The drought...

i wish i had sold that pipe...

 

I live in a suburb of Chicago. We have restrictions on lawn watering but that's all. I like water restrictions. As you know, water is a precious commodity. If we lose our water supply we are finished and that is very serious business.

 

But ... but ... but ... fire sprinklers are a fantastic revenue opportunity for many parties, not just for the manufacturers.

Water districts can charge higher initial and monthly connection fees to sprinklered homes because of the higher capacity 1-inch meter required for most systems, vs the normal 5/8- or 3/4-inch meter for normal homes. Never mind that fires in sprinklered homes are usually put out with one-tenth the water of unsprinkler homes, and the 'high' flow of home sprinklers is only 2% of the flow needed at the fire hydrants on the very same water mains, needed to fight fires at unsprinklered home too. Until the water district's rate structure was fixed to reflect this reality, I paid several thousand dollars more in fixed water bill charges than any of my neighbors had to pay. These water charges alone exceeded the fire industry's claimed typical sprinkler installation costs. And this doesn't count the larger connection fee the builder paid to connect the house to city water.

A water department technician, upon hearing that I had a sprinkler system but his system didn't show the annual backflow preventer test results (test fees required, of course), was about to write me up for a violation. It took a while teach him that said backflow preventer is applicable to a particular sprinkler topology, and my system was one of several different topologies. Turns out, his district prohibits those other topologies. Turns out, his district's code book documentation of that prohibition was dated two months after he verbally made that claim to me. Thank goodness their new requirements are not retroactive to existing structures, half the town would mutiny.

Fire departments can charge extra permit and flow test fees any time anything in the system is touched or upgraded. And my local department won't even answer questions about their particular sprinkler requirements until I've paid those fees. Don't want to deprive their union friends in the sprinkler business. Also, never mind that the original paperwork on this home's sprinkler system, which had to be filed at the fire department instead of the county permit office that archived everything else, is 'lost' because the FD did not have a meaningful records system at that time. The permit office's records system works just fine, and has provided me copies of all the house's plans and permits and approvals except for the sprinkler documentation. Several county documents do make specific reference to the missing sprinkler items.

When any defects are suspected, and professional assistance is needed for upgrades (DIY is illegal here), most local fire protection companies won't touch an existing residential system, especially one lacking paperwork. The old system would need to be removed and replaced, at far far higher cost than an installation in new construction. Even the engineering fee to look at it exceeded the sprinkler industry's claimed typical total installation cost. One salesman who was interested in helping, was shortly let go, and his ex-boss who now refused my business altogether also refused give me any contact information. (The guy's business cell phone number was deactivated, no forwarding.) The other guy, after trying repeatedly to get my local fire department to put a verbal approval into writing, finally just dumped it and quit returning my calls.

The only positive here is that no government or fire industry employee has been inside to look at my system, so there is no official notice of any possible defect or problem. All chatter about one is traceable only to hearsay from one non-competent person (i.e. me) who has no certifications or legal authority or official training whatsoever in these matters. And I'm keeping it that way.

Sorry that you got me going on this.

 

"Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink...."
(from Sam Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

Actually?
The earth has quite a bit of water.
So much in fact that many nations build Underseeboots to take advantage of the vastness of the oceans.

However (comma!) humans cannot drink seawater, and it kills many plants....and we tend to be last-minute problem solvers, and not very adapt at resource management.
Oh yes.....and we tend to gather together to live in harmonious bliss in ultra dense population sloburbs.

Normally, I'd join the arm-flapping crowd and worry about this but as long as we use much of our potable water to flush toilets, fill swimming pools, and make grass green I'm not going to sweat the "precious natural resource" angle.
Anthropogenic environmental changes turned a brown California green over a hundred years ago....which is why most of the drought pictures feature.....(wait for it!!!)..........empty HUMAN MADE lakes.
Interestingly enough, Florida started tinkering with this something like thirty years ago, despite the fact that most of the Sunshine State gets a lot more rain than most of California......like 5:1.
Many parts of Florida use grey water recycling for things like non-ag irrigation, water features, car washing, etc... leaving more water to feed Big Ag.....which, like California, is the 800# gorilla in the room.

