They have been saying that a big one is coming on the Hayward in the next thirty years for as long as I've been paying attention, so for about thirty years.
The next six months will be particularly important.
I suppose the Bering Tunnel will matter less to me when I live off the coast of Japan on Hayward Island.
Part of the problem seems to be California is full of profligate assholes. From the article:
But the Mira Loma plant was surrounded by six acres of grass that annually slurped up about 15 million gallons of water -- enough to supply roughly 90 Southern California households for a year.
If that's right, it means the average Southern California household uses more than five times as much water as mine and I live on top of an underground stream.
I wonder if they're including how much water it takes to provide food and energy to a family, not just household use.
Moby, if you rely on rainfall to water your landscaping, then the average Californian almost certainly does use five times as much water as you do.
Indoor use is about 20% of a household's water use. The other 80% is for landscaping. If you aren't watering your yard (because rain does it for you) then you only have the indoor use component.
That said, outdoor watering can be more or less efficient and you can select an outdoor look that doesn't require a lot of water. But the need for outdoor watering is pretty inescapable in a place where it doesn't rain for eight months.
That might make more sense, but until there's a citation, I'm going to assume profligate assholes.
5: probably not, but if you are interested, I think the Pacific Institute has a water footprint project (which results do not match my intuition) that might tell you.
6.1: Rainfall and the fact that it's 90% paved or mulched.
The figures quoted in 4 seemed quite high, but I think it works out to a depth of 2.3 meters/year, which is only about twice our annual precipitation here in the Austin that was foretold to us. Really thirsty grass, and huge losses to evaporation?
6: Wow! That's a lot of wasted water! I never thought that the grass would not exist at all without extensive human intervention. Why does any house in those places bother doing it?
Anyway, I think maybe having a private grass lawn in Southern California puts you on team Profligate Asshole.
Why does any house in those places bother doing it?
Grass is nice, but one wonders. I don't have enough of a mental image to put a percentage on it, but a lot of homes in New Mexico were xeriscaped, and it can look good. This is an instance where houses with tiny yards, but more parks in a neighborhood, can be a good idea.
10: I suppose we have higher humidity also. That would keep evaporation much lower.
11: Possibly the home owner doesn't have to pay the actual cost of the water.
10: That doesn't seem like an insane amount of water to you? We're a fairly wet part of the nation (but not the wettest) and so twice that, piped artificially from a slightly less dry (but still pretty dry!) area of the country is preposterous. If The West is going to allow behavior like that, they deserve their water problems.
Boy do I hate gallons. Converted into a reasonable unit, that is 46 acrefeet per 6 acres. That's very high, 7.6acrefeet/acre.
The grass needs about 3 or 3.5 acrefeet/acre for a year, including evaporation. (As a rule of thumb, so does just about every crop.) so it is getting twice as much water as it needs. Turned to native plants or xeriscaped, it could probably get down to the 1-2 acrefeet/acre. I wouldn't guess that evaporation at one location is unusually high, rather I would figure that the extra is running down the roar or leaking into a nearby stormdrain without being noticed.
AIHMHB, I was raised with a strong cultural tradition( among Western U.S. Anglos) that having a lawn of real grass, and generally having landscaping that is appropriate to places with lots of rainfall (rose bushes, lots of other flowers, willow trees, etc.), is sort of the White Man's birthright, or even more strongly, it's a demonstration of white superiority over the Native Americans and Mexicans who we took the land from. My parents will never give up their lawn, even though it looks way worse than decent xeriscaping. Mormons love to talk about Brigham Young and irrigation and making the desert bloom as a rose. And of course Californians have transmuted "these massive water projects are the source of all my money" into "these massive water projects are the very basis of civilization."
11: Lots of social pressure. Friends of mine here decided to let their lawn go dormant during the hottest part of the summer, and their neighbors placed sprinklers on their lawn. Only recently were the city regulations changed to permit non-grass lawns.
It's tough here, though, because grass does really well except in the heat of summer, so full xeriscaping doesn't make a ton of sense (grass will grow through your rock beds and actually takes more work.) Our compromise has been to make all of the ornamental flower beds xeric, so they can get by with only minimal watering once established, and slowly decreasing the amount of lawn, but it takes time and effort. Much easier to mow the grass once a week than to weed a flower bed.
