7 ms·

In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak

47 points by jeo1234 11y ago

rdancer 11y ago
She used 178 gallons (674 litres) per day? And that wasn't enough to take a shower every day?! A bathtub is ~80l, and a showering consumes less than that. A washing machine cycle is another ~80l. A dishwasher ~20l/cycle. Cooking maybe 20l. Flush the toilet 5 times/day, 50l. Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.
- dalke 11y ago
  http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-californians-use-each-day-and-what-does-a-20-reduction-look-like/ http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-cal... says "An often-cited 2011 study of California single-family water consumption estimated that the average California household used more than 360 gallons of water per day." They are under 1/2 that water use. The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use. Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average. The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF/PW/Water/Documents/California-Single-Family-Home-Water-Use-Efficiency-Study-20110420.pdf http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes). By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day. I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve. > Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption. I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-standard-for-the-west/ http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day." You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change. Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
  - rdancer 11y ago
    From the 1st paragraph of the fine article: "She [...] cut her family’s water use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons per person each day." [emphasis mine]. I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Yeah, I just checked, the per person usage here is ~1050 gallons per month. There's no shortage of water ($3 for 10,000 gallons), and we don't work real hard to conserve (and no kids in the house). It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so. Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    > You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change. I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing). My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)
- yason 11y ago
  I was thinking exactly the same thing. I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage. I do wonder where all that water of hers goes.
  - StephenConnell 11y ago
    Landscape or leaks. Flushing is a drop in the bucket and showering is minimal.
    - ptaipale 11y ago
      Big leaks in her house? Landscaping your garden is part of "bare minimum" for survival?
      - Zarathustra30 11y ago
        There ARE some HOAs that fine home owners for lacking green lawns. There's still the option of zero-scaping (covering your yard with gravel), but that is a big up-front investment.
        ptaipale 11y ago
        > There ARE some HOAs that fine home owners for lacking green lawns. One would expect that in circumstances of drought, a city or state government should be able to mandate such HOA rules void.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    I think the article has probably misstated the usage and that the 180 gallons is for the household.
- Luc 11y ago
  In Flanders in Belgium, domestic water usage is 110 liter per person per day on average ( https://www.water-link.be/files/uploads/document/gemiddeld-waterverbruik_4.pdf https://www.water-link.be/files/uploads/document/gemiddeld-w... ) So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?
1971genocide 11y ago
The whole thing with california reminds me of the story about that one civilization in the pacific - "what were they thinking when they cut down the last tree ?" Water exists until it doesn't.
- dalke 11y ago
  That's a question posed in Diamond's "Collapse", regarding Easter Island. Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?
  - 1971genocide 11y ago
    Its different though - since water is very basic. A lot like food.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Certainly they are different, but you brought up how it reminded you of the person who asked Diamond about cutting down the last tree on Easter Island. That's neither water nor food either.
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    Economics and local optimization http://throbgoblins.blogspot.fi/2006/12/blog-post_2817.html http://throbgoblins.blogspot.fi/2006/12/blog-post_2817.html
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    They were thinking solely of their immediate individual gain, of course. They had bills to pay, and mouths to feed, and no time to watch the tragedy of the commons unfold. Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken. The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed. * As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water. That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off. If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help". You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.
e40 11y ago
Another problem: if you were previously very conservative with your water use, then how do you cut it further? I have a coworker that years ago cut her water use dramatically. Now, she's in a quandary because she's being asked to cut it more. Her solution: family members now take showers at the gym.
- jerf 11y ago
  Second-order effect: Next drought, when asked to conserve, she will do the minimum possible the first time. Allocations based on previous use seems sensible, but if done naively encourage people to push up their resource consumption when they can. A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
  - paulryanrogers 11y ago
    Isn't this short term thinking? If it causes budget shortfalls elsewhere and the pork is exposed they end up unemployable.
    - bsg75 11y ago
      Do local government solutions ever use long term thinking?
- methehack 11y ago
  I've wondered about that. Why isn't per person? Seems pretty fair, right?
- getpost 11y ago
  This is true, and the difficulty is compounded because the government lies or is incompetent. I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved. IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.
post_break 11y ago
Family of 5, 1,303 gallons a month. Daily showers, clothes washing, dishes, etc. That's 43 gallons a day. How is she using four times that?
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  Seems even more ridiculous actually > to just 178 gallons per person each day. which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    That seems to mesh with the rest of the facts. Her family use in one month is still 1/3 less than a single Bel Air resident's daily usage. Edit: love the downmods on this
bradleyjg 11y ago
Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five of them for one house, are a red herring.
- AcerbicZero 11y ago
  It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - panglott 11y ago
      Except in this case it's explicitly about class issues.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  <----Please, more downmods. Every article can't mention every thing. This article is about a discrepancy where some people are using 90x the water as everyone else. How do you think the house in Bel-air is going through a tenth of an acre-foot of water per day?
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    However, when discussing room, it would be good to mention the elephant in it.
    - jsprogrammer 11y ago
amluto 11y ago
There are some questionable comments in this article. It's hard to find real numbers, but swimming pools that are kept covered use very little water. And complaining about "verdant" gardens isn't quite the right metric. We have a few verdant oak trees, and they use no water whatsoever except from rainfall. We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.
- astrodust 11y ago
  That number seems ridiculously high. Local figures here suggest much lower rates: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang=en&n=7E808512-1 https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang... That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.
Zarathustra30 11y ago
And yet, Californians still grow rice, a pound of which requires about 300 gallons of water to grow. The 11.8 million gallons the kingpen used is enough to grow about 40 thousand pounds of rice, which is worth about $20,000. That is less than a quarter of the kingpen's water bill of $90,000.
- lmkg 11y ago
  To be fair, rice farmers have scaled back their crop by (iirc) 25% this year.
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    The implied question is how they're making any money at all if it costs $90k worth of water to grow $20k worth of rice.
dnautics 11y ago
It's even worse: limits for thee but not for me. https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-officials-arent-following-own-call-for-conservation/ https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...

