When Gov. Jerry Brown announced plans for a 25 percent reduction in urban water use, I immediately thought of Teri Redman Kahn, a Brentwood resident who has been promoting the idea of drought-resistant plants for years.
Teri has suggested for quite some time that grass on San Vicente’s median strip be replaced by drought resistant plants and crushed stone. It feels like her ideas just took a big step toward becoming reality.
I asked Teri to pen a guest editorial about how Brentwood should be thinking about the water crisis. Click here to read her guest editorial.
I attended a conference on water usage a while back at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, and many of the expert speakers there said the little things can really add up. If everyone cut back on watering their yards, the gains would be huge. DWP will actually pay you to replace grass with water-resistant plantings. More and more people are taking advantage of this.
Another idea presented at the Milken conference was to re-pipe our plumbing systems to capture “greywater” at the source – water from showers, bathtubs, washing machines, kitchen sinks and even rainwater – and use this water, which is far cleaner than “blackwater” from toilets – for irrigation, toilet flushing, wetland replenishment, etc.
Right now everything is mixed together and cleaning all this water is expensive. Then, almost all the cleaned up water goes into the ocean. If we separated out the greywater, cleanup efforts could focus mostly on blackwater, with its biological contaminants.
That would make it easier to quickly return greywater into the system for other purposes – especially irrigation and replenishing groundwater supplies. If we store the water in the earth, think of this as huge storage tanks we don’t have to build.
We all have a lot to learn about this. I saw an ad recently about free rain barrels being handed out by the city. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with one if I had it.
Two representatives of DWP gave an excellent presentation about water recycling at the last BCC meeting. I’m going to suggest to the speakers that they tape this talk and post it on a website where all can see it. It was quite informative.
Some at the BCC asked if desalination is an option. With the ocean so close by, it seems like an obvious idea. But the DWP representatives said it costs a lot more to clean ocean water than recycle water that’s already in the system, so the DWP’s focus will be on the “low hanging fruit” for now – water conservation and recycling.
A letter to the editor was sent to the LA Times recently, suggesting a water pipeline from points north to California. Huge amounts of ice in Alaska and Canada melt and find their way into the sea; why not build a big pipeline and send some of it this way? Water could become a “cash crop” for our neighbors to the north.
DWP representatives said pumping water is actually quite costly. Much energy is required to do this. So, once again, water conservation and recycling will be the first lines of attack, according to DWP.
Clearly water prices are kept artificially low. Look at your water bill next time it arrives; water is ridiculously inexpensive. Our electricity costs far more by comparison. In a worst-case scenario, we could live without electricity; we can’t live without water. If we bumped the price of water, waste would go down and some of the more exotic sources of water (desalination plants; pipelines from the north) would become more economic.
Some at the Milken conference pointed out that upping the price of water would hit those who live in lower-income areas much harder than those who live in places like Brentwood. As a percentage of income, basics add up more quickly for those of lesser means. So there hasn’t been the political will to raise water prices.
So let’s exempt certain areas from increased water bills and focus, to start, on neighborhoods that can afford to pay more – like Brentwood. Have you ever walked by someone’s house and seen lots and lots of water rushing down the street toward a drain that then empties out to sea? I know I have.
If we cut back on green grass, we’ll miss the greenery, to be sure. But who will miss mowing the lawn?
Let’s get on board the water-reduction and water recycling bandwagon now and lead by example. Let’s do it now while we can still do this in a friendly way. As Teri Redman Kahn points out in her guest editorial, we surely don’t want other parts of the city to get mad as us for using more than our fair share of water.
It’s time to put on our thinking caps. All ideas should be explored. Got any ideas for saving water? Send them to jeffhall@brentwoodnewsonline.com. We’ll discuss this more in future issues.
