Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 2, 2008
2. Supply –
City to change water rules
Conservation plan will help during dry times
Stockton Record
Tulare County homeowners call drilling companies to find water sources
Visalia Times Delta
EBMUD sets 'loggers' to listen for leaks
San Francisco Chronicle
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City to change water rules
Conservation plan will help during dry times
Stockton Record – 9/2/02
By Alex Breitler, staff writer
STOCKTON - Some say it's a little backward, especially in summer of a drought year.
But in Stockton, the more water you use, the cheaper it gets.
City officials are considering changing this years-old policy as part of a new water-conservation plan, which they say will be more suitable for these dry times.
According to the American Water Works Association, Stockton is one of very few cities in the state still using what's called a "declining rate structure." A survey of 299 California water agencies last year found just six using this strategy, the association reports.
This doesn't mean Stockton residents can leave their sprinklers on an extra five minutes and get a cheaper rate. The current policy, said to have been in place for many years, benefits only those who use copious amounts of water, such as commercial and industrial facilities.
Indeed, the rates may have been intended to attract those types of businesses to Stockton, officials said.
Times have changed.
The state is parched. Hardly a raindrop has fallen since February. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he wants to reduce urban water usage 20 percent per capita by 2020.
"Our plans are not that robust," said Mark Madison, director of Stockton's Municipal Utilities Department. "But we will be looking harder at water conservation in the future."
The city's goal is to reduce water usage 3.4 percent in five years. That would save about 1,200 acre-feet of water, enough to serve roughly the same number of families.
A consultant's plan approved earlier this year says the city should encourage residents to replace thousands of water-guzzling appliances, with the city contributing about $825,000 in rebates.
The plan also recommends a great deal of public outreach.
Water conservation should become "a part of the overall community psyche," reads the plan prepared for the city by consultant PMC, based in Rancho Cordova.
Saving water won't just save customers money but will reduce energy usage as well, and thus limit greenhouse gases released when energy is produced.
The problem is water is cheap enough that there's not much economic motivation for average people to conserve.
Those Stocktonians who get their water from the city, not to be confused with private California Water Service Co., pay one-tenth of a cent for a gallon of water. Compare that with gas at nearly $4 a gallon.
Put another way, an average shower might cost you about 2 cents.
Unlike some water-starved areas of the state, conservation in San Joaquin County remains essentially voluntary.
That's because the Stockton area is in better shape than those other regions, including Southern California and the East Bay. Several rivers feed the county, and there is groundwater to draw from.
Even in this drought year, Stockton's water-saving rules are similar to most other years. For example, residents may not water their lawns from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and they must repair any waterline leaks within 24 hours. Restaurants can serve water only upon request.
As for the water rates, Madison said they will be reconsidered as the city pushes on with plans to tap the Delta for the first time as an additional drinking water source. Rate increases would help pay for the project but could also be restructured to encourage conservation, officials said.
Sierra Club advocate Dale Stocking said it's time to fix the city's system of use more water, pay less.
"At a time of tight water supplies, we give the heaviest users the lowest rates," he said. "These rates are going to have to be revisited. The situation has changed."#
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080902/A_NEWS/809020314/-1/A_NEWS07
Tulare County homeowners call drilling companies to find water sources
Visalia Times Delta – 9/2/08
By Valerie Gibbons, staff writer
Business has never been better for Loudie Crisp — but you won't find her bragging about it.
As one of the owners of Visalia's Crisp Well Drilling, Crisp has been running from site to site all summer as wells throughout the Valley start to run dry.
"I received eight calls today," she said. "Everyone's running out of water. It's the worst I've ever seen it."
The problem: A water table that has been steadily dropping throughout the Valley, a situation made worse by the exponential growth during the last decade.
Drilling waiting list
And this year's early spring and hot weather have meant hundreds of homeowners have put in calls to local well drillers —and have been given a spot on the waiting list.
"A lot of them have old wells that are too shallow now, maybe 80 to 120 feet deep," she said.
This year drillers are boring down to more than 250 feet to find reliable water supplies — and in many cases that means drilling an entirely new well.
The pipes in older wells can be incompatible with simply drilling an existing well farther down.
The price tag for a 200-foot well can run more than $13,500.
"I don't take payments," Crisp said. "It's really difficult because I know people are really hurting now — but they have to pay it in full or use a credit card."
Crisp is booked solid for the next six weeks — a new record for the 30-year-old company. Other Visalia well drillers are in the same boat.
Greg Loverin's company is also booked well into advance with calls from homeowners and growers who have suddenly found themselves out of water.
"It's just progressively gotten worse," he said.
Loverin's standard well is 250 to 300 feet deep.
"Twenty years ago, it was 140 feet," he said.
