon to be packaged and shipped.
14:47It didn't take long for the world to get a taste for it.
14:51Canneries sprang up along the Columbia, 55 of them by 1883, manned mostly by Chinese immigrants.
15:00That year alone, they produced 30 million cans of salmon.
15:10Whether immigrants came to America from east or west, arriving at the coast wasn't always the end of the journey.
15:19America's inland waterways shaped how the interior of the nation was settled.
15:28The most famous inland journey of discovery was Lewis and Clark.
15:34They were sent by Thomas Jefferson in 1804 to explore land he had just purchased from the French,
15:40828,000 square miles for about three cents an acre.
15:46Lewis and Clark set sail from a camp near St. Louis, went up the Mississippi to the fork with the Missouri, and took a left.
15:54They were headed west, against the river's current.
15:59Among the stated goals for the expedition was to find a water route to the Pacific,
16:04for what Jefferson called the purpose of commerce.
16:10They were a party of 30 or so men, including a slave.
16:17And later, a young Native American teenage girl they hired as a guide.
16:23They came across every kind of landscape, weather, and hazard.
16:29They discovered animals completely foreign to them, along with Native American tribes both curious and wary.
16:40Finally, they encountered the Rocky Mountains.
16:49The continental divide runs the length of the Rockies.
16:53A raindrop on one side of the ridge flows to the Pacific.
16:57A drop on the other side flows to the Atlantic.
17:01But to Lewis and Clark, it was simply a barrier.
17:06So they followed tributaries of the Missouri so far as to stand up and straddle either side of a creek.
17:13And upon climbing what he thought would be the final summit,
17:17Lewis imagined the other side to be a downward slope all the way to the ocean.
17:23Instead, he saw nothing but more mountains as far as he could see.
17:32After weeks of bushwhacking and portaging on foot, they found the Clearwater River.
17:39They were back on the water, this time with the current.
17:44They joined the Snake River, and finally, the Columbia.
17:49They followed the Columbia all the way to the Pacific.
17:53It took 18 months of exploration, mostly by water, with Clark estimating the distance they had traveled.
18:02By his reckoning, they had gone 4,162 miles to the Pacific.
18:08Modern measurements show he was only 40 miles off.
18:14Now, they needed to pick a site to camp for the winter.
18:20Until now, it had been strictly a military expedition.
18:24But after a year and a half of giving orders, Lewis and Clark opened it up to a vote.
18:30Sacagawea, the teenage Shoshone girl, voted.
18:35Clark's slave, a black man named York, voted.
18:39On the banks of a river that wasn't even American territory yet,
18:43the expedition took a page from the future and allowed every one of its members a voice.
18:50Their journey remains a testament to the spirit of exploration and the budding concept of democracy.
19:03Later in the 19th century, when America's wave of immigration arrived on shore,
19:08many continued into the country's interior on its natural network of rivers.
19:16Name a city, and there's a good chance it was settled via water.
19:24Cincinnati, founded at the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers.
19:30It became a magnet for German settlers and a hub of river commerce.
19:36Midwestern pork, flour, and whiskey flowed through town,
19:40often headed for plantations in the antebellum south.
19:44Business boomed, and by the 1850s, Cincinnati was almost four times bigger than Chicago.
19:54Pittsburgh, at the intersection of three rivers.
19:57The Ohio, the Monongahela, and the Allegheny.
20:02When steel production became Pittsburgh's calling card,
20:06river barges hauled it out in three different directions to a growing nation.
20:13It was the interstate exchange of its day.
20:17Minneapolis and St. Paul, twin cities born when the U.S. military convinced the Dakota Sioux
20:23to sell some land so it could build a fort where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers meet.
20:31Boise, Idaho, on the Boise River, which looked like an oasis to early explorers.
20:38Surrounded by the dry, rough Rockies, it was a blue ribbon of water surrounded by green cottonwood trees.
20:47Albuquerque, New Mexico, straddling the banks of the Rio Grande, founded as a Spanish colonial outpost.
