Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

April 20, 2009

2. Supply –
 
A solution to California's water shortage goes down the drain
The Los Angeles Times
 
Watered-down supplies
The San Diego Union Tribune
 
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A solution to California's water shortage goes down the drain
The Los Angeles Times – 4/19/09
By Marc B. Haefele


During a prolonged drought in the early 1990s, L.A.'s Department of Water and Power and Department of Public Works conducted an ambitious experiment. In eight homes, including those of several elected officials, they installed "gray water" equipment that diverted the outflows from washing machines, showers, bathtubs and bathroom sinks to irrigate lawns and gardens outside the homes.

Participants in the program were happy with the results, and the test was officially proclaimed successful in a 21-page research report that found the installations reduced water consumption by about 50% per household on average. No human disease pathogens were found in the outside drainage areas.
 
Now, the drought is back, the report forgotten, and here we are again, facing another statewide water shortage with river flows at record lows and L.A. residents facing mandatory 15% usage cuts. So what happened to the simple plumbing trick that could save so much water?

What happened was that state health and housing officials, asked in 1992 by the Legislature to draw up a permit code to regulate and legalize gray water use, instead presented a statute so laden with oppressive regulations that few Californians have installed systems. Appendix G of the state plumbing code requires that gray water systems not only get costly permits and have extensive filtering systems but that they also be installed 9 inches underground -- too deep to irrigate most plantings.

In the entire state, only an estimated 200 legal gray water systems have been built. The draconian permitting process has driven gray water, literally as well as figuratively, underground. As many as 1.7 million gray water outlets are running illegally in California, according to Santa Barbara gray water guru Art Ludwig, whose Oasis Design website is a leading resource for gray water research, lore and history.
 
In official state language, these unofficial gray water systems are "unapproved auxiliary water supplies." But none of the owners has been prosecuted. Northern California even has its "gray water guerrillas," who help homeowners all over the state to construct their own unpermitted systems. "It's a benign conspiracy," says San Diego County gray water expert Steve Bilson.

At the heart of the official obstructiveness is the Sacramento bureaucracies' unproven suspicion that gray waste water carries disease. "They became obsessed with irrelevant risks," Ludwig says. "They miss the big thing -- pollution by industry -- and focus on this."

He says the Centers for Disease Control has found no human disease transmissions from gray water irrigation.

Bilson suggests that state officials were originally overly cautious because of major ground-water pollution issues of the early 1990s -- such as factory-site perchlorates and MBTE from gas station storage tanks.

Water expert Larry Farwell, who participated in the 1990s state safety discussion, said, "Nothing is cuter than two kids bathing in a tub together, but once you pull the plug, they say you have toxic waste."

He estimates that extensive gray water recycling could save more than 16% of the state's residential water use.

That suspicion may be why state Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) calls his new bill to revive gray water irrigation the "Shower to Flower" law. The January legislation is now going through a state health and safety agency review process similar to that which gutted its predecessor. "This time we hope we can convince the Building Standards Commission," he said.

State officials recently quoted by The Times say that there's little research to prove gray water is safe.

They seem to have missed Los Angeles' 1992 $500,000 study by San Francisco consultant Bahman Sheikh, which did exactly that. There's a pending $450,000 "Long Term Effects of Landscape Irrigation Using Household Graywater" study by the Virginia-based Water Environment Research Foundation whose full results come in 2011. Its preliminary results may be out in June. The state could report its new guidelines in May, however.

The basic appeal of gray water is its utter simplicity. Just pipe your washing machine, bath and bathroom sink outflow onto your lawns and garden. They flourish, as detergents and organic dirt particles become plant nutrients.

Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Montana have much more generous laws on gray water irrigation. "The state's challenge is this time to do gray water right," says Peter Gleick, of the prestigious Pacific Institute. "We have to match the quality of water available to our needs. We can't go on using scarce potable water for everything."

Andy Lipkis, of L.A.'s Tree People, suggests that retrofitting hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles low-rise apartments and single-family homes with gray water plumbing, besides saving a lot of water, could provide thousands of new, well-paying jobs.

Dry is becoming California's future. We've long assumed that our drought years would, after seasons of parched lawns and scrimping, be followed by plenteous rains and even flooding; that reservoirs and leftover snowpack would always return to save us again.

Now, in the grip of a global climate shift, we are learning better than to count on this. Dryness could become permanent in places where it's long been cyclical, whether it's in Argentina's Pampas, Australia's southeast or, in years to come, the great state of California -- where our river outflows can no long support several fish populations and where Colorado River allowances are shrinking like the flow of the river itself.