We've seen what high fuel prices do with fuel efficiency.
I suspect that we're just seeing the usual growing pains with resource management.
More feaux lawns, saltwater pools, fewer naturally green gold courses,and dual water plumbing (one grey, one blue) will all play some part in turning Brown's brown California back to green..............yet again!

 

The sinkholes kinda spurred Florida's response on. Man's activity can't cause a shift in climate, but it can cause the earth to open up and swallow homes.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania doesn't believe in grey water systems.

 

WA->CA water pipeline would not help if both ends are dry:

Governor declares statewide drought emergency | Governor Jay Inslee

 

Bad news: a region is not defined by a state boundary.

Good news: developing El Nino may dump enough rain to flood/mud-slide CA.

Bob Wilson

 

when I lived in Palm Springs, California, we had no water meters and the person who filled their swimming pool paid the same monthly fee as the person who just had a one-person household with no lawn.

This was in the 1980s. I lived there some 15 years. The underground water table where pretty much all the water came from was basically at a static 80 feet below the surface when I moved there. When I left, it had gone to 125 feet below, IIRC.

There was SERIOUS talk that conservation was not necessary, that all needed water could be brought down from the Frasier River in Canada.

Now, in Seattle. We have a lot of rain. But, we have a lot of people, also. I do a lot to save water. Could probably do more, but I try.

 

Western Washington (Seattle, Tacoma, etc.) suffered a significant water shortage during the 1992 drought, and had to impose some restrictions.

Since then, the Seattle-area water system has put considerable resources into improving water efficiency. Back then, a lot of water was lost to distribution system leaks. They aggressively tracked down and repaired those leaks, sharply reducing those losses. They also actively encouraged home conservation, handing out vast quantities of free low-flow showerheads, faucet aerators, toilet leak detection dye tablets, and offering rebates for updated higher efficiency appliances (clothes washers, dishwashers, toilets). Considerable attention and publicity has also been directed to better outdoor water efficiency.

Without these changes, Seattle would have already needed to develop a third watershed to meet demands of the growing population. Such efforts would have taken water away from fish runs and many important natural environments. But with these and other improvements, total urban water use has dropped considerably. Some years ago, (possibly before the current projections of AGW-driven supply reductions), the system was projecting sufficient capacity for several more decades even without more conservation. But more conservation efforts are still continuing, so we should be able to extend our supply longer. However, climate-change-driven reduced snowpacks are a wildcard, and may well demand those additional efforts sooner than later. This year's abnormal winter was similar to what some AGW models are projecting to be typical by 2070.

We have put great effort into making better use of our existing resources, and still see plenty of opportunity to do better. So it should be no surprise that many of us take a very dim view of outside regions coveting the water we worked so hard to conserve. Especially when many of those outsiders have put far less effort into living within their own local supply, keeping their historic philosophy of unmetered household water as a birthright, and fining homeowners for not maintaining lush climate-inappropriate landscapes.

We already killed a lot of our migratory fish in their nests just to prevent artificially driven blackouts in California during the 'Enron crisis'. If they are willing to kill off fish populations and riparian habitats to avoid reasonable conservation and efficiency improvements, they should commit that desecration on their own rivers, not export it to ours. Yes, even CA is still dumping a lot of fresh river water into the ocean.

Due largely to those past efforts, the major Puget Sound area municipalities are not expecting to face a real water issue this year. But agricultural and natural environments elsewhere in the state are facing a real problem now, so we can't export water this year. And years like this are expected to become more common, so other Western regions cannot count on us to bail them out of regional droughts.

 

Fuzzy @29. That's the deal. 1992 was ENSO- (La Nina) US west coast gets rain N or S as ENSO goes + or -.

Current to a few years back, ENSO has ben near neutral, but still a drought. So the true picture must be larger and more complicated. within that, 1992 fits the narrower pattern.