Amazing Facts About CA Drought: #1 - No Water Meters In Sacramento, Other Valley Towns
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As Paul Rogers and Nicholas St. Fleur reported for the San Jose Mercury News, not surprisingly cooler coastal areas tend to use less water, like Santa Cruz, which averages 113 gallons person a day and Crescent City, which uses 97 gallons per person a day. But in hotter, drier areas like the the Central Valley and desert areas of Southern California use can hit 591 gallons of water per person a day in Riverside County and 736 in Palm Springs. Although the worst is Vernon in Los Angeles County which only has 112 residents but a per capita daily water use of more than 94,000 gallons thanks to “dozen factories, meatpacking plants and other water-guzzling industries within its city limits,” wrote Rogers and Fleur.
Some parts of the state, including areas of Sacramento and the Central Valley still don’t have water meters -- although they are now mandated by 2025. At the municipal level, tiered rate structures where rates increase greater the more you use (and of course water meters) are instrumental in reducing water consumption.
There are also lots that individuals can do by restricting watering for outdoor plants and lawns or replacing lawns entirely with drought-tolerant plants (some local water agencies offer incentives for turf removal), checking plumbing for leaks, using low-flow fixtures and toilets, not washing cars, using rain barrels to collect water for outside use, and taking shorter showers.
These are all well and good but in the big picture, asking someone to turn off the faucet while they brush their teeth to help the drought is akin to Al Gore telling you to change your light bulb to combat climate change. Let’s be clear, you should change your lightbulbs … and use less water, but California’s water issues are more complicated than that. We haven’t even begun to scrape the surface of what we can do at the municipal level (like reuse of graywater, not flushing our toilets with drinking water, and collecting storm water) for a more long-term vision of how to be smarter about our water use. But even that doesn’t get to the heart of the state’s political dysfunction around water.
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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-17/fantasizing-about-california-or-already-here-5-shocking-drought-facts-to-make-you-rethink-the-golden-state
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Artesian wells even. Drill a hole in the ground, the water would shoot up out of the hole on it's own.
It was part of the selling of California. No water meters.
I had family living in "no water meter places." You could build a fountain in your backyard with no pump, no recycling, and the only limit was how fast the water would percolate back into the ground simply because you didn't want to create a swamp or overflow your septic tank.
"Too cheap to meter."
Horrible for the natural environment, lakes and rivers were drained or dried up, artesian aquifers collapsed, land sank, but that's the way it was.
Very similar to oil, actually. The cost of gasoline was the cost to refine it. Drilling the hole was easy. Sometimes the oil simply spurted out and was sold, if the driller was lucky, to reimburse with slight profit the cost of drilling the hole. Otherwise the driller went bankrupt and the crude oil was essentially free in comparison to the cost of refining it.
