Rain is all the news here in California lately, and with good reason. This is the second drought I’ve lived through. I was five when the 1987-1992 drought started. I was at a very impressionable age, and yet still very oblivious. I figured I had lucked out when I only had to take a bath every other day, when children living in the rest of the world were forced to bathe every night. Unfortunately that habit has stuck with me… that and becoming very anxious whenever water is running needlessly.
It is very easy to get political about water here, what with idiots wanting to split the state into six separate states, big ag lobbying for public money to build a pipe that will only cater to their wasteful farming practices, and people already jumping to conclusions wondering why we haven’t built five desalination plants already. But the biggest problem with all of these is just that: they’re huge, expensive solutions that will take years to build. There are small measures we can take now that can make a big impact!
A friend of mine who also grew up in California posed an interesting question on Facebook the other day: “I wonder how much flow you could remove from stormwater system during the critical first 5 minutes of a major storm event if everyone in the neighborhood put all their pots pans, buckets, etc. outside.” To which, someone else answered “ [There’s] 38 million Californians, if we all used a 5 gallon bucket, that’s about 190 million gallons.”
Which got me thinking. That’s a lot of water. A lot of water. Wasted water that is washed off roofs, swept down into the street and out to god-knows-where, not be used in any fashion other than to back up storm drains and flood streets and even homes and business. This is how we deal with California’s most precious resource?!
I thought about equating this scenario with a business–as all good entrepreneurial blogs would–but I’m not going to. I think we’re all smart enough to see there’s a problem without having to first picture that it is money that we’re flushing down the pooper.
My friend then went on to point out that it is still against building code to put rain barrels on your downspouts in most California cities, and that gray water recovery is also a code violation. Considering he’s mastering in land use and environmental studies at Cornell, I tend to take him at his word. For the sake of this and the following two articles I’ve devoted to better water management, lets pretend that after two major droughts in my lifetime and three in my parent’s, the Golden state has taken some action toward water conservation and overturned this legislation.
Rainwater collection is a simple enough idea. You put a bucket outside, it rains, you have (somewhat) usable water. The more buckets you put out, the more you capture, right? But what if you don’t have a yard? What if you do have a yard and don’t wish to turn it into a mosquito nursery? What if, instead, all of the water that runs off of your roof and down your gutters doesn’t go to a storm drain or the sewer, but is instead collected, processed and re-used?
If the idea of drinking roof water grosses you out, we can always use it for something else, like watering parks or fountains perhaps. I should also point out the added benefit of keeping local rivers, lakes and other bodies of water clean! If storm water is being reclaimed, treated and reused, that means it is not being directed toward the nearest stream–or in my case the San Francisco bay–where it is loosed upon the environment, carrying with it everything in it’s path; a thought that should make all locals shudder, and never want to eat anything that comes out of this bay.
The point is, you can build conservation into city infrastructure itself. Maybe while Google is ripping up streets to install fiber, we can also divert the storm drains to local aquifers. Two birds, one stone, thousands of gallons of conserved water!