But the need for outdoor watering is pretty inescapable in a place where it doesn't rain for eight months.
I'm not sure what you mean by "need" here.
Oh hai 18! It's typically the newcomers who keep pointing out that it's really not quite wet enough for an English garden here...
If The West is going to allow behavior like that, they deserve their water problems.
So long as California does have behavior like that, gains are easy. For a few days of the groundskeeper's time, they can find the leak or re-set the automatic sprinklers or put in better sprinkler system. That's the easy case.
A harder case is getting them to switch over the kind of landscaping. People are nuts about their lawns and someone else being indifferent to lawns doesn't make them want lawns less.
The hardest case is where they can't have any outdoor landscaping of any kind. I have to admit, I would find that a hardship myself.
But the first two cases would take urban Californians a long way. As the drought progresses, the real squeeze will be agriculture. That is more interesting to me, but like the study says, not a large economic loss to the state.
16: Sorry, I wasn't clear. It does seem like a huge amount, but not by the somewhere-a-decimal-point-is-missing factor I was expecting.
On preview, 17.last is a more likely culprit.
AIHMHB
Didn't that used to have more lettes?
20: need = have anything in your yard besides bare dirt and dead weeds from winter.
26: Dormant grass isn't bare dirt or dead weeds unless grass works differently in California than it works in Nebraska.
Friends of mine here decided to let their lawn go dormant during the hottest part of the summer, and their neighbors placed sprinklers on their lawn.
Wow.
When we lived in Lubbock, we used a xeriscaping technique known as "complete neglect." A lot of native grasses and weeds popped up that were adapted to survive in semi-arid conditions. They rarely got to be very tall, and I guess if they did, we cut them down. I don't recall owning a lawnmower. It looked fine.
Just out of curiosity and my own desire to complain about my high water bill, what does it cost in Los Angeles or whatever for a month of water/sewer if you use 15,000 gallons?
My own water/sewer bill is over $80 a month. That's the minimum amount you can pay even if you don't have a lawn and only poop when out of the house.
Mormons love to talk about Brigham Young and irrigation and making the desert bloom as a rose.
I'm picking up a kinship between Mormons and Israelis.
32: Wait, the kinship is that one group has converted the other's dead ancestors, right?
New Mexico state government might have been chronically underfunded, but they put together a great xeriscaping guide.
Here's streetview of a street a friend lived on in Albuquerque, where we stayed pretty often. At least 80% xeriscaped. Maybe more posh neighborhoods have more lawns? I don't even want to think about Rio Rancho. It would be interesting to look at some LA neighborhoods, too.
Deliberately dumping lots of water on the ground around your house for any reason other than to grow food is stupid and wasteful. But if the only alternative really is bare dirt, then I guess I have at least some fleeting sympathy. What gets me is how many people water their lawns constantly even around here, even though plenty of lush green grass and other plants will grow fine just from the water falling from the sky. (My grass grows much thicker and faster than I would prefer, and I've never even considered watering it.) But for some reason people want to plant exotic grasses or other landscaping that requires even more water. So they still run sprinklers all the damn time. Insane.
urple: Objectively anti-backyard pot.
My grass grows much thicker and faster than I would prefer
... laydeez.
Sitting here 20+ floors up in SF, thank you all for focusing on drought rather than the other thing.
I did think the linked article on drought was a bit odd in saying perennial tree and vine crops would become more common, as they require reliable water supplies over many, many years. I would not mourn the passing of alfalfa and cotton farming in California that's for sure.
This makes me feel slightly guilty for having had some landscapers come in to re-do the lawn that the last landscapers totally botched (lots of weed seed, poor choice of grass type, general lousy work, grubs), and having to water it daily while it gets established. But it's not a dry climate generally and we're certainly paying a lot for the water.
(also, the water/sewer charge is like 2/3 sewer and the lawn-watering, of course, isn't using any sewer capacity, so the city is definitely getting well-paid for this water).
I think the news here is that the faults are "locked," and we're not just blindly waiting for plates to slide.
This is news? I guess maybe it's not common knowledge but locked faults is basically the cause of earthquakes everywhere.
There are no more locked faults in the Gulf of Mexico. BP lubricated them for us. Nobody even thanked them.
I don't have enough of a mental image to put a percentage on it, but a lot of homes in New Mexico were xeriscaped, and it can look good.
