California Water Shortage? Not Here!

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imp

Senior Member
Food (or water) for thought. I scanned only this first page, to explain the details of how some have water aplenty. Water rights privately-held, are "trumping" others' needs for water, big-time. I envisioned scarcity over the entire state. I'm wrong. Should extreme government intervention be employed, ya think? One farming couple use annually, an amount of water which would serve the City of San Francisco for 10 years! Incredible! imp

 

That San Francisco number is a bit suspect - I found 2 billion gallons a month used by SF in August 2015. The article's number comes out to be 10 billion gal. per month or only 5 years - not a decade's - worth of water.

Still impressive but not totally accurate.
 
SifuPhil said:
That San Francisco number is a bit suspect - I found 2 billion gallons a month used by SF in August 2015. The article's number comes out to be 10 billion gal. per month or only 5 years - not a decade's - worth of water.

Still impressive but not totally accurate.
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I don't believe accuracy beyond 50% is even possible, but you do get the gist of it. Mebbe I better shut up until someone else offers some thoughts. imp
 

I live in California where water is getting more and more scarce. Instead of creating a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, why not build a pipeline from Lake Superior to California so we grow our crops and stop worrying about a tiny minnow holding up our water supply?
 
John C said:
I live in California where water is getting more and more scarce. Instead of creating a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, why not build a pipeline from Lake Superior to California
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Why not? Mainly because the average Midwesterner cares little for Westerners in general, and Californians, in particular. Why? Envious, probably, especially when fighting winter cold and heating bills.

But, when the California-grown produce shows up in their stores, they buy it! Sorta like a catch-22 with warped sentiments.

Sorry, Midwesterners! Chastise me now! imp
 
John C said:
I live in California where water is getting more and more scarce. Instead of creating a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, why not build a pipeline from Lake Superior to California so we grow our crops and stop worrying about a tiny minnow holding up our water supply?
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Agreed, the bullet train is dumb, what we need is desalinization plants to take advantage of the bazillions of gallons of water sittin there in the Pacific Ocean.
 
Salt Water to Pure, then Pure to Electrical Energy!

tnthomas said:
Agreed, the bullet train is dumb, what we need is desalinization plants to take advantage of the bazillions of gallons of water sittin there in the Pacific Ocean.
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And, a bazillion desal. plants would cost LESS to build and implement, than a cross-country water pipeline. 'Ceptin desal. is a VERY expensive process of both energy used, and auxiliary function. Water pushed through a pipe for free.....Ahh, no way! Vast mountain ranges are in the way. As Central Arizona Project (CAP) quickly learned, those 100,000 HP pumps raising the water over only 2 PUNY mountain ranges, almost negated the project early-on. The info on CAP today I note is glowingly illuminated about it's success. When construction was almost completed, the press revealed disastrous cracking in the concrete culverts, failure during testing of those giant pumps, general debate about the possibility of abandoning.

IF, IF, a way to desalinate ocean water could be found which provided reasonably-priced product, we'd be home free, IMO.

Might it be possible, should we realize workable FUSION of ocean-water hydrogen to provide electric power, to "syphon off" some of that "free" power to "fission" or break apart the Helium so produced, giving again Hydrogen, then simply combining that Hydrogen with Air (actually, Oxygen in the air), a "double-whammy" of human interdiction over previous rules and regulations of Physics lying in the way, Power and Water might be abundantly available.

Think I should run for public office?? imp
 
My 2 wells don't do me much good as long as I depend on electricity to run them, if the country goes off the grid. I need to get a solar panel out there over each of them but I'm wondering........do they require electricity to work?? I'm for the salmon but I'd be fine with strangling each little smelt. I bought 30# of them and had to use them for compost as they were nothing like the Columbia River smelt. They were yellow and rubbery. That sounds terrible, but it's how I feel.
 
