Running Water

I’ve been enjoying the Aguanomics blog, which has as its premise that. if water were priced to encourage conservation, that’s what people would do. He’s got a post today about the water district down in Antelope Valley, where directors also seem to run unopposed for years and years, appoint their own successors, and maintain that they’re not politicians.

This morning’s Mercury features an article by Paul Rogers about the Semitropic Water Bank down near Bakersfield, where the SCVWD has been storing water for the past decade. It’s not a true bank, in that we don’t get back the same water that we “deposit.” In years like this one when the District makes a “withdrawal,” it diverts water from the Delta that would have otherwise gone down to Semitropic. It’s actually a big weakness, since any disruption in Delta pumping would immediately increase our need for the water, while making it impossible to reach.

When I was reading about Semitropic this spring, I got the impression that its storage capacity was a result of way too much pumping in the past. But Paul doesn’t mention that angle.

I’ve just learned that I’ve been appointed one of the 16 members of the Community Advisory Group for the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant’s Master Plan. I “will participate in a three-year process to develop a Plant Master Plan, which has recently been launched to guide improvements to the Plant’s facilities, operations and land use over the next 30 years.”

On a related note, I attended the preview of the new Willow Glen branch library yesterday evening, and I was pleased to see that the outdoor landscaping is irrigated with recycled water. Increasing use of recycled water will be a major goal of mine in this new committee position. When Minnesota Avenue was being torn up a month or so ago, I wondered whether it was bringing purple pipe to the new library, so I was excited to see the purple sprinkler heads yesterday evening. Now that we have purple pipe in Willow Glen, what else can we do with it?

In case you don’t regularly read the paper of record, here’s a NY Times article about Orange County’s water recycling. Although the author does get around to saying

To understand the basics of contemporary water infrastructure is to acknowledge that most American tap water has had some contact with treated sewage. Our wastewater-treatment plants discharge into streams that feed rivers from which other cities suck water for drinking.

just once, it would nice to see an article that didn’t start with a variant of

I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

From the Onion

Filling a large number of bags with sand and then placing them side by side next to a body of water remains the nation’s most sophisticated method for flood prevention, a two-month FEMA study concluded Tuesday.