The California tourist town that’s running out of water: ‘It’s a shock’ | Hacker News Reader

The California tourist town that’s running out of water: ‘It’s a shock’

theguardian.com

21 pointsNotSwift15 comments

Ha! It's only a shock to those who believed it couldn't happen here. I live 8 miles up Highway One in Fort Bragg and many shallow wells all along the coast have been going dry earlier every years since at least 2013.

I tried for years to no avail to convince the Fort Bragg City Council to mandate point of use hot water heaters at the main taps in every house, which would save hundreds of thousands of gallons of precious water every year.

People always seem to ignore early warnings until it's too late to deal with.

When all the Coast Redwoods were gone was probably when people should have started worrying, but that was more than a hundred years ago.

Meanwhile walnut and almond tree farms are still operating in Mendocino. Keep taking those short cold showers to save water!

Dont forget pistachios. The Wonderful Company grows tons of pistachios in California that can take up to 40-50 gallons per day per tree. Remember folks, your water is going to a luxury snack food!

Half of California water goes to alfalfa feedstock for beef. Is beef a luxury snack food? It probably should be treated as such.

I'm disappointed to see this answer so far down considering how often the almond milk myth is busted. Animal agriculture uses significantly more water than what else was mentioned in this thread. https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

The world wouldn’t notice if nuts were not grown anymore.

The world would revolt if beef disappeared.

> The world would revolt if beef disappeared.

Or perhaps US would just have to revise the beef quotas it sets on foreign exporters. A lot of California farm production is designed with costs borne by the public and profits kept private.

It wouldn't stay competitive without a mount of legislative work, quotas and tariffs.

I don't think you are thinking about Mendocino. It is on the Pacific at the mouth of the Big River. The Big River flows into the sea from headwaters in the Coastal Ranges and has significant protection as a natural system. Mendocino is on the edge of large swaths of public land and there is little industrial agriculture in the area (what there is, is mostly timber, vineyards, and cattle.

The water politics to which you reference are in regard the Central Valley, because the California Canal flows from up near Mount Shasta to deliver water to Southern California. Polanski's Chinatown is an interesting primer on all that.

>Renowned for its bounty of dairies, row crops, grapes, almonds, pistachios and fruit trees

https://nationalnutgrower.com/news/last-falls-freezing-weath...

https://www.farmprogress.com/tree-nuts/lake-county-walnut-cr...

The original article is about the unincorporated community Mendocino. It's population is about 1000.

Mendocino county is almost 4000 square miles (more than 10,000 square kilometers). Other parts of Mendocino County have substantial agriculture.

The links provided are about the county not the community.

Could perhaps most of 4000 square miles of the county being filled by water intensive farming have some connection to town located in that county at the edge of ocean being dry?

Not really, the community of Mendocino is in a different watershed. Per the article, it relies on shallow aquifers.

You can look at on Google maps. The agricultural areas are along the 101 and further east. Even those areas aren't involved in the California Canal politics, They're still in a different watershed.

They are next to the sea. Flushing with salt water, and membrame based desalination for potable water?

Where does the waste brine go, back into the ocean or onto the land?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com