The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014 | Hacker News Reader

The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014

weatherwest.com

96 pointspc67 comments

The Oakland Museum's Gallery of California Natural Sciences has some great installations highlighting California's water management and usage. I was taken aback by how much of California's total rainfall is captured and diverted for human consumption. It's well worth a visit to learn about all the infrastructure California already has for managing water and coping with draught, and how severe this draught must be to overcome those safeguards.

I'd argue that California's water management infrastructure is doing a great job. For example, the Crystal Springs reservoir, which supplies San Francisco, has remained nearly full [1], and municipalities haven't undertaken rationing or other drastic measures beyond "rat out your neighbors if they are watering the sidewalk."

This means that not only is the reservoir system keeping water in the taps of California's 38 million residents, but at least some of it is also keeping enough of a reserve to deal with catastrophes like an earthquake severing the pipelines that supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area.

[1] http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryMonthly?CRY

What I don't understand is how we have gotten to the point where we are living paycheck to paycheck in terms of water consumption. We know that it varies from year to year... why don't we have some sort of cushion with which to plan ahead?

We have an enormous cushion and can survive multiple drought years. The current water restrictions are just mild precautions against the chance that this will be a multi-year drought.

Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level. In the 1970s, the multi-year drought got to the point where the restrictions were "do not use more than 50 gallons per person per day."

> The current water restrictions are just mild precautions against the chance that this will be a multi-year drought.

The current drought has already had both lower rainfall in the worst years and more years below the long-term average than the multi-year drought of the 1970s.

> Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level. In the 1970s, the multi-year drought got to the point where the restrictions were "do not use more than 50 gallons per person per day."

Actually, the kind of mandatory limits imposed in the 1970s drought are also being imposed in many places in this drought, although the bigger effect is on the bigger use of water (and bigger increase in the use of water since the 1970s), agricultural uses. see, e.g. http://www.usbr.gov/mp/PA/water/

Who uses 50 gallons per person per day? People with a swimming pool? A 10 minute shower is ~25 gallons, so how on Earth can 50gallons/person/day can be a "restriction"? (not being a judgemental asshole, but I'm not honestly dumbfounded)

A dishwasher uses ~6 gallons of water per cycle. Flush can use 3 to 7 gallons and are often flushed 2 or more times a day. Shaving and brushing your teeth can easily use 2 or more gallons. Add in cooking and 50 gallons per day is well below what the average person uses even without watering their lawn.

PS: Older showers used up to 4 gallons per minute, high flow showers can get well above that. Worse and old style washing machine will often use 40 to 45 gallons per load.

That would have to be an ancient toilet to use 7 gallons of water. US law has required a maximum of 1.6 gallons per flush for new toilets since the late 90s, and I've never seen one more that used more than 3 in my life.

Don't forget the folks who rent. It looks like the national average is 35% and California can be up to 50% in areas (hard to tell if the statistics are by person or by household).

Landlords have no incentives to install toilets and appliances that use less water (or electricity), and every incentive to go cheap (which will also be less frugal). They don't incur any of the running costs. And since it is private property they can't be forced into doing anything. Tenants rarely have rights to install more efficient ones either.

If you get out of rent controlled areas like San Francisco, you'll find it's actually quite common for landlords to foot utility bills (except electricity), or at the least charge a flat fee per month that doesn't vary with usage.

Having individualized water meters isn't nearly as efficient or convenient for large apartment complexes as just doing it centrally, especially when the landlord is also using a large chunk of the water (eg for communal lawns). Rent control regimes prohibit separate fees (or higher rents) including the price of the water, so landlords in rent control situations will pass such costs directly to residents any way they can, even if it is inefficient. They'll also pass the costs of upgrading fixtures like toilets and showers, since they're not allowed to charge for them either.

I lived in Santa Cruz, CA for 14 years where there is no rent control, and in regular houses. While apartments may have utilities included for the reasons you gave, individual houses don't because there is no need.

In one house it would have cost $20 more to replace a toilet with an efficient one, versus repairing the existing leaking old one. I wanted to pay that $20 extra - they refused leaving me paying higher water for several years.

Well he was talking about the 1970s...

My wife and I work from home most of the time. I just checked our last bill and our use is 108 gallons per day. Toilets, showers, laundry, cooking, dishwasher. We don't wash our cars and just water some house plants. It adds up.

Some folks water their lawns twice a day and take two showers, hose down the car every Saturday and set up a water slide for the kids. It's not hard to use a lot of water.

In other words, it was intended to be a restriction on truly frivolous use, while still allowing all the basic day-to-day without worry.