47 points by jeo1234 11y ago

She used 178 gallons (674 litres) per day? And that wasn't enough to take a shower every day?! A bathtub is ~80l, and a showering consumes less than that. A washing machine cycle is another ~80l. A dishwasher ~20l/cycle. Cooking maybe 20l. Flush the toilet 5 times/day, 50l. Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption.

dalke 11y ago
http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-californians-use-each-day-and-what-does-a-20-reduction-look-like/ http://ww2.kqed.org/lowdown/2014/01/23/how-much-water-do-cal... says "An often-cited 2011 study of California single-family water consumption estimated that the average California household used more than 360 gallons of water per day." They are under 1/2 that water use. The KQED page continues "... Meanwhile, Indoor use accounted for more than 170 gallons per household per day. Not surprisingly, the most in-home water consumption was in toilet flushes. A more shocking finding, however, was the whopping 18 percent lost to leaks inside homes, the study found." The family is well-aligned with that water use. Of course, the "per household" in that study is an average. This household has 4 people, while the study uses an average of 2.94 people per household, so we should expect this family to use more water than average. The study is at http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF/PW/Water/Documents/California-Single-Family-Home-Water-Use-Efficiency-Study-20110420.pdf http://water.cityofdavis.org/Media/PublicWorks/Documents/PDF... . Page 197 gives an estimated water use per household as a function of household size, using various models (old homes, new homes, California homes, and high efficiency homes). By that benchmark, 178/gallons is well below the 200 gal/day average for California homes, though worse than expected for a high efficiency home, which comes out to 150 gallons per day. I don't really see the source of your astonishment. By all accounts, the water use in this household is below average for California. If it were an older house, with more wasteful fixtures, then these numbers would be unsurprising even for a family doing its best to conserve. > Even such generous estimates get barely to ⅓ of her reported consumption. I lived in Santa Fe, which has some of the lowest water use per capita of any city in the south-west. I had drip irrigation for my garden, and like most in the city, no grass. The city had rebate and other incentive programs in place to promote water conservation. For example, I got my toilets replaced with high efficiency toilets for free, due to a city program which coupled housing growth to water conservation. They now have a rebate for households which install water-free urinals. Even with all that in place, and quoting from http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-standard-for-the-west/ http://savewatersantafe.com/2015/06/santa-fe-2014-gpcd-sets-... "For people in single-family residences, each person within the household uses 51 gallons per person per day." You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change. Is your astonishment not all the more greater for those using over 25x the district average, as reported in this piece?
- rdancer 11y ago
  From the 1st paragraph of the fine article: "She [...] cut her family’s water use nearly in half, to just 178 gallons per person each day." [emphasis mine]. I agree with your analysis wholeheartedly.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Yeah, I just checked, the per person usage here is ~1050 gallons per month. There's no shortage of water ($3 for 10,000 gallons), and we don't work real hard to conserve (and no kids in the house). It could be the case that the article got it wrong. You sort of hope so. Otherwise there is probably something wrong with their plumbing.
- ptaipale 11y ago
  > You can see that that 50 gallons/month is higher than your "generous" expectations of 1/3 of 178 gallons = 45 gallons/capita/day. While it's certainly possible to have a lower water use lifestyle, all evidence is that it's not a quick or cheap change. I don't quite understand why the change would be expensive (unless the house is already severely broken in the way of internal leaks, and you would need to build a whole new plumbing). My family uses about 110 litres per day per person, which is about one third less than this 45 gallons. And I feel I'm using water abundantly (shower every day, flush toilet at will, wash clothes more often than is good for them, one teenager still living in the house, etc.)