IM(minimal)E, this struck me as an indicator of the New Mexico-Arizona cultural divide. I saw a lot more lawns in AZ.
In local water news, we had two days of rain the entire summer, and then a couple of days ago smashed the rainfall record for the date (1.88 inches, previous record 1.31, from 1951). Blissful memories of summer weather instantly erased.
Does everybody there have those really nice raincoats from REI that cost so much I can never make myself buy one?
Having actual rain gear is mostly deprecated unless you're a bicycle commuter. Umbrellas are for tourists.
If God didn't want you to be wet, He wouldn't piss on you for nine months straight.
Every AGU and GSA for a decade has had a for-the-general-public lecture on "Was the recent giant earthquake elsewhere on the Ring of Fire a warning that Cascadia/California are now at greater risk?" with the punchline "No greater risk because we could have the Big Ones ANY DAY."
The recent GSA had a Cascadia Fault track, most of which I didn't understand, but there was an interesting argument that Cascadia proper is enough like the system in the bend in Chile that we might get an undersea/underplate warning as they did. Not that I'm sure what I would do if I thought there was a higher chance of the Big One sometime in the next ten days. Sleep outdoors?
(Also fun in tectonic lectures: a new-to-me plot: Beachball interpretation, deriving a beachball from the sensor data, beach ball results worldwide (probably fire walled, sorry).)
They make umbrellas with swords in them. Just saying.
44: Last time I flew out of Phoenix, I saw a couple mega-blocks that were full of suburban houses with curvy-suburban streets where all of the backyards went right into a correspondingly curvy lake, like so. Are these the remains of natural ponds, a cunning use of drinking reservoirs, or suburban excess at its worse? Look how many of those houses have pools!
In 1953, Wallace Stegner published Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the story of John Wesley Powell's thirty-year struggle to explore and understand the geography—including the ethnography—of the arid west. And of how his attempts to shape policy to reflect his understanding, to reflect reality, collided with the massive momentum of American culture, which wanted to project existing habits and institutions into a terrain totally unsuited to them. There was a huge will to deny that any such limits as he envisioned really existed, and there was a scientistic ideology that "rain follows the plow," or essentially that people could will an arable climate into existence.
Stegner was under no illusion that Powell's views had prevailed, in his lifetime or afterwards. The pattern endlessly repeated was of ruin and hard lessons almost immediately forgotten, of impregnable denial. His hope in the 50s was that that might be ready to change, but in subsequent editions he admitted that that didn't happen either.
And still hasn't.
Phoenix, as far as I could tell, is an abomination.
Powell's organization of the US into states based on watersheds is great.
Grass: I let mine go brown in dry summers; it turns out it's still cool and pleasant to walk on; it comes back nice and green in the fall. Pre-midcentury California art often refers to, or paints, `the golden hills', meaning the dry summer grasses. They green up very nicely, too. Anywhere the unmanaged land does that, it will require less management than actual xeriscaping. Doing xeriscaping when not in a xeric climate is nearly as weird as trying to do SE English gardening in every climate in the US. Hey, actual English people, when you have hosepipe bans, what does your grass do? Brown temporarily, or die off?
Chaparral is somewhere between, and often looks really untidy from close up. I was part of a slow project to put in a garden next to a Berkeley building with native (very local) germ stock but the semi-formal layout that the building and historical landscape plan expect. I think it would have worked, had I been there longer, and done some serious pruning every couple of years. No-one's going to keep up the buckwheat as a `topiary' edging, alas (native buckwheats will grow into lovely hemispheres on their own, one doesn't need to prune them, and they look a lot like tidy privet edging. But you do need to weed around them).
"For a while, poor people would get a lot poorer throughout the Central Valley," he said. "Then they'd move."
Finally read the OP article. Lotta agony wrapped up in that little paragraph.
Yeah, that was the other bit I thought about quoting.
52: So true. I was in Tucson visiting friends and we did a road trip so that I could visit my grandparents' grave. This necessitated driving through Phoenix.
The shopping plaza with The Dump and a chain restaurant near Phoenix had the lushest lawn and landscaping I've seen in a plaza for a while.
We had to stop for gas, and the gas station was called the AutoSpa. It was landscaped with lavender bushes and willow trees. And it seemed like they wanted to dump buckets of water on every car--not just the cars of people who paid to go through a car wash.
