Watershed

Doom! And lawns

The original link I followed (from WaterTech e_News) to this story in the Modesto Bee was "California May Run Out of Water".  Which is a pretty common headline in this area -- sort of like global warming has this standard headline:  "Scientist Agree -- But Administration Still Avoids Doing Anything".

But usually it's a pure usage story.  Which this story has, of course:

California is projected to add about 11 million new residents by 2025, and at least half of them are expected to live in inland areas.

"Do the math," said PPIC economist Ellen Hanak

I probably read a story a week like that about Florida (with different numbers).

But the buried casual lede in the link was the HEADLINE of the Bee story:

Study: Valley lawns will help evaporate state's water supply

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Last Updated: July 14, 2006, 04:26:25 AM PDT

 

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Thirsty grass is expected to strain water supplies in California over the next 25 years if nothing is done to reduce outdoor water use, according to a new study. The growing number of single-family homes with lush lawns, especially in the Central Valley, is projected to significantly increase the state's water demands, according to the report released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.

 

You know, I can fully understand why people don't want to give up their cars.  I don't want to give up mine, without a better alternative.  (And Tri-Rail doesn't count, and wouldn't help me either.  And biking to work in Florida summer isn't it, either.)  But who the hell loves LAWNS?  What mad bastard wants to be chained to the tyranny of the mower?

Except my brother-in-law, of course.  But OD is insane.  Wonderful, but insane.

I need to start researching lawns, I think.

Lake Apopka Water Wars

Back to the normal topics of interest.  From desert to Florida lakes.

Well, maybe I can make a smoohter transition that that.  It is weird to see all the lawnsa all over Dubai.  Yet is claining a desert through sod any weirder than changing the kind of lawswn you could have, just to make them look like Levittown?

Lake Apopka's water war                 

Conflict over withdrawals pits two cities, environmental groups.

APOPKA -- Lake Apopka is once again in the middle of a water war.

In its heyday, the lake -- once home to 21 fish camps -- was a major tourist attraction.

But decades of farming on its 40 miles of shoreline allowed fertilizers and pesticides to run into the lake, turning the once-pristine water into something akin to fluorescent pea soup. The pollution led to the mutation and deaths of fish and wildlife.

Eight years ago, the state bought the farms, shut them down and began restoring Lake Apopka.

Now that its water clarity has improved greatly, people are interested in the lake again. But competing interests have created conflict.

At least two groups -- the cities of Apopka and Clermont -- want to siphon water from the lake for lawn irrigation purposes.

...

water withdrawals from the Floridan aquifer system have increased by 538 percent, from 630 million gallons per day in 1950 to 4,020 million gallons per day in 2000, says a 2005 study by the U.S. Geological Survey. In addition, irrigation withdrawals increased by 2,065 percent, from 90 million gallons per day in 1950 to 1,949 million gallons per day in 2000.

The same report says the increased water withdrawals have caused lake levels to decline and wetlands to dry up throughout Florida, which has led to saltwater intrusion in many areas.

Meanwhile, the cities of Apopka and Clermont say they need more water to keep up with increasing demand. And it has to come from somewhere.

And that's the heart of it:  it has to come from somewhere!  Because the people keep coming.

On a more prosaic note

The Orlando area is possibly coming right up against the limit of what should be drawn fomr the Florida Aquifer.  After that point -- around 650 million gallons a day, and the area is already sucking down 625 million a day -- the aquifer will start to fill with salt water.  Undrinkable, destructive to water life, and generally unacceptable salt water.

Water requests exceed limit
Kevin Spear | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted March 6, 2006

Central Florida is rapidly closing in on the 650 million gallons of water that experts say can be safely pumped from the ground each day without serious harm to the environment.

The booming region currently guzzles an estimated 625 million gallons per day, with the remaining 25 million gallons of capacity being eyed by dozens of utilities across six counties as if it were the last jug of water for a shipwrecked crew on a desert island.