20:55It started as a farming community, drawing water from the river for crops and sheep herding.
21:02The Willamette Valley of Oregon, blessed with a river lined with abundant resources and rich soil.
21:10It was publicized in the 1820s as a promised land of flowing milk and honey.
21:17Many who braved the Oregon Trail were on their way here.
21:22For more than a century, water dictated the direction of American migration.
21:29But ingenuity and engineering soon turned that model on its head.
21:34Americans were going to dictate the direction of water.
21:38As newcomers continued to settle into the nation's midsection, they found a region teeming with natural resources.
21:46In Minnesota, vast forests were harvested to house and provide warmth for a growing population.
21:55In Illinois, fertile land was used for agriculture.
21:59In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, some riches were underground.
22:04Just five years after becoming a state, various ores, like iron, were discovered.
22:10But these ores were not the only source of income.
22:14In the late 1820s, the state of Illinois saw the rise of mining.
22:19In the late 1830s, the state of Illinois saw the rise of mining.
22:23Just five years after becoming a state, various ores, like iron, were discovered.
22:29But these resources remained mostly locked in by land, with nature offering no easy way out to a broader market.
22:37Until America made its own way.
22:41In 1825, the Erie Canal was completed.
22:45363 miles of artificial waterway connecting the Hudson River to Lake Erie.
22:50It took eight years to dig out by hand, with the help of pack animals and explosives.
22:57Then, in 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected Lake Michigan to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.
23:06With these two canals, there was now an inland waterway from New York City all the way to New Orleans.
23:13The breadbasket of America was open for business.
23:17People poured into the region.
23:20And commodities poured out.
23:24Cranberries from Wisconsin.
23:27Corn from Iowa.
23:30And wheat from Kansas.
23:33Now these goods could reach a broader market, thanks to a new economic thoroughfare made of water.
23:39Towns on the route blossomed into full-blown cities.
23:43Cleveland, Ohio, on the south shore of Lake Erie.
23:47Winters were harsh, and nearby land could be swampy.
23:51The city grew up anyway, thanks to its very busy port.
23:56But it was not just a shipping stop.
23:59Cleveland grew into a manufacturing power, known for taking in raw elements from the ocean.
24:05And putting out finished machinery for the masses, such as cars, steam engines, and iron beams for construction.
24:14Milwaukee, Wisconsin, overlooking Lake Michigan.
24:18In the 1840s, German immigrants flowed in via the new water route from the east.
24:25And they brought their beer recipes with them.
24:28By 1900, a full third of Milwaukee's population was of German ancestry.
24:34With such a high density of countrymen, German culture flourished on the shores of Lake Michigan, and in the surrounding farm fields.
24:45One of their lasting legacies was the concept of preschool.
24:49Thanks to German immigrants, every American kid goes to kindergarten.
24:53A tradition that began in this schoolhouse in Watertown.
25:01Chicago, Illinois.
25:06It was founded as a town of about 200 people.
25:10It was the birthplace of the first American school.
25:14It was founded as a town of about 200 people in 1833.
25:20Thanks in part to the canals that would soon connect it to the rest of the country,
25:25Chicago became the fastest growing city in the world for much of the 19th century.
25:31The engineering of water took an interesting twist in Chicago.
25:35In 1856, the city began installing the nation's first comprehensive sewage system.
25:41Step one was raising central Chicago to a new grade,
25:45basically jacking it up street by street and building by building.
25:51This would allow gravity to work its magic.
25:56But the sewage drained into the Chicago River, which then drained into Lake Michigan.
26:01The sewage drained into the Chicago River, which then drained into Lake Michigan,
26:06polluting Chicago's source of drinking water.
26:10To remedy the problem, engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River,
26:15forcing its waters and Chicago's sewage in the opposite direction, away from the lake.
26:21But at the very bottom of this new shipping route through the nation was the gateway to the ocean,
26:28New Orleans.
26:31No place else can claim the gumbo of influences that molded the Crescent City.