51: My dad always says stuff like that. He probably read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, having lived his whole life just on the rainy side of it.
But he was also more on the financial side of it than the environmental side. His main point seemed to have been to warn us not to buy farmland when crop prices were high.
When we lived in Texas, we had neighbors who suddenly stopped speaking to us. We thought it was because they found out we didn't go to church, but it turned out it was because we didn't water our lawn.
We have neighbors that stopped talking to us, but I have no idea why. We never talked much anyway.
11: Our city cut back the summer lawn watering schedule from 3 nights/week (April - Oct), to 2 -- but even more, they cut November to March watering from 1 day/week to 0. (The council passed that just this summer.) November begins our rainy time of year, usually... it'll be interesting to see how people adjust. It should reduce the common "scalp and replant with fescue" winter pattern that's so common here.
The big reason people keep lawns here, even in drought, is inertia. If you're not going to live somewhere very long, it's expensive to redo your lawn as anything else--and reduces the mythical "curb appeal" for house shopping families. An even greater factor is that the piping and sprinklers is already setup for the current layout--changing your sprinkler layout involves long weeks of work or a crew to dig up the pipes in a timely way. (Though your xeriscape plan would probably allow you to eliminate the sprinkler system altogether, I suppose.)
The big reason people keep lawns here, even in drought, is inertia
That sounds right to me.
If you let tall grass dry in CA without doing some maintenance on it, you can run a higher fire risk. In the east bay parks they bring in goats.
62 is completely outside my ken. I've never lived anyplace where the lawn had permanent sprinklers set up. Is it common in California?
50: Good lord, they built an artificial lake snaking through all the suburban backyards. Are they pretending they're in Florida? Did they stock the lake with alligators?
The thing that annoyed me flying into Phoenix was the complete absence of residential solar. No solar PV, no solar hot water. You see more solar panels flying into Boston or Seattle.
65: Yeah, California is peppered with these trench-laid sprinkler systems. They're not as inflexible as 62 implies---the pipes and heads are where they are, but if you change from lawn to semi-xeriscape you can in principle change the heads and adjust the range and shape of the spray.
Phoenix is the worst. Tucson, to the extent it can push back against the forces trying to turn it into Phoenix, is somewhat saner. In the neighborhood where I grew up there were very few grass lawns in backyards, and none in the front. Pebbles, scrub and thorns feel homey to me, and at present I'm letting our front yard die out slowly, so the landlord doesn't notice, in hopes of replacing it with a giant organ pipe cactus or something.
My grandmother (Santa Cruz) removed her front lawn during the last big drought in the early 90s (the back has a small creek). She replanted it about ten years later. Her father maintained beautiful flower gardens as well as vegetable gardens, and I think she felt she owed it to him to keep up. She has had built in sprinklers since putting the lawn in, and she waters once a week at night (or did, not sure what she does now). There is a handwritten index card taped to the control box for the sprinklers to a former gardener that says, "I do like my lawn to be green, but I am not made of money! Do not water more than twice a week or during daylight hours. It's like watching money evaporate." (Something to that effect.)
The boyfriend says it's noticeable how much more careful my family is about water usage that folks from the Great Lakes states.
65, 67: Yeah, most houses have permanent sprinkler systems. In fact, those sprinkler systems, and the first set of grass is often installed by the developer as part of house construction these days.
Interestingly, CALGreen requires calculation of the water use and compliance with the Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (or a stricter local equivalent) for new commercial projects, but not homes. The CALGreen requirement started in 2008, and is erratically (at best) enforced across the state--often by city planning departments. Since 2011, most new non-residential projects also require a separate water meter/submeter for landscaping, so you can track inside and outside use separately.
There's also a requirement that new landscaping sprinklers must be controlled with weather or soil moisture sensors, and that applies to all projects.
Very few cities have passed ordinances allowing them to address existing landscaping. The last one I worked for had the authority to go after "water wasters" on the books, but hadn't used it beyond requiring sprinkler repair.
64: A lawn mowed to 3" or 4" will brown and recover at that height, though. Not like having dry tules knocking the eaves.
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Kevin Drum's got cancer, and has just given some details.
He thinks the short-term prognosis is good.
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72: Ugh. Based on what he'd said earlier this week I'd been guessing it was cancer, but still.
Maybe more posh neighborhoods have more lawns?
