One of Our San Diego Neighbors Uses Almost 38,000 Gallons of Water a Day

Despite receiving normal rainfall in the last year or so, we here in southern California have been trying to do our part to save water in a state that is experiencing one of the worst droughts in our history. So it is disheartening to read about one of our neighbors in Rancho Santa Fe who is using 13.8 million gallons of water a year.

            That comes out to almost 38,000 gallons of water a day. Almost 38,000 gallons a day! As our local paper, the Union-Tribune illustrates, that is enough water to supply the water needs of 110 single-family homes. The paper is leaving the name of the owner of the property unpublished.

            I can hear the argument, “Well, he pays for that water, so what is wrong with that?”

What could possibly be wrong with one southern California homeowner using almost 38,000 gallons of water a day?

The problem is that everybody else is paying for that water as well. We San Diegans are facing water rate increases, as much as 17 percent. Part of that increase would go to pay for the new water desalination plant in Carlsbad and the indirect potable reuse program, a plant and a program that would be unnecessary were it not for some folks using an enormous amount of water.

            The price paid by everybody else doesn’t stop there. We use pumps to bring water here from the Colorado River and the Sacramento River Delta, which uses energy. It is estimated that 20 percent of the energy used in California is to move water from one place to another. It also takes energy to desalinate water. That energy use translates into climate change.

            Maybe I shouldn’t grouse so much. The good news is that our neighbor has reduced his consumption of water down from last year’s 31.7 million gallons. I guess I should be thankful for that.

            How about you? What do you think when you read a story like this? Does it discourage you from conserving? Do you think there should be an upper limit on how much water one person or household can consume?

The Waters - and the People - of West Virginia Are Unsafe Again

This is one of those bits of news that sends my cynicism meter into the stratosphere. On Monday, the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee passed, by a 13 to 12 vote, SB 423. This bill will undo the chemical tank safety legislation that was passed last year after a coal-cleaning chemical from a tank owned by Freedom Industries spilled into the Elk River and poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, some of whom had to rely on bottled water for weeks. Schools were closed, and many businesses, such as restaurants, lost business.

The bill would give West Virginia’s Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management more power to withhold from the public information on the chemical tanks in the state. I don’t know about you, but that certainly makes me feel more secure. The bill also reduces the number of tanks administered by last year’s safety law from around 50,000 down to about 12,000. State mandated inspections will be cut back under this bill, and information concerning hazardous materials stored near drinking water intakes will be blocked from the public. The bill has already passed the West Virginia Senate. Governor Tomblin’s signature is almost a certainty.

Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette has more detail of the story here, and you can read his Coal Tattoo blog about it here.

How is a fiasco like this possible? Is it that the folks in West Virginia are too distracted by driving their kids to school and getting themselves off to work that they don’t have the time or energy to care about the water they drink? Or have all those chemicals in the water affected the memories of all those people who had to go to the store just so they could have water to drink last year?

Bryan T. McNiel, in his book Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal, says that West Virginia best resembles a third world country, one in which an outside industry extracts resources and, in order to do so, has all of the state, the political leaders and the populace, under its thumb. Even if you were to ignore the endemic poverty of West Virginia, the poorest state of the union, or the manner in which the coal industry keeps its message in the minds of the folks of the Mountain State—going so far as to inject itself into the classrooms of Appalachian schoolchildren—this latest turn by the elected officials in Charleston would be proof enough that McNiel is correct in thinking of West Virginia as the banana republic that rests somewhere between Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

I guess that it will be impossible to find out how this came about. Did this legislation come about only recently, the result of renewed backroom deals between politicians and the coal companies? Or had the fix been in from the start? That SB 373 was only a sham, a dog and pony show of politicians doing what’s right for the state of West Virginia and the people who live there, while they knew full well that months hence, possibly even a year later, that SB 373 would die and the laws to protect the water would be as flimsy as a rusted 50-year-old storage tank held together by duct tape and earnestly crossed fingers.

            I don’t think we’ll find out either way. Oh, and by the way, we still do not know about the toxicity of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, the licorice smelling substance that fouled the waters of the Elk River.

Troubled waters again for West Virginia

During Our Drought, Rancho Santa Fe Uses Water Like There's No Tomorrow

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.

Hope and Change Not Coming to West Virginia Any Time Soon

There may be little hope that things will actually change for the folks living in southern West Virginia. Despite the inconvenience and health risks that the chemical spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol brought to their homes, businesses, and schools for the last seven weeks, it looks like effective legislation to regulate the types of storage tanks that hold MCHM and similar dangerous substances will not be forthcoming. Stalled in committee, a chemical regulation bill looks unlikely to pass before the West Virginia legislative session closes in a week.

            By the way, I did not get this story from the usual domestic news sources that I rely upon, the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, etc. I didn’t even see the story in the Charleston Gazette, which has done some fine reporting on the poisonous spill. I got the news from Al Jazeera, a news source that has been a bombing target of the U.S. and British governments.

            I’m feeling especially cynical right now.

The tank that leaked thousands of gallons of MCHM into West Virginia's Elk River, poisoning the drinking water for 300,000 residents. Note the evidence of corrosion streaming down the side of the aged tank. photo Tom Hindman Getty Images

So What Do They Do With That Chemical When They're Not Spilling It In Rivers?