26:40By 1850, it was the fourth largest port in the world.
26:45By 1850, it was the fourth largest port in the world.
26:50The docks would have been chock full of goods on their way in or out of the country.
26:55Meat, grain, sugar, and most famously, cotton.
27:05The process began all over the Deep South, at thousands of plantations.
27:11Sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and slaves tended the delicate crop from planting to picking.
27:21The Mississippi River connected this back-breaking work to the rest of the world.
27:28Picked and bundled cotton made its way down the Mississippi and over the ocean,
27:33where it could be spun into goods for a global market.
27:36A customer in Great Britain or Brazil could buy clothing that originated in the fields of Alabama or Arkansas.
27:46But the new demand for cotton created more demand for slaves.
27:52The Mississippi River became the continent to bring more slaves south.
27:57Many were auctioned off in New Orleans.
28:00Plantation owners were frequent buyers.
28:02This is the origin of the phrase, sold down the river.
28:11But after the Civil War, human bondage slowly gave way to human ingenuity.
28:19By the 20th century, America would harness water to fulfill its growing thirst for expansion.
28:26With canals and locks opening more regions to settlement and commerce, modern America was taking shape.
28:35But that shape was forever altered when we chose to override the forces of nature.
28:45The Hoover Dam was built in the late 19th century.
28:49While the river was a natural marvel, it was also an agricultural headache.
28:54Some farmers weren't getting the water they needed,
28:57and others faced acres of ruined crops when the river flooded.
29:02The Hoover Dam turned the river into a resource to be managed and used.
29:07The dam was built in the late 19th century.
29:10The dam was built in the late 19th century.
29:12The river flooded.
29:15The Hoover Dam turned the river into a resource to be managed and a source of power to be harnessed.
29:23Water shooting through its turbines generates power for 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona, and California.
29:31The dam's maximum power rating is 2080 megawatts, or almost 3 million horsepower.
29:37When the dam went online, the rivers of the Colorado built up behind it,
29:42creating a brand new lake with a surface area bigger than Lake Tahoe.
29:48They named it Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in America.
29:53It creates power, irrigation, and plenty of recreation in the otherwise parched American Southwest.
29:59The Hoover Dam is just one example of engineering water to serve a growing nation.
30:11Another is the Shasta Dam in California.
30:15Also built in the 1930s, it allowed the Sacramento River to be tapped for power and irrigation,
30:22creating one of the most fertile growing regions in the world.
30:25California's Central Valley.
30:29Once, it was a grassland prairie.
30:32But a series of dams, canals, and pumps turned it into an agricultural wonderland.
30:39At one point, the Central Valley grew 25% of the food eaten in the United States.
30:47But we didn't just divert water to grow crops.
30:49In some cases, we grew cities.
30:54In the early 20th century, Los Angeles was already a growing town.
30:59But officials feared that scarcity of water would limit its growth,
31:04and its real estate values.
31:09230 miles to the north lay the Old City of Los Angeles.
31:13At that time, it was fertile farmland, fed by the Owens River, and capped by the blue-green Owens Lake.
31:23With ingenuity, hubris, and a fair amount of deception,
31:27a few conspirators bought up the rights to the river,
31:30and officials built an aqueduct all the way to L.A.
31:33No pumps were necessary.
31:35It's downhill all the way.
31:39For a hundred years and counting,
31:41Los Angeles has grown into an urban jungle that is mostly watered from afar.
31:49And as the original developers envisioned,
31:51Los Angeles became the centerpiece of the urban landscape.
31:55The city of Los Angeles,
31:57was mostly watered from afar.
32:01And as the original developers envisioned,
32:03real estate is still priced like gold.
32:08Elsewhere, the problem wasn't scarcity of water.
32:12It was an overabundance.
32:18In late 19th century Florida,
32:20the Everglades was putting a chokehold on development.
32:24You couldn't farm it, and you couldn't build on it.
32:29Then Governor Broward wanted to, quote,
32:31drain that abominable, pestilence-ridden swamp.
