Maps reveal extent of CA drought | Hacker News Reader

Maps reveal extent of CA drought

latimes.com

25 pointsmikenyc39 comments

My wife(Australian) and me(Canadian) are in California at the moment. She is constantly commenting on the fact that despite all the drought warnings and conserve water posters everywhere we constantly see people watering their grass and fields to the point of forming large puddles of water. Like everywhere we have been there has been constant watering of plants. As someone that has lived through drought it has been really confusing to her.

It really seems like no one there believes their is a drought or at least it isn't changing anyones personal actions.

I don't know what part of California you're in, but here (in the Bay Area), there's this persistent narrative that because farms and industry use a lot of water, it doesn't matter what individuals do.

This, of course, is crap: much of the bay area gets its water from dedicated reservoirs that aren't shared with farms. But it's hard to convince people to make changes when they're cynical about the impact of their behaviors.

If you're told there's a resource emergency, and you need to conserve / stop doing things you like, but you look around and see just profligate usage of that resource, it's pretty natural for your response to be, "Bullshit." eg Ruby Hills in Pleasanton (a gated community with enormous bright green lawns), or agriculture. Hell, even in Wisconsin -- which has few water issues -- agriculture doesn't water all damn day long because so much of it evaporates. We do in CA.

Same thing in hillsborough and atherton. The homeowners use something like 400g of water per day on average and I doubt they give a fuck about the drought.

I read somewhere that despite drought warnings, water consumption has gone up 1% this year over last year. It paints a picture as to how environmental california really is, despite it's image.

For me "400g of water a day" took me a while to interpret (I read 400 grams. That's less than half a liter, an amount a human cannot live on).

Because of that, I soon realized you must mean gallons, but I never saw that abbreviated to 'g' before. Is that common? Wikipedia and other internet sources only give me 'gal', 'gall', and 'gl'. On the other hand, 'mpg' for miles per gallon is perfectly normal.

I had the same view when I was in the Bay Area recently - the hotel sink was square and flat so needed lots of water in it to shave, and the toilets seem to have at least a gallon in before you flush it

Try rinsing your razor in a cup of water. No need to fill up a sink, even at home.

The toilets in SF are so incredibly wasteful. I didn't see any dual flush ones anywhere, and the full flush probably 10x as much water as the toilets in Australia.

American toilets are old-fashioned like that. It's not an SF thing.

"American Standard"

Don't forget water glasses in restaurants. You know the drought is serious when they start telling restaurants to only serve water on request. Yeah, that ought to save about 0.0000000001% of the total.

Nobody tells restaurants to only serve water on request - as you pointed out, the amount of water that a human can drink is insignificant compared to other water use; a 7 gallon/26 liter toilet flush could keep you alive for two weeks. Restaurants hate serving water, as it reduces the amount of (paid for) food/beverages that you will order.

The drought is a great excuse for them to find way to make more money. It's pretty clever, actually.

Actually this is common during drought periods[1]. My intuition is this is a "drop in the bucket" (ha ha) in terms of water savings. So I think it's done for the symbolism. The government wants to let everyone know that they're "doing something" to solve the problem!

As you point out, there are so many other activities that use a lot of water. I notice that you responded to another comment where someone mentioned that Palm Springs was using 736 gallons per residential customer per day. Incredible.

Oh, and BTW, for those not from the area, there really is a serious drought in California. But most of the locals don't seem very concerned about it.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/02/05/271997854/califo...

I've been to Lake Shasta, and the drought is apparent and appalling. The shoreline has receded a few hundred feet.

This report [1] shows that in 2010, Palm Springs was using 736 gallons of water per residential customer per day.

It almost makes me sick.

Sources: [1] http://www.water.ca.gov/urbanwatermanagement/docs/Report%20t...

Why would 736 gallons of water use per day almost make you sick? Presumably the water board continues to charge very little money for water, and so people use it accordingly. Increase the cost of water, people stop using it as much. Increase it enough, and people will decide they no longer need emerald green lawns, and, hell, maybe they will have make big sacrifices and put a nozzle on their hose when watering their car.

I've never understood why the California water boards don't just using pricing as a mechanism to moderate people's water use.

Here in Melbourne, water is priced on a tiered basis. 0.23 cents per litre for the first 440 litres per day (averaged over the quarter), 0.27 cents per litre for the next 440 litres a day, and 0.41 cents per litre beyond that. Plus a flat fee of about $100 a quarter.

If I used 736 gallons a day I'd be paying... hmmm, six bucks a day for water. Actually that's not that bad, I pay more than that for coffee.

Another nice thing about Australia - some areas have "Dual Flush" toilets - that allow you to use a different flush for solid waste - 6 liters/flush and 4 liters/flush.

I'm interested in what you pay for water - The ceiling price on water "creation" (not including distribution) for countries near oceans with access to cheap energy (And Australia, for better or worse, has access to a LOT of cheap coal energy) - should be around $0.50/cubic meter according to this DBO (Design-Build-Operate) project in Singapore that Hyflux's SingSpring plant is going to deliver.

http://www.waterworld.com/articles/2013/09/singapore-s-secon...

A Cubic Meter = 1000 liters, so that should be 50 cents / 1000 or 0.05 cents/liter.

That would suggest that either Desalination has jumped ahead of what other sources in Australia cost, and Australia just needs to get desalination plants online, or, more likely, the bulk of the cost of water (in your case, 70-90%), comes from things like distribution, and not water generation.

Water in SoCal _is_ very expensive. The problem is that by the time you make it expensive enough for the country club set to need to conserve, the rest of us can't afford to flush the toilet. There are solutions, but billionaires with green lawns while low-income workers are loosing service just doesn't work.

