This is First Stage

Thomas Lord

Wed May 14 09:47:10 -0700 2008

Some background and further info.

The Nevada-Sierra's actually had, over the winter, slightly above average snow pack this year. At that point, some of us were daring to sigh with a little relief because that usually portends a good year, water-wise. Perhaps our reservoirs would rise a little this year.

No such luck. Dry air, pathetic rainfall, and too much heat have undone that. Some of the snow simply evaporates. Some melts and seeps into the ground rather than running down into the watersheds.

Tomorrow, for the first time in history, the Bay Area is under an NWS High Temperature Alert (as in, check up on the elderly, stay hydrated, etc.).

EBMUD (our water district authority) has done the least they can do, right now. You can be charged (misdemeanor, I assume) for things like hosing down the side-walk or washing your car without a shut-off nozzle on the end of the hose. They've named the conservation goals (19% single-family, 11% multi-unit, etc.). There's not (yet!) any teeth behind those goals.

This is a sane first step. They meet again in about a month to consider more stringent measures. Why is this a sane first step?

The Bay Area has been through drought before. Big time. In living memory for many. People might actually (believe it or not) voluntarily take appropriate measures to secure the year. They might. For example, restaurants, old hands at this, immediately change their policy about automatically pouring everyone a glass of water. Good for them.

On the other hand, these measures might not work. The last huge drought was the time during which many installed low-flow this and low-flow that, for example. Well, you can't do that twice. I don't know how many more owners than already have will install drip-irrigation systems. It may well be the case that nobody is not already conserving who isn't of the sort that will only conserve if forced to conserve. So the EBMUD meeting next month should be interesting.

Closer to home, a slight mess. For the longest time the largest part of the (largely clay) ground near us was wild. It'd get hacked back a bit when it got too out of hand but, basically, it was wild grasses, weeds, shrubs. Quite lovely, actually. Looked like a good place for kids to play.

I kibbitzed for composting and tilling and starting to build some soil here over the clay but, "kibbitz" was the extent of my rights. The owner opted to raze the native growth and roll out some sod. Sigh.

Fast forward a couple of years and, unsurprisingly: the sod is hard to keep alive without using obscene quantities of water, especially given our record heat. And, without the weeds, and without soil, the sod doesn't really properly root. The weeds had a genuine root system going -- giving us a manageable but annoying ant problem. The roots helped retain water, of course. Now, the racoons still sometimes come around and simply peel back the sod to get at grubs underneath. The consequence? The underlying clay dries and cracks. Not only do you have to pour tons of water on the sod just to keep it alive, but most of that water then just seeps deep down into the clay -- complete waste.

Sigh.

-t

This is First Stage

Bruce Perens

Wed May 14 14:48:40 -0700 2008

I think I might drill a surface well for irrigation water. The water table is 7 feet down in June.

Water Rationing for California East Bay Area

chipmonck

Wed May 14 14:58:42 -0700 2008

And of course, the next step after everybody conserves is to jack up water rates so that the government still gets the same revenue.

It happened here (Atlanta Metro area). We cut water usage by 15%, and the city council last month voted to raise water rates by 15%. Pretty sweet deal if you're a government body - you get the same revenue regardless of how much or how little service you provide.

Of course, I lived through the late 70s so I anticipated this from the beginning.

Water Rationing for California East Bay Area

ColaMan

Wed May 14 16:53:10 -0700 2008

And here, in Australia, we had to cut water usage back drastically. In Brisbane, we're on "level 6" restrictions, where you can't water anything outside with a hose, you can use a bucket of water on a plant or two every second day from 4-7pm, and you can only clean the glass/mirrors/license plates on cars (and bird poo off the paintwork). The target is 140 litres per person per day.

And yes, they raised the rates on water. And suddenly they've realised that all the pipelines they are putting in to shuffle recycled/effluent water about aren't going to work as well, as there's less water going through the system due to all the conservation efforts.....whoops.

The sad part is, we had some summer rain recently, and the combined total of the regional dams went from 17% or so up to 38%. There were calls from far and wide in the community that now we could "finally relax these restrictions". But they don't seem to realise that "38% full" is "62% empty"... and now we're heading back to the drier part of the year with dams that are a long way from even half full....

