Comments due by Oct. 19, 2014
That California and many other Western states are suffering of a severe drought is a major problem of concern to the residents of the affected states and to the rest of us who depend on the produce of these severely affected areas. None of this is controversial.
My only aim in this post is to highlight the fact that residential water conservation is to be encouraged but that its contributions in the final analysis are meager to say the least. Note that California is estimated to have at its disposal about 82 Million Acre Feet of water each year to be allocated among the various users.
Residential use, both indoors and outdoors amounts to only 5.6 MAF which is only about 7 % of the overall stock of water. The following brief news item about California touts the fact that water conservation efforts have already saved the equivalent of 27 Billion gallons. That is a fact that is not negotiable. But the real issue is how many MAF does that 27 Billion gallon represent?
You do the math: Each acre Foot is equal to 325,851 gallons. which means that 100,000 AF represents 32.5 Billion gallons. Which in essence says that all the water efforts have saved only 0.0012% of the average annual volume used by the state or a 0.0144 % if the effort is to be mainatined over a year.. Let me repeat that I am not arguing that we should not conserve but pointing out that our residential conservation efforts can never even make a dent in the problem that is facing us.
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Water conservation efforts across drought-stricken California hit a new high in August, cutting use by 11.5 percent, according to the state’s Water Resources Control Board. About 27 billion gallons of water were saved over the month of August as Californians responded to a call by Gov. Jerry Brown to cut use by 20 percent overall, with no end to the prolonged dry spell in sight. “Many more California communities are taking the drought seriously and making water conservation a priority — and residents are responding,” Felicia Marcus, State Water Board chair, said in a release. “However, while we can hope for rain, we can’t count on it, so we must keep going.” The earliest numbers for October showed nearly 60 percent of California in the highest category of drought, according to an assessmentfrom the National Drought Mitigation Center. Eighty-one percent of California is now in a state of at least “extreme drought,” the second most severe category, up from 11 percent a year ago, with a total of 37,250,000 people affected.
