California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3044988/california-is-sitting-on-the-solution-to-its-drought-problem

by adventured • 11 years ago

64 54 11 years ago

summary: Capture and utilize rainwater much more, and recycle water from waste treatment plants, rather than dumping most of it into the ocean. Reform the water rights system so that nobody has to use their allotment for fear of losing it in the future.

adventured2• 11 years ago

While we're at it, throw in $50 billion for desalination over the next 20 years, and build 30+ new desal plants.

The big one that just went up in San Diego only cost $1 billion, and will provide 7% of the total water needs of San Diego county.

URSpider94• 11 years ago

Desalination is not the answer.

As TFA mentions, desalination is incredibly power-hungry. Additionally, it creates ultra-salty brine as a byproduct, which is difficult to dispose of -- if you just dump it into the ocean, you'll kill fish.

Finally, desalination plants are a great option for supplying water when nothing else is available, but as soon as you can get water from pretty much anywhere else, they become extremely cost-inefficient. Take the case of Santa Barbara as a great example: drought from 1986-1992, built a desal plant for $34 million. Turned it on in March 1992, it ran until June 1992, and then it started raining ... hasn't been used since.

(http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/...)

danmaz743• 11 years ago

throw in $50 billion for desalination over the next 20 years, and build 30+ new desal plants

I hope you're being sarcastic? As the article clearly reminds, desalination uses tons of energy and so will require releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere. The whole point is that better conservation of rain water will be more sustainable AND less expensive.

bradleyjg• 11 years ago

It makes no sense at all to pay $2k an acre-foot for water in a state where millions of acre-feet are being used to grow alfalfa that sells for less than $400 per acre-feet of water consumed.

It would be cheaper to use eminent domain on water rights and pay the fifth amendment just compensation costs.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

The water rights laws cannot be underestimated. This is mostly the result of the 1983 case National Audubon Society v. Superior Court [1]. Based around the public trust doctrine this case originally was about LA draining water from feeder streams to Mono Lake. The real effect has been many counties using this ruling as basis for restricting landowners from selling water from their properties outside the county. Hence farmers either let it go to no use or on lower value crops.

As for the rainwater issue, well they engineered themselves into that but that cistern idea was great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Audubon_Society_v._Su...

bkeroack• 11 years ago

I suspect capturing runoff is not nearly as simple as it seems. In SoCal/LA it rarely rains, so when it does rain a few times a year the runoff is a black, horrendously toxic stew of petrochemicals and urban detritus. For a day or two following a rainstorm there are advisories to avoid swimming at the beach because all that crap goes into the ocean and makes it hazardous.

I imagine it would be incredibly difficult/expensive to treat that water even to graywater level, let alone potability.

jessaustin• 11 years ago

Certainly by the time the water enters public catchment basins or the LA River it's nasty. TFA envisions harvesting and storing water onsite. I'd imagine the most common method would be attaching gutter downspouts to a really big tank, although better landscaping and less hard ground cover could also help.

batbomb• 11 years ago

those advisories, at least in SF and a few other placesx are often the result of too much rainwater in the sewage system and so raw sewage and runoff both end up going into the ocean.

cleaver• 11 years ago

I'm not intimately familiar with the California climate, but this project in India dealt with infrequent rainfall and capturing runoff: http://www.permaculturereflections.com/2009/07/india-talupul...

airza3• 11 years ago

2004 was the rainest year in over a century in LA. Without it, the average deficiency from 2005-2015 is about 3 inches of water (20% of the total) per year for ten years.

That is not an "there's no drought in this region" error factor.

Tloewald4• 11 years ago

The article isn't arguing that there's not a drought, it's arguing that even in a drought Southern California wastes more water (runoff) than it consumes and it would be easy to capture and use it.

allendoerfer• 11 years ago

What he is trying to do is attack the premise of the article. The leaky bucket method does not work if you overflow the bucket once every ten years and then stop filling until the next flood. The bucket would have to be enormous and is therefore not the solution.

I think it is a simple solution that should definitely be used to the full extent.

numbsafari• 11 years ago

FTFA:

"During the decade from 2003 to 2012 we had wet years of nearly 38 inches of rain and dry ones of less than 4 inches, but the average was still just under 14 inches, meaning there is no drought in the most populous region of the state."

The premise of the article is that there is no drought. That there's enough rainfall, that the problem is water management practices.

While the conclusion may have some validity, it starts from a bad premise that weakens its argument.

sorenbs• 11 years ago

Over the last five years or so many communities in Denmark has made it mandatory to treat rain water separately from sewage to reduce the pressure on our water cleaning utilities and reuse the rain water directly. It is done by either running two separate sewer systems or using/disposing rain water on premise.

s_q_b4• 11 years ago

That's the state standard for new sewer systems in many locations in the United States as well. It's also actively subsidized through a complicated system of grants by the Federal government. The motive, however, usually isn't reuse of the stormwater runoff, but to reduce pollution.

