Water in Southern California and the Los Angeles River

[Tdarcos]

[1931 Newspaper article of inventor recommending desalinization of the ocean as a replacement for Colorado River water.]

So, how's that working out for Cali?

I know you can filter drugs from wastewater but from the ocean you'd mostly get plastiç. Desalinization is expensive I read.

About triple the cost of Colorado River water. The reverse osmosis method forces the water through a filter where the pores in it are no larger than that of a water molecule. Unless the plastic has broken up into microscopic pieces, I think it will be trapped by the filter. A little research finds the water molecule is 2.75 angstroms (an angstrom is 1/10,000,000,000 of a meter) wide. Now let's see: PVC has a molecular size of 31434 angstroms; styrene, about 5-6; styrofoam 4.5 wide and 7 tall; and so on.

I think that would work.



California gets very cheap water from the Colorado River. The court case of Arizona v. California has been litigated about 5 times over the last hundred years. There is a specific formula, based on expected water levels, CA gets about 54%; Nevada, 2%; Native American tribes 1%; and Arizona gets the rest. Plus, some has to be left for Mexico. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California transports the water from the Colorado River by canal and pipeline all the way from the border with Arizona all the way across to the thirsty people of Southern California.

Only problem is these percentages were based on the highest flow, that the Colorado River ever had. Climate Change is reducing the amount of water available. The problem with desalinization isn't the residential and industrial uses of water, if they had to use desalinated water, it's about triple the cost of water from the Colorado River. While that would raise the cost of water by about triple, from the current price of about $125 a month to $375. Painful, but people would manage, maybe cost shift more onto business and industrial users to allow residences to pay less. Giving another reason for companies to move out of California!

The real problem with desalinization is the agricultural use of water, which is the "300 pound gorilla" of water usage. Farmers in Southern California have been addicted to cheap Colorado River water for decades, and have big lobbying power to make sure it stays that way. The way water is delivered, residential, business, and Industrial users are charged more so that Agricultural users can pay less. If agricultural users had to pay market rates for water, food would be much more expensive.

I think So. Cal is going to have to do one or both of the following to solve the water shortage problem:

1. Bite the bullet and build desalinization plants, and maybe use that as "reserve" water, although the least cost might be to run the plants at maximum. Reverse osmosis, where the water is forced through a membrane with very tiny holes, small enough that only water molecules can fit, takes a lot of electricity, which is why it is expensive.
2. At the City of Long Beach mouth of the concrete channel called the Los Angeles River, the wastewater and stormwater runoff of Los Angeles County is dumped into the Pacific Ocean. I've actually stood in it, it's like a V-shaped channel about 400-600' wide at the top, (depending on where), 200-400' wide at the bottom, and 20-35' deep. At the center is a channel about 10' wide and probably no more than a foot deep. During low flow periods, this is where the water is. When it rains, the entire basin could be half full or more, delivering about 100,000 gallons per second. Now, that water is all discarded. Perhaps a processing plant could be put there to extract the water into huge tanks, process it, and return it back to the input point in Los Angeles County where the water from the Colo. River is piped, and use it as a secondary source. When there is a large amount of water, extract a lot of water into storage tanks, then process and release some, saving the rest for bad times. Might require a huge storage facility, like a lake. Or perhaps make the bottom 5 or 10 miles of the river a storage tank, so that when there is too much water, that can be released to prevent overflow.

Something has to be done. The drought problem is not going to go away. They need to start on something now so it could be ready by 2030-2035. Presuming the area can survive on existing water until then.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I like golf and I am not saying shut them all down, but I know who we can go UMMMMMM to first out there.

[Casual Observer]

I like William Shatner's idea of piping water from the Pacific Northwest to California. We have more fresh water here than we know what to do with, may as well sell some.

[Tdarcos]

I like William Shatner's idea of piping water from the Pacific Northwest to California. We have more fresh water here than we know what to do with, may as well sell some.

Probably not sustainable for the same reason, it's not economically feasible, Any other source would already be tapped. First, it would require the cooperation of the states of Washington and Oregon, because it would require running a pipeline hundreds of miles. It would probably as expensive as the Alaska Pipeline.

