Challenges with capturing and storing rainwater for drought in California

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/07/1147494521/california-weather-storm-water

by lxm • 4 years ago

45 42 4 years ago

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

This headline format really needs to die.

There's no story here beyond 'California's reservoirs are not sufficiently large to offset all water losses from drought, or to capture all rainfall during flood weather.' It's great clickbait because the same story is likely to be true under almost any conceivable range of circumstances.

labrador• 4 years ago

This story is a perennial favorite that is trotted out every time it rains heavily enough to cause flooding. I also agree the headline format sucks because it's lazy clickbait format.

googlryas• 4 years ago

That's way too long of a headline. And if it was just "California's reservoirs are not sufficiently large", or something, doesn't that imply that they should be increased in volume?

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

Take a positive spin:

“California’s reservoirs full early in rain conveyor whatever it’s called now”

Ie. tell them they met their goals early!

kec• 4 years ago

How? Reservoirs take up enormous amounts of land, are ecologically disruptive and increase flood risk, especially if the embankments are allowed to dry out during times of drought.

sliken• 4 years ago

After a week of storms the reservoirs had moved from 33% full to 34% full. It's not that they aren't large enough, it's just the watersheds that lead into them aren't particularly large relative to the state. I lived near Berryessa and yes it raid from a low of 394 on Dec 20th to 399 today. It's still 40 feet under the spillway, which I've seen activated before.

fdr2• 4 years ago

The existing reservoirs are, generally, nowhere close to full. https://www.sfchronicle.com/weather/article/Here-s-where-Cal...

Looking at the contents of the interview, the problem looks more to be in aquifer recharge. Also probably runoff, and nitrogen pollution (especially, but among others) I bet.

human_person• 4 years ago

But is it about the average state of the reservoir or the extreme case of catching (all) the water you get during unlikely but intense weather events?

gerdesj2• 4 years ago

Get a grip. I'm a Brit so 7000 zillion miles away from CA. The title says x is an issue and the article tries to answer it. I'm reading stuff about somewhere else and why not? CA is famously in a long term drought and yet it is being short term very heavily rained on. I cannot fault the article title - it is a very obvious question.

This seems pertinent:

"Some of it can be captured for later, but the short answer is it falls so quickly that we lack the ability to take that water and set it aside quickly enough in a place where we can store it for later. The primary forms of storage for water in California are the snowpack, that typically accumulates annually, and then reservoirs behind dams, and then groundwater aquifers."

dang2• 4 years ago

Can you please omit swipes like "Get a grip" from your HN posts? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and your otherwise fine comment would be much better without that bit.

(I realize things like that aren't cardinal sins or anything but they poison the ecosystem in a way that doesn't automatically self-correct the way it can in smaller groups or more private forums. On HN it makes a big difference when commenters throw these things in vs. restrain themselves from doing so.)

bee_rider• 4 years ago

It feels like the journalist is channeling the guy from the xkcd.

https://xkcd.com/793/

adolph• 4 years ago

He’s not wrong tho. A nuclear explosion would blow the water back into the atmosphere as vapor where it will cool with fallout and join the snowpack. Just add potassium iodide to the municipal water supplies. Putting “challenge” in the headline is pure clickbait.

random314• 4 years ago

I read the short article and your summary.

Your summary is terrible and misses several details

1. The reservoirs are already full 2. Not all the water can be channeled as ground water because of water quality and throughput issues 3. The primary sources depend on slow melting of the snowpack. But the water is coming in too fast to form a snow pack and gets washed away

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

They are not close to full.

AuthorizedCust2• 4 years ago

Far from full: https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain

dang2• 4 years ago

Ok, I've attempted a neutral title using language from the article that will satisfy your and the different commenters' criticisms here.

If anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

Really, I don't mind it being posted on HN (even though I think the article is clickbaity). If anything, changing the title obsures the issue because readers won't see it as the clickbait it is.

There are fashions in headlines like anything else. Two very popular fads at present are 'X is a given fact, so why doesn't obvious corollary Y obtain?' and 'No, X isn't actually Y'. If I run across an article like this, I'm reluctant to submit it to HN because it's usually a low-quality piece of writing, and there's usually a better-quality that will appeal more to a technical audience.

rllearneratwork• 4 years ago

In November 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1: The Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act. The $7.5 billion bond dedicated $2.7 billion for the public benefits of new water-storage projects.

But no new reservoirs have been built. This may or may not be changing now [1].

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/02/10/opinion-voter-approve....

s0rce2• 4 years ago

My understanding is they went pretty gung-ho building them and there aren't great spots left and new ones would severely disrupt or destroy entire ecosystems, like damming the Klameth.

scythe• 4 years ago

Maybe you could just make the existing dams higher? That way, a lot of the new water sits on top of old water, and the undammed rivers continue to flow.

Disclaimer: I know very little about dams. But it has been done:

https://www.denverwater.org/grossreservoir/construction/rais...

seiferteric• 4 years ago

The sites reservoir looks like it will be built finally.

darth_avocado• 4 years ago

What if they built thousands of smaller lakes?

pwarner• 4 years ago

https://cwc.ca.gov/Water-Storage/WSIP-Project-Review-Portal/...

janalsncm• 4 years ago

I wonder if the problem of aquifers not getting filled up can be planned for in future cities. Covering huge swaths of land in concrete is great for vehicles but really not great for flood prevention: if water can’t go into the ground, guess where it’s going? Your basement!

colechristensen2• 4 years ago

Places where it rains have vast storm sewers and you only get flooded if you build in the wrong place. Streets, parking lots, basements are all drained.

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

A solution used on one street in Seattle is to have the drainage ditches on the side of the road have places where the water can slow down and soak into the ground.

tamade• 4 years ago

The reason is California lacks infrastructure to collect rainwater. Rain hitting urban areas mostly heads out to the ocean or into the sewage network. The tech and engineering know-how to collect and recycle storm water at scale is available-- Singapore does a great job at this.

hinkley2• 4 years ago

California farmland lacks the technology to collect rainwater. If you catch the water high in the watershed you don’t have to deal with the deluge at the bottom. Also ground water can end up being aquifer water.

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

Terracing is an ancient technology that turned arid land into gardens.

danielvf• 4 years ago

Here's a nice, simple chart of the current state of California's reservoirs. There's currently a lot of room for rain and more water, with most of them far below historical averages, (and even farther below capacity)

https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain.

However, when you look a charts on a single reservoir, you can see that the rain is making a clear increase in water levels.

https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/ResDetail?resid=SNL

docfort• 4 years ago

Schwarzenegger was famously interested in water, conservation and storage when he was governor of California [1]. There are cities in the desert which capture rainwater and store it underground, but the scale is fairly small for what the large cities in California would actually need.

[1] https://www.waterworld.com/home/article/16222295/gov-schwarz...

alfor• 4 years ago

What is happening at lake Mead?

The water level is still at an historical low, does the rain hit its watershed?

jay-anderson• 4 years ago

https://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp

Looking at past years it seems to usually go up a bit this time of year. It's going to take much more to get back up to levels of past years. 2019-2022 this time of year had a sharper increase than it has now.

hiddencost• 4 years ago

For a little bit of fun history:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

AwaAwa• 4 years ago

I'm sure the fact that trying to build such an infrastructure can be construed as anti-environment plays some part in the lack.

Challenges with capturing and storing rainwater for drought in California

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