Decision to dump water from Tulare County lakes altered after confusing locals
sjvwater.org
sjvwater.org
https://www.spk-wc.usace.army.mil/fcgi-bin/midnight.py?days=...
1 acre foot is 43560 feet^3, or 1233 m^3 of water.
m³ is already a pretty hard to visualize unit (unless you are used to visualize volume) but acre feet is just about impossible.
I don't think it's that hard; just think of a standard 1000L water tank (which is, in my experience, the most common size).
It's 264 US gallons. So presumably sold as a 250 gallon tank with a bit of extra headroom.
A single m^3 is fairly easy to visualize, but once you get to higher amounts it's pretty meaningless.
An alternative is using "known" points of reference like Olympic swimming pools, the Sistine Chapel etc (similar to "an area the size of Belgium"). But that risks getting absurd.
Acres can be any shape, but gp is correct that acres were originally defined as chain x furlong (per wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furlong ). They're also correct that it's a weird combination of disparate sizes which doesn't lend itself to visualization.
On the other hand, for many people it’s easier to visualize than you might imagine. As you may know, virtually the entire US was surveyed and divided up into one mile × one mile sections. A square mile is exactly 640 acres. At one time a homesteader could buy that square mile and move west. Over time the minimum size of a homestead was halved and halved again until it was 160 acres, or one quarter of a square mile, around the time of the Civil War. These were often quartered again into 40 acre fields. A farmer and his family could expect to work two or three of those fields every year, rotating which one was fallow if they were smart. They are ¼ of a mile on a side.
You can zoom in on almost any random part of the US and find those squares everywhere. Farmland is all gridded with roads along the 1 mile section boundaries, and cities are a jumble. But in between the suburbs are made up of the smaller divisions. It is very common for a 40–acre field to be divided up into 13 lots of ~3 acres each. It is super common to find whole areas of 10–acre lots made by quartering those fields. And it is also not surprising to find a 10–acre lot that has been divided up into 1 acre lots that are all 66ft×660ft.
Here, as an example I [zoomed into a randomly–chosen point in the midwest](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.6540747,-86.0094355,1456m/da...). If you measure E McGregor Rd along the northern edge of the map you’ll find that it’s 1 mile long until it hits that jog. You can immediately see that this section was subdivided into four 160–acre farms, and some of those were subdivided into 40–acre fields. Knapp Rd runs north–south and divides the section in half. To the east is an older area of mostly 2, 3, and 5–acre lots. On the western side a developer has bought up 90 acres (two 40–acre fields connected by a 10–acre lot) and turned it into a very modern subdivision of houses each built on (approximately) half–acre lots. For many Americans, visualizing an acre is easy; it’s half the size of the land their house was built on, or their lot plus their neighbor’s lot, or some other similar amount.
That's a furrow width x a furrow length. I imagine our agrarian roots have something to do with this. Then you can easily find tables for expected food production from 1 acre of your crops.
> weird rectangular cuboid
A good 1:10 crop row.
> m³ is already a pretty hard to visualize unit
1000 1L bottles doesn't seem that hard to visualize.
Square is great in a science book but land and reality is easier with divisions by 2,3,4,6,8 etc
If you are a farmer with 26 acres of field that need to be irrigated the equivalence of 1 foot of water every 2 weeks throughout the dry season which is expected to last 3 months, it is easy to calculate that you need 26 × 6 acre feet of water for that. But ones you use volume for literally anything else the flaws of the unit become very apparent.
Idk about the US but in Europe 1m³ water tanks[0] are extremely popular as rainwater collectors. Also they are approximately the size of a pallet, another popular item.
Whereas acre feet, since I don't know what both units are... But "are meter" wouldn't help either, to be fair.
[0]: https://www.multicuves.com/2049-thickbox_default/kit-eco-de-...
The acre-foot is a nice manageable size. Plus if you know you’ve got 160 acres planted, and you need 6 in of water over everything, it’s pretty easy figure the volume to request
https://cdec.water.ca.gov/resapp/RescondMain
This accomplishes nothing useful, unless they plan to irrigate the wilderness to keep the brush green year round (of course, there is certainly not enough water for that).
Which - to be clear - Tulare County is not a part of. While it's in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley, that doesn't make it part of Southern California. The dividing line is around the Tehachapi Mountains.
Water released from these reservoirs would end up flowing northwards in the San Joaquin River, and eventually out to sea in the Sacramento Delta. It wouldn't do anything to help fight fires in Los Angeles; it's in entirely the wrong place for that.