>Who uses 50 gallons per person per day? People with a swimming pool?

Swimming pools actually use less water per square foot than an irrigated lawn. About half, in fact. So lawns might be one answer to your question.

I take half-hour showers; longer on the weekend. It's a decent way to unwind.

Don't worry, I'm not using Californian water. ;)

> Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level.

Which seems a bit like trying to minimize global warming by telling people not to use gass-based ovens; a relatively petty concern.

Which seems to suggest that this drought really isn't an issue at all.

This is the third year of unusually dry conditions, so reserves where already somewhat low to begin with.

Dams generally store water from excess years to be used in lean ones, but like anything there is major cost benefit analysis going on. Usually, they trade some power generation capacity for water in lean years, but they can't let dams get to low or you risk structural problems.

More importantly, one of the major, but less talked about issues is evaporation. http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2006/5252/section2.html

Suppose you built a standby hover just to store water. Assuming you found a usable location and outside of the direct costs for construction and ~125,600 acres of land. It's going to cost you 791,000 acre-ft/yr * (1 acre-ft ~= 325,851 U.S. gal) = 257 BILLION gallons of water every year just for a standby. Considering water is already in short supply in good years it's just not worth it.

It is too politically expensive and difficult to build dams and reservoirs in California's eco-sensitive environment. There were more dams and reservoirs built in the 70s (18) than the 34 years since (11). Also, a lot of the easy/obvious sites have already been built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_...

That doesn't say a lot by itself; it's not crazy to imagine that additional reservoirs become less worthwhile as your stock of existing reservoirs grows.

The currently empty reservoirs show more are worthwhile. The population is growing much faster now than it was when more reservoirs were being built. California has grown ~40% (14.6 million) since 1980.

> The population is growing much faster now than it was when more reservoirs were being built. California has grown ~40% (14.6 million) since 1980.

This at least makes sense on its face, though I was under the impression that the population wasn't using much of California's water consumption.

> The currently empty reservoirs show more are worthwhile.

This is total nonsense. By this argument, additional reservoirs would only stop being worthwhile if we never withdrew water at all. That's no better, and in fact much worse, than never building reservoirs in the first place.

That's really not what I'm saying. Additional reservoirs would only stop being worthwhile if we never withdrew more than 100% of water. I.e., if reservoirs are down to 0% capacity, we should have had more reservoirs.

Your Wikipedia link says there are over 1,400 named dams in California (and presumably more unnamed ones). But the list you are reading from contains less than 250 of them, so you are probably under-counting.

A thousand dams and reservoirs sounds to me like an awful lot already.

There are 41 million acre feet of reservoir in California. The 10 largest reservoirs account for over half that, and the top 50 account for 90%. The unlisted reservoirs beyond the 250 in the table don;t account for much storage. The big 10 million plus acre feet reservoirs average 60 years old.

> What I don't understand is how we have gotten to the point where we are living paycheck to paycheck in terms of water consumption.

We have systems that address variability and provide reserves for it, and a few low years can be handled without people noticing -- California's had more than a few low years. While 2013-2014 has been the worst year, its not the one bad year that is the problem.

Well to be fair, we are not living paycheck to paycheck. Are water reservoirs and dams function as our emergency fund. We have (had) years of water stored within these reservoirs. And many years in unregulated groundwater. The problem is, even if you plan a large emergency fund, during an epic drought, the emergency fund is eventually going to run dry.

We're three years into a drought and there's still some water in the reservoirs. Perhaps the cushion was too small, but it clearly existed.

We do -- they're called reservoirs.

Look towards farmland...

that is kind of disconcerting here is that there are clear winners in the drought - people who have water rights and who sell these rights at record prices as it is just much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to productive use. I wouldn't be surprised if these people haven't had any effect on the state water politics.

On the other side, once price gets high enough, some enterprising folks will charter some big tugboats and start towing icebergs to CA :)

>much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to productive use

But this is exactly what selling the rights does: passes the rights on to someone who can put the water to better use.

if somebody can use it better why would you get assigned rights to the shared state resource like water in the first place? It is not like the water is collected on your land or pumped from your well (such cases would have at least some logic behind it)

Because the state generally arbitrates what the 'best' use of a shared resource is sub-optimally, usually according to politics, rather than economics.

Hence when the state allocates water you get a situation where crops that would be grown at a loss when paying for water, like rice and almonds, are given severely discounted access to water to encourage misallocation of water from profitable uses to unprofitable ones.

