Evacuating Tehran

Fifteen million without water.

There are two dozen articles about Iran on this Substack, with MIOS: Iran’s PressTV gracing the masthead at the time of this publication. While I’ve thrown shoes at the IRGC every chance I’ve had over the last sixteen years, I’m just an infidel, not a crusader. My first time ever getting involved in international affairs was during the 2009 Green Revolution. If I am active, I will be found on the side of the Iran’s post revolution baby boom, as they try to shake off the Islamic Republic’s conflict-centric origin narrative.

Forty years ago my first job using a computer was for a Persian mycopathologist named Nader Gohli Vakili and many of my coworkers at the National Soil Tilth Laboratory were Kurds. The Soviet Union was still a thing, it was the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, and this was my first direct, personal experience with people who had not had the same “tense but safe” world I had known my whole life.

Prior to the quarterly focus of this Substack, I would pick a new research direction after each biannual U.S. election. During the years 2013/2014 I focused on food and water security in an area roughly defined by the maximum extent of the Ottoman empire. I think the first article I ever wrote about Iran’s water concerns was Greater Iran’s Greatest Problem, back in 2013.

So let’s take a look at a truly unprecedented problem, namely the need to evacuate a city of fifteen million …

Attention Conservation Notice:

Just a water security piece. I used to focus on this, now I just catch the spindrift coming off the waves of news in this area.

Relocation:

The first mention of this was in Caspian Report: Relocating Tehran five months ago. Now summer is here and Mother Nature, who is done with our shit on a global basis, is about to turn Tehran into a ghost town.

We nearly lost Cape Town seven years ago. It’s just 1/35th the size of Tehran, but any country losing a major urban area to a water crisis is going to have similar issues.

Personal:

I worked in Des Moines in 1993, the year Iowa became a shallow inland sea. The Raccoon river overtopped our water plant and the pipes were dry for eleven days. I know what it is to be without …

I started with an IT company based in New Orleans on August 28th, 2005. I got one day of work and then Katrina swamped the city. Omaha is a thousand miles north of there, but we had busloads of people show up. This was my first encounter with climate change refugees. The relatively small pulse of people who had no choice to get out quickly destabilized the low end rental market in Houston, and there were stories in the news about the friction. NoLa is a quarter the size of Houston.

Now try to envision what happens when 20% of the country’s population are on the move.