32:37It started in the 1880s,
32:39when a developer named Hamilton Diston bought 4 million acres of Florida Swamp,
32:44an area the size of Connecticut, for 25 cents an acre.
32:47A modest canal system tried to drain some of it for agriculture.
32:53The canals didn't always work so well.
32:56But the word was out, true or not.
33:00Wetland could be turned into land,
33:05and turn a profit.
33:11Within four years, the value of Diston's project,
33:14Within four years, the value of Diston's purchase doubled.
33:20The Florida land boom was on.
33:24Decades of development followed,
33:26turning South Florida into a hot destination,
33:29but also an ecological mess.
33:33Today, the Everglades is hanging on,
33:36thanks to a change of heart about the natural value of wetlands.
33:41Another region has grappled with water since the very beginning.
33:52New Orleans was first laid out as 14 city blocks.
33:56Even then, each block was surrounded by a drainage ditch.
34:02That's what you have to do when you build a city just a few feet above sea level,
34:06surrounded by water.
34:10As New Orleans grew, it had little land to grow on.
34:14So, low-lying swamps were drained in small sections
34:18to make way for new neighborhoods.
34:21Then, officials began to think bigger.
34:25In the early 1900s, the vast swamp between the city and Lake Pontchartrain was drained,
34:31increasing the city's urban acreage by 700%.
34:36But flooding has always been a threat,
34:40no more so than with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
34:48Katrina devastated some areas of the city, and they are still recovering.
34:53This set New Orleans back, but also moved engineering ideas forward.
35:00After Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers
35:03embarked on building the biggest defense yet,
35:06a surge barrier almost two miles long,
35:09and the largest drainage pumping station in the world.
35:14New Orleans is a living experiment in how far we can push water
35:18before water pushes back.
35:25Today, modern America benefits from a vast network of highways and railways.
35:31In the public eye, our lakes and rivers are more about recreation than transportation.
35:39There are now more than 4 million recreational watercraft in the country.
35:45Fishing is still an important industry.
35:48For example, the lobster in Maine are still critical to the local economy.
35:54But for many coastal residents, water no longer provides the livelihood it once did.
36:01Fisheries are depleted after centuries of bountiful catches.
36:06So living on the water is more of an aesthetic choice rather than economic.
36:12Consider the story of Newport, Rhode Island.
36:16It rose to prominence as a whaling town,
36:19with Portuguese immigrants bringing their expertise to turn sperm whales
36:23into commodities such as oil, candles, and perfume.
36:28Later, its port became a hub for moving textiles, chocolate, and rum.
36:33As a result, it also became an epicenter of piracy.
36:38Legal or not, Newport's economy was based on waterborne commerce.
36:43But things began to change in the mid-1800s.
36:50Wealthy business tycoons looking for cooler summers
36:53began building what they called cottages in seaside Newport.
36:59This one is called The Breakers, built by the Vanderbilts in the 1890s.
37:05It sits on 13 acres, with cliffs that corrugate the water.
37:10It sits on 13 acres, with cliffs that careen down to the Atlantic Ocean.
37:18Inside, there are 70 rooms, totaling over 125,000 square feet.
37:27Though the house was large enough to throw grand parties,
37:30there were only a few extra bedrooms.
37:33Guests were presumed to have cottages of their own.
37:37And so began the trend of coastal living without needing the coast to live.
37:43Today, most people who live on the water do not subsist on it.
37:47Those who do, like local fishermen,
37:50often struggle to afford the increasing costs of living near the sea.
37:56But there are still people who make a living on the water.
38:00Some in small boats,
38:03and some just a little bit bigger.
38:08The story of modern shipping is the story of container ships.
38:13The biggest ones can carry 11,000 20-foot containers.
38:19With America's thirst for imports,
38:21there's a good chance much of your household was once boxed up and carried by ship.
38:27It may have come to shore in Miami.
38:31This port turns around an average of four ships per day,
38:34loading and unloading everything from furniture to fruits.
38:40It handles about 8 million tons of cargo every year.
