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Comment by stephentmcm | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea. Victoria, Australia built one and the drought conditions immediately abated making the entire thing pointless. I'm sure someone here can find a term for describe the sense of 'fate' created by seeing something created to protect against a now non-existent issue.*

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

*I realise Australia as a whole is likely to lapse into drought again and make having a desal plant good but until then it's amusing.

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This too happened here in California. The city of Santa Barbara build a desalination plant, and it opened just in time for the drought to end. It's been unused since 1991, they are now planning to get it up and running again.

Now? What took so long?

Because there was no need. Reservoirs were full and residents conserved: http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/...

FWIW, this explains why it will take 20 mil to get it back on line: http://www.noozhawk.com/article/santa_barbara_desalination_p... One eye-opener: reverse osmosis membranes break down with disuse so they were sold to Saudi Arabia.

The problem with our desalinisation plant wasn't that it was built, it's that it wasn't made a 'roll-out' system, paying for and bringing online sections of the plant as we needed them. Instead we paid for the whole thing as a job lot.

As for the end of the drought, no-one could predict it. People had been predicting the end of the ten-year drought of since year three or so. Melbourne's water was down to 14% of reserve, which was only worth a couple of years of rationed usage. Unfortunately, the people who campaigned against the desal plant convenient forgot that little tidbit...

This is sort of like joking about all the "wasted effort" that went into fixing the Y2K bug. It's not wasted effort if it averts an existential crisis.

So, the infrastructure equivalent of buffing your car because you know that'll make it rain the next day? :)

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