About Cambria

Santa Rosa (Marin County) will remain under a voluntary conservation order, asking residents to not water during the day, not wash down sidewalks and driveways and only use a hose with a shut-off valve to wash cars. If that doesn’t get the necessary 15 percent (reduction), Wright said the city would move to a mandatory rationing plan, allocating each home 65 gallons a person a day, plus 2,500 gallons a month for irrigation.

In CCSD terms, Santa Rosa’s rationaing plan would restrict their customers to 13 units per billing period (2 months) for landscaping plus 5 units per billing period per person.  Santa Rosa must be one GREEN town. If my math is correct, their rationing would allow only 65 gallons per person per day, but 82 gallons per day for landscaping. Really? Interesting message they are sending  about their priorities and the severity of the water shortage.

Read the article here.

This item found online at the Coastal Post, a Marin County publication. Perhaps Cambria could take this path instead of surcharges if our aquifers are in real danger of overdraft or saltwater intrusion. It would educate our community while conserving and protecting our precious and limited water resources.

Bolinas Water Rationing Rescinded

Utility District Update And Message To Users:

March 20, 2009-At its regular meeting on March 18, 2009, the BCPUD (Bolinas Community Public Utility District) Board of Directors passed Resolution 576, which amends Resolution 575 and rescinds its provisions imposing mandatory rationing of 20 cubic feet (or 150 gallons) of water per service connection per day.

Resolution 576 encourages continued voluntary conservation efforts and directs staff to develop a water conservation and dry year water use reduction program for the Board’s discussion and enactment at its regularly scheduled meeting on April 22, 2009.

Resolution 576 provides that this program should include provisions defining foreseeable circumstances in which the district will re-establish mandatory use restrictions (i.e., rationing) so that our customers have a clear articulation of the circumstances that will trigger water rationing and so that the district reduces and/or eliminates the need to take such action on an ad hoc basis.

Resolution 576 provides that staff should specifically consider the inclusion in this program of circumstances in which the district is unable to produce sufficient water to meet demand for seven (7) or more consecutive days.

Unfortunately, despite the recent rains that have filled our reservoirs and helped recharge our primary water source, the Arroyo Hondo Creek, we have received only about 2/3 of our normal rainfall. Given that this is the third consecutive year of less-than-normal rainfall, the BCPUD remains concerned that the district may experience an early drop in creek flows this spring, which will then require us to turn to our emergency reservoir water supplies prior to the fall months.

In the event this occurs, particularly given the anticipated high fire danger for the upcoming summer and fall months, it may be necessary for the BCPUD to reinstitute mandatory water rationing to ensure adequate supplies until the rains return at the end of the year.

In the meantime, the BCPUD extends its sincere appreciation to you, our community members, who have been nothing short of extraordinary in your efforts to comply with Resolution 575′s rationing requirements. In fact, the community’s compliance with Resolution 575′s prohibition of the use of more than 150 gallons per service connection per day exceeded 98%!

The district has received dozens of reports from residents who learned how to read their own meters to ensure they were complying with the ration amounts and then discovered leaks in their plumbing; from others who were motivated and/or financially able to replace their old toilets or washing machines with low-flow appliances; and from still others who have purchased large water tanks and installed catchment systems to capture rainwater for their landscape irrigation needs.

Thank you, Bolinas, for all of your hard work – we all benefit from the permanent reduction in water consumption that our system will experience as a result of your conservation efforts.

We will continue to keep you updated with news of our water supply throughout 2009. If you would like to receive updates via e-mail, please either call or office at 868-1224 or e-mail us at bcpud at bcpud.org with your e-mail address. Thank you!! -Bolinas Community Public Utility District

Very recently, the Ecology Law Review posted a comment on the water moratorium that Bolinas imposed in 1971 and is still going strong after 37 years. The article lays out the history (legal and social) of the moratorium and offers a potential alternative to solving the water shortage and allowing people to build on their property. The author’s suggestion would only work for Bolinas if the moratorium is really about a water shortage and not about stopping growth.