Orange County Utilities is close to securing the right to pump an additional 15 million gallons a day just for itself, which some neighbors see as selfish. Meanwhile, more than 20 other utilities are lined up, seeking new withdrawals totaling 82 million gallons a day.

In short, the dwindling supply of aquifer water can't come close to meeting the skyrocketing demand.

That's why the flurry of legal opposition during the past several days to Orange County's quest for more water could even trigger water warfare.

"We all knew this day was coming," said Jake Varn, a Tallahassee lawyer hired by regional authorities to help Central Florida tap new sources of water. "If you want to talk about bloody, divisive and all that, competing uses [among utilities] means tough, tough decisions."

Limit hard to predict

The St. Johns River Water Management District, covering most of the Orlando area, has often warned that the region is about to hit the limit of Floridan Aquifer water. But agency officials, for several reasons avoid discussing the region's water future in terms of specific amounts left to be tapped.

Agency experts acknowledge that their 650 million-gallon estimate, derived from complex computer simulations, could be significantly off-target in either direction.
...
But utility officials and water lawyers point out another reason the St. Johns district won't talk in specific detail about how much water is left: The agency doesn't want to cause a panic.

Picture it:  vast numbers of timeshare owners, land developers, sod farmers, and Disney Cast members, all fleeing for the Georgia boder in a ragtag automotive fleet.  ANy who fall behind are left for the wolves.  The tourists are also left to fend for themselves in empty theme parks, airports and chain restaurants.

Pissing around aside, utilities for four of the counties in the area -- Seminole, Osceola, Polk and Lake -- are suing to keep Orange COunty (which holds Orlando and Disney) from laying claim to any more water until the issue is addressed at a more strategic level.

And that doesn't even count the fact that there are also two competing water management districts: St. John's and South Florida.  They both are involved in regularting use of the Floridan Aquifer, but don't necessarily agree on how it should be done.

In the meantime, the lawns of Orlando continue to be watered.

Personal Water Consumption, Redux

So I went back to the AQUASTAT numbers to see if I could identify places wher I went wrong.

First of all, it drives me crazy that different places offer different conversion formulas for converting from lietrs to gallons.  Good lord.  So I finally went with the Google conversion rate.      1 liter = 0.264172051 US gallon.

Second, I decided to plug in all the country numbers AQUASTAT had available.

Get the final Excel spreadsheet, if you want.

I am still not clear these numbers are right, but at least they seem in the right area.  And, as my education and reading continues -- as with that Fort Collins, CO, article --  I am starting to have a clearer sense of the range of water usage. Here's some random pullouts from the spreadseet.

 

 

Top 5 Overall Usage (m3)
Turkmenistan	5142
Uzbekistan	2270
Kazakhstan	2263
Guyana	2147
Azerbaijan, Republic of	2079

Top 5 Agricultural use per day (gallons)
Turkmenistan	3119.198305
Uzbekistan	1315.874464
Guyana	1302.796328
Kyrgyzstan	1159.788369
Kazakhstan	1151.358436

Top 5 Domestic use per day (gallons)
Canada	178.8376172
Armenia	178.1692992
New Zealand	164.9434746
United States of America	130.0978171
Costa Rica	120.0262313

Top 5 Industrial use per day (gallons)
Bulgaria	640.9723759
Canada	627.9431263
United States of America	471.7326362
Belgium-Luxembourg	444.6258486
Azerbaijan, Republic of	357.538089

Nothing but fascination!

Rethinking numbers because of Colorado conservation

Water consumers take conservation to heart

Water use by city customers - 125,800 of them in 2004 - dropped from 211 gallons per person per day in 2000 to 145 gallons per day in 2004, a 31 percent reduction and perhaps the lowest since the city's modern development.

City water managers say 2004 use was especially low because of a wet summer, tiered water rates and continued drought awareness.

But recent years have generally seen some of the lowest per-person water use of the last 15 years.

In 2003, per-person use was 154 gallons per day, second only to 2004 use in the last decade and a half.

