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Comment by sanswork | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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