How Would You Solve The California Drought?
 

Suppose you are the Governor of the Golden State. It is 2017, and the drought shows no signs of ending. Almost every city is on water rationing, aquifers are depleted, wells going dry, the reservoirs are at 5% capacity. The public and business are demanding action and you have a rare political chance to take action - to change a century of water law, practices and flows - and save the state.

What is your plan?

Serious plans preferred. Moving everyone to Texas isn't a solution; they are out of water there too.

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Sam had the right answer. U haul.
You live in a desert.

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Cloud seeding. Done deal.

Invest in desalination factories,
drip irrigation farming of resilient low-waste crops,
solutions for golf courses and estates,
promote natural succulant gardening everywhere(Succulant Design Ideas, Pictures, Remodel and Decor),
enclose aquaducts,
no-flush urinals, etc. as a start.

Desalination only really makes sense if its from Nukes.

Move back to where I was born. Wettest place on the Con't US coast....Forks, WA....Fain Forest....140 in/yr

Trucking and Train tanking water to the state from states with lots of water.

I think only a few years ago they started metering water in places like Modesto. Raise water prices in some areas. BTW most of the Orange and Almond groves have been doing the drip irrigation think for a long, long time.

Maybe do like L.A. has done for a long time, namely suck the water out of someplace else (Owens Valley in L.A.'s case) and transport it via aqueducts, pipes, and pumping stations from a place with excess water to locations in Kalifornia. Of course the great north west is the first candidate that comes to mind. I bet there would be huge resistance from the source locations, because they know supplying water to socal would be creating a monster. Kalifornia would just continue to increase the demand. It would be a real megaproject if it happened.

Just read Lake Mead is 100' below normal levels. A 14 year drought. If it's levels don't rebound this winter there will be severe water rationing in SoCal.

I think paying Arizonans to pee on ya'll would do the trick.

Not from Michigan please.
We like our water, thank you, and the great lakes are still recovering from record lows here.

There is already an interstate agreement in effect to prevent siphoning (3-5 states plus canada I think)
Only water bottling companies like foreign Nestle can bypass that law.

Hey, I've got an idea. Just pipe it down from Northern California. They don't need it.

It seems like it's just a matter of time before there are actual water pipelines just like we have for oil and gas.

We're under mandatory irrigation restrictions here but so far I just switched the sprinklering days per their schedule. I didn't reduce durations as stuff would die. :rolleyes: But with our bill already at $150-200/month and bound to go up, I'm definitely thinking about going fake turf, native plants and rocks.

Some information :

Water usage
The Yodeler, Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter Sierra Club

Desalination
Nation's largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast? - San Jose Mercury News

I don't think you can fix 100 years of stupid with any sort of alacrity.

Speaking of stupid, no way in hell is building tunnels under the delta to transport water a good idea. They should build a cover on the California Aqueduct, how stupid is it to waste a vital resource with an open canal to transport it? I wonder how many tons of water they lose to evaporation every day. "They," WTF am I saying, it is we.

Should have been building reservoirs alongside rivers, sort of like big tanks, for a long time. Divert water into them in the spring, when the rivers are running high. Not going to be building dams for storage, due to environmental impact. Only short term answer is draconian rationing, which should be constantly in place in Southern California, which is an overpopulated desert and has been for many years. We have needed a better water policy since before I was born, it is just a more acute problem due to the overpopulation here.

Sacramento is at the confluence of two rather larger rivers, we have water in relative abundance. I, and everyone I know, have consistently conserved water as much as possible for as long as I can remember. Have had meters for a few years, prior to that it was a flat rate based on the area of your lot. There are not a lot of gains to be had from conservation, IMHO. Desalinization takes a LOT of energy. As Mr R has suggested, Nuke power is the only thing to make sense for large scale, but building those is not going to help in the short term. In any event, you probably don't get any approved for construction, so it is a bit of a moot point. I think you could put together a solar still for small quantities, but nothing of much consequence. We sure as heck should not be wasting water to grow corn to turn into fuel. My cousin is a botanist who worked in one of the sandy countries to develop grass that could grow using brackish water for irrigation. If you must use something for biofuel, it ought to be something along those lines. We need to be smarter in how we use what we have.


This is a critically important subject, not just for California. Wars will be fought over drinking water in the not too distant future.

John,

I appreciate your starting this thread here, rather than in the dungeon, so there is a greater chance for reasonable discussion. Sadly, water and politics are inextricably linked, especially here in California. That said, I hope everyone can behave themselves and comport themselves like adults.