And the 183 gallons used by each customer in 2002, the driest of the recent drought, was the lowest per-person use since 1995, when the average person used 181 gallons per day.

"We went along for so many years with no restrictions and probably over watered. I know I did at times," Ron Sisson said.

Along the Front Range, more than half of urban water use can occur outdoors, including lawn watering, according to Colorado State University Extension. It's closer to 30 percent or 40 percent in Fort Collins, water managers say.

In Fort Collins and other Front Range cities, the largest reductions in use have come during summer months when restrictions, rate increases, media coverage and drought awareness help curb lawn watering. But winter use in Fort Collins has also gone down, by 15 percent, said Laurie D'Audney, a water conservation specialist with the city.

"That's not weather-related," D'Audney said.

Low-flow plumbing fixtures, including toilets and shower heads, are thought to be reducing year-round water use. In 2003 and 2004, the city gave away a combined 7,000 low-flow shower heads to customers as part of its conservation program.

"All those kits kind of flew out the door," D'Audney said.

Fort Collins also gave away about 5,000 sprinkler timers and automatic hose shut-off nozzles in 2003 and 2004, D'Audney said.

Water meters are also thought to be reducing use, said Dennis Bode, the city's water resource manager. The city began metering residential customers in 1991 - few single-family residences had meters before then - and completed the effort in 2003. Before metering, customers were charged a flat rate each month based in part on lot size.

So, first of all: wow, from 211 to 145 gallons per persona per day!  Maybe my conclusions from the UN figures weren't so far off when I calculated that Americans use 151 gallons a day, per capita.

Second:  Colorado is one of the states that was arguing for changes in the usage of Powell and Mead water, just a few weeks ago.  Interesting that a state with water issues would have such a high per capita daily usage of water.

Third:  this relates to some of the news stories I have read about suggestions people have made for dealing with Australian water usage.  Let me collect those into a separate post.

Fourth:  cool, nice to see that a combined approach of conservation, better products, and "market forces" have produced a result.

Sorry if I sound too cynical about the magical market fantasy.  Clearly, some economic tinkering will affect water usage.  But in the very same story, there's an example of how the "market" will actually work:

Denver Water, for example, the state's largest water utility with more than 1 million customers in the metro area, hasn't seen water use bounce back as fast as it expected from drought-related conservation measures, causing a $13 million dip in the utility's water revenues this year and possible rate hikes.

Consumers are still expected to fill the coffers of companies, even as usage goes down.  That's nice.  I don't feel like getting into a detailed manifesto today of why the market is no kind of answer to water usage, or to many parts of societal need.   But suffice to say I think full market solutions are almost always disasters or scams.

That said, privatization is an interesting issue in water utility.  Still collecting some articles about it. 

Categorization Follies

Some neighbors vs. Gilbert ice, water park plans

"I bought my house here. I want to retire here, I want to die here, in peace and quiet," she said. "I don't want to have to live with 50 Cent, Nelly or country-Western music blaring in my ears every day from some water park."

Last month, town officials began development negotiations with Hawaiian Falls Waterparks and Polar Ice Entertainment Inc.

The two companies applied to jointly operate a recreation complex at Crossroads near Greenfield and Ray roads.

It sits in the middle of an enclave of houses, built in the 1990s and occupied mainly by middle-age couples and retirees with no families.

"There aren't any kids in this neighborhood," said Godinez, who moved to Cottonwood Crossing in 2001 from Oregon. "Why would you put something like that here?"

Talk has waged for years over what to do with Crossroads, once prized alfalfa and hay farmland.

I wonder how water parks are categorized by the UN's Food and Agroculture Organization.  Industrial?  Domestic?  Certainly not agriculture, unless growing mold inside one of those enclosed slides counts.

And I wonder how much water is used per day in a waterpark?  And if they use recycled water.  And what level of purity the water is filtered to.

Anyway...

