Who Gets the Water?

The Problem

One good way to understand how dry Southern California is is to look out the window of an airplane as it pulls in to land at one of the airports there.

Planes arriving at LAX enter from the east, and for many minutes as they make their approach, the view below is one of brown, dry land and then many, many roads and buildings with not a lot of trees or other greenery.

Once you get on the ground you see little patches of lawn and shrubbery, but still:  Without the water that has been piped hundreds of miles in for more than 100 years, Los Angeles would be mostly dry grassland, partially green only in the late autumn, with a lovely ocean at its western periphery.

The three metropolitan areas of Southern California are home to about 20 million people.  They don't plan to move, most of them anyway, and when they turn the faucets in their kitchen sinks, they want water to come out.

This is getting to be a challenge.

Coping With the Problem

For more than 30 years, the state of California has been preaching water conservation -- low-flow toilets and then lower-flow toilets, low-flow showerheads and time-limited showers, limits on landscape watering and an absolute ban on lawns in front of newly constructed homes.  You must ask to get a glass of water in a restaurant.  There is a hardly a gym in Los Angeles where you can take an apres-workout shower anymore.

It appears that people in Southern California do use less water, about 380 gallons daily per family, than the national norm of 400.  Not surprisingly, people with bigger houses (and, presumably, more landscaping) use more water than people who live in smaller houses or apartments.

As the state went into a fourth drought year with no end in sight this summer, the governor called for all to reduce water consumption by 20 percent.  People have been cooperating, but in recent months the reduction has been only 10 to 12 percent.  Even at that, water supplies are low and there is no serious rain in sight.

What to Do

What Southern California needs is more water, particularly during drought years when there is much less rainfall and not as much water flows across the mountains from inland rivers.  Scientists are saying now that 10-year droughts (the current one is less than four years old) happened in the region's past and are likely to occur in its future.

Southern California could try to get more water from the Owens and Colorado rivers, which flow on the even drier side of the Sierra Nevada.  Unfortunately this will not work because those areas too are suffering drought, serious depletion of groundwater, the drying up of the Colorado estuary and thick, lung-threatening dust storms.

Southern California could try to recycle water.  In fact, Orange County has been doing this for years. Once people got over the "ick" factor about "toilet to tap" water -- the recycled water is put through several filtration processes -- they began to accept it.   Water agencies in several other areas are now -- finally, now! -- considering similar actions.
        This is actually a good idea and deserves exploration.  But, if there comes a 10-year drought, and there might, available water for recycling might dwindle.

You get this impression that a bunch of people in the southern part of California are sitting on their lanais, looking out at the Pacific Ocean, and saying to themselves, "Gosh, if only we could find some more water!"

One Idea

I've said it, and I'll say it again:  Desalination.

Here are some facts:

     -- One percent of the world's drinking water comes from desalination.  It's a big deal in the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and the poorer countries of North Africa.  It accounts for 40 percent of Israel's domestic water. Plants operate from Germany to Spain to Aruba to Singapore to India.

     -- Many oceangoing ships have employed onboard desalination technology for years to provide water for their crews.

     -- Desalination is not cheap, but its cost has declined by many orders of magnitude over recent years due to mechanical engineering improvements that I certainly am not equipped to describe.


The Barriers

Australia, always dry in its interior, got interested in desalination during a major drought in aughts.  The country built six large desalination plants in metropolitan areas on both its coasts.  The plants in the east -- Perth, say -- came in handy as the dry years continued.  In the east -- New South Wales -- the rains returned and the new plants were not needed. This became a handy political issue used by politicians out of power to pummel incumbents about about excessive spending.

Here in the United States, the barrier seems to be the bureaucracy.  The newest and most technically advanced American desalination plant, set for completion next summer in Carlsbad, Calif., was first proposed in 1998.  Gaining the appropriate permits from the state and federal agencies -- and defending against opposition lawsuits took until 2013, at which point construction began.
        I'm not a patient person, and so I would not have persisted so long, but the company is proposing another plant in Huntington Beach, very similar to the previous one.  Nobody is making book on whether or when that plant will be built.


Why

It seems appropriate that metropolitan areas near oceans should take some responsibility for providing water for their people.

Over the years, California's agricultural economy has used most of the state's water, providing billions of dollars in revenue and nourishing millions of people. Farmers have gotten progressively more efficient about water over time, but a certain amount of the stuff is necessary for any kind of agriculture.  In the current drought, farms have been plunging ever-deeper wells and pulling up only enough water for their highest-value crops.  Nobody knows when the drought will end, and so it is difficult to plan.

There are similar concerns in the nation's interior states, even those without droughts.  Aquifers like the great Ogalala that runs from Texas to South Dakota and was built with thousands of years of rainfall, are running perilously low now.  Atop the Ogalala sit 442 million acres of cropland in a dry climate.  Those acres may not count for many votes in a fight over water, but we may want to consider diverting some rivers inland in the next few generations.

We need water when we turn on the faucet.  But we also need food when it is time for dinner.