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I can feel for the people who have been living there for a long time and now have to deal with the water situation. But I can't understand the attitudes of peo

• newaccount2021 4y ago
• MisterTea 4y ago
  > But I can't understand the attitudes of people who are choosing to move to such a place where access to water is such a risk. From the article: "They believe that the county is not going to let five hundred homes next to one of the wealthiest cities go without water.” In their mind: "This is America." Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end.
  • juve1996 4y ago
    > Meaning they are used to living in the "Land of plenty" never thinking that one day, it could end. This was my thought as well. The music is about to stop. Many don't realize it. Some don't believe it. Some actively deny it. But it's happening, and faster than we're ready for.
    • sbf501 4y ago
      Many of us do realize it and are just sitting here staring at the screen at work realizing what a horrible mistake it all was, and hoping the fall won't as bad as the movies lead us to believe.
      • danaris 4y ago
        I am frequently reminded these days of a particular New Yorker cartoon [0]. We can still avert most of the predicted catastrophes, but we need to stop letting the people with the money just dictate policy to the rest of us to favor themselves. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • imtringued 4y ago
        I am sitting here, thinking that it would be an easily solvable problem if people actually cared about the sustainability of their communities.
        • tharkun__ 4y ago
          So much this. Our town is trying. They're trying to educate people about it. They are showing people how much water we're collectively consuming per day, how much lower the water table is than in previous years etc. And it seems that nobody cares. Water consumption numbers are actually going up and I see people running sprinklers. I'm hoping the town will actually soon switch from only allowing sprinklers during the night to disallowing sprinklers altogether and actually enforcing that.
          • sbf501 4y ago
            I didn't realize how much water I was using until my bill went way up. Then I started running outside to read my water meter after various activities. Showering is the #1 usage of water: 80-100 gallons per shower!!! I had no idea. Literally, it never crossed my mind because water has always been so cheap.
    • jeffbee 4y ago
      Many are actively working to bring the disaster into the present! In the book Running Out the author interviews Kansas farmers who are explicitly managing the aquifer so that it runs out within their lifetimes. Not too soon, but not too far into the future, either.
      • anigbrowl 4y ago
        What's the logic here - is it just agribusiness maximizing profit in the short-medium term with the expectation of writing it off and moving production elsewhere once the point of collapse arrives?
        • azinman2 4y ago
          “I got mine”
        • imtringued 4y ago
          You can't just take the planet with you when you die hence you need to consume it in its entirety to minimize "waste" aka earth left for other humans.
  • __derek__ 4y ago
    Juxtaposing this with the Flint water crisis -- which occurred in a place with abundant fresh water, albeit no wealthy cities next door -- is really something. They may be right, but this is not a bet I would be comfortable making.
  • RC_ITR 4y ago
    Add in “I’m a nature lover! I’m not the bad guy because I want to live in nature (with air conditioning, easy car access and half hour showers)!”
• Enginerrrd 4y ago
  >I have no information about this, but I would expect that homeowner's insurance should get much more expensive for these locations as without access to water it's quite hard to have firefighting infrastructure. Without firefighters, homes and humans are at much higher risk. Maybe insurance economics will help to resolve this? It's pretty normal in rural areas to basically not have a fire department for all practical purposes anyway. Yeah, they often have a volunteer fire department, but when your best case scenario response time is like 30 minutes, you're not gonna save structures anyway. That's not considering the wildfire risk at all.
  • bradfa 4y ago
    Right, but even with a volunteer fire department, at least there's normally water that they can use to save the neighbor houses once they arrive on-scene. If there's no water then there's no way to save anything from a fire.
    • Scoundreller 4y ago
      Right: They'll have water delivery trucks on standby contracts. The very trucks that deliver water to homes. They'll come to the scene and deploy an instant-pool for firetrucks to draw from. You could say that having homes that depend on cisterns actually helps in firefighting efforts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i090t5scQ1o&t=220s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i090t5scQ1o&t=220s
      • tlavoie 4y ago
        The tenders, as those trucks are known, would be from the fire department themselves. Filling from nearby-as-possible ponds or tanks, a good-sized structure fire will still go through multiple trucks' worth of water. I volunteer with our rural, island-based fire department. The more populated part has 90% or more of the people, and is part of our coverage area. The larger part is more parks and forest, and sees regional coverage such as chopper- or truck-based crews, helicopters and so on. Each of the engine trucks carries something like 1000 gallons of water, and is kept full. So are the tenders, which can dump into the "porta-pond" as in that video. The water supply team has a list of available sources of water that they can go to to keep that water flowing, but if there is nothing nearby, the round-trip time will get longer, and firefighters will have to leave the building until there is water available. Wildfire fighting is very different, and much more focused on containing the edges of the fire by using natural fire breaks or creating new ones. (Think picks and shovels, heli buckets, and heavy equipment where available.) If there is a house or two threatened, maybe some sprinklers can be set up ahead of the fire. If the house is on fire, too bad, efforts are on what's ahead.
• throw8383833jj 4y ago
  they said it's because there's no HOA. HOAs really are incredibly awful. And, it's getting harder and harder to find houses that are not in an HOA.