In general, yes, but in looking around street view for examples in the Northeast Heights I couldn't find any that show the number of lawns I remember those neighborhoods having when I was a kid. That may be partly my faulty memory, but it's also likely that xeriscaping has become more popular in the past few years as the reality of the water supply situation has become more apparent. This seems to be the case even in Rio Rancho, where a quick spot check found very few lawns. Super-fancy neighborhoods in the foothills are a different story; they generally leave the native vegetation in place and build around it, since those people can afford architects who do that sort of thing. Bave is totally right about the racial element to this, but Jesus is also right about NM being more moderate in this respect than other Southwestern states.
they generally leave the native vegetation in place and build around it, since those people can afford architects who do that sort of thing
I got to spend a little time within the pale of a Spanish land grant, still a single estate, on -- I won't be too specific, but the land ran from the coast to the mountain crest near a California town no-one would be sorry to live in. Lots of carefully grazed open space, the (excellent) arable land rented to organic farmers with conservation remits, and the house compound had some of the most brilliant landscaping I've ever seen. Native plantings, laid out right-plant-right-place for the burnt hillslopes, the little streambank, the salt wind -- but the overall effect was a perfect Gertrude Jekyll English border. *Brilliant* editing.
The lots I'm talking about are much smaller than that: more like typical rich-person suburban homes, but larger and more tasteful than McMansions. The current occupants are not necessarily the people who built the houses, but comparable in wealth and status and all at a level where context-sensitive design is a serious possibility. Worlds away from typical UMC Sunbelt subdivisions.
In the Middlewest, there are examples of tallgrass prairie landscaping, usually associated with larger estates but sometimes on much smaller plots. I'd be curious if around the country there aren't analogous things.
There is definitely a class divide in ecological sensibility, this one cutting through about the middle of the UMC, with distribution dependent on education and to some extent ethnicity as well as wealth.
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Has chocolate milk never been sold in New Zealand before? Or is there something new about this product?
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65. I dunno about CA, but I live in MA, and a lot of people have sprinkler systems even though most years the grass doesn't even brown up. Ours doesn't, anyway, and we never water it.
Of course this is UMCland.
1, 42: Yeah, I'm trying to see what precisely is new here, It seems that they have made a a lot of quite precise measurements of movement along the faults over a fairly long period of time. So I think their estimates are probably better than others but the article and others I've found do a poor job of indicating how the current estimates differ* from previous ones. And yes, per JM the Hayward Fault in particular has been the subject of warnings (for instance this USGS paper from 2008. "The Hayward Fault: America's Most Dangerous?"). Her's a more detailed write up on the National Geographic site, and a presentation from the lead author describing mapping some of the faults from a few years back (warning PowerPoint with some eye and sensibility-damaging colors choices).
*Most notably, the Green Valley Fault in the North Bay's Solano County "is likely to have a larger earthquake than people previously thought," says James J. Lienkaemper of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. But I'd like to see how much "bigger."
The madness of crowds. Apparently it's just really fatty & sugary, which is why it tastes so good.
Overestimation of SF earthquake impact may in fact be the lowest form of "humor."
If there is a big earthquake (on the Hayward in particular) I'm sure the tech-lead rebuilding will be a thing to see. Disruptive!
17: that is 46 acrefeet per 6 acres. That's very high, 7.6acrefeet/acre.
IAMNAH, but aka 7.6 feet.
81: So the concept really is new there? It's been widespread in the US for decades.
To tie these subthreads together, I calculate that New Zealand is producing (and immediately consuming) approximately .024 acrefeet of chocolate milk per week.
In case anyone was confused by these strange "liters" mentioned in the article in 78.
Give it in acrefeet per acre or you've go nothing.
It's apparently only available on the North Island, so that would be .000000000854 acrefeet/acre.
Much less if you include the whole country, of course.
3.6237836e-10 acrefeet per acre. Or for the non-hydrologists among us, enough to coat New Zealand in a layer of chocolate milk ~1 angstrom deep.
OK, so a little more than 2½ angtroms over the North Island.
Oh no we've had it for ages. It's just fancy. And from an ad man's company.
The only include the 's' in angstrom in the South Island because provincialism.
93: Lorde brought the first chocolate milk to New Zealand. Unless you count Elijah Wood, but he never shared it with anyone else.
93: Ah, that makes more sense. Well, sort of.
