California: Let’s all get wet

As I write these words, rain is hammering my apartment building and rivers of fresh water — hundreds or perhaps thousands of gallons per minute — are gushing down the streets and the sidewalks, filling rain gutters, overwhelming the storm drains and rinsing the City relatively clean, and you think, ahh yes, rain, bring it on, so healthy, so good, so desperately needed.

Maybe you also think: Surely all that water is going somewhere helpful, yes? Surely at least some of those drains feed into some grand network of reservoirs and tanks that, in turn, replenish the supply and nourish the community and come back through our taps and get recycled for irrigation, and it’s all glorious and helpful, right?

Wrong.

Truth is, the vast majority of that glorious water is merely flushed away by a system of conduits and drainage pipes and sent straight out into the bay, all in an effort to avoid urban flooding because, well, we are simply not equipped to handle too much of it at once.

Meanwhile, I read the same dire stories as you. Despite the rain, despite weeks of snow and storms and pounding amounts of water crashing down on the region for hours on end, we are still in very serious drought conditions. Long-starved state reservoirs aren’t even half full. The governor declared a state of emergency. The Colorado River is long overtaxed, lakes are drying up, the besieged Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta is being siphoned off at a record pace. We do not, they say, have nearly enough water. And it’s getting worse.

It seems to prompt one ridiculously obvious, but still increasingly urgent question: How can this be? How is it that tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water are pouring through the city streets right now, but we are only able to capture and use but a fraction? Why do we not have better systems in place? Why is this not more imperative?

Is that too naïve to ponder aloud? Hardly. Sure, we all know the state has its grand reservoirs, the spring snowmelt is the lifeblood of the aquifers, the rainfall feeds the starving, overbled rivers and deltas. But what about what’s right here, right now? What about what every single city, every single person, every single household isn’t doing in the slightest?

Why do we not, for example, have in place regulations similar to what much of drought-plagued Australia’s already done, mandates requiring that every homeowner cut their usage in half and every home and building be fitted with a basic water-capture and storage apparatus — along with solar panels and compost and so on — aiming toward at least some semblance of self-sustainability? How is it we are still stuck with the archaic, centralized models of water and energy supply that, unless we start changing it fast, will likely spell California’s doom?

I know: simple questions. Simplistic, even. But as we get more desperate, we sure as hell don’t seem to have very many satisfying answers.

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Source: San Francisco Chronicle