Former City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who, along with former City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, promoted the original pilot project and had one of the original DWP gray water installations, believes the city, county and state should go out of their way to encourage, not discourage, as much gray water recycling as possible. "We should be giving tax credits for gray water use. We do that for energy efficiency, and compared to the amount of energy available, there's only a finite amount of water."#
 
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-haefele19-2009apr19,0,5455610.story
 
 
Watered-down supplies
The San Diego Union Tribune – 4/19/09
By Vic Pollard

Californians are facing a future of pinched water supplies as the population grows, agriculture thirsts and legal, political and natural events play out in unpredictable ways. The city of San Diego, like many Southern California agencies facing reduced supplies, has announced mandatory water conservation efforts.



Why don't we have enough water?



It's easy to blame it on the current drought plaguing the Western states, but that's only a small part of the answer.



If the drought ended tomorrow, experts warn that Californians would still have to resign themselves to a future with less and less water that will cost them more and more. That's a hard lesson to learn in a state where much of the culture revolves around swimming pools, green lawns, boating, fishing, skiing and snowboarding. And in a state where irrigation is the basic fuel for a $36.6 billion agriculture industry, the largest in the nation. It's no wonder that most Californians think an ample water supply is almost a birthright.



In a typical year, an almost unimaginable 61 trillion gallons of water fall on California in the form of rain and snow, state water officials say. That's 1.6 million gallons for each of the state's 38 million residents, whose average annual usage is a fraction of that, about 163,000 gallons per household. And that doesn't even count the trillions more that fall on the Rocky Mountains, feeding the Colorado River that supplies much of Southern California's water and recreation.



Yet every year, drought or no drought, there is less and less water to go around. That's because an unrelenting series of natural, political and legal problems keep squeezing the state's ability to get water from where it falls to the ground – mostly in the northern Sierra Nevada and the Rockies – to the people who need it, most of them in Southern California.



The mounting threats to the state's future water supplies led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year to call for a permanent reduction of 20 percent in water usage by 2020.



The drought, that dirty trick being played by Mother Nature, may not be to blame for all the problems, but it's bad enough.

It hit home hard for city dwellers in San Diego and the rest of Southern California last week. The region's biggest water wholesaler, the Metropolitan Water District, warned that the loss of 70 percent of its supplies from Northern California via the State Water Project will require mandatory reductions in water use and higher water bills for most residents and businesses.



The drought was the last thing California needed in the face of water supply problems that just keep piling on.

Many of the problems arise in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sweeping estuary northeast of San Francisco.



The delta was once a vast sea-level swamp whose chief natural function was to nurture fish and funnel Northern California rivers into San Francisco Bay. It is now carved by 1,000 miles of meandering levees into a jigsaw puzzle of streams and sloughs diverting much of the water to giant pumps that channel it to 25 million people in the Bay Area and Southern California and 3 million acres of farmland. On a plane from San Diego to Sacramento, the delta presents a placid landscape of gleaming waterways surrounding large islands of lush farmland. But that idyllic scene disguises a set of enormous problems that have already begun to restrict the water supply for the state's growing population. Solving them is likely to cost billions, but water agencies, environmentalists and politicians have yet to agree on what to do and who will pay for it.



Several fish species whose existence depends on the delta are listed as threatened or endangered, ranging from the finger-length delta smelt to the magnificent chinook salmon. The California commercial salmon fishing season has been canceled for the second year in a row to help resuscitate the species. Environmentalists and fishing the pumping water disrupts fish habitat. Farmers and others say fish stocks are down because of pollution and predators. A federal judge last year accepted the environmental argument and ordered restrictions on the amount of water being pumped out of the delta for human use.



In an argument that illustrates the depth of disagreement about the delta's problems, water suppliers say the court order has sharply magnified the impact of the drought. Jeff Kightlinger, the Metropolitan Water District's general manager, blames his agency's historic cutbacks almost entirely on the environmental restrictions, noting the Sierra snowpack is not far from normal.



“We could have managed through this but for those fishery restrictions,” Kightlinger said.



“That is really, really false,” said Tina Swanson, executive director of the Bay Institute. She said the amount of restrictions on water exports from the delta have been relatively minor, about 17 percent of available water last year and even less so far this year. She blames the current shortage on water agencies trying to maintain maximum deliveries to farms and cities during the first two years of the drought, draining reservoirs to critically low levels, rather than managing them for long-term reliability. “The reason they're not exporting water this year is that they don't have any water left,” she said.



To make things worse, the earthen levees that channel water through the delta are in danger of crumbing from age and poor maintenance. Moreover, the peat soil of the delta is slowly oxidizing – just disappearing. Some of the islands are as much as 20 feet below sea level, putting more pressure on the levees than they were designed to take.



