Water

Re: "Dr Pepper buys land for bottling plant, distribution center," March 5: On the one hand it's "Whoopee, jobs for Victorville!"; but on the other hand (and this gives one considerable pause), where is this soda bottling plant going to get all the gazillions of gallons of water it needs? Does Victorville have a hidden and endless source of water we all don't know about? Or is Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc. planning on using recycled water in all that Dr Pepper, 7-UP, et al? Somebody here needs to come up with Some Thought and a Plan, don'tchya think?

Re "Cleanup pits nonprofit vs. councilman," March 9 Community Coalition devotes its very limited resources to fighting off nuisance properties like liquor stores, which are ruining the quality of life in South Los Angeles. A politician should welcome an organization like Community Coalition into his district. He should not attempt to water down its efforts as Bernard C. Parks has consistently done on the City Council. Parks appears incapable of working with community-based groups that are desperately needed in South Los Angeles to organize and empower our many fractured and dormant neighborhood associations.

Gov. Charlie Crist's $1.34-billion deal to buy 180,000 acres of U.S. Sugar Corp. land to help restore the Everglades is being scaled back by more than half because the state can't afford the original deal, the governor announced. The reduction means the state will buy 72,500 acres for $533 million, and hold a 10-year option to buy the rest. The goal is to convert farm land into conservation land, allowing water managers to clean and store water before sending it into the Everglades.

Raging torrents from a ruptured dam swamped a rural town in Brazil, killing a young girl and destroying at least 500 homes in a region already devastated by weeks of floods, authorities said. Amateur video showed water inundating the northeastern village of Cocal, home to about 25,000 people, after the dam failed. "It was like a tsunami," Piaui state Gov. Wellington Dias said after visiting the area. "What I saw was frightening. It was a wall of water 65 feet high, equivalent to a three-story building," Dias was quoted as saying on a website operated by SBT television.

Some call the Los Angeles River the "secret river," a rare section in the heart of the inner city that the Army Corps of Engineers couldn't tame. It's directly across from this unlikely place that "Touch the Water," Julie Hebert's play, is having its world premiere. A mix of contemporary characters, live music and Native American myth, "Water" is the fourth offering in Cornerstone Theater's Justice Cycle, a series examining the effects, both positive and adverse, of specific laws on communities.

No tweaking of sprinklers can end the wasteful runoff created by that patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street. The errant spray drains our water supply and sends pollution into the Pacific. The best fix? Emily Green, our columnist who covers low-water gardening, makes a case for one alternative, and it's not the perennials you see here. Look for her weekly post on our blog at latimes.com/home.

"Women, Water and Wells: Photographs of West Africa by Gil Garcetti," a 2007 exhibition at UCLA's Fowler Museum, is evolving into a new show at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The revised version, combining Garcetti's images of women struggling to provide safe water for their families with young students' responses to his pictures, will be on view from July 25 to Sept. 6 in the visitors lobby of the U.N. building. Garcetti, a former Los Angeles district attorney who has become a prominent photographer, made his first trip to West Africa in 2001.

Re "Demand for water drops to 32-year low, DWP says," July 28 If we all work together to conserve water, we can help assure a bright and prosperous life for future generations. I say that we all become advocates of conservation in our communities. Help promote conservation as a wise and important water-management principle. However, even if we drastically reduce the watering of our urban landscapes, projected population growth will eventually make new water development necessary.