LeakBird

(April 24, 2009, The San Diego Union-Tribune)
After months of warnings and voluntary conservation programs, the San Diego County Water Authority yesterday moved to Level 2 drought alert.
The decision will spark mandatory water rationing of about 8 percent for residents throughout the county, from San Ysidro to Fallbrook. The planned restrictions include bans on certain [...]

(April 23, 2009, The Los Angeles Times)
DWP has a water conservation team whose members drive through neighborhoods in Los Angeles checking for water waste. If your sprinkler is running on a Wednesday, they can cite you for violating the conservation measures. For a first citation, you will receive a warning. Subsequent citations are subject to [...]

(April 20, 2009, The Mercury News)

Water users in Antioch will be asked to cut their consumption by 15 percent this summer.
The mandatory reduction comes because the Contra Costa Water District, from which Antioch purchases some of its water, has notified its customers of a decrease in available water this year, according to a city news [...]

(April 19, 2009, Kelly Zito, The San Francisco Chronicle)
“We’re out there telling people to use less water, and yet a lot of the revenue we have is based on what people use,” said Gary Breaux, finance director for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, which serves 1.3 million people in Contra Costa and Alameda counties. [...]

(April 9, 2009, AFP)
Some two million residents of Mexico City on Thursday began 36 hours without water under an emergency plan over Easter vacation to respond to a record drop in water supply and to work on repairs…
(Original Article Here)

(April 8, 2009, Reuters)
Despite dire warnings of water shortages due to prolonged drought, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday rejected a plan to ration water in the nation’s second-largest city for the first time in 18 years.
The unanimous 15-0 vote against the plan marked a surprise setback for Los Angeles water managers, who like [...]

(March 29, 2009, Tampa Bay Online)
On Friday, turning on your lawn sprinklers will become a crime in Tampa under the toughest water restrictions in the state.
Everyone else in the Bay area, meanwhile, will be allowed to turn on their sprinklers once a week. Their lawns may struggle and shrivel but likely will survive until the [...]

(March 23, 2009, The Mercury News)

Citing three dry years in a row, Silicon Valley’s biggest water supplier will vote this morning on whether to call for a 15 percent mandatory summer cutback, the first water rationing in Santa Clara County in 18 years. Yet, just over the county line, Fremont residents will face no restrictions.
On [...]

(March 22, 2009, The Mercury News)

As California’s drought continues, water rationing is becoming a reality in many cities — and Antioch is no exception.
On Tuesday, the City Council will be asked to weigh in on a water shortage contingency plan to cut consumption by an estimated 25 percent — the amount by which Antioch’s water [...]

(March 20, 2009, The Mercury News)

The pain of a full-blown summer drought came closer to reality Friday when the staff of Silicon Valley’s main water supplier recommended a 15 percent mandatory cutback.
If the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District — which is the wholesale supplier of drinking water for 1.8 million people from [...]

After reading today’s article in the San Diego Tribune in which the Metropolitan Water District has its drinking straws in its final water reserves and options, I’m convinced that water rationing will not be averted in Southern California (or perhaps all of California for that matter).  In other words, we can bank on water rationing, [...]

(March 4, 2009, Robert Glennon, The Huffington Post)
Drought has prompted California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state emergency. Water agencies are preparing to impose mandatory water rationing. We’re all hoping that melting snow in the Sierra will save the state’s farmers and city dwellers from hardship.
But once rain starts to fall – and it [...]

I think that David Zetland is onto the zeitgeist, only it hasn’t happened yet. What do I mean, or what is Mr. Zetland saying essentially?
Price water according to its scarcity, and water shortages will become a thing of the past.
This is the axe we hear Mr. Zetland grinding again and again, and it appears that [...]

(March 10, 2009, Reuters)
It’s hard to visualize a water crisis while driving the lush boulevards of Los Angeles, golfing Arizona’s green fairways or watching dancing Las Vegas fountains leap more than 20 stories high.
So look Down Under. A decade into its worst drought in a hundred years Australia is a lesson of what the American [...]

(March 10, 2009, Aguanomics)
The title of this post is my reformulation of “missing the forest for the trees,” and the subject of the post is a new report from the Pacific Institute.
In Water Scarcity and Climate Change: Growing Risks for Businesses and Investors, the PI assesses the various risks to water supplies that companies should [...]

David Curran wrote a stimulating op-ed on the California drought in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.  Mr. Curran expressed his perplexity at the incongruity of intermittent first quarter flooding in the Bay Area and the Governor’s dire “worst drought ever” declaration.
California has gone from being the bread basket of the US to a water crisis basket [...]

(March 8, 2009, SramanaMitra)
While people focus on carbon footprints and potential ways to reduce the impact man-made CO2 emissions, the world is running out of another of its key elements: fresh water.
We use fresh water much faster than it can replenish: it is increasingly scarce and has no alternative.
Water is a strategic resource for countries [...]