  • bradfa 4y ago
    I think the whole concept of having HOAs in many neighborhoods is a very regional thing. I live in upstate NY and pretty much every single-family homes neighborhood around me does not have an HOA. The only neighborhoods which have HOAs are those with large numbers of multi-family homes, like townhomes. In some ways it's nice to not have an HOA, no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here: there's probably 6 different companies who service my neighborhood on all 5 days of the week, it would be nice if we all just had 1 and probably we could all save some money this way too.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      >>no one bugs me if my lawn is looking sad. But in other ways it would be nice to have a unified group to take care of some neighborhood things, like unifying garbage pickup since we have private garbage companies here: In many locations neither of those items are purview of the HOA, those would be City ordinances and City Services. HOA's in my experience fit 2 molds, with some over lap The first takes care of common property of the community, like playgrounds, community centers, etc. Then you have rules enforcement, which are beyond the standard city rules like length of grass, in the realm of the type and style of grass you can have, the plants you can have, the color of the home, the type of (or if you can) have a pool, or structure, or Playground, etc etc etc. These HOA expanded on what would be normal governmental regulations around safety, and go into the realm of "property value" protection, and other ascetics needs of the community
      • bradfa 4y ago
        My town has no interest in operating garbage service. A few of the area villages do have village-provided garbage service and often the quality and cost is less than the private companies, but it seems garbage service is not a big enough deal for people to try and unite over it. Pools and structures like decks or sheds are regulated by the building code of the town, but they do not impact your property value for property taxes. Pools specifically also don't seem to impact property value when you sell, a pool is only useful here for 3 months of the year and lots of people don't want to deal with maintaining them. I would happily pay an HOA to take care of a nice neighborhood pool instead of maintaining my own but I've never seen a local single-family home neighborhood with a community pool here.
• pj_mukh 4y ago
  This is a real problem in California and is some how ingrained into the political structure and hard to shake. The Governor last year: "“There’s something that is truly Californian about the wilderness and the wild and pioneering spirit,” Newsom said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m not advocating for no (building).” [1] AFAIK, lawmakers are actually considering subsidizing insurance costs for exurbs in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round. [1]: https://apnews.com/article/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe https://apnews.com/article/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    This sounds very similar to issues around houses built in known historical flood zones.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • tlavoie 4y ago
      Where this has been found to be a very expensive mistake, you are now seeing communities buy out homeowners, demolish, and leave the areas empty. Other efforts can be very expensive, but worthwhile if they're protecting enough. For example of the latter, the Winnipeg floodway is a huge ditch around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Built in the late '50s, it diverts the Red River around the city, reconnecting further north. It was seen as a huge boondoggle when being built, but has saved much of the city repeatedly since.
  • throwaway193948 4y ago
    > in places that were never meant to host human habitation year round. and which places on earth were meant for humans exactly?
• throw8383833jj 4y ago
  It's the real estate agent's duty to inform house buyers that they property they're buying may not have water in the future and what a huge pain point that would be. The only logical conclusion i can come to is that the buyers real estate agents have not been honest in this regard.
  • s0rce 4y ago
    Are they really duty bound to disclose this? What about fire, flood, earthquake and any other risk. My experience is they don't, other than legally mandated things like asbestos or lead.
    • dllthomas 4y ago
      I bought a house in California, and the docs include a bunch of details on potential disasters, natural and otherwise. Dam inundation maps are engrossing - there's a dam over San Leandro that could put water on the OAK runways. That said, I see wiggle room on "if nothing changes there eventually won't be enough water", even if we all know that in practice nothing will change in time, so I don't know how that actually plays out.
  • anigbrowl 4y ago
    Other people just don't care. I know a Mojave desert community far to the east of LA where water delivery happens by truck. It's a very harsh and unforgiving environment, but I really liked it when I worked out there some years ago and have considered moving there because I like solitude and am comfortable with a very frugal/minimal lifestyle. Last year I ran across an LA Times article about how people were making different life choices due to the pandemic, and and other factors - specifically moving from LA to this place. In contrast to locals who tend to build low houses and choose colors that blend with the desert landscape, these people were painting their houses bright white and, I kid you not, installing swimming pools.
    • etc-hosts 4y ago
      Would a white house reflect more height and be cooler inside ?
• time_to_smile 4y ago
  > But I can't understand the attitudes of people who are choosing to move to such a place where access to water is such a risk. Denial is incredibly powerful. Most people can't really comprehend that there isn't enough water in that region (even though it should be obvious). We've lived in a time of plenty for so long the idea that something as fundamental as water could be limited just seems impossible. You see this everywhere, and only tend to notice the denial when the problems don't impact you. Comments pointing out concerns that impact tech or everyone are frequently downvoted to oblivion here on HN. I saw a comment claiming that democracy in the US has been under threat, something no one who was observing the US from outside would deny, get downvoted to oblivion and decried as pure hyperbole. We're all living in a constant and escalating state of cognitive dissonance, the world around is collapsing in multiple ways, but locally you aren't allowed to acknowledge this. The "this is fine meme" summarizes our current environment perfectly.
  • patrick451 4y ago
    That may all be true. But we've also had chicken littles screaming about the falling sky since the beginning of time. Y2k comes to mind. I was in high school at the time, and still remember all the breathless articles. The trains would stop, the water treatment plants would fail, the traffic lights would go haywire. Somewhere within each semi truck, grid sub-station and bank mainframe was a tiny ticking time bomb that would rollover in a few short months to 00 and implode into chaos. For the want of a few bits, the implements of modern life would become useless hunks of scrap. The crusty cobol programmers were working round the clock to stop it but there simply weren't enough of them or the source code was missing or nobody had a compiler anymore. We were doomed. Turns out, the damned lights didn't even flicker at midnight. And with rise of click-driven journalism, it's even worse.
    • emptyparadise 4y ago
      Do you think Y2K fixed itself?