According to this recent story by Matt Weiser of the Sacramento Bee, SacTown (supposedly one of the city’s nicknames, per Wikipedia) easily beat out such formidable competitors as Las Vegas and Los Angeles in per capita water use. Other highly-populated regions throughout the state and country have gone all out in the grueling, high-stakes contest, but in the end, as Weiser notes, it wasn’t even close:

No concentration of residents and businesses, however, uses as much as Sacramento: 25 percent more per capita on a daily basis than Las Vegas, and nearly 50 percent more than Los Angeles.

Stunned also-ran opponents were quick to point out that Sacramento’s large base of industrial and agricultural users gave it an unfair advantage, but Weiser notes that the victory was a community effort:

Even excluding large industrial and agricultural users, the Bee’s review of an array of water statistics found per-capita consumption here is greater than the U.S. daily average. It’s also higher than urban use in Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and a host of other developed nations.

What’s Sacto’s (another nickname) secret? Well, apparently the city has developed some innovative tactics, such as banning brooms for outdoor use. Asked why she was hosing down her sidewalk, a resident said:

. . .it’s either that or the (leaf) blower.”

But, as in all high-level competition, what it really comes down to is dogged determination. While other cities, such as Las Vegas and even LA, have started to bow to environmentalists’ pressures to conserve, Sacramento and its surrounding municipalities have stolidly resisted. Observers are still shaking their heads in awe over the region’s daring eight-year fake-out play: In 2000, Sacramento and 14 other regional urban areas promised to meet 16 conservation goals. To date, they’ve collectively failed to meet half the goals, and regional leader Sacramento, the Big Tomato, completed none.

The region isn’t planning on resting on its laurels. Though conservationists are pushing for reducing the amount of water taken from the American and Sacramento rivers, Weiser reports that:

. . .several Sacramento-area water districts are laying plans to divert more river flows to keep up with demand.

The good news is that we’ve been forced to take to our collective beds, which really isn’t such a bad thing. It will give us a couple of days of downtime to rest, evaluate our work thus far, contemplate ways to upgrade the blog, and reassess this whole cumbersome writing-in-the-first-person plural business.

Before we sink back into a hallucinogenic fever-and-Theraflu-induced stupor, we raise a shaky finger to point you in the direction of Alternet’s water page, which offers a big selection of water-related articles where you can learn, for example, why a desalination plant will soon be in operation in supposedly water-flush New England.

. . .cloud seeders fly directly into the roiling depths, firing dozens of foot-long flares that disperse a cocktail of salty substances as they burn up. The salt forms millions of ice nuclei that attract droplets of water. Eventually, the drops grow heavy enough to fall out of the sky as rain. “Our mission is to make inefficient clouds more efficient with aerosols that are lacking in nature,” says Bruce Boe, Weather Modification’s director of meteorology.

Yes, science is finally dealing with those inefficient–possibly even lazy–clouds that are floating around up there all listless and anemic due to an aerosol deficiency. (in this sense, aerosol mean fine particulate matter dispersed in a gas, not just what you spray on ants or armpits.)

Our cheeky, skeptical tone notwithstanding, we really don’t know if cloud seeding works. As the article states, there’s no agreement about it in the scientific community (see also here). But this hasn’t stopped the wide-spread use of cloud-seeding to not only induce precipitation, but to disperse fog, reduce the size of hailstones, and clear polluted air. Hey, The Chinese swear by it.

Click on the illustration to see other examples of the spectacular work of its creator, Ian Kim.

These first couple of paragraphs from the blog of the Greensboro, NC-based News & Record raise the possibility that squeamishness could encourage conservation:

As yet another drought turns what once were local lakes into vast plains of cracked red clay, how serious — really serious — are we willing to get about conserving water?

Serious enough to raise a toast with the same water in which we bathed or washed dishes — or worse?

This article discusses LA’s plan for “sewer to spigot” (another colorful term coined by detractors) recycling. This blog entry discusses a recently launched Orange County system for what the author considers an acceptable method for this kind of recycling.

According to the recent Water & Wastes Digest State of the Industry Report, the average water/wastewater professional has been working in the industry for 22 years. Almost one-third (30%) of 10,000 randomly surveyed subscribers to Water & Wastes Digest have been in the industry for 30 years or more. Additionally, 41.5% of respondents said they are between the ages of 50 and 59.

It doesn’t take much to see that Baby Boomers currently hold many critical positions and as they reach retirement, there won’t be young professionals galore waiting to enter the water and wastewater field. This problem is even more severe in rural areas and remote locations where it is especially challenging to find, train and keep skilled employees.

What’s more alarming is that many utilities could find themselves in such desperate need to fill vacancies that they may end up hiring people lacking the technical know-how and experience necessary for the job.

Hey kids, want Waterblogged.info’s advice? Of course you do! Head on over to Water & Wastes Digest‘s web site and nose around through their content, particularly the Zone link. If your eyes don’t glaze over reading about filtration, membrane technology, and ultraviolet disinfection, and that indie band or hip hop career isn’t taking off as planned, check out your local community college or university for the relevant training. We’re talkin’ recession-proof employment here. (At social gatherings, you might just want to say that you’re in the water management field and skip the wastewater part. Just sayin’. . . .)