(March 7, 2009, MSNBC)
Using the back yard of a Tierrasanta resident as a backdrop, Mayor Jerry Sanders called on San Diegans to get serious about water conservation.
Sanders revealed what he has done personally to conserve and showed clear disappointment in the overall efforts of San Diegans.
“Despite some successes, we still continue to fall shrt of [...]

(March 5, 2009, Kansas City InfoZine)
Maintaining water quality and efficiency shouldn’t be purely a local problem, a panel of water experts told the House Science and Technology Committee Wednesday.
Five witnesses said federal agencies should cooperate on water research and policy initiatives to combat scarcity caused by drought and population growth.
“We can’t continue to use the [...]

With all of the rain California has been receiving over the last few weeks, water levels are back to 80% in Sierra snowpack terms and there is “drought improvement“.  The 167-mile stretch of the Hetch-Hetchy system, which provides 85% of the Bay Area’s water, can continue to flow at four fifths capacity.  But water restrictions [...]

(March 5, 2009, The San Francisco Chronicle)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s declaration of a statewide drought emergency last week had classic comic timing: It’s been pouring ever since. What’s not funny are the governor’s proposals: Expedited water transfers now, which may adversely affect fish and wildlife, and possible mandatory rationing later. Is the drought really that bad?
Some [...]

(March 4, 2009, The Mercury News)

It has been nearly a week since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped the bomb, laying out a doomsday drought scenario so starkly apocalyptic he sounded like Dr. Strangelove. And yet, Justina Pillado endured weather Tuesday in the teeth of the governor’s state of emergency that made her toes curl.
“This rain sucks,” [...]

(March 2, 2009, The Mercury News)

Even with the recent heavy rains that deluged the state, California’s snowpack is 80 percent of normal and the state’s largest reservoirs are still far below where they should be at this time of year.
“Obviously, it’s much better than last month. The problem is, on the heels of two critically [...]

(Feb. 28, 2009, Kelly Zito, The San Francisco Chronicle)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide drought emergency Friday, urging cities to cut their use of water 20 percent and paving the way for projects such as desalination plants and water recycling projects to bypass standard environmental reviews.
Despite heavy rainstorms this month, state officials say California’s water [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, The OCRegister)
Even as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a statewide water emergency Friday, Orange County agencies were pushing ahead with tough new restrictions on water use amid growing worries about drought-driven cuts in water supply.
Despite recent rains, the state is in its third year of drought, a statement from the Governor’s Office said. [...]

(Feb. 27, 2009, Reuters)
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday declared a state emergency due to drought and said he would consider mandatory water rationing in the face of nearly $3 billion in economic losses from below-normal rainfall this year.
As many as 95,000 agricultural jobs will be lost, communities will be devastated and some growers in [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, The Mercury News)

In March, after a series of cold winter storms, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was above normal. That seemed to be good news for California’s water supply, which relies heavily on Sierra Nevada snow.
But after a record heat wave in the early spring, it was as if the winter’s [...]

(Feb. 26, 2009, Bloomberg News)
On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30- foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.
As they’ve been doing since June, they’ll blast and dig straight down into the limestone surrounding the reservoir that supplies 90 percent of Las Vegas’s water. In September, [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, On The Scene, Fox News)

In case you didn’t know, the Southeastern United States has been in a drought for the last several years.  The City of Atlanta was in danger of losing their water supply and many small towns in Tennessee simply ran out.  To keep the Southeast from going completely dry, [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, The Ludwig Von Mises Institute)
It is near impossible to imagine any private company not enjoying the “problem” of high demand for its products and services. Yet there are some products that are repeatedly reported as shortages. There is one thing these products have in common: government intervention, typically in the form of [...]

(Feb. 23, 2009, David Zetland, Aguanomics)
I’m thinking that the water managers and politicians in San Diego must be drinking something other than simple, tasty water. It seems that they are bound and determined to implement the most-stupid possible water rationing scheme, i.e.,
Even San Diegans who have torn out their lawns, planted drought-tolerant landscaping and scrimped [...]

(Feb. 20, 2009, Contra Costa Times)

The Contra Costa Water District’s 500,000 customers likely will face mandatory water rationing in the coming months and some of the biggest farms in the state may get no water at all, water managers said Friday.
The cuts to water supplies across the state are in response to what is shaping [...]

(Feb. 19, 2009, Napa Valley Register)

The American Canyon city manager now has the power to order water use restrictions if the drought continues.
Under the new rules approved unanimously by City Council on Tuesday, business and residents who use too much water will pay a premium fee. Customers who already use little water will not have [...]

