Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five of them for one house, are a red herring.
You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right?
Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
Well, 30,000 gallons of water per day is an acre-foot of water every 11 days, where as 178 gallons per person is an acre-foot every 5 years, per person.
To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn.
Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
Another problem: if you were previously very conservative with your water use, then how do you cut it further? I have a coworker that years ago cut her water use dramatically. Now, she's in a quandary because she's being asked to cut it more. Her solution: family members now take showers at the gym.
Second-order effect: Next drought, when asked to conserve, she will do the minimum possible the first time. Allocations based on previous use seems sensible, but if done naively encourage people to push up their resource consumption when they can.
A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
This is true, and the difficulty is compounded because the government lies or is incompetent.
I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved.
IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
And yet, Californians still grow rice, a pound of which requires about 300 gallons of water to grow. The 11.8 million gallons the kingpen used is enough to grow about 40 thousand pounds of rice, which is worth about $20,000. That is less than a quarter of the kingpen's water bill of $90,000.
There are some questionable comments in this article. It's hard to find real numbers, but swimming pools that are kept covered use very little water. And complaining about "verdant" gardens isn't quite the right metric. We have a few verdant oak trees, and they use no water whatsoever except from rainfall.
We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
She used 178 gallons (674 litres) per day? And that wasn't enough to take a shower every day?! A bathtub is ~80l, and a showering consumes less than that. A washing machine cycle is another ~80l. A dishwasher ~20l/cycle. Cooking maybe 20l. Flush the toilet 5 times/day, 50l. Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-cal... says "An often-cited 2011 study of California single-family water consumption estimated that the average California household used more than 360 gallons of water per day." They are under 1/2 that water use.
The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use.
Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average.
The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes).
By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day.
I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve.
> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."
You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage.
The whole thing with california reminds me of the story about that one civilization in the pacific - "what were they thinking when they cut down the last tree ?"
[+] [-] bradleyjg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AcerbicZero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdsudac|10 years ago|reply
Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.
[+] [-] xigency|10 years ago|reply
To add more perspective, over 100 days that 30,000 gallons of water per day could bear eight and a half acres of corn.
Most of California's crops use more water than that but that is one comparison with agriculture.
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] e40|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
[+] [-] getpost|10 years ago|reply
I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved.
IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
[+] [-] methehack|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zarathustra30|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmkg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amluto|10 years ago|reply
We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
[+] [-] astrodust|10 years ago|reply
Local figures here suggest much lower rates: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang...
That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.
[+] [-] post_break|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjaredsimpson|10 years ago|reply
> to just 178 gallons per person each day.
which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
[+] [-] rdancer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalke|10 years ago|reply
The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use.
Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average.
The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes).
By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day.
I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve.
> Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day."
You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change.
Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
[+] [-] Luc|10 years ago|reply
So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?
[+] [-] yason|10 years ago|reply
I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage.
I do wonder where all that water of hers goes.
[+] [-] 1971genocide|10 years ago|reply
Water exists until it doesn't.
[+] [-] dalke|10 years ago|reply
Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?
[+] [-] masklinn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnautics|10 years ago|reply
https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...