A powerful thirst is building in Southern California as forecasters predict the addition of about 2 million new households in the region over the next 20 years.
In the past, finding water for all those extra showers, toilets and lawn sprinklers would have been easy: Look beyond a mountain range, find a wild river and divert it to Los Angeles.
But those days are over. The rivers are tapped, and there's more competition for their resources. So where will the water come from?
Water conservation: An article about water conservation in Sunday's California section said Mono Lake was in the Owens Valley. In fact, the lake is in a separate watershed to the north known as the Mono Basin. A photo caption with the article referred to rushing water from the San Gorgonio Mountains. The range is the San Bernardino Mountains, of which Mt. San Gorgonio is the highest peak.
Part of the answer can be found at Loyola Marymount University, where a new cleaning process slashed the amount of water needed to flush giant cooling towers that regulate the campus' heating and air-conditioning system, saving 1.4 million gallons a year.
The university also switched to front-loading washing machines, turned to treated wastewater for landscaping and installed motion-sensing faucets and low-flow urinals that require one-fourth less water.
"We have more students and faculty, water rates are up, but our utility bills are down," said Gerald Robinson, energy manager for the college near Marina del Rey. "So we're actively pursuing more conservation measures."
Such steps may seem like drops in the bucket, but their widespread use add up to big savings. Water customers across the region -- including vineyards, housing subdivisions, parks, restaurants and farms -- are in the midst of an ambitious push to find more efficient ways to use the state's most precious natural resource.
Indeed, Southern California today gets half of its water from imported sources, compared with two-thirds a decade ago. Per capita water use in the region was 205 gallons a day 10 years ago; today it's about 175 gallons.
Doing more with less has become the cornerstone of water management policy for one of the biggest and driest megalopolises on the continent. Unlike previous droughts, the last one -- which ran from 1999 to 2003 and required no rationing in Southern California -- went largely unnoticed because of the success of such programs, officials said.
"We've come to realize over the last decade that we're not building new dams, new aqueducts and moving more rivers to Southern California," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager for the Metropolitan Water District, which provides 60% of the region's water. "We're creating the equivalent of a new river by conservation, water storage and paying transfer fees" to move water around the state.
- How Much More Water Will the State Need? Dec 30, 1990
- Water for the Future Jan 05, 1988
- No shortage of water ideas Oct 14, 2007