38:47This evolution in shipping transformed one of America's most famous bays.
38:52When container ships reach San Francisco,
38:55they don't stop where all the passengers disembarked for the gold rush.
39:00San Francisco's famous hills are a barrier to big ocean commerce.
39:06Instead, the ships continue on to Oakland.
39:10Surrounded by flatter land and closer to highways and railroads,
39:14Oakland became the next boomtown on the bay.
39:17There is room to stack up containers like building blocks
39:20as they await their inland journey by a truck or train.
39:26So while San Francisco grew up on the influx of people,
39:31Oakland grew up on the influx of stuff.
39:38By 1970, it became the Bay Area's leading port.
39:42The American economy came of age with the power of water.
39:48But the industry that rose on its banks became the curse that fouled its future.
39:54For the better part of the country's lifespan,
39:56pollution controls were weak, if they existed at all.
40:02Anyone could dump just about anything on the water.
40:05Raw sewage, chemicals, and oils poured into our lakes, rivers, and seas.
40:11By the 1960s, America's waters were on life support.
40:18There were record fish kills, sharp drops in fishery populations
40:22that could only be attributed to the lack of water.
40:26And there was a shortage of food.
40:29There were record fish kills, sharp drops in fishery populations
40:33that could only be attributed to pollution.
40:38In 1969, a Florida lake reported the biggest kill ever, 26 million fish,
40:44blamed on discharge from nearby food processing plants.
40:50One study found that pollution in the Chesapeake Bay
40:53was costing the fishing industry $3 million a year.
40:59Officials sampled the Hudson River
41:01and found bacteria levels 170 times the safe limit.
41:07The Charles River in Boston became such a foul soup
41:11that a boater who fell into the water had to seek medical treatment for skin rashes.
41:17Lake Erie was written off as dead by Time magazine.
41:23Finally, the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland was so polluted,
41:27it actually caught fire in 1969.
41:31Flames floated right down the river.
41:35Investigators blamed waters choked with petroleum derivatives,
41:39volatile enough to be ignited by a wayward spark.
41:45By 1972, two-thirds of the nation's lakes, rivers, and coastal waters
41:50were unsafe for fishing or swimming.
41:54That year, the government finally responded with the Clean Water Act.
42:02Considered one of the broadest environmental laws ever,
42:05its goal was to, quote,
42:07restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of our nation's waters.
42:14More than 40 years later, it has not been a perfect recovery.
42:19But success stories abound.
42:23It stopped billions of pounds of pollution from spilling into waterways,
42:26allowing them to self-cleanse over time.
42:31And since so many American cities were settled around water,
42:35cleaner downtown waters helped revitalize the urban core.
42:39People started coming back from the suburbs.
42:43Kansas City was founded at the junction of two rivers.
42:47In the 1800s, meatpacking plants dumped slaughterhouse waste right in,
42:52streaking them red with blood.
42:56Today, they run a much cleaner blue, framing a vibrant city center.
43:03In Oklahoma City, the North Canadian River used to flow through downtown.
43:08But when it got stinkier and occasionally flooded,
43:11officials rerouted the river around town.
43:16The original riverbed became an urban eyesore,
43:19an overgrown drainage ditch that had to be mowed three times a year.
43:24But with cleaner waters and a trend to revitalize urban centers,
43:28the city diverted the river back through downtown and renamed it the Oklahoma River.
43:35Now it hosts world-class kayak competitions.
43:44Modern America is a product of many forces,
43:47with water carving a distinct path through its history.
43:55But what about its future?
43:59Can we adapt to waters that rise?
44:03Or waters that disappear?
44:07Modern Las Vegas was built on the promise of cheap, plentiful water
44:11and power from the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.
44:15In the long run, that promise may be a mirage.
44:19Surrounding Lake Mead is what locals call the Bathtub Ring.
44:24It illustrates the drop in water level caused by years of drought.
44:29And it's the place where the river meets the ocean.
44:32It illustrates the drop in water level caused by years of drought.
