Musings on water

[Post for Sunday, February 2, 2009]

This is Texas, Texas is hot, much like most of the mid-west it's also dry (in some places), water is worth its weight... so to say. We don't get rain like Seattle and such so we rely on rivers mostly. The same rivers that carry water from up north somewhere from a place called "Colorado". Colorado........It ain't Texas so I don't see what the big deal is?

Now we have plenty of natural reservoirs and we have dammed the rivers to create man-made lakes. It provided fresh water for decades. However, as of late it seems that our water levels are dropping very quickly. Our natural reservoirs are having trouble recharging (rain water) and the lake levels are dropping as well. Now, I am happy to provide my empirical opinion on why, first, our supply of water is dropping and , second, why the demand is so high

Supply
To many g-d dang California's are moving to Texas! One is too many but in the last ten years we have seen an exodus of people from California move to Texas. You know its not just California. it seems like East coast as well as West coast have been moving to the mid-west or just mid. I am talking hundreds of thousands of people. This brings a natural population growth waaaaay outside of the normal growth variance you would see from .... well natural growth. So basically the source and destination (in this context) have seen a huge increase in population which from the supply side tells us that more people are consuming water before it can even reach the destination.

Demand
Over consuming! For purely selfish reasons most people in suburbs of Texas love, and I do mean love, to grow grass that is not native to Texas (St. Augustine). If I recall the numbers correctly St. Augustine/Bermuda grass takes about 1,00 gallons of water per square foot to keep green. The average lawn size in Texas, I've seen 1,000 square feet posted several times, needs 92,857 gallons of water need to keep just one yard of St. Augustine/Bermuda alive and green (per year). multiply that by the number of homes with yards and you can see a huge water demand right there. Another factor is that our Summer rain fall is "poor" meaning that the highest demand for watering St. Augustine/Bermuda grass comes at a time when water supply is at an all time low.

There are a ton of other factors; Long showers, inefficient watering devices (shower heads, crappers, etc), washing your car at noon, watering your yard at noon, etc.

my solution to all this mess? Build a wall around California