Toby

Much more recycling the way Orange County does it: Clean up waste water as much as commercially feasible, pump it to catch basins, let it percolate naturally into the soil to fill up ground water supply, and then pump it out as fresh drinking water.

Slideshow: California Drought: Orange County expands 'toilet to tap' water recycling | 89.3 KPCC

Reflective pricing with a curved scale makes good sense. Use 10x's the water of an average household then with a curve say you then pay 100x's the rate. This would ensure abusive use is far more expensive than the base minimum survival use. This would go well on top of a larger scale conservation effort and alternative sourcing.

People are out of water but still watering grass? Seriously?

Please dont move to Texas.

I lived in two different counties during my 34 yrs. in KA - Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. During the Silicon Valley boom, many building campuses were constructed and it was required that a certain % of the land had to be grass, turf, lawn. Some campuses were so massive and had so much grass - requiring water - the water demand for all of that grass was such that the irrigation systems ran 24 hrs./day because there was only so much water volume and pressure available.
I thought that requirement to be strange...even back then.

Nothing to add, other than Optimum No Rinse is my favorite car wash product and is perfect for those of you that have to deal with rationing. One gallon of water for your entire car, and you can wash it anywhere (like your garage).

Agricultural use is pretty huge, you are only going to get so much benefit addressing the residential side of it.

Should be planting more trees, less grass. I water my trees and garden, my lawn looks like West Texas, dry and brown.

If those Sierra Club numbers are correct and percapita residential use is 25% higher in CA than in the rest of the country, I think at least part of the answer is obvious.

I was boggled when I learned that many public water customers in CA didn't have meters - and utilities have decades long schedules to install them, if the local government will allow it.

SAWS (San Antonio water system) is a rather militant utility, but they have achieved impressive results. They use a stage system based on the volume of water in the aquifer. With each stage comes more restrictions and higher rates per consumption level. They also post the highest users of water in the paper as a shaming tactic. It seems to work as the city has grown exponentially, but water use has stayed fairly flat. At some point water pipelines may become necessary, but the restrict, price and shame approach is a viable mid-term solution.

Btw, it's rained here almost very day over the past two weeks and things are green and lush.

Read the farmers almanac, Drought cycles run every 7-10 years, If government was in charge of Sahara desert there would be a sand shortage in 5 years.

The only short term fix is to limit use for agriculture, as that uses by far the most water. Residential irrigation account for less than 3% of total water use. Produce prices will go up nationwide, but that's the way it goes.

Either spend the billions on desalinization plants, which Californians won't want to do because higher taxes would be needed to pay for them, or scores of people who live there need to move back to where they came from. California has been loved to death for over a hundred years and the tipping point was passed decades ago.

In reality, there is no solution that people would rally behind other than fantasy solutions. Fantasy in that the solution would happen quickly and at no cost to individuals. (See: Magical thinking.) Otherwise, California politics is far too Balkanized (has been for decades) for any real solution to occur.

Unless the skies suddenly open and stay open, turning the place into Seattle-south, which doesn't seem likely, seems like the only avenue that's open is to carefully govern how existing water supplies are used. Even as some wells (outside Bakersfield, for instance) are sucking nothing but air, even though many reservoirs are at 30-percent capacity and some are at far less than that, there really aren't many restrictions in place now, at least not in most of the state.

A water czar might want to enact strict limits on water use for all customers and institute large fines for exceeding those limits. He'd probably want to institute immediate limits on how much water well-users could pump, rather than putting this off until 2018, or whatever the newly enacted law specifies. He'd probably want to outlaw flood irrigation - that's still in use in some places, just saw it outside Modesto a couple of weekends ago. He'd probably require that all irrigation districts, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley, institute drip-only irrigation, except for crops where it isn't practical. He probably would want to put a moratorium on rice production. He'd probably want to require that all new construction implement gray-water recovery, no exceptions. Draconian, for sure, and the agricultural interests would howl.

I've lived here for a very long time and I've never seen the hillsides so dry or the trees so stressed. We're in for a very rough ride, I think - but what do I know?

FWIW, here are a couple of the sites that seem worth scanning, if you're interested in what the prospects look like:

http://www.plantmaps.com/interactive-california-drought-monitor-map.php

http://www.climate.gov/news-features/department/8443/all

www.weatherwest.com

Nuclear power plants, desalination plants.

