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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