yason 11y ago
I was thinking exactly the same thing. I had to check the numbers for Finland which has abundant, cheap, and clean groundwater just about everywhere. By the token of the first few Google hits the average consumption here is roughly 150 liters per person per day. It sounds somewhat realistic, based on my own usage. I do wonder where all that water of hers goes.
- StephenConnell 11y ago
  Landscape or leaks. Flushing is a drop in the bucket and showering is minimal.
  - ptaipale 11y ago
    Big leaks in her house? Landscaping your garden is part of "bare minimum" for survival?
    - Zarathustra30 11y ago
      There ARE some HOAs that fine home owners for lacking green lawns. There's still the option of zero-scaping (covering your yard with gravel), but that is a big up-front investment.
      - ptaipale 11y ago
        > There ARE some HOAs that fine home owners for lacking green lawns. One would expect that in circumstances of drought, a city or state government should be able to mandate such HOA rules void.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  I think the article has probably misstated the usage and that the 180 gallons is for the household.
Luc 11y ago
In Flanders in Belgium, domestic water usage is 110 liter per person per day on average ( https://www.water-link.be/files/uploads/document/gemiddeld-waterverbruik_4.pdf https://www.water-link.be/files/uploads/document/gemiddeld-w... ) So they use 6 times as much, and that's the bare minimum?

1971genocide 11y ago

The whole thing with california reminds me of the story about that one civilization in the pacific - "what were they thinking when they cut down the last tree ?" Water exists until it doesn't.

dalke 11y ago
That's a question posed in Diamond's "Collapse", regarding Easter Island. Of course, the same applies to the last of many things - what were they thinking of when they killed off the passenger pigeons, or the aurochs?
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  Its different though - since water is very basic. A lot like food.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Certainly they are different, but you brought up how it reminded you of the person who asked Diamond about cutting down the last tree on Easter Island. That's neither water nor food either.
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  Economics and local optimization http://throbgoblins.blogspot.fi/2006/12/blog-post_2817.html http://throbgoblins.blogspot.fi/2006/12/blog-post_2817.html
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  They were thinking solely of their immediate individual gain, of course. They had bills to pay, and mouths to feed, and no time to watch the tragedy of the commons unfold. Even if it is the last one, if taking it is the only way to individually profit, then it will be taken. The only way to preserve an endangered common resource is to make the conservation pay more on an individual basis than immediate harvest. Usually, this is accomplished by imposing stiff penalties such that harvest is a net loss, but that is very dependent on being able to reliably catch poachers. Bribing people to not destroy their own commons also works, but is much more expensive, which is why when this happens at all, the bribes are usually paid out from money that was originally taken from the people being bribed. * As for the article, my household runs about 180 gallons per person-day, without any extreme conservation measures. We flush every time, plus gratuitous flushes to dispose of dead bugs or simply to refresh the hands-free toilet cleaner product, and take long showers. Our water bill stopped having intermittent spikes and unexplained fluctuations when we put plumbing locks on our outdoor-accessible faucets. Some neighborhood dipshit had been stealing our water. That, by itself, was no big deal. A cubic foot or two here or there is small change. But they also left the water running while no one who cared was around to turn it off. If you are forgoing flushes, skipping showers, and such, there is no way you're using more than 170 gallons per person-day without "help". You could probably make some decent money buying up some faucet locks and then peddling them door-to-door in those water districts.

