written by Bonnie Donovan
Did You Know was somewhat taken aback at the sudden realization by Governor Gavin Newsom that California cannot save itself from the continuous loss of drinking water caused by non-stop droughts, by simply using less water?
How does this co-exist with Newsom’s demand for 2.5 Million new homes to be built by 2031, when the average home uses more than 300 gallons of water per day? That is an additional 750,000,000 gallons a day for the 2.5 million new homes or 273.75 billion gallons of additional water a year.
Why did the city of Santa Barbara and county not reject this preposterous number, when it means 8,000 new homes to be built in eight years within city limits alone? The number for the county as a whole is 24,856 additional homes.
Where were/are our elected officials in rejecting these numbers from the state?
In 2016 SB County had a population of 444,341, by 2022 it is 448,656, a growth of 4,315 in 7 years.
The target of 24,856 new homes for the County by 2031 assumes a population growth rate far in excess of recent history if one assumes an average occupancy rate of 2.5 persons per home. That would be 62,140 additional people, or 8,080 per year, double the rate of increase over the last eight years.
Same questions. Where are the jobs, and where does the water come from? What investments in services and infrastructure at what costs are needed to support this growth?
The population of the city of Santa Barbara decreased from 90,922 in 2016 to 88,255 in 2021.
The reduction from 2000 to 2021 was 1.5%.
Therefore, why is there a need for an additional 8,000 homes over the next 8 years?
Where are the additional jobs coming from? What new industries are moving in? Or, is the assumption that retail and hospitality will provide the jobs? Retail is declining and people don’t want jobs in restaurants and hotels.
Will the desalination plant have to work full time to provide an additional 300 gallons of water per day, 365 days a year to 8,000 new homes? That’s 876,000,000 more gallons of water we need just for these new homes. We won’t even bring up all the new hotel rooms going in.
It took 14 years to produce a desalination plant in Carlsbad. Australia, with 30 desalination plants, achieved time frames of 8 years. How long will an organized statewide water recycling take?
Less than 3% of the earth’s water is freshwater. Most of that water is inaccessible. Over 68% of that freshwater is found in glaciers, sheet ice, and icecaps. Just over 3% is found in groundwater. Only about 0.3% of freshwater is found in the surface water of lakes, rivers, streams and swamps. 99% of water is unavailable for use by humans.
Glaciers, sheet ice and snow caps are melting rapidly into the oceans, and they are not being replaced.
An average healthy human being can live for only 3 – 4 days without water.
We concluded, as has Gov. Newsom, that using less water is necessary but insufficient. We cannot put off the necessary investments on a statewide level to guarantee adequate supplies of freshwater for the future. Which is closer than we think.
A century of deals in apportioning rights to water from the Colorado river was made between Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico, plus a number of Indian tribes. California is entitled to more than a third of the river’s natural flow.
In 2019, a contingency plan effective through 2026 was agreed to laying out which state gets cuts in water supply from the lower Colorado River Basin. California’s cutback starts when Lake Mead’s water levels reach between 1,040 feet and 1,045 feet. Lake Mead will be below 1,040 feet by year-end 2022. The generation of electric power from the Hoover Dam will be under stress.
On July 22, Lake Mead was at 27% of capacity and falling. Lake Powell, also on the Colorado River, is at 24.81% of capacity and falling. Shasta Lake in California was only 37% full in February 2022. Oroville Lake was 42% of the total capacity on January 12.
In California, more and more water is being drawn from aquifers at a much faster rate than it can be replenished by natural water flows from rain, snow, rivers and man-made replenishment sources. The results are devastating. Millions of acre-feet of water have been permanently removed from aquifers which are our last natural resource against eventual water starvation.
In the examples below, accessible water in aquifers has fallen by more than 100 feet between 1930/1950 and 2016/2017. This is a huge loss of capacity. The natural replenishment of aquifer water levels from surface water, rain and snowmelt cannot keep up with the water extraction rates because, at the same time, these water sources are declining from years of long droughts.
In California, agriculture is a $50 billion a year industry that uses 80% of the available water in California.
In 1920, the population of California was 3,426,861. Today, the population of California is 39,185,605. That is a growth of 11.43 times the 1920 population.
In Fresno, the depth to reach groundwater in the aquifer in 1930 was 25 feet. By 2016, the depth of groundwater had increased to 130 ft. The population grew from about 70,000 to 550,000. In Clovis, the depth to reach groundwater was 25 feet in 1950. By 2017 it was 145 feet. The population grew from around 13,000 to about 120,000.
Fresno County is part of The North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency. In 2020 it proposed a plan to bring into balance the usage and replenishment of the aquifers. California needs activated aquifer usage/replenishment balance actions in place everywhere aquifers are being used to replace lost surface water supplies due to continuous droughts.
We know that we are not doing nearly enough to recycle water on a massive scale. We are not doing enough to replenish lost water in the many aquifers now substituting for surface water. We are not doing nearly enough to capture and store water from rain and snowmelt, both of which are declining in volume and frequency every year. We are not doing enough to capture and convert brackish water and sea water into potable water, nor enough to capture water from the humid air in our long coastal regions. California should be a leader in water management research and technology.
Yes, probably, there are plans in place to do some of this in California. But where is the urgency, the funding, the contracts or even the accelerated approvals process? If California’s experience with high-speed rail is our guide, we are in trouble.