This is only a technicality though because even though the system includes the largest pumps in the world, it's still relatively small compared to a natural waterway at full capacity and it's already running.
https://sjvwater.org/trumps-emergency-water-order-responsibl...
So... Trump just wanted Hugest Most Beautiful Water Moving Numbers so he could brag to his supporters, and he ordered it done no matter how useless or harmful it would be?
Oof. I'm remembering that 2018 letter [0] where some anonymous staff sought sympathy from the American public for their unsung work keeping Trump from Doing Something Crooked. (I still feel they were actually making it worse in the long run.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Part_of_the_Resistance_In...
Trump doesn't care about legal barriers, but he may be a little more convinced about physical ones.
He thought raking forests would prevent fires. His off-the-cuff solution to physical barriers would be long hoses and a bunch of water pumps.
So, what are the rules regarding water ownership?
It wasn't until 2012 that you were allowed to capture RAIN that fell on your roof.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
In South Australia which is similarly dry to parts of California, newly built houses are required to have rainwater tanks installed and plumbed to the house (e.g., to flush a toilet, for example).
Americans have a long history of killing each other over water. That tends to result in very defined access rights.
https://www.worldwater.org/conflict/list/
"Water violence in New Mexico over water rights"
"Cattlemen fight Texan landowners for access to water and pasture"
"Many are killed during the Johnson County Water War between competing cattle association over access to water resources and land"
In popular culture:
* Pale Rider - creek is dammed to force the miners off the land.
* Yellowstone - creek is dammed to prevent the building of a subdivision.
This might help explain a bit:
https://www.npr.org/2013/06/15/192034094/rivers-run-through-...
> California's waters cannot be owned by individuals, groups, businesses, or governmental agencies.
A contrast with "Every drop belongs to someone"
Maybe this is an issue is loose language, but it feels like the state owns the water, not individuals? Perhaps the use of the word belongs means state-allocated?
Everyone in this chain of command should be fired and Trump should get the 25th amendment.
(I know that won't happen... we'll be on to the next scandal tomorrow, then the next, ad infinitum...)
I prefer sleepy. If the presidency should be spent in a coma compared to this, then all the better.
I think that ship sailed when Merrick Garland failed to aggressively prosecute Trump after he incited an attack on the Capitol. He seems to have been under the impression that given time opinions would settle and become wholly aligned against Trump. Instead, the Republicans' initial condemnation gave way to denial and approval. Garland misjudged the right-wing's domination of media and assumed that sanity would prevail, sparing him from having to do something potentially controversial. Now just over half the voting population believes that the 2020 elections were rigged by Democrats, and that they tried to unjustly charge Trump. It was liberal incompetence at its peak, and it may well be the historical all-time peak-liberal point ideologically-speaking, as we're forced to confront the fact that propaganda works, and voters are not rational. My greatest fear is that Trump tanks the economy, makes life intolerable, and when 2028 rolls around the American public overwhelmingly vote in a Democrat who has learned nothing of value and runs on a platform of "return to sanity" ushering in a return to neo-liberalism, but dropping the progressive social policies in favor of strict media and communication controls to "prevent misinformation from destroying our country again."
This is active sabotage of the nation’s food supply.
I can’t wait to find out how this will be blamed on Biden.
“Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of their economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.” [1]
[1] https://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp?srsltid=AfmBOopur7dsLKE...
Does that mean you support laws to protect those workers from exploitation by enforcing workplace safety standards and giving them legal guest worker permits? Great, let's hold the exploiters accountable by protecting the exploited.
But the plan isn't that, nor is the plan to deport them. Rather it is to put them in a state of fear of deportation so they don't complain about the exploitation.
You don't actually think the exploiters want to pay Americans a living wage, leave crops to rot in the field, or slow down meat packing plants do you?
There's a separate issue where the nominal water rights in any given year significantly exceeds the amount of water available, so some people are left with no rights they can exercise and they're forced to buy from others. Further, the full natural flow isn't allocated to the water rights system. Roughly 60% of the natural flow goes towards so-called "environmental flow" to prevent various ecological disasters like salinization of the San Joaquin delta or extinction of various fish.
Farmers would generally like more water to be available so that they can exercise their water rights and they either don't understand or don't care about the consequences of diverting the already-limited environmental flows.
This is actually in the name of the EO being discussed here: Putting people over fish, which inverts a popular rallying cry for people opposed to environmental flows.