Lower water tables
While agricultural users switch to well water after the water deliveries from Lake Kaweah and the Friant-Kern Canal end in late summer, residential water almost inevitably comes from wells.
The resulting draw down can leave water tables up to 50 feet below what they were in the early spring.
"Farmers are turning to their groundwater sources earlier in the summer," said Patricia Stever, the executive director of the Tulare County Farm Bureau. "It's not going to get any better until we have more storage."
From July 1, 2007, until July 1, 2008, Visalia received just 6.66 inches of rain — only a half an inch more than the year before.
The driest season on record in the Valley was in 1947, with a scant 3 1/2 inches of rain. The season from July 1, 2006, to July 1, 2007, at 6.03 inches, was the 11th driest season since the record-keeping began in 1878.
At the foothill lakes, Kaweah Lake's storage is 71 percent of normal, Pine Flat is at 35 percent, Millerton Lake, 66 percent and Lake Success — which is kept at an artificially low level because of structural problems with the dam — is at 21 percent of normal, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
The 15,000 farms served by the Friant-Kern Canal received all of their Class 1, or basic deliveries and about 5 percent of their surplus, or Class 2, deliveries.
The Friant-Kern Canal draws its water from Millerton Lake in Fresno County.
Foothill lakes
Which means this year's dry spring at the foothill lakes that deliver can be expensive for cities in the heart of the Valley.
Every summer the city of Tulare lowers the pumping level of about three or four of its 27 active wells, at a cost of $28,000 a year.
The city's systems are drilled deep into the earth —more than 500 feet in many cases — and the pumps can be raised or lowered depending on the water level.
"Last July we had the water level drop by 50 feet in one month," said Dan Boggs, the City of Tulare's water superintendent. "That was pretty scary."
Recharge ponds
At the Kaweah Delta Resource Conservation District — the agency charged with recharging the county's groundwater — there has been a big push toward building more recharge ponds, to allow more water to filter through the system.
"We have a historical overdraft," said Mark Larson, the district's assistant manager. "Right now we are partnering with each of the water districts, the cities and the county to build more ponds."
The ponds cost about $2 million to build and can put tens of thousands of acre feet of water back into the system.
"We're hoping to reverse some of this for future generations," he said.#
http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080902/NEWS01/809020328
EBMUD sets 'loggers' to listen for leaks
San Francisco Chronicle – 8/30/08
Patricia Yollin, Staff Writer
In the middle of the night, when most of Berkeley is sleeping, hundreds of underground objects are listening for sounds that people can't hear.
They haven't been planted by terrorists, spies, FBI agents or mystics. Instead, the East Bay Municipal Utility District is installing the acoustic devices, known as "loggers," in an unprecedented pilot project to conserve water by finding leaks in water mains before they surface.
The effort was conceived of before the drought, but has taken on added urgency because of it. Within a few months, the loggers will be all over town. More than 300 are in place, with as many as 900 yet to come.
"You can hear a water leak before you see it," said David Wallenstein, an associate engineer in the utility's water department who is overseeing the project. "And nighttime is the best time to hear leaks. It's supposed to be quiet then, and you can detect noise when there shouldn't be noise."
The noise made by leaks travels nicely in metal pipes, Wallenstein said, and is distinct from the normal flow in a water main, which is fairly subdued.
"The loggers are looking for loudness and consistency," he said. "They're looking for something continuous - not someone taking a shower."
The devices are connected to water mains under Berkeley's 250-mile street system. They operate from 2 to 4 a.m., listening for leak noises every three seconds within a 1,000-foot radius.
"A little computer in them decides if there's a leak or not," Wallenstein said on a recent afternoon, as he prepared to patrol the leak-prone Berkeley hills, where sliding and shifting ground damages water mains.
Every 10 days or so, two EBMUD employees cruise around Berkeley, checking out what each logger has discovered. The devices, metal cylinders the size of a can of Red Bull, electronically transmit information that says "leak," "no leak," "possible leak" or "probable leak."
"It works like a champ," said Mike Hatch, water distribution crew foreman. "The data is on a laptop on your partner's lap. You drive through and the software talks to you. It's beautiful."
Answers to mystery leaks
A $300,000 federal grant and matching funds from EBMUD are paying for the project, which will end in December 2009. The state-of-the-art sensors are being supplied by Gutermann International of Switzerland.
"This is the largest deployment ever done for research purposes and water savings," Wallenstein said. "We're going to learn so much. It's kind of a mystery - how pipes leak and why."
The utility, which serves 1.3 million people, is eager to solve that mystery.
"Part of the reason we're doing the study is to evaluate how much money we're losing," Wallenstein said.
The devices in the Berkeley project are the most sophisticated weapons in an arsenal that includes 120 older loggers, ground microphones and correlators, which pinpoint the location of a leak after much detective work by the utility's