[Santa_Cruz_Permaculture] Greywater Article - Check it out! DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: SUPPLY - 4/20/09

[Devin S]

*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.
*
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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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Regenerative Design & Mentoring
AbundanceInBalance.com

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