Let's say the idea is to pipe water from Lake Washington at Mercer Island near Seattle. Mercer Island to Los Angeles is a distance of about 1,200 miles. Reinforced pipeline is not cheap, at the 48" size it's about $260 a foot. Plus installation, pumps, power, maintenance, etc. They're still building New York City Water Tunnel #3, which started in 1970, and won't be fully completed until 2035, although parts of it went operational in 1998 and 2013. It cost about $6 billion.

My comparison above is almost spot-on. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System is a 49" pipe running 1,280 miles. It cost $8 billion in 1977 dollars, and the oil companies estimate it would cost $32-48 billion now. So, presumably, it would cost that much to ship water by pipeline from Mercer Island to Los Angeles. Using the recommended flow rate of 8'/second, a 48" pipeline can deliver 45,122 gal./minute. That would provide 64.9 million gallons of water a day. Let's reduce that to 64 to cover losses due to running pigs (pipeline inspection plugs) through the pipe. That's 23.7 billion gallons a year. We also have to cover maintenance every year, that's about $10,000 a mile, which is $120 million a year.

To borrow $48 billion at 5% for 30 years would cost $258 million a month. Maintenance quoted above adds $10 million. That's $269 million a month. From above we get 64 million gallons a day, 1.29 billion gallons a month. This presumes we get the water for free; if we have to pay 0.001c/gallon, that's another 1.2 million, or $271 million. Divide that by 1.29 billion, you get 21c/gallon, which is prohibitively expensive compared to the current cost of about $10/100 cubic feet of water (748 gallons), so that price is $152.88, or 15 times the current price. Since desalination at 3x current cost is considered expensive, this is more than a full order of magnitude higher than the current price of Colorado River water.

[Casual Observer]

this is more than a full order of magnitude higher than the current price of Colorado River water.

ok, but have you seen Lake Mead lately? They're pulling bodies off the newly revealed shores as the lake empties. California is going to die of dehydration.

[Jizaboz]

Ricky from Trailer Park boys had an excellent solution..

"Just blow the clouds in from states that don't need more rain."

How are you gonna do that? Giant fans in the sky?

"Yeah flying on uh.. drones or some shit I dunno"

That's a fucking stupid idea. It'll never work.

"Yeah well just because we can't do it now doesn't mean we won't one day."

[Tdarcos]

Annnnd the news gets worse. Groundwater aquifers (water pockets underground that wells drill into) in the Midwest, used for agriculture, are being drained faster than the earth can replenish them. Worse, climate change is reducing snowfall, reducing the water from snow melt, meaning the aquifers are getting even less water.

There is a solution, but people aren't going to like it. Because of irrational fears, a cheap and easy to find water source is being completely ignored, and in fact, wasted.

Wastewater reclamation. Take the water we've used, and instead of releasing it - presumably after treatment - into lakes or oceans, treat the wastewater to remove solids, extract unwanted elements through filtration, then use chemicals to kill the bacteria. You now have water that is actually cleaner than most water sources now in use. In some cases, this water is actually too clean; they actually have to add minerals to make the water taste normal. Only problem is, too many are "squicked" out, because they see it as "toilet to tap" as if raw sewage was going to be used untreated.

I never even thought of this, and it's a no-brainer. When I heard it mentioned, not only did it make sense, but it was obvious to me: some or all of the water I drank was excreted by some other creature. Someone else peed it out, it went - treated or untreated into either a lake, or the ocean, ended up in some aquifer, or evaporated and fell as rain into either the ground or back into a water supply like a lake.

It would be a (hell of a) lot cheaper to take the outgoing water, and instead of dumping it into the ocean or a lake, pipe it back to the intake point and use it again, than to do things like desalinate seawater. Or run a pipe 1200 miles to pull water from another source.

[Tdarcos]

I have seen the following video and I think its numbers sound right. Residential users combined usage: drinking, cooking, lawn watering, toilet flushing, bathing, car washing, etc., all use only about 6% of potable water sources. Reducing car washing or lawn watering is like putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound.

Commercial and industrial users are only another 8% of total water use. It's growing crops that use all the water, and a large part of that is not even for food for people, but for animals. Alfalfa is a huge part of the consumption of water. Cut alfalfa production by 20% and that's as much water as residential, commercial, and industrial users combined consume.