So, I guess as no big surprise, we’re finding out that a second chemical was spilled from the Freedom Industries tank along the Elk River in West Virginia. And the great consolation to southern West Virginians, whether they were sickened by their water or not, is that it appears that the second chemical, a mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH, is no more toxic than the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol that was spilled into the Elk River earlier this month. I'm sure that's a big relief for those folks!

            Officials at Freedom Industries knew of the other leak, but only let the state of West Virginia know about the second leak two days ago, more than ten days after the spill. And they are not being forthcoming about the nature of PPH because Freedom Industries considers the nature of this compound “proprietary.”

            My guess is that if the MCHM hadn’t made the water smell like licorice—if people couldn’t smell that their water was bad—then we may not have known about this spill until many more people had been sickened.

More compounds for your drinking pleasure in West Virginia

The 4-methylcyclohexane methanol has been used by the coal industry for years, and now it’s time to connect the dots. OK, if the mining companies have been using this stuff for a long time, where do the put it once they are through with it? You got it. They throw it in the coal slurry ponds or down old mine shafts. Joe Stanley, a former miner and union president, claims that coal companies have been poisoning the waters of Appalachia for years. He says:

I watched the coal industry poison our water for years. Now they're telling us not to drink the water? We've been dumping this stuff into unlined ponds and into old mines for years. This MCHM was just one of the chemicals we were told was highly toxic but that we dumped into old mine shafts and slurry ponds, and it's been seeping into the groundwater for years. As soon as we're out of that mine it immediately fills with water. And where does it go from there? I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.

Robert Johnson and Gus Lubin who wrote this Business Insider feature on Stanley go on to say:

An Environmental Protection Agency assessment last year identified 132 cases where coal-fired power plant waste has damaged rivers, streams and lakes, and 123 where it has tainted underground water sources, according to an AP investigation by Dina Cappiello and Seth Borenstein. Nearly three quarters of the 1,727 coalmines in the U.S. have not been inspected in five years to see if they are following water pollution laws, according to the same investigation, which cites these and other alarming findings about coal pollution. (Italics mine)

Southern Californians Saying Goodbye to Their Lawns and Lawnmowers

For southern California, the future is more people and less water. In the next ten years hundreds of thousands more folks are expected to make San Diego County their home. The populations of other areas in southern California are also expected to increase as well. All the while our supply of water is diminishing.

            In San Diego we get about half of our water from the Colorado River. The flow of the river has been diminishing for years. Because of global warming, this diminishing trend is expected to continue.[i] We get most of the rest of our water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta. A great deal of the flow of the river delta comes from the melting of the Sierra Mountains snowpack. The Sierra snowpack has declined in the last twenty years and, as with the Colorado River, is expected to diminish further due to climate change. The reductions may be as great as 30 to 70 percent from historic levels.[ii]

            Water is precious here. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at the place. We southern Californians go through water like crazy. The average American uses about 90 gallons of water a day for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and other purposes. The average San Diegan uses about 150 gallons of water a day. That extra 60 gallons of water that we use goes outside to keep our lawns and landscaping green. We like the weeks and weeks—months actually—of clear blue skies, but we also want to have nice lush lawns and other greenery around our houses and neighborhoods.

 

Google Earth image of northern San Diego County neighborhood. Note the native coastal sage scrub on the right next to the lush green lawns and trees around the houses. Making the landscape green on the left takes a lot of water.

As this article in the LA Times points out, many of the municipalities of the Southwest are giving residents incentives to restrict the watering of their lawns. By offering $1.4 million in incentives to residents to convert their lawns to native plants, xeriscaping, or artificial turf, Los Angeles has removed over one million square feet of lawn-watered grass from the yards of the city in less than five years.

            There are ways of maintaining some green and grass around homes, such as harvesting rainwater with rain barrels, and some municipalities, such as San Diego, are loosening the restrictions on the use of grey water, the water left over from washing machines, hand basins, showers, and baths, for use in watering lawns and landscaping. Anyway around it, things are changing water wise for San Diego and the rest of southern California.

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[i] Tootle, G., and T. Piechota. "Forecasting of Lower Colorado River Basin Streamflow Using Pacific Ocean Sea Surface Temperatures and ENSO". Proceedings of the 2004 World Water and Environmental Resources Congress: Critical Transitions in Water and Environmental Resources Management (2004): 234-47.

[ii] Hayhoe, K., et al. "Emissions Pathways, Climate Change, and Impacts on California." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A 101.34 (2004): 12422-27.

No Heavy Metals For Kentucky's Public Drinking Water

This is from the Kentucky Division of Water. A study that looked at 12 years of data of Kentucky’s drinking water found that the drinking water was safe from heavy metal pollutants, even in the counties where there is a lot of coal mining.

            Using data from the National Cancer Institute, the study compared counties where coal production has been high with counties where coal production has been low and found no significant difference in cancer rates, although the study did find that cancer rates were higher in the eastern Appalachian mountains of the state.

            Other recent scientific studies have found high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other ailments afflicting those who live among mountaintop removal mines. These studies were peer reviewed. The study from the Kentucky Division of Water has yet to receive peer review. Also, the study only considered public drinking water and not well water. It is water drawn from wells that is usually fouled by mountaintop mining. And, as well, cancer rates were compared between counties of high and low coal production. Including counties where there is no coal production, a control group, was not included.

            Even still, I’d be interested to know more about some of this research and what might be concluded after this study receives peer review.

Judas Priest, heavy metal you might want photo: last.fm 

A coal ash spill, heavy metals you probably don't want photo: celcias.com