Just for Kicks: Agricultural Use per Capita

Total water withdrawal: per capita (m3/inhab/yr)	1998-2002 (m3)	Gallons/yr	Gallons/day	% Agricultural use	Total per capita per day?
Australia	1 224	323300	886	75.26	667
Canada	1 470	388300	1064	11.77	125
Iran	1 071	282900	775	90.88	704
Saudi Arabia	736.4	194500	533	89.03	475
United States	1 647	435100	1192	41.26	492
Zimbabwe	327.6	86540	237	78.91	187

Just for Kicks: Industrial Use per Capita

Total water withdrawal: per capita (m3/inhab/yr)	1998-2002 (m3)	Gallons/yr	Gallons/day	% Industrial use	Total per capita per day?
Australia	1 224	323300	886	10.03	89
Canada	1 470	388300	1064	68.68	731
Iran	1 071	282900	775	2.319	18
Saudi Arabia	736.4	194500	533	1.155	6
United States	1 647	435100	1192	46.05	549
Zimbabwe	327.6	86540	237	7.087	17

How much water do you use in a day?

Last night, I reread a story about the drought in Australia, where it was claimed that the lovely citizens of Sydney are profligate users of water. Watering lawns, washing cars, filling pools, all these are part of the extensive use of water. (I suspect that the journalist was too polite to mention that Sydney-ites are noted worldwide for having the weakest bladders in the civilized world, and they pee 32.7 times a day. It's a whole city full of people who constantly have the "7 Beer Piss" feeling.)

It got me to thinking: what is the per capita - per day usage in Australia? When I googled, I came across a page which talked about Canadian water usage. How about them? Or the US? In Alice Outwater's book Water: A Natural History, she mentions that an American uses about 100 gallons a day, a number pretty consistent since the wide adoption of the flush toilet. If the Australians and Canadians are worried about their usage, could it possibly be more than the US? I mean, they all use toilets, and all toilets are roughly the same in engineering, more or less.

But Google was, for a change, absolutely no help for finding fully crunched numbers. Instead, I got items like this: "The North American households included in this study use approximately 146,000 gallons annually. Of this amount, 42 percent (61,300 gallons) is used indoors. The remaining 58 percent (84,700 gallons) is used outdoors." (From an AWWA study.)

Interesting, tells me nothing about per capita use. I had to go find some original numbers. Which AQUASTAT provided me. AQUASTAT is an online database provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Land and Water Development Division). Provides all manner of country stats related to water. From there, I combined a number of different stats to come up with the table below

Total water withdrawal: per capita (m3/inhab/yr)	1998-2002 (m3)	Gallons/yr	Gallons/day	% Domestic use	Total per capita per day?
Australia	1 224	323300	886	14.71	130
Canada	1 470	388300	1064	19.56	208
Iran	1 071	282900	775	6.806	52.7
Saudi Arabia	736.4	194500	533	9.815	52.3
United States	1 647	435100	1192	12.7	151
Zimbabwe	327.6	86540	237	14.01	33.18

(Note: 1 m3 = 1,000 liters/264.2 gallons)

I am fairly certain these numbers are way off, entirely due to my method being wrong-headed. I converted the cubic meters to gallons using Convert-me.com. (Frankly, I probably have to get out of the habit of thinking in terms of galloons, instead of liters. Easier on the brain, since international stats seem to be most commonly shown in metric.) Divided the gallons by 365. Then, for each country, got the percentage of water drawn down for "domestic" use, as opposed to industry or agriculture. Took that percentage out of the gallons/day number, and voila: numbers that don't correspond to anything I've read to date.

All of the western usage numbers seem high, especially the Canadian one. 208 gallons a day for personal use? That seems awfully, awfully high. I will say this, though: the relative usage patterns make a certain amount of sense. Canada is extremely water rich. Australia is water poor. America is somewhere in-between, depending on which state you live in. It's not impossible these numbers are right, but I will continue to investigate. I suspect these numbers feeling so off comes down to a lack of definition of what constitute "domestic use".  Is it all household usage, from flushing to showering to watering to cleaning?