Water Rationing for California East Bay Area

chipmonck

Wed May 14 18:57:58 -0700 2008

That was more of a "government believes it has a right to a certain level of revenue, regardless of how much (or how little) service it provides" rant.

A couple of other examples from the same time period:

1) Trash pickup went from twice a week to once a week, with the fee not changing and government screaming "recycle, reduce, reuse" and actual trash volume falling about 40%.

2) Auto inspections going from twice a year to once a year and the fee doubling! And no, the inspection wasn't in any more depth.

The sad fact is that governments see these as "revenue producers" not "necesssary services". That led to my favorite expression at the time "gee, I want to be a government when I grow up!"

Meanwhile, we've gotten some significant rainfall here, and we're allowed to water up to 25 minutes once a week, as long as a human stands out there and holds the hose. I decided I didn't want to do that, so I put in rain barrels instead. As far as I can tell, you can use as much water from rain barrels as you want.

Water Rationing for California East Bay Area

AB3A	Thu May 15 04:50:38 -0700 2008

The problem is twofold: First, population growth has pretty much hit the limits of what your grandparents could conceive of. They and/or your great grandparents were the ones who probably designated the resources for your water utility.

Second, the climate is changing. That means some places will have more rain, some will have less. Historic records of rainfall are just that. They're not a prediction of what we can expect in the future.

Many water utilities are working on waste-water re-use. The problem is that culturally we've learned to flush a very wide variety of things down the drain. The water carries many things besides just soap, and human waste. The question is how can we clean this stuff up, and then if we do, what becomes of the sludge?

Until now, we've been relying on good old solar energy to clean up our water through evaporation and rainfall. The Earth's population is approaching a limit on that front. We don't have endless fresh water supplies any more. We need to learn how to recycle the water we use, or we'll suffer a similar fate as the Maya did in the 8th and 9th centuries.

Water Rationing for California East Bay Area

Thomas Lord

Thu May 15 09:44:36 -0700 2008

As a general guess that's not bad but the history of our water utility is well documented, interesting, and "not quite that".

Long story short: the land which is now San Francisco was mostly sandy dunes and rocky hills (mini-mountains, really). The land where Berkeley is was wetlands down near the bay, grasslands and some forest as you go up the hills.

Gold rush happens. The big money isn't in gold but in banking, land development, and land speculation. Corruption, top to bottom, is the rule of the day. At that time, this is all still new-in-recent-memory US territory, "under developed".

There isn't really enough water to support even the population of the day. And there's all that land speculation going on.

Strings are pulled, right on up to the federal level. The bankers basically manage to grab watershed land for near free, put up massive damns, and the first big waterworks projects happen. They intend to monopolize water and be in a position to develop their land.

Fast forward. The bankers have screwed up in various ways. The water projects aren't making money. Eventually they get turned into municipal districts.

There wasn't, in other words, any serious planning or engineering thought or anything like that dominating the build-out. It was a get-rich(er)-quick scheme that went sour. But by the time it went sour, SF was a major city. The University of California at Berkeley was the growing concern on this side. There was no stopping any of it.

We live in a near-desert, basically.

As for climate: we're historically arid; droughts have happened often enough including a severe one in the 1980s; now we've got record temps and way below average rain....

It's not very scientific, of course, but I've been around these parts off and on over almost 20 years. It's mostly getting hotter and drier. Our classic pattern of a lot of "damp", "foggy" (really, mostly, very very low overcast) days is down. The plants "don't look right".

The other new extreme I've seen might leave us drenched, maybe, though I haven't seen it actually happen yet for more than a couple of days. In the winter, at least this past one, we're getting more stuff blowing in from the north. Cold air from the north smells very different from what we mostly get. The wind off marin, for example: well, you can smell the redwood forests in it. But the northern stuff -- when it's really cold -- smells like snow. Maybe the pattern bringing that in will give us some of Seattle's rain, but, as I say, no sign of that yet.

-t