A Vision of Water Conservation For California |
Water Conservation needs to be conducted on Personal, Local Region, and Wide Region levels.
Follow the recommendations at www.bewaterwise.com.
These recommendations are primarily to reduce water consumption from the tap.
Ideally, we want to reduce water runoff from rain also.
So to that end it is recommended that each house has a rain water cistern or French drain. A cistern, an above ground or below ground tank that would capture rainwater and allow it's use for irrigation. Or a French drain, essentially a pit filled with gravel, that rainwater is directed to. This will allow the rainwater to percolate into the groundwater, which we will eventually pump out and drink on the local region level.
Grade your property so that rain water does not run off into the street, instead send it to a low spot, cistern or French drain.
Gray water!
Use gray water to water your garden, lawn, and trees. The city wastes
most of our waste water, so the more we use ourselves and the less that we put
into the sewer, the better. Remember, gray water comes from sinks, showers, and
the laundry. The toilet is black water, reduce it with a low flow toilet, but
send it to the city.
Earthquake water
The "big one" when it finally hits will cut off the Southland's water
from the north and east. And it will break water mains across the city. So, you
should have sufficient water for at least a week, or possibly a month. This
water can include the rain water cistern, swimming pools, hot tubs, and
more.
Making water potable;
This is easy, it takes a micron-charcoal filter. We generally don't have to
worry about virus's. And a micron filter will remove bacteria. And the charcoal
removes chemicals, flavors, and odors.
We can of course boil or chemically treat (chlorine, iodine, bleach, peroxide,
ozone, and more) to disinfect the water. But a good filter does it for us
without leaving a chemical residue.
Local Regions (Cities & Towns) encourage individuals and corporations to conserve water (www.bewaterwise.com).
Water conservation is the way to make available water last longer.
Regions increase water supply through two methods, and both of these can be greatly increased.
Recycled or Reclaimed water is potable or almost potable water made from waste water. The almost potable water is used for irrigation and groundwater recharge.
A few places take the water up to potable standards and put it right back into the drinking water system. Most places recycle only a small fraction of their wastewater. Getting this value into the majority will help cities and towns tremendously to meet their water needs. Of course, treatment systems are big ticket items.
So the other, and cheaper, way of increasing water is:
Stormwater is free water, you just have to capture it and hold onto it until needed. Nature holds onto the water in two ways. A mountain snowpack, holds water from the winter months into the summer months when we need more for agriculture. The changing (warming) environment may make this natural method less reliable in the future.
Nature also infiltrates water into the ground, which we can then pump out later for use. However, in many areas, the rate of pumping is larger than the rate of recharge. We can deliberately increase the rate of recharge. One of the more common techniques is to dam a drainage to create a reservoir. Reservoirs are expensive and require a large area and can destroy some local habitat. The open reservoir will also lose water to evaporation. Another semi-common method is to divert part of a stream into a shallow basin for infiltration into the ground. This process takes a bit of area and cannot be installed retroactively in urban areas.
New urban developments are easy to fit with stormwater capture devices. These can be installed under lawns or paved areas. These reduce flooding as they increase water resources. In mature urban areas, there are many ways to retrofit the systems to increase stormwater capture and infiltration.
There are fancy and expensive systems that can be installed under parks and parking lots, and simple systems such as catchbasins with gravel bottoms instead of concrete. There are also drywells, low spots in vegetated swales, and many other simple systems to hold water until it infiltrates. Ideally, we capture most of the rainwater and just loose the flood levels.
Larger regions, such as states, will encourage individuals, corporations, cities and counties to conserve water. They will have reservoirs to capture water. And they can have canals and water diversion structures to move water from one region to another. This allows wetter regions to supply water to drier regions allowing a greater overall use of the available land.