Those Sierra Club numbers are probably not very accurate, and definitely very deceiving. For example. Most people in SF County don't have a yard at all, close to 100% of the water is household use rather than used to water a vegetable garden or yard. Sacramento County is primarily single family homes and has a lot of people not on meters, so the per capita use they post is a WAG at best, and we are watering trees and yards. The reason that there are meters here at all is because folks in Southern California did not think it was "fair" that the water they got from Northern California was metered, and the people up here did not have meters. Mono County looks like it has a lot of water use, but there are probably not even 15,000 people living there, and it is high desert, so they sort of use a lot of water. Also a WAG on amount of water used, as I believe most are on well water.

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/r_211ehchapter2r.pdf

A lot of information is here.

It's not the Sierra Club's fault. There are simply too many people vying for too little resources and the resources are becoming more scarce. Add to that the inability for the people involved to see this fact clearly and deal with it rationally and you have a painful road ahead.

Any solution involves some kind of sacrifice, whether through higher taxes (desalinization plants) and/or behavioral changes within the population (no more green grass and daily car washing). We Americans think we do sacrifice well but we don't--not anymore anyway. (We really have gone soft since WWII.) We point our fingers and make demands, the main demand being that the means to achieve the solution have no effect on us personally. "FIX IT!" is the main demand and then some hapless--and helpless--politician and/or group of bureaucrats tries to fix it and finds that it cannot be fixed without pain and suffering occurring. People then demand "NOT ME!" and the politicians and bureaucrats dither and wring their hands because their constituents demand a magical, painless solution that doesn't exist.

I guess praying for the deluge is all we can do. An actual, reality-based solution is very likely to be far beyond the ability of the population to achieve.

Back when I had my first business - commercial landscape design, installation, and maintenance - and a drought hit KA, obviously with less water usage, less plant growth, there was less work. I just loaded up my 55 gal. sprayer (two-wheeled trailer) and did what other similar companies did, hired-out to spray dead lawns with green agricultural dye.
Clients loved it.
I thought it looked like hell...but I deposited the checks anyway.

You don't fix a drought. It occurs naturally. What you do is prepare for them, because they are a regular feature here.

The water infrastructure in CA, depending on who you read, was built for around 20 million residents. I think we are now 38 million in population.

If you simply return to building dams, aqueducts and spreading grounds the problem would be solved.

Instead, the environmental wackos here actually want to tear down dams. They block every attempt to fix the problem, and the leftist legislature goes right a long with them.

And as for nukes, the plans and foundation were set for a nuke de=sal in Fountain Valley in the 60, but of course the left prevented it from ever getting any further than that.

Agriculture uses 80% to 90% (depending on how measured) of available water in California. 10 percent of California&rsquo;s water goes to almond farming.

Agriculture provides <5% of California economic output.

I see some potential actions right there.

(And I think most of you are missing the point, by focusing on residential lawns etc.)

Rice production will be affected.
Production
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1411253131.gif
"About a third of all California medium grain rice (calrose) is exported to Japan. Then a large quantity is exported to Turkey and Jordan. Calrose is ideal for the domestic industrial markets (rice crispies and beer), but in recent years has been high in price due to pressures from demand in Japan."

Quadruple taxes and homeowners insurance to new people that move into places that are at the limit of sustainability. The same for high risk places like on the shoreline or in the mountains middle of nowhere where forest fires are a natural occurrence.

Use the extra money to develop technology or build pipelines.

It makes no sense to let people build in the most ludicrous places and then waste money or resources to bail them out when they shouldn't be there in the first place. CA is way over-populated for the resources available. Think of it like fire codes limit the allowable number of people in a building based on safety...

You want to build that beautiful mountain chalet in the middle of a forest? No problem. If forest fire hits, let nature take its course and don't ask the public to pay to put it out.

Fact: One of the reasons we are having so many uncontrollable forest fires is because do-gooder environmentalist have tried to "fix" nature by not allowing smaller natural fires to burn out kindling (and the Hollywood star's home in that area). It seems like a good idea until there is so much there that when fire does hit, it goes up like a tinder box.

This solution is actually a PARF discussion but here is what happened...
Back about 15 yrs ago, two politicians, one a republican and one a democrat got into
a huge debate over the Auburn Dam.
It was the answer to what is going on in California today.

It would have provided Hydro Electric (spinning reserve) power to California during peak power consumption.
The dam was a "God Send."
Massive retention pond for the Sierra snow melt and rain.
This thing could have given the farmers in central calif. all the water they would ever need for crop production and everyone could have a swimming pool in there back yard.

What happened? Matsui.

That dam was a brilliant solution to the "worst case" for water shortages in the ca's future.