Scientists are increasingly worried that the levees are vulnerable to a catastrophic collapse, toppling like dominoes in a major earthquake or a big flood combined with rising sea levels due to global warming. That would send sea water rushing into the delta, forcing a complete shutdown of the export pumps for at least two or three years, with costly repairs on top of enormous economic impacts.



What's to be done?



Much of the discussion centers on the revival of a decades-old proposal for a canal to divert water from the delta's biggest source – the Sacramento River – around the east side of the delta, sending it directly to the pumps of the federal and state water projects. Under another scenario, a scaled-down canal could be built and used in combination with a channel through the delta enclosed by strengthened levees, an arrangement the engineers call dual conveyance. Officials of most water agencies that receive delta water believe the canal would solve most of the problems. It could be designed and operated to restore more natural flows in the streams and sloughs of the interior delta, benefiting the fish, they say. It could also be used to lower water levels in the delta if flooding was imminent and would allow an uninterrupted water supply south of the delta in the event of a catastrophic levee collapse.



The San Diego County Water Authority is among those pushing hard for a better way of moving water around or through the delta, or both, as soon as possible, said its water resources chief, Ken Weinberg.



“The fact is that you're using a natural estuary as a main part of our water conveyance system and it's not working,” Weinberg said. Not so fast, say environmentalists and fishing groups. They don't trust the water agencies and politicians who they believe have traditionally made major water policy decisions to benefit politically powerful farmers and urban water agencies at the expense of the environment.



The Bay Institute's Swanson said a canal should be just one part of a complex policy decision that ensures the rivers and the delta are managed to halt decades of damage to the environment. That means people would have to make do with less water from that source.



“We've been taking too much water out of the system,” she said.



While environmental groups are not as adamantly opposed to the canal plan as they were when the Peripheral Canal, as it was called, was rejected by voters in 1982, owners of farms on the delta islands are bitter about it. Fearing the canal will be used to cut off the fresh water flows they depend on for irrigation within the delta, they have filed a lawsuit to try to block its construction.



Weinberg, of the San Diego authority, said local agencies are resigned to getting less water from the delta from now on, but the worst thing for the region is the uncertainty – not knowing from year to year how much water it will get.



That's why they say we need a conveyance system to get water through or around the delta and more storage facilities to hold it.



“The issue with the delta is you need some certainty that we can count on some amount of water, and given the situation now, we don't have that certainty,” he said.



While they may disagree with environmentalists on how to build or manage the canal, most Southern California water officials agree that the region faces a future with less water – and more expensive water – from the delta. Both Metropolitan and San Diego County water suppliers are working to develop additional local supplies from sources such as new or expanded reservoirs and the desalination of sea water and brackish ground water.



That includes, Kightlinger said, trying to get people past the “yuck factor” of treated water from sewage plants. On top of all that, the long-term outlook for California's water supply is clouded by climate change. Scientists aren't certain how it will play out, but most believe there will be more rain and less snow, with the snowpack melting earlier in the spring, and more floods and droughts. Most water agencies believe more reservoirs are needed to capture that runoff when it comes because the current collection system was designed to accommodate a deep winter snowpack that normally melts slowly through the spring and early summer. That's one reason the San Diego authority is raising the San Vicente Reservoir dam to more than double its storage capacity, Weinberg said, and why Metropolitan built the big new Diamond Valley Reservoir a few years ago.



Environmentalists say building more dams may be a waste of money with needless damage to the environment if it turns out that total precipitation is no more than it is now, or even less, as some scientists say is likely.



“Just like building new banks won't make new money, building new reservoirs isn't going to make new water,” Swanson said.



Also pinching the restricted water supply is the growing population – more people competing for less water. California is expected to have 50 million to 60 million residents by 2050, up from the current 38 million. Metropolitan's Kightlinger said this is a double-edged sword. The emphasis on conservation by water agencies throughout the region in recent years has worked well, reducing consumption from between 200 and 250 gallons per person per day 15 years ago to about 150 gallons now. But that makes it ever harder to wring more demand out of the system.



All of the challenges facing California don't mean people will have to go thirsty in the future, he said.



But it means they may have to accept some lifestyle changes – giving up lawns for yards that need less water, accepting heavily treated sewage water recycled through the ground or treatment plants and, above all, expecting water bills that will take more of their income.



“Southern California is a semi-arid climate,” he said, “and we don't want people treating it like it was an English garden. We need people to change how they live, change their lifestyle, think of water conservation as a permanent ethic.” #



http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/apr/19/lz1e19pollard233921-watered-down-supplies/?uniontrib



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