(Feb. 18, 2009, Steve Gorman, Reuters)
With a recent flurry of winter storms doing little to dampen California’s latest drought, the nation’s biggest public utility voted on Tuesday to impose water rationing in Los Angeles for the first time in nearly two decades.
Under the plan adopted in principle by the governing board of the L.A. Department [...]

(Feb. 13, 2009, The Los Angeles Times)

On Monday, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed accelerated water restrictions for Los Angeles — and the city got about a third of an inch of rain. In the past, showers were considered bad luck for a conservation push, but these days they are a fitting backdrop. We may get a [...]

(Feb. 12, 2009, Aguanomics)
I have criticized rationing as uneconomical, and I have criticized dumb rationing as unfair, yet water managers continue to pursue it.
What do I mean by that? Cutting EVERYONE back by 20% when supply falls by 20%. That’s not only lame compared to raising prices, but it’s patently unfair to cut water wasters [...]

(Feb. 11, 2009, Alternet)

Just as the economic evidence shows that we’re in a recession, the scientific evidence shows that climate change will affect our natural resources.
One logical response to the constant news of the economic recession is cutting back on discretionary purchases and developing a household budget.  That is, if we know that times are [...]

(Feb. 10. 2009, The Mercury News)

Santa Clara County residents will face mandatory water rationing this spring, although it is not yet clear exactly when, or how much residents and businesses will have to cut their water usage.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors voted Tuesday to impose rationing measures on the county’s 1.7 [...]

I finally got to catch David Zetland in person the other night, at the Black Rocks Arts Foundation (BRAF) on 3rd St.  The theme was “Elemental Interactions: Water” and Mr. Zetland opened with a 23-Minute talk, which I was able to film with my Flip camcorder.
I’ve broken Zetland’s talk up into three 7-minute parts:
Part 1 [...]

(Feb. 4, 2009, Kelly Zito, San Francisco Chronicle)
With California in a critical drought, every shower, load of laundry and glass of tap water counts. But only in Bolinas could those things cost you your water connection.
The oceanside enclave in Marin County has enacted some of the state’s toughest water restrictions. Each customer – with the [...]

(Feb. 3, 2009, San Francisco Business Times)

North Bay water companies are looking at rationing to cut use by 30 percent or more.
The Sonoma County Water Agency, which serves Sonoma and northern Marin counties, told cities and water districts to plan on losing 30 percent of their flow, according to North Bay news reports.
“If things don’t [...]

(Jan. 30, 2009, The Los Angeles Times)

Reporting from Mexico City — Already-scarce water gets even scarcer this weekend for millions of Mexicans.
One of the world’s largest cities is launching a rationing plan in a drastic — and some say overdue — effort to conserve water after rampant development, mismanagement and reduced rainfall caused supplies [...]

(Jan. 28, 2009, The Mercury News)
San Diego needs to watch its water use.Mayor Jerry Sanders said Tuesday that water rationing for residents is likely to be imposed by July 1, the beginning of San Diego’s next fiscal year.
Sanders says the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California may soon slash deliveries to the region by as [...]

We’ve been watching water rates jump here and there, 5%, 10%, sometimes 20% or 30%, all across the nation for the last year. But shocking news was delivered today that San Diego customers may soon have a 200% to 400% water rate increase on their hands!
There’s some SERIOUS groundwork (or groundwater-work) for water rationing, followed [...]

(Jan. 19, 2009, The Mercury News)
A Napa County town is imposing strict water-use limits on its residents as the region confronts sparse rainfall and forecasts promising little relief. The St. Helena City Council voted last week to implement emergency restrictions that allow residents to water their lawns, gardens and vineyards only on specific days.
The rules [...]

(Photo Courtesy of Collectors-Badges.com)
Aguanomics water virtuoso David Zetland recently did a 26-minute interview with Bloomberg Radio that’s well worth listening to. Among a myriad of thoughtful points, one caught my attention in particular: The costliness of water rationing.
Zetland was referring to a tack Santa Barbara took in the 80’s during another big California drought, whereby [...]

(Jan. 14, 2009, Mercury News)
Sonoma County water officials are warning residents that mandatory water rationing might be need later this year if the area doesn’t get more rain soon. Officials say Lake Mendocino is at its lowest point in 20 years. Lake Sonoma also is far below normal amid a statewide drought.
Heavy, prolonged rainfall over [...]

The heat is on, it seems the fuzz are coming, as an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, May 14th, declaring “East Bay Begins Water Rationing”
Some of the more frightening truths:

“Residents of single-family homes throughout much of Alameda and Contra Costa counties are required to immediately reduce water use by 19 [...]

Last week’s SF Chronicle ran a timely and fascinating story by Kelly Zito on water rationing and the future of California’s water supplies.
I was amazed to learn that 80% of California’s water goes to agriculture, whereas 20% goes to urban areas, and that more water, because of increasing demand, is beginning to be supplied to [...]