Almost all older sewers in the United States use a combined sewer system, with a CSO (combined sewer overflow) into a nearby river. So when there's a heavy rain, the system dumps the excess combined rainwater and sewage into the river. Most U.S. towns and cities are this way.

Right now, whenever a system is ripped out, the combined state and local regulations and incentives usually drive the municipality to put in separate sewer systems, with the stormwater system using the old overflow site as its outlet.

s_q_b4• 11 years ago

One cannot address California's drought problem without first addressing agriculture.

Agriculture consumes the vast majority of the state's water. Distribution of water is governed by a system of "riparian rights" that (in brief) have an all-you-can-use first-come-first-served basis, giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water. The result is that this system gives many farmers no incentive to minimize water use.

Currently, agriculture consumes most of the output of the state's vast water engineering projects, especially to irrigate the Central Valley. This has not been helped by the farmers growing monocrops that are not suited to the area's environment, such as fruit and rice.

For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!

Now these same farmers are drilling ever-deeper wells that are draining the aquifers beneath them at pace greater than their recharge rate. As a result, household wells are going dry, the river is dust, and consumers are being asked to cut back water usage by 25%.

But you cannot fight a drought in this manner when residential water use makes up barely 14% of statewide water consumption.

Like most resource crises, California has more than enough water to supply itself, but the problem lies in distribution. Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.

Californian water, even in these drought years, is plentiful, but due to legal strictures, a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of its supply.

Efficient distribution cannot be achieved until the arcane system of riparian rights for agriculture is abolished, and water is recognized as a truly public resource.

The solution to the crisis must be political as much as environmental.

crystaln• 11 years ago

This seems like an interesting diatribe, but gives no indication that you read the article.

s_q_b4• 11 years ago

Of course I read the article. It is suggesting making local decentralized use of naturally occurring rainwater rather than relying on California's water system. My suggestion is that it is a poor solution because:

1. It has limited feasibility given the amount of rainfall in the area and investment required to create infrastructure to gather, process, and store.

2. It is unnecessary as the current infrastructure is sufficient if agricultural use, which contributes a relatively small amount to GDP for its large water footprint, was not prioritized were curtailed by reforming the riparian rights system.

dpark4• 11 years ago

For God's sake, they're growing monsoon crops in what is naturally a desert!

This is misleading. Most of California, and even most of the Central Valley specifically, is not a desert. The southern part of the central valley is naturally quite dry, but even that is generally considered a semidesert.

None of this is to say that California shouldn't address how, where, and why water is being used for agriculture, but they cries of "They're irrigating a desert" are a distraction at best.

jacobolus• 11 years ago

Even if it’s not a desert, it’s also clearly not an environment suited to growing many of these crops without heavy irrigation.

If we priced water appropriately, low-value high-water-use crops like rice, cotton, and alfalfa, which really have no business being grown at the expense of draining our reservoirs and aquifers, would be priced out of production, and the land could be devoted to more valuable or less water intensive crops.

a8da6b0c91d• 11 years ago

Too much is available for agriculture, and too little is available for the people.

California is probably overpopulated. You can tweak agriculture policy all you want, but we can't pretend there isn't an inevitable problem with trying to support ever more people in a mostly arid region.

dpark4• 11 years ago

California does not consume most of what it produces agriculturally. Most of it is exported to the rest of the United States and beyond. If California were only producing enough food for its own residents, there would be no water shortage. Of course, you'd probably have no lettuce in your grocery store then (unless you live in California).

The point is that California is not overpopulated by the "enough water for its people" metric. Most of the water use in California is to grow crops that are sent out of state.

pdglenn• 11 years ago

giving landowners farther upstream and closer to the waterworks greater ability to extract water

This is not exactly correct. Water rights in the west are governed by prior appropriation. It's in a sense first-come, first-served, but has to do with who first made "beneficial use" of the water, not who is farther upstream.

"Disputes arose when newcomers made diversions upstream from existing operations, because water was so scarce that dividing the flow among multiple miners could make it useless to all. Early farmers faced identical conflicts. The solution, through much of the West, was a new conception of water rights whose central tenet was “first in time, first in right.” Proximity to the source counted for nothing, because miners and farmers sometimes had to move water long distances. The critical factor was the date of first use."[1]

[1]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...

s_q_b4• 11 years ago

That's all correct, and there can be considerable complexity over primary vs. secondary rights, etc.

CHsurfer• 11 years ago

Could the sisterns be used on the farms? Scrape off the top soil, install sisterns, replace top soil. Plant crops.

It should be cheaper than digging up streets.

bsimpson• 11 years ago

If the solution is so damned simple, why is this the first I've heard of it after years of FUD?

California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem

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