In a market economy when someone does something stupid, like thinking it's a good idea to grow rice in a desert the market responds by making their business unprofitable. In a political economy when someone does something stupid, everyone else goes without so that morons can grow rice and almonds in deserts. Therefore almond farmers being somewhat non-moronic will sell their water rights to people who need to take showers rather than grow almonds because they are at least intelligent enough to understand that more money is better than less money.

For an example see, any centrally planned economy, ever.

> For an example see, any centrally planned economy, ever.

We're pretty centrally planned here in Denmark, and it works well. :)

The key is to centrally plan infrastructure, but not everything. Electricity, healthcare, heating, oil/gas production, transport, education, and other basic infrastructure is mainly centrally planned, but plenty of the economy isn't. Things are also not always centrally operated (transit is usually bid out to private companies to operate), but infrastructure, energy, and other common resources are generally centrally planned. I think overall this produces results that are less chaotic and short-term-profit-maximizing, and more sensible.

Central planners can also use market mechanisms where appropriate, so planning and markets aren't exclusive. For example, the university system is 100% public and generally rationally planned, but there are also market mechanisms within it that reallocate funds based on various metrics, such as tying # of admissions slots in various fields to employment outcomes. I don't think it's perfect, but I strongly suspect a laissez-faire market would produce worse outcomes.

(You do, of course, also need a functioning civil society, so that the planning isn't abysmally stupid, but that is basically a prerequisite for democracy to work at all.)

The key is to have a country 2x the size of Massachusetts (one of the smallest states in the US) — Denmark is the 133rd largest country. Using a country of your size with a population only 2/3rds NYC to argue for global planned economies is incredibly disingenuous.

A more apt comparison would be China or the former USSR.

Disregarding the EU is also disingenuous.

Rather than consider the USA as a single monolith and comparing to a single European nation like Denmark, compare to the equivalent monolith (the EU has 46% of the area, 158% of the population, and 103% GDP of the USA). Most EU countries have heavy central planning for all the things _delirium mentioned, probably all EU countries if you use the USA as a baseline.

Right, the EU is more applicable if you compare each country to a US state. US States typically do have central planning, like doling out these water rights.

And the EU doesn't generate massive waste? Denmark is not exactly the average, it's exceptional even in the EU.

Yes, I think generally medium-sized countries make more sense than giant ones, for many reasons. Though even the U.S. can do central planning when it wants to—the interstate highway system is an example.

As for China, we'll see. It's a huge country that I think would be chaotic under just about any system, but their current vaguely mercantalist, sort-of centrally planned quasi-capitalism is doing reasonably well, producing strong economic growth— with its attendant social problems. Would a fully market-oriented economy without the strong role of the state work better? I don't honestly know. I don't know how you'd even go about testing that kind of counterfactual.

Even the interstate highway system in the US was implemented by the state governments who collaborated with each others' planning committees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

I don't doubt that things in Denmark work satisfactorily, but I'm curious why you suspect that a laissez-faire market would produce worse outcomes.

If you want a vivid illustration what the free market does to a product, which is a natural monopoly you need not look any further then the UK train system.

It's not only considered the most expensive, but is also in line for the price of the most atrocious train network anywhere in Europe.

Another great example is broadband in the US.

Both are market economy in action.

Now, I'm not claiming that centrally planned (and usually government operated) infrastructure is the best choice in any case. What I do argue, however, is that there are a lot of examples where the free market doesn't know best, enables operators and companies to make indecent and unfair profits, while shafting the populace at the same time.

> For an example see, any centrally planned economy, ever.

Just an example to counter that absolutism: The city of Prague has one of the best public transport systems just about anywhere. You can get to anywhere within in the pretty big city by tram, bus and metro. Day and night.

It could never provide this level of service if it would be forced to operate under free market forces.

Oh, and it's an inheritance from Communist times.

Yup, free markets love monopolies. Government regulation is necessary, but it should be aimed at stimulating competition, not protecting vested interests. Of course, in the real world corporations have shown themselves to be rather gifted at regulation capture, so we often see governments providing regulations that harm consumers in the name of protecting producers.

I'm kicking myself for not investing in almond farms like Mike Burry did.

> It is not like the water is collected on your land

You jest, but people have gone to jail for collecting water on their own land.

http://offgridsurvival.com/rainwaterillegal/

if done on large scale, collecting water instead of letting it cycle naturally is extremely dangerous for the environment.

A perfectly valid point, of course.

I'd guess that the rights were assigned in the past, and they made sense then. In the present there are different, better uses for the water, but the rights have not been reassigned.