44:37Unless fortunes change, a lot of fortunes could be lost.
44:42The water level has gone below 40% of its capacity.
44:47Soon it may go below the level of the intakes that pump it to Las Vegas.
44:52They're building a new one even deeper.
44:57Already residents are pitching in and using less.
45:00Officials are forcing conservation.
45:03Planting a water-gulping front lawn is now illegal.
45:08Las Vegas could be forced to reckon with a radical future,
45:12reverting back to a true desert city, where water is as precious as gold.
45:19Efforts to keep the city afloat could be the biggest gamble yet.
45:24It's a story duplicated all the way down the depleted Colorado River.
45:32Almost 30 dams, including the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona,
45:36have turned the river into what amounts to a controllable faucet.
45:44Countless canals divert its water to some 4 million acres of cropland.
45:49Arizona would be even more parched without the Colorado River fanning out in a spiderweb of canals.
45:58It allowed the population of Phoenix to double.
46:04In California, some of the most productive farms
46:07increasingly rely on the state's share of diverted river water.
46:12The area's drought makes this imported water even more treacherous.
46:16Droughts come and go, but human alterations to the landscape can be permanent.
46:24Remember the Owens River Valley, drained to slake the thirst of Los Angeles?
46:29Now it's so dry that winds whip up thick clouds of noxious, alkali dust,
46:34causing health problems and even traffic jams.
46:39Underground water is a major source of pollution.
46:42In California's Central Valley, farmers pump up groundwater for more than 100,000 wells,
46:48few of which are monitored or regulated.
46:52In the last century, they've pulled out a volume of water equivalent to over four lake meads.
47:01It is causing the valley floor to sink about six inches from the ground.
47:06At one spot, the ground sank almost 30 feet in 50 years.
47:13And back in the nation's midsection,
47:15the massive Ogallala Aquifer is being tapped faster than nature can replenish it.
47:22One year, scientists realized that farmers depleted the water level by more than 50 percent.
47:28And nature can replenish it.
47:31One year, scientists realized that farmers depleted the water level by six feet.
47:38And nature only replenished a half inch.
47:44One reason is the type of food America prefers.
47:48Beef is still one of our favorite meals.
47:52But raising cattle takes a lot of water, mostly to grow the food they eat.
47:59In the end, a single hamburger takes 600 gallons of water to produce.
48:06Scarcity of fresh water is a looming national challenge.
48:11Another is the slow rise of the sea.
48:17Ocean waters now lap up against some of America's biggest cities.
48:23Scientists fear that innocuous waves could soon cause increasingly destructive erosion
48:31and disastrous floods.
48:35Driven by climate change, sea level is projected to rise at least three feet, perhaps within a century.
48:43As the level rises, there is a lot in water's way.
48:49In Galveston, Texas, a 17-foot seawall protects the low-lying city.
48:56But in 2008, Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm, breached the wall and caused widespread flooding.
49:04With higher seas in the forecast, a bigger storm could be a decisive blow.
49:10In Norfolk, Virginia, city officials estimate it will cost at least a billion dollars
49:15to protect the city from rising seas.
49:19The outer banks of North Carolina could be decimated, with some barrier islands already falling apart.
49:27San Diego's entire infrastructure is at risk.
49:32Erosion and flooding could jeopardize its power grid, water supply, and transportation network.
49:39For over two centuries, Americans gathered where water was plentiful for farming or accessible for travel.
49:48Centuries from now, some of those settlements may be abandoned.
49:53Will we be able to engineer ourselves out of harm's way?
49:58Or will water chart its own course and carve out its own future?
50:09Water has a power all its own.
50:14Its importance ripples from coast to coast.
50:18As a resource.
50:21As recreation.
50:24And as a requirement for life itself.
50:28It cut through time, nourished our growth,
50:32and continues to write a fundamental storyline of American history.
50:38The poet W.H. Auden was an immigrant who came to America by sea in 1939.
50:45He once wrote,
50:48Thousands have lived without love.
50:52Not one without water.