It’s not a short read, but for anyone interested in the issue of a water shortage emergency and accompanying moratorium, there are some instructive and useful ideas in this paper.

Download and read it here.

Two articles of note you might want to check out – the first an op-ed from LA Times, the other an article from Scientific American magazine.

Something tells me many of you have already read the LA Times piece, but for those of your who haven’t:

It’s easy to understand why so many of us, hearing of threats from climate change and shrinking water supplies, turn our gaze west to the mighty Pacific. The Colorado River, a water source strained to its limits, once seemed endless. The ocean practically is endless. As Saudi Arabia and now Australia have shown, it is possible to remove the salt from ocean water and get perfectly decent — indeed, quite high-quality — drinking water.

…
Because of strict development regulations on the coast, acquiring permits for desalination plants is a complicated and expensive process. Poseidon Resources Corp., a water infrastructure development company based in Stamford, Conn., has spent tens of millions of dollars and 10 years on a plant in Carlsbad that will produce 50 million gallons a day — and it hasn’t even broken ground. If the company gets final approval from the Coastal Commission on Aug. 6, it will spend at least $300 million more on capital costs before it produces its first drop of desalinated water, which won’t be before 2011.
…
In the short term, desalinated water is unaffordable for Los Angeles — though it may make better economic sense as imported water becomes scarcer and pricier. In a place like San Diego County, which has few local water resources and depends almost entirely on imported water from the MWD and even more expensive supplies, desal makes a lot more sense. Hoping to lessen cities’ dependence on water from the delta and the Colorado, the MWD offers a $250-per-acre-foot subsidy for water districts for the purchase of desalinated water, which could make Poseidon’s Carlsbad water, for example, almost competitive with imported water (with the added bonus of being drought-proof and therefore dependable).
…
But desalination is just one in a broad portfolio of technologies and strategies that California will have to employ to meet its water needs in the decades to come. Throughout the state — and especially in Los Angeles, where water is relatively cheap — conservation, wastewater recycling, storm water capture and other approaches must come first. Desalination isn’t some kind of magic that will allow us to continue sprinkling our sidewalks, hosing down our driveways and taking hourlong showers. Its modest promise cannot become an excuse to waste water. It must be a complement to conservation — not an alternative to it.

Read the entire piece here.

Keeping perspective

One of the things that caught my eye in the op/ed just points out how skewed the basis is for evaluating “shortage”. “an acre foot, or 326,000 gallons, is enough water to supply two families for one year.” Just so we can keep this in perspective, to use an acre foot in a year, each family would have to use 36 units every two months or 440 gallons per family per day. In reviewing the issue, most Americans outside California use somewhere around 100 gallons a day. Even Californian average somewhere closer to 150 gallons per person per day. I don’t know where the write got his information, but I dispute its validity in the real world. According to the CCSD, “most Cambrians” use 12 units bi-monthly. One acre-foot of water here is enough for six families. Drop the usage to 9 units per billing cycle and one acre-foot is enough for eight families.

Scientific American’s most recent issue has water as its cover story. “Facing the Freshwater Crisis” puts our water woes into a global perspective. The main thrust of this article is that the technologies already exist to solve the water shortages, we just have to have the political will to do what needs to be done. Read the article here.

Note: Articles about water often refer to water using all kinds of different units. It’s always bothered me and it makes it difficult to compare to my own use. Like in the Op-ed piece – I wanted to see if I use half an acre-foot of water a year….so I opened my handy-dandy water calculator/converter. You can download this excel calculator to convert and calculate acre-feet, gallons to liters, cubic meters to gallons, CCSD units to Acre-feet and much more. Get it in the AboutCambria.com Library.

Thank you to our friend over at WaterWired.com for this nugget of information:

David Zetland, the ‘James Dean of Resource Economists’, who runs Aguanomics, has made quite a splash with his solution to California’s water shortage (and those of other areas): increase prices!

His plan, in a nutshell, is that the first 75 gallons per day is free, every 75 gallons per day after that is $5.60.

Read more about this economists’ suggestion at WaterWired.com or at Forbes.com