Couldn't they simply charge a normal rate for the first 50 or so gallons, and then a "drought rate" for anything beyond that?

You have dual charges. Domestic use is given one rate. Commercial ise is given another rate.

Palm Springs area water does not come from the same place as SD/LA etc..

IIRC, most of the drinking water comes from the local groundwater, and nearly all of the ag water comes from the Colorado like in the Imperial Valley

That seems insane! I know Australia is a bit more used to drought but it does seem to do astonishingly better at water conservation.

My water bill tells us our water consumption is 200L per day, or 100L per person. Brisbane average is 400L per day per household.

Let's assume our house is very conservative and twice as good as average and everyone else is using 200L per person per day - that's around 7 times better than the 360G (1362L) per day in California [1]! A 20% reduction seems completely unambitious on that scale.

Most of the solutions seem to be around water conservation (low flow toilets, showers and taps, water tanks, water efficient washing machines and dishwashers) and education (have showers lasting no more than 5 minutes, no baths).

Usage-based water bills were also used to drive down consumption, but it's now got to a point where 75% of our bill is fixed access costs - as people consumed less water, the access costs increased!

[1] http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-c...

> water tanks

I wanted to emphasize that, if it's what I think it is. I saw a TV show about Australian property (one of those shows that follow a couple trying to buy a house). One startling thing was seeing houses there with large, multi-thousand liter water storage tanks along the side of the house. I assume these collect rainwater.

Is that what you're talking about? If so, that's quite uncommon in the USA. I've seen older houses that had a way to store rainwater collected from the roof into a cistern in the basement. But that sort of thing just is not done here in new construction.

The problem in the USA is people (generally) don't understand anything other than price. Which means there's no way a builder can include an expensive "extra" such as this. At least not in a subdivision. Of course out in the boonies where there is one house in 160 acres, wells and cisterns are used.

In Australia are these water tanks required by building codes?

First, I can't find the data for "Palm Springs" in the report, although "Desert Water Agency" reports a value of 736. Is that the same?

However, the numbers in the main table, Appendix B table 2, are the "Baseline GPCD" (Gallons Per Person Per Day - p7), which, as far as I can tell, is total use per capita, including not just residential use, but also commercial and public use. ("Baseline Gross Water Use and Service Area Population", Data Reporting, p.14)

That fact that "Vernon, City of" apparently describes itself as "exclusively industrial" with a 2010 population of 112[0], and according to the report has a Baseline GPCD of 94,111 (bottom of p.32) further supports this.

So while you may be correct in saying that the usage is "per residential customer", I think your wording is a bit misleading in that it can cause the reader[1] to think that the value you quoted is the residential usage per customer.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_California

[1] Well, it caused me to think that.

I hypothesize that droughts never feel quite "real" so long as there is water coming out of the tap.

Perhaps there could be "rolling blackouts" for water?

I read the comments. Don't read the comments.

Wow, the comments are epic. How did people ever get so confused? I'm surprised nobody has mentioned extraterrestrial visits as a possible cause for the drought yet.

There are plans to build a desalination plant in the Bay Area [1]. This and other plants in CA could help water supply in populated areas.

The water districts in CA have two problems: 1. They are not connected well so water cannot easily be transfered from one district to another. 2. The reservoirs cannot sustain an extended drought.

[1] https://portal.ebmud.com/our-water/water-supply/long-term-pl...

80 percent of California's water usage is agricultural. Agricultural water allocations are based on a "use it or lose it" system.

That's the water districts' biggest problem.

Slightly off topic, but I was hoping these were satellite images and not just shaded maps. Also showing 180 individual images seems like an awful way to present the data, maybe an animation or have a time slider?

Regardless, it's an interesting dataset, and I honestly didn't know that the drought was so severe, having only heard it mentioned in passing.

http://www.latimes.com/la-me-g-california-drought-map-gif-ht...

Thank You! This definitely helped me visualize it. It's interesting that it seemed to "move" locations over time. At the beginning the hardest hit area was the north eastern part and towards the end it was (is I suppose) the Southern part of the state. Does anyone know a particular reason for this? I'd think that the driest parts would be mostly consistent, but my knowledge in this area is non-existent.

Edit: Looking at the article again I see this link is at the bottom of the text, not sure how I missed it the first time around.

"The desert grows, and woe to him who conceals the desert within him."

Nietzsche

I remember a "conserve water!" flyer that was set on the tabletops in the UCSC dining hall. It helpfully pointed out that, since California was experiencing a drought that year, we shouldn't be using so much water.

It also gave the actual rainfall statistics for the current and past year (approximated but basically accurate in my memory): that year, we'd received 20% of the average annual rainfall. The year before, 210%.

This basically convinced me that emoting about california droughts is just something people do because it makes them feel good.

I'm clearly not as smart as you. How do those numbers imply that the droughts don't need worrying about?

That sort of thing is the whole point of a reservoir. It doesn't make any sense to complain that we desperately need to conserve water because we've actually been getting more than we expected. A rainfall cycle longer than one year doesn't make calendar years that happen to swing low into emergencies.

It is if your average water consumption is based on an above-average rainfall, just like winters are disasters if you do not collect extra wood in autumn.

But you are right; the US/California government should continuously call for water conservation.

We are getting regular fliers in the mail saying to conserve water. The call is being made. But consumers are often bad listeners when told not to consume.

If your average water consumption exceeds the average annual rainfall, then either your average water consumption will go down or you'll import water. In the first case, it's not necessary to call for water conservation; it will happen inevitably because there won't be water to waste. In the second case... what's the emergency?

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