[Danimal16]

One of the big things will be fire fighting water. Each city uses different standards. This has to do with the water in the steel tanks or other reservoirs, not the capacity at the house or the hydrant. Fire Marshals will argue that all day long but if those reservoirs fail, there ain't no water.

There are a number of factors that deal with the amount of the water that needs to be stored based on density, construction type, use and the standards that the community chooses to utilize. The last item is a real bone of contention with developers. A lot of folks do not understand just how undersized their systems are and how important it is to make the construction of storage and transmission capacity a part of the development. If the developer pays a share of a fee to a fund, you are behind the cost curve and nearly certain to have an undersized system as soon as that development comes on line. The best examples of that, and there are many in California, are the Oakland fire, Laguna Beach, Malibu (the city portion), the recent fires in Orange County where the lack of storage was the main culprit. This was also the case in the great San Francisco earthquake as well.

The other issue with developers paying into a fund is the fact that construction material and labor costs ALWAYS exceed the amount earned on a fund. The other issue is that unknown to the public is these utility reserves are easy targets for politicians to redirect to their pet projects. There are tons of examples of that one.

I could go on for days on this. In Simi we did not use the state standards. They, even though recently updated, are IMHO grossly inadequate for the typical modern day (pack em in tight) development. Just for comparison the Simi Standard (and many other well run utilities/cities use the same) for single family residential was 1500 gpm for 4 hours duration, that is each pressure or isolated zone, by GRAVITY, must have at least 180,000 gallons of fire storage. The state calls for 500 at 2 hours. This is in addition to the other storage components including O&M, Municipal and Industrial, etc.

And it is further complicated by the common practice of municipal leaders not insuring these standards are met favoring the developers profits over staff's enforcement of the standards.

I have seen this change dramatically in the past decade and the results are becoming apparent. Not just in water but in the reserves that have been squandered by pandering politicians at all levels to promote their self serving give away programs that yield nothing. And people wonder why utility rates are going up so much. One factor is it is pay back time for those petty politicians that got what they wanted and are now long gone.