Just a few days ago some HN commenters were saying it's perfectly fine to waste food in America because, hey, you can't really know how much food you'll really need while buying it. Someone ought to correlate what is the environmental impact on California from wasting 35 million tonnes of food annually.

It takes somewhere between 441-12,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, depending on whether you want to believe the stats from the beef industry or an ardent environmentalist/vegetarian: http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big...

My guess is that the real number is somewhere in between, but that still represents an order of magnitude more water consumption than producing plant-based foodstuffs.

The 35mm tons of wasted food is terrible, for numerous reasons, but we shouldn't stop there. There are a lot of things we can and should do to drastically reduce our water consumption. Like eating alternative foods.

Fwiw, I essentially haven't eaten beef in about 17 years. I eat a fair amount of poultry and fish, and occasionally eat pork, but I skip beef both for personal health and general environmental reasons.

It is not so much water consumption that is the problem, it was the ridiculously subsidized price of water to this area that made it a problem. Locating water intensive farming away from a natural resource was only asking for problems.

Then to top it off with far too many people who want that picturesque green lawn and just throwing water on it.

Anyone interested in managing water should read the book Living with Water Scarcity (free pdf here http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/)

When you really stop to think about it, the amount of things in our lives that depend on the weather are overwhelming.

My electricity bills seem to have been more expensive last summer than last winter (obviously no heating in the summer, and no cooling), which I suspect is because of less precipitation (though I haven't looked into it).

My wife and I had an argument about whether we would ever move from our paid-for house in zip 90045. I said if the drought gets bad enough, she said never. Hope we never have to decide, but I am worried.

I don't get it. Why would you think about moving just because you can't wash your car or water your lawn for a couple of months?

There are droughts and droughts. Some suspect a 150 years drought led to the collapse of Maya civilization.

> Our results show rather modest rainfall reductions between times when the Classic Maya Civilization flourished and its collapse -- between AD 800-950. These reductions amount to only 25 to 40 per cent in annual rainfall. But they were large enough for evaporation to become dominant over rainfall, and open water availability was rapidly reduced. The data suggest that the main cause was a decrease in summer storm activity

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120223142455.ht...

> Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse#Drought_t...

The drought could get much worse than disrupting home irrigation. Depending on how bad it gets, the price of water could rise and force people out, leaving them with no choice but to leave. I don't know what that would look like or how it would affect households already economically strained with limited capacity to move, but I doubt it will be a good situation.

The disruption to California's ability to produce food will also affect people outside of the state, raising prices.

There's probably water around to import if the price is right if it came to that, so I think it just becomes a question of market forces and how the drought will impact California's economy and the country. I don't think many people are going to die of thirst, although that is a real possibility for immigrants who cross the border illegally who may encounter less water because of the drought.

> I don't think many people are going to die of thirst

Remember 80% of California's water goes to agriculture. More water is used to grow almonds than for all of residential irrigation. There are far more non-farmers than farmers; I expect the next step will be to cut back more on agricultural uses.

In a few generations we may look back and wonder why we were flooding fields half a foot deep with increasing scarce water to grow rice in an extremely dry climate. Especially when rice grows perfectly well in areas of the world that actually, you know, get rain all year round.

If history teach us much, the scarcity will spark innovation in water efficiency. Most of the US has been pretty lax when it comes to water usage.

Perhaps large scale desalination efficiency will be found, or atmospheric moisture extraction will take off.

Imagine if you could get some order of magnitude improvements on these technologies..

Consider reversing the flow of water now: pump from ocean, back up the land, and let each consumer desalinate on premise?

Another thing history might teach is that when critical resources like food and water are so poorly and corruptly managed that the result is famine and drought, millions of people can die. I suppose we're going to call that disruptive innovation?

I always come back to air traffic. Did patterns change significantly in the last few years? I could swear the weather here in MI changed a bit after delta bought northwest and made Detroit a non-hub. But that's just anecdotal. Does anyone study weather pattern correlation with air traffic routes?

As you might remember, there were a few days after 9/11 when all air traffic nationwide was grounded. Some scientists took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine what effect air traffic might have on climate.

Here's an article in Nature talking about it.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.h...

Thanks for the link. I was well aware of that week. Michigan skies were exceptionally deep blue and cloud free - all week. I am also aware that NASA recorded an increase in the daily temperature range (details escape me). My question getting modded down to -4 is an amazing example of... something. People thinking climate is all about CO2? I dunno, but I'm gonna go follow that nature link. Thanks again.

right. that's why all other major airline hubs report droughts as well. globally.

Wat

Reply on news.ycombinator.com