e40 11y ago

Another problem: if you were previously very conservative with your water use, then how do you cut it further? I have a coworker that years ago cut her water use dramatically. Now, she's in a quandary because she's being asked to cut it more. Her solution: family members now take showers at the gym.

jerf 11y ago
Second-order effect: Next drought, when asked to conserve, she will do the minimum possible the first time. Allocations based on previous use seems sensible, but if done naively encourage people to push up their resource consumption when they can. A more familiar instance of this same effect can be seen in the way that any bureaucrat that has even one iota of bureaucratic sense knows that you never leave a financial period with money left in the budget. You want to be seen to have to spend it all, perhaps even a bit overdrafted, and yet still be visibly pressed for resources so that you can get more next year. Efficiency with your resources means you're first on the chopping block next budget period. (I suspect this is one of the larger contributors to why large organizations inevitably become inefficient.)
- paulryanrogers 11y ago
  Isn't this short term thinking? If it causes budget shortfalls elsewhere and the pork is exposed they end up unemployable.
  - bsg75 11y ago
    Do local government solutions ever use long term thinking?
methehack 11y ago
I've wondered about that. Why isn't per person? Seems pretty fair, right?
getpost 11y ago
This is true, and the difficulty is compounded because the government lies or is incompetent. I remember a time in Menlo Park (unclear on the year, was it the late 70s drought?) when there were fears of the need for water cutbacks. The Water District said, "Please conserve now; it won't be held against you if rationing is imposed." But that is exactly what happened. When rationing was imposed, it was based on recent usage, which penalized those who had already conserved. IIRC, the issue was that Menlo Park got its water from Hetch Hetchy Water District and HHWD set the rationing policy. Evidently, MPWD should not have made that statement, but nevertheless those who relied on it were put in a very difficult situation.

post_break 11y ago

Family of 5, 1,303 gallons a month. Daily showers, clothes washing, dishes, etc. That's 43 gallons a day. How is she using four times that?

jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Seems even more ridiculous actually > to just 178 gallons per person each day. which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  That seems to mesh with the rest of the facts. Her family use in one month is still 1/3 less than a single Bel Air resident's daily usage. Edit: love the downmods on this

bradleyjg 11y ago

Another article about water in California that doesn't mention agriculture and uses gallons instead of acre-feet to make the numbers look huge. Pools, even five of them for one house, are a red herring.

AcerbicZero 11y ago
It does seem there is a serious amount of effort being put into making this some sort of wedge issue while utterly ignoring agricultural use.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  It seems like the little sibling of 'hey, focus on these gender/race issues, not those class issues'.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - panglott 11y ago
    Except in this case it's explicitly about class issues.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
<----Please, more downmods. Every article can't mention every thing. This article is about a discrepancy where some people are using 90x the water as everyone else. How do you think the house in Bel-air is going through a tenth of an acre-foot of water per day?
- ptaipale 11y ago
  However, when discussing room, it would be good to mention the elephant in it.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago

amluto 11y ago

There are some questionable comments in this article. It's hard to find real numbers, but swimming pools that are kept covered use very little water. And complaining about "verdant" gardens isn't quite the right metric. We have a few verdant oak trees, and they use no water whatsoever except from rainfall. We also come in well below 178 interior gallons/person/day, and we're not going to extremes to reduce interior usage.

astrodust 11y ago
That number seems ridiculously high. Local figures here suggest much lower rates: https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang=en&n=7E808512-1 https://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang... That's about 250L per day, or about 65 gallons.

Zarathustra30 11y ago

And yet, Californians still grow rice, a pound of which requires about 300 gallons of water to grow. The 11.8 million gallons the kingpen used is enough to grow about 40 thousand pounds of rice, which is worth about $20,000. That is less than a quarter of the kingpen's water bill of $90,000.

lmkg 11y ago
To be fair, rice farmers have scaled back their crop by (iirc) 25% this year.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  The implied question is how they're making any money at all if it costs $90k worth of water to grow $20k worth of rice.

dnautics 11y ago

It's even worse: limits for thee but not for me. https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-officials-arent-following-own-call-for-conservation/ https://www.revealnews.org/article-legacy/california-water-o...