Linda said:
And imp, your OP was too long to read. Sorry, but it was. Next time, read it yourself and then encapsule it for the rest of us.
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I can do that. One farm raising primarily nuts, owns water rights amounting to sufficient amount each YEAR, to supply Metro San Fran. for 5 to 10 years. Nothing can be done to change that. imp
 
Solar can be self-sufficient but requires expensive batteries (replaced every 10 yrs) and an inverter (also 10 yr life, $750) to work.

Remember that wildlife conservation is not always about human food supply. Eliminate enough small animals, and larger ones, including humans, can starve too.

Agriculture is the biggest industry in CA. Farms can use water more wisely, that's true. But proportionately the biggest wasters of water are cities. I would rather save Delta smelt than watch millions of gallons of Northern CA water go to endless numbers of golf courses in Palm Springs!

CA is mostly high desert plateau. It never had as much water as people assumed, because we were in a rare 100-yr cycle of higher-than-average rainfall. Studies have now shown that happens only about once every 600-1000 years. Big development = wrong time.

The nation's largest desalination plant is scheduled to soon go on-line, just north of San Diego. Excellent article in the New Yorker about it: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/can-desalination-counter-the-drought.
 
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Consider the Three Utilities, Water, Power, Telephone

The article presented is a good one. Seems written without bias in some way, unusual nowadays. If it can be considered bias, it indicates that fresh water supplied domestically in America is ridiculously low-priced, about 10 dollars per thousand gallons, on average. Interestingly, our last water bill here in the desert came to $3.40 per thousand gallons, 1/3 the national average. Why would that be so, in an arid, water-scarce area?

I see the cost as being competitively-derived. There are three or four companies here (maybe more I have not heard of), supplying water independent of municipal control of any kind. A much different situation exists just across the river in Laughlin (Nevada), where there are 10,000+ rooms having toilets awaiting flushing. Big businesses use (and undoubtedly) waste a lot of water. Awhile back, I posted a chart comparing monthly water bills in Las Vegas. The highest users (and therefore highest revenue-producers) were the major hotels, having monthly water bills exceeding $100,000. The golf courses are right up there with them. Grassy green golf courses in the desert make absolutely no sense, except that they produce revenue for their use. Incredibly ridiculous, IMO. Sorry, golfers, if you disagree. Perhaps golf could be played on a turf made up of close-cropped alfalfa? Feed it to the dairy cows, double-whammy income producer, golf + crop. Make the game challenging, too.

Take a big-population place like Chicago, and it's suburbs. I know (or knew, actually) a bit about the area because we paid water bills there for 30 years. Look close here: MANY residences in Chicago had NO WATER METER! My Grandma left a hose running outdoors all summer long, no meter. Where? 3020 S. Central Park Ave., QS, check it out! They have that great big fresh-water lake there, supplying the City as well as most (if not all) the suburbs within perhaps a 50-mile radius. We lived in Berwyn, 2nd. suburb west, after Al Capone's old home of Cicero. We did have a meter. But the cost was so low, they only read it every 6 months, cost too much to do it more frequently, the bills ran around $30 or so, as I recall. What justification could exist there for water costing $10/1000 gallons? Profit for the municipalities. You bought your water from them; there was no water company, thus they had a monopoly on the sale of water. FWIW, current cost of water, City of Chicago, $3.81/1000 gallons, identical to our desert area! Bingo! http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/e.../cust_serv/svcs/know_my_water_sewerrates.html

Aside: Near our place in Missouri, the City of Salem went even better. You want water and electricity there? You buy both from the city, despite an Act passed by Congress in the '90s guaranteeing every household the ability to choose their supplier of electric power. Ever hear of it? The only viable way to achieve multiple (true) suppliers of power is for each to generate it's own. Not feasible, really, because the "grid", the electrical structure which interconnects the entire country, is not isolatable for use by individual producers of power. So the option of "choosing" a supplier is actually a poorly-disguised "guesstimation-game".

Wanna hear about the telephone system? Even worse. 'Course, cells have now diminished that (or have they?). imp
 

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