In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/stingy-water-users-in-fined-in-drought-while-the-rich-soak.html

by jeo1234 • 11 years ago

47 55 11 years ago

rdancer2• 11 years ago

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.

dalke3• 11 years ago

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?

rdancer2• 11 years ago

From the 1st paragraph of the fine article: "She [...] cut her family’s water use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons per person each day." [emphasis mine].

I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.

ptaipale5• 11 years ago

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.

I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing).

My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)

yason• 11 years ago

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

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.

StephenConnell• 11 years ago

Landscape or leaks. Flushing is a drop in the bucket and showering is minimal.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

I think the article has probably misstated the usage and that the 180 gallons is for the household.

Luc• 11 years ago

In Flanders in Belgium, domestic water usage is 110 liter per person per day on average ( https://www.water-link.be/files/uploads/document/gemiddeld-w... )

So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?

1971genocide2• 11 years ago

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 ?"

Water exists until it doesn't.

dalke3• 11 years ago

That's a question posed in Diamond's "Collapse", regarding Easter Island.

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?

1971genocide2• 11 years ago

Its different though - since water is very basic. A lot like food.

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

Economics and local optimization http://throbgoblins.blogspot.fi/2006/12/blog-post_2817.html

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

They were thinking solely of their immediate individual gain, of course. They had bills to pay, and mouths to feed, and no time to watch the tragedy of the commons unfold.

Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken.

The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed.

As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water.

That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off.

If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help".

You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.

masklinn2• 11 years ago

Well there's a difference in that water is never really lost, though it can become unusable for our purposes.

mattlutze• 11 years ago

New trees can eventually grow on a barren island as well... but I think it's not really practical in the article's time frames to make a point of the distinction, in either case.

bryanlarsen2• 11 years ago

Using water doesn't destroy it.

ptaipale5• 11 years ago

Except when you are overusing groundwater resources.

(Over here, no shortage of clean water whatsoever, but per-person usage is much smaller than California average numbers. The average consumer uses 155 litres (41 gallons) per day, which is 4700 litres or 1250 gallons per month.)

pjc50• 11 years ago

Using fresh water converts it into dirty water, salt water, or water in the air. Converting those back above the rate of the water cycle costs energy and therefore money.

e40• 11 years ago

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.

jerf• 11 years ago

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.)

paulryanrogers• 11 years ago

Isn't this short term thinking? If it causes budget shortfalls elsewhere and the pork is exposed they end up unemployable.

methehack• 11 years ago

I've wondered about that. Why isn't per person? Seems pretty fair, right?

getpost• 11 years ago

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.

post_break• 11 years ago

Family of 5, 1,303 gallons a month. Daily showers, clothes washing, dishes, etc. That's 43 gallons a day. How is she using four times that?

jjaredsimpson• 11 years ago

Seems even more ridiculous actually

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.

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

That seems to mesh with the rest of the facts. Her family use in one month is still 1/3 less than a single Bel Air resident's daily usage.

Edit: love the downmods on this

bradleyjg4• 11 years ago

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.

AcerbicZero• 11 years ago

It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.

Lawtonfogle• 11 years ago

It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.

xigency• 11 years ago

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.

kdsudac3• 11 years ago

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.

bradleyjg4• 11 years ago

So instead they are pumping fossil water from the ground at unprecedented rates. Water can be taken from aquifers at a sustainable level, but if too much is taken they will either collapse or have salt water intrusion. Either way they will be rendered permanently useless.

And as for water rights, the western water system (i.e. "prior appropriation") is the problem -- along with the non-regulation of groundwater extraction -- not an excuse for it.

amluto• 11 years ago

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.

astrodust2• 11 years ago

That number seems ridiculously high.

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.

Zarathustra302• 11 years ago

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.

lmkg• 11 years ago

To be fair, rice farmers have scaled back their crop by (iirc) 25% this year.

rcthompson• 11 years ago

The implied question is how they're making any money at all if it costs $90k worth of water to grow $20k worth of rice.

dnautics• 11 years ago

It's even worse: limits for thee but not for me.

https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...

In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak

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