FUNAFUTI, Tuvalu — Palelei Tovia recalls how Tuvalu islanders used to survive droughts with all-night vigils at wells to collect precious fresh water during the moments it seeped into the shafts.
Tovia, now a schoolteacher, said that during the last bad drought 14 years ago, she stayed up beside a well with her high school friends, telling one another stories to stay awake. As the ocean tide rose, she said, it would push fresh water up into the well, and they would take turns scooping it out, cup by cup.
This year’s drought on this isolated atoll in the South Pacific is equally severe, she said, but with a difference: People no longer turn to well water when the rains don’t come. It’s too contaminated and salty.
“The situation is bad,” said Pusinelli Laafai, Tuvalu’s permanent secretary of home affairs.
Experts say the contamination is due in part to development and population growth. But part of it, too, can be attributed to greater recent tidal fluctuations, resulting in unusually high tides that have mixed saltwater in with groundwater.
With climate change expected to push sea levels higher in the decades ahead, Tuvalu could become a bellwether for low-lying islands from the Maldives to Kiribati, where rising oceans threaten to contaminate groundwater.
“Clearly, one of the issues for all coral atolls is the limited fresh water available,” said Ian Fry, a climate-change lecturer at National University of Australia who also works as an international environmental officer for the Tuvalu government.
A weather pattern known as La Niña has settled over the region and deprived Tuvalu of any substantial rainfall for six months. Weather linked to La Niña also has been blamed for the higher tides. Forecasters say it could be another three months before the rains return.
