First off, apologies
for the dearth of blogs from Environment in Context. Weekly, sometimes almost
daily blog posts became infrequent, then nonexistent. Sorry. I imagine that I
could give a number of excuses. What it boils down to mostly, if you ask anyone
who blogs, is that blogging takes up way more time than what it might seem, and
I just was feeling that I did not have enough time to write up good blogs.
Sorry about the hiatus. I’ll try my best to send out at least a couple blogs a
week. Now on to some serious blogging.
Using
data from 400 urban water agencies, State Water Resources Control Board issued
a report on per capita water use for us folks here in California, as well as a
conservation report. Both of these reports are requirements of the Emergency
Water Conservation Regulation. The emergency regulation was adopted by the
State Water Board in response to the severe drought that we are enduring here
throughout the entire state.
What
emerges from the data on per capita water use is the incredible disparity in
the amount of water that Californian’s use. At the lower end of per capita use
are areas like East Los Angeles, where folks get by on about 48 gallons a day.
This past May the municipality of Santa Cruz called for a 25 percent reduction
in water use—or a limit of 60 gallons of water per person, per day. Santa
Cruzans have been exceeding the limit, with each person using only 44.9 gallons
per day.
At
the other extreme are the folks who live in the northern reaches of San Diego
County, the Santa Fe Irrigation District, where folks use up 584.35 gallons of
water a day, more than ten times the amount used by East Los Angelinos, Santa
Cruzans, as well as the water use of people who live in Daly City, Palo Alto,
Hayward, and a few other municipalities.
Now
it’s not that folks in East Los Angeles or Daly City don’t bath less frequently
or that they aren’t as thirsty as other folks. Those differences are almost
entirely from the differences in how much individuals water their landscaping.
And the State Water Resources Control Board on its website where the data of
this report can be found let us know that the use of water for landscaping will
vary a lot because of things like climate and population density. People who
live in places that are hot and dry will use more water for landscaping than
people who live where it is cooler and rains more. High-density communities,
where residents live in apartments or where real estate lot sizes are small,
will use less water per person than where there are large estates. Water rates
are a factor as well.
But
584.35 gallons a day? That’s, well, a lot of water! Multiplying that out by the
number of residents in the district, 19,386, that comes out to well over eleven
million gallons of water a day. That’s enough to fill 17 Olympic swimming pools
every day. These are folks who don’t live in a Palm Springs desert. Though dry,
the climate of San Diego is mild. These folks just have large lots that they
water a lot! Compare the bird’s eye view of Daly City and that of Rancho Santa
Fe.
 |
| Daly City |
 |
| Rancho Santa Fe, where they use lots and lots of water |
The houses in Daly
City are tightly situated on streets, while the estates of Rancho Santa Fe
sprawl over the landscape. And note how green those estates are. The Santa Fe
Irrigation district also includes Solana Beach, a beach community of middle
class houses and apartments. These residents, with their more modest water use,
bring down the average of the Santa Fe Irrigation District. There must be some
residents of Rancho Santa Fe who use A LOT more than 580 gallons a day.
While
this just seems so obviously wrong to me, the way this has been covered in the
press also intrigues me. The story in the Los Angeles Times is pretty
straightforward, giving readers the notable extremes of use, the factors
involved in that water use, and overall water use trends. Two days ago, our
local paper, the San Diego UT, had this to say about the disparity of usage, “The
statistics ranged from a low of 85 gallons for the San Francisco Bay area to a
high of 252 gallons for the Colorado River region.” This gives the reader the
impression that the highest use was that of 252 gallons a day in the eastern
part of our county. The article mentions that per capita use in parts of the
county, Carlsbad and Olivenhain, ranged from 185 to 305 gallons a day, which is
confusing when the reader has just read that the highest use was 252 gallons a
day. And nowhere in the article
did it say that the folks here in Rancho Santa Fe district used about twice
that amount of water.
Now,
two days later, the UT comes out with the rest of the story and the prodigal
water use going on in our north county. I don’t know why it took them a couple
extra days to get around to mentioning this. It’s important information. But
having the two different articles could be confusing, and before we go spending millions of dollars on projects to
recycle water or on desalination plants, we need to know all the facts.
Nothing
against the folks who live in Rancho Santa Fe, but perhaps the most affordable
and easiest solution to our present problems presented to us by this
long-standing drought is simply using water more equitably.