We have dutifully added a link to the KGO video to our ever-growing page of desalination resources: Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info: Desalination. Included in that compendium is a narrated slide show called A Tour of Tampa Bay’s Desalination Plant, written and narrated by a journalist who specializes in water issues, Cynthia Barnett.

Navigating from the handy-dandy book icon below, you can read it online or download it as a PDF. You executives out there can also read or download the executive summary, and there is even a podcast summary. For some reason, items on the web that are designated FREE in capital letters are not, but in this case, it’s lower-case free, meaning you can read or download the entire document without paying a nickel. (If you insist on spending money, you can buy the paperback version for the strange sum of $57.83.) Waterblogged.info has addressed desalination here and here, and maintains and updates the soon-to-be-famous Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info: Desalination, a comprehensive package of online resources on the topic—pro and con and every position in-between—with annotated links to articles, white papers, PDFs, diagrams, and videos. It’s also free in the lower-case sense of the word.

Desalination: …
Read this FREE online!Full Book | PDF Summary | PDF Report Brief

Indeed, there is. The catch is that we’re not talking about Bling H2O, which will set you back one crumpled portrait of Andrew Jackson for a 375-ml. bottle and ostensibly earn you the approbation of a certain kind of person. Nor are we recommending any of the other luxury bottled waters, which you can learn about in the video below.

Let Scott Harrison, founder of Charity, explain why buying a $20-dollar bottle of water isn’t as self-indulgent as it sounds. Or, possibly even better, let Simon Willows and Beck school you.

Actually, Perdue didn’t say that, but he could have, because, like the members of the Georgia legislature, he’s a shameless idiot who should be removed from office. The state’s newest solution to persistent drought and the imminent drying up of Atlanta? Why, revive a centuries’ old border dispute between the Water Hog State and Tennessee, and move Geogia’s border approximately 1-1/2 miles to the north to include a portion of the Tennessee River. This would give Georgia’s real-estate developers—the state’s true rulers—access to that flow’s prodigious waters, and would make thousands of Tennesseans instant pissed-off citizens of Georgia in the process. (This just in: Perdue has indicated that Georgia would declare Tennesseans caught up in the land grab illegal aliens and deport them.)

No really, all of that is true. Well, we made up the Perdue quote and the illegal alien stuff, but there are things that you can’t make up, no matter how much Jack Daniels you drink.

Tennesseans have responded predictably, as the linked article states, “with humor, anger and defiance.” (And, as in any beautiful spring dispute, a Southern man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gun play: “Us good Tennesseeans (sic) will take our long rifles up to Lookout Mountain and fire when ready,” said Justin Wilson, a Nashville attorney and former deputy governor.)

Mayor Ron Littlefield of Chattanooga, now arguably America’s funniest mayor, took the humor high road and made a creative gesture of peace, conciliation, and wicked shame to Georgia by proclaiming February 27 “Give Our Georgia Friends a Drink Day” and delivering a truckload of bottled water to the legislators—driven mad, proclaimed Littlefield, by thirst. The proclamation follows in its entertaining entirety.

PROCLAMATION
WHEREAS, it has come to pass that the heavens are shut up and a drought of Biblical proportions has been visited upon the Southern United States, and

WHEREAS, the parched and dry conditions have weighed heavily upon the State of Georgia and sorely afflicted those who inhabit the Great City of Atlanta, and

WHEREAS, the leaders of Georgia have assembled like the Children of Israel in the desert, grumbled among themselves and have begun to cast longing eyes toward the north, coveting their neighbor’s assets, and

WHEREAS, the lack of water has led some misguided souls to seek more potent refreshment or for other reasons has resulted in irrational and outrageous actions seeking to move a long established and peaceful boundary, and

WHEREAS, it is deemed better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and better to offer a cool, wet kiss of friendship rather than face a hot and angry legislator gone mad from thirst, and

WHEREAS, it is feared that if today they come for our river, tomorrow they might come for our Jack Daniels or George Dickel,

NOW THEREFORE, In the interest of brotherly love, peace, friendship, mutual prosperity, citywide self promotion, political grandstanding and all that

I Ron Littlefield, Mayor of the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee,
Do hereby Proclaim that Wednesday, February 27, 2008 shall be known as

“Give Our Georgia Friends a Drink Day”

1. catatonic
2. dead
3. Jack Bauer

Oh wait, you may also be Jeff Siegal. [After being terrified by the trailers, check out our page of web resources on water privatization from our slowly-but-surely growing Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info series.]

From the documentary’s site:

With an unflinching focus on politics, pollution and human rights, FLOW: For Love of Water ensures that the precarious relationship between humanity and water can no longer be ignored. While specifics of locality and issue may differ, the message is the same; water, and our future as a species, is quickly drying up.

Below are two video segments about the documentary from Pacifica Radio’s essential Democracy Now. Each features clips from the movie and commentary by water expert/activist extraordinaire, Maude Barlow. Barlow, a Canadian—who was probably moved to action by the water profligacy of her fellow citizens (see Waterblogged.info’s Canada: Water hogs of the planet)—is the co-author of the water privatization exposé, Blue Gold, and has recently published The Blue Covenant, described by its publishers as

“. . .a powerful response to this trend [privatization] : the emergence of an international, grassroots-led movement to have water declared a basic human right, something that can’t be bought or sold for profit.

(Here is a link to a pdf bluegold2.pdf, a 67-page, very readable white paper with a bibliography, which appears to be a summary of the book’s arguments.)