What Say You? Drought
and Clean Water
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| Susan Cloke Santa Monica Mirror Photo |
SUSAN CLOKE
Columnist
“Drought, it’s got everyone’s attention and
that’s a good thing. The storm we
had at the beginning of March dropped 2 inches of rain. Normal rainfall in a year is about 14
inches and this 2 inches is the first rain we’ve seen,” said Gil Borboa, Water
Resources Manager for the City of Santa Monica.
Borboa went on to explain that California’s
water resources are in the snow in the Sierras in Northern California and the
largest part of the State’s population is in the South. “We haven’t seen the pattern of snow
that we need and our reservoirs are drastically low,” said Borboa.
Santa Monica has local plans for both short term
and long term responses to drought conditions. These include water conservation, the use of recycled water
and digging new wells at the Olympic Well Fields.
“Our long term plan is to make Santa Monica
Water Independent by 2020,” said Borboa.
“We estimate that two new wells will produce 5000 acre feet per year and
that, along with our conservation and water recycling programs, will close the
gap between City demand for water and what we can supply with our own resources
at the Charnock and Olympic Well Fields.
“Conservation programs will save approximately
1500 acre feet of water. Our
residents are doing very well with conservation and resident usage is
calculated at 85 gallons per resident per day and that’s a very good number,”
stated Borboa. “Add offices and
hotels and businesses and restaurants and the number goes to 130 gallons per
day per resident and that’s not a good number.”
The Santa Monica Urban Recycling Facility (SMURF)
reduces our demand for potable
water because it treats urban runoff (storm drain) water to the point where it
can be reused. The City uses SMURF
water to irrigate Palisades Park and provide irrigation water to Rand, the Public
Safety Building and the Cemetery.
Gray water, water which would otherwise go down
the drain from washing machines and showers and so on, is now a realistic
option in Santa Monica. Borboa said, “Gray water systems are regulated by the
LA County Health Department and, originally the regulations made using gray
water very difficult. It took
quite a while for the County and Santa Monica, working together, to create
regulations that are both protective and reasonable. I think we’ve done a good job and we are now starting to see
gray water systems in Santa Monica.”
Steve Fleischli, Santa Monica resident and Water
Program Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) shares
Borboa’s concerns about water, drought and climate change.
“This is an historic drought – the worst drought
in California record keeping history.
Making it even harder we don’t know how long the drought will last and
so we can’t know if we have sufficient water supplies,” said Fleischli.
“The effect is hardest on communities in the
Central Valley where some communities are okay for now but are at risk of
running out of water.
“Part of the reason is climate change. While we can’t link climate change and
an individual event we have learned that climate change affects drought
frequency and intensity,” said Fleischli.
In March 2004 scientist and UC Santa Cruz
Professor Lisa Sloan and graduate student Jacob Sewall published a study
titled, “Disappearing
Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west.”
The study predicted the loss of Arctic ice would dry out California. Sloan wrote, “I think the actual
situation in the next few decades could be even more dire than our study
suggested.”
“We need to be concerned not only for Santa
Monica and the LA area, we also need to be concerned for the state, the nation
and the global community. Globally the primary concern is access to safe and
sufficient water,” said Fleischli.
“When you look globally almost 2.5 billion
people don’t have access to sanitation and almost 780 million don’t have access
to clean water.”
(Fleischli will be one of the speakers at the
Zocalo program on the global issues of clean water on Monday, March 17. http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/event/will-we-ever-have-clean-water-for-all/)
“We also have to look at the rules of civil
society.
In the United Stats we have the Clean Water Act
and the Administrative Procedures Act,” said Fleischli. “Citizens have the
right to petition the government, citizens have the right to sue the government
to require enforcement of the rules and citizens can sue polluters to require
them to follow the law.
“This is true in many parts of the world but not
all,” Fleischli continued. “We have the technology to address many of these
problems but if we don’t have the basic rules of civil society we won’t be
successful. If people are not
empowered to participate in decision making and chart their own destiny that is
a severe disadvantage and that affects us all.”
I get being discouraged. So why bother? Nothing we do will be enough, say some.
Know that we are making a difference here in
Santa Monica and that is good for our personal and environmental health.
Also know that, in California, we often set a
standard for water quality replicated across the nation and in other parts of
the World.
We are fortunate we live where the rules of
civil society allow us to achieve so much. There are people in every part of the world doing everything
they can, often in dangerous situations, to make water safe and sufficient and
available to all.
Climate change and clean water are inextricably
linked. And we are in a race to
find the way to the resolution of both issues. Knowing this makes the work more urgent.
What Say You?
