Water Table

The City Council voted unanimously last week to raise water rates nine cents per 100 cubic feet starting this month to offset an increase in pumping costs caused by a low water table. The increase, to 78 cents per 100 cubic feet, will mean the bill for a homeowner using 4,000 cubic feet of water per billing cycle would rise from $27.60 to $31.20. City Administrator James E.

A Florida man who was in his bedroom late Thursday night is presumed dead, swallowed by a sinkhole that opened beneath his Tampa-area home, officials said. The man, identified as Jeff Bush, 36, was in his bedroom when the sinkhole opened up. Bush screamed for help, but by the time his relatives could come to his aid, he had fallen through the abyss, Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers told reporters at a televised news conference Friday morning. The sinkhole is 20 to 30 feet across and up to 30 feet deep.

Negotiations have begun to allow San Clemente to tap a vast water table beneath Camp Pendleton, a reservoir that could increase the city's water supply at least sevenfold. Last week, the Tri-Cities Water District board of directors voted to explore the possibility of using the 300-million-gallon water table as an emergency storage area.

California's water wars aren't about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation's most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state's inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs and canals. Only that way can California's rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round.

San Gabriel Valley water officials have approved a plan that allows a City of Industry manufacturing firm to clean up potentially cancer-causing pollution in the water table. The board of the Main San Gabriel Basin Watermaster, the agency that oversees water rights in the area, has authorized BDP Co. to pump the polluted water from the ground, treat it and then return it to the water table.

Dear Street Smart: On the San Diego Freeway between about Beach and Harbor boulevards, the surface of the freeway changes from concrete to blacktop and then back to concrete again. My question is: Why is blacktop used between Beach and Harbor and not concrete? Michael Erickson, Fountain Valley It's the water--and a whole lot more. Bad old Olympia Beer commercials have nothing to do with that section of the San Diego Freeway.

The recent torrential rains have been like pennies or, more accurately, millions of dollars, from heaven for the San Gabriel Valley. The monetary value of all the moisture that has fallen on the region in the past two weeks, water officials say, could be worth as much as $25 million.

About half a dozen residents from the Four Oaks community in Canyon Country, many of them complaining that they have had to put temporary outhouses in their yards or garages and have been showering in plastic tubs because of sewer problems related to high ground-water levels, are taking their case to the City Council. Winter rains are blamed for the flooding, which for the last three months has undermined and damaged streets and sidewalks in the area.

Ground-water levels have dropped significantly in parts of Nevada due to decades of irrigation and, more recently, the pumping of billions of gallons of water out of gold mines, a new study shows. As a result, the water table has fallen as much as 1,000 feet around some of the largest open-pit gold mines in northern Nevada's Humboldt River Basin, the U.S. Geological Survey says.

A Florida man who was in his bedroom late Thursday night is presumed dead, swallowed by a sinkhole that opened beneath his Tampa-area home, officials said. The man, identified as Jeff Bush, 36, was in his bedroom when the sinkhole opened up. Bush screamed for help, but by the time his relatives could come to his aid, he had fallen through the abyss, Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers told reporters at a televised news conference Friday morning. The sinkhole is 20 to 30 feet across and up to 30 feet deep.

Re "Venice's Green Cube" from April 24: Since when is almost 3,800 square feet of house for two adults and two small children in any way "green"? As a 20-year Venice resident, I have seen so many of the small, charming houses get transformed into monstrous three-story rectangles, inhibiting the privacy and sunshine of neighbors. This "green cube" is no exception. A nod to being "green" (and all of its cultural currency) is no excuse for overbuilding in a neighborhood with some of the smallest lot sizes in L.A. Not impressed.

Federal officials plan to pump from the water table near a blocked mine drainage tunnel to ease pressure from more than a billion gallons of trapped water that locals fear could cascade through the historic mining town of Leadville. Pumps will be installed at an abandoned mine shaft next week, Lake County Commissioner Carl Schaefer said. The move will give federal officials time to work on a plan to drill into the damaged tunnel, then pump backed-up contaminated water to a treatment plant.

A Bay Area environmental group filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging that Southern California Gas Co. operations near Marina del Rey are polluting a local water table. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, charges that the utility is in violation of Proposition 65, which prohibits discharge or release of chemicals known to cause cancer or birth defects.

Re "Houseboat Heaven: Flush It," Opinion, June 19: So the Colorado River is drying up? That makes it a harbinger of our planet-wide legacy to the future. Cancerous population growth has outstripped Earth's resources. That should not come as a surprise, as we have long known that we cannot replace what we are destroying. Time is no longer on our side. Progress has become a lie. Consumption rather than production has become the driving force. It need not have been so. Rex Styzens Long Beach I own a 60-foot houseboat on Lake Powell.

The clients, from Phoenix, had dreamed of a house on the water in Coronado, the "island" that lies across a graceful arc of bridge spanning San Diego Bay. Surrounded on three sides by glimmering blue bays and the Pacific Ocean, the seductive 13.5-square-mile city of Coronado is connected to the mainland by only a narrow, silvery spit of sand. Real estate in this exclusive enclave sells for more per square foot than almost anywhere else in California, and rarely comes on the market.

Abdul Baqi says the "flower" is very difficult to find these days, its life-bearing "root" buried deep beneath the harsh sands and dry, packed earth. That flower is the moisture that seeps from the upper layers of the water table, the 27-year-old well-driller explains. The root is the deeper, water-rich layer. Afghanistan's worst drought in three decades has begun its fourth year. The lack of water has withered farms famous for raisins and pomegranates and devastated herds of nomadic tribes.

California's water wars aren't about scarcity. Even with 37 million people and the nation's most irrigation-intensive agriculture, the state usually has enough water for both people and crops, thanks to the brilliant hydrological engineering of past Californians. But now there is a new element in the century-old water calculus: a demand that the state's inland waters flow as pristinely as they supposedly did before the age of dams, reservoirs and canals. Only that way can California's rivers, descending from their mountain origins, reach the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta year-round.

The letter from Prof. C.R. Berger (Dec. 11) expresses concern that recycling water by underground water recharge in the San Fernando Valley could significantly increase damage potential during earthquakes due to liquefaction. Liquefaction induced by an earthquake can be a danger only when the water table is close to the ground surface. But due to many years of pumping ground water in the Valley, the water table in the areas where recharge is practiced (the East Valley) is hundreds of feet below the ground surface.

Fog swirling around lofty pines gives an unmistakable impression of lushness here. But beneath the surface lies a different picture--of the mountains' water evaporating amid what officials call the worst local drought in 70 years. The ground-water table is dropping, a reservoir lake has dried to the depth of a wading pond and local water agencies have imposed mandatory water restrictions in this mountain town of 2,000.

A court-ordered study has concluded that Huntington Beach's ground water was not contaminated by the massive sewage leaks that resulted in criminal charges against the city. The study was undertaken after Huntington Beach officials pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of violating state water laws by knowingly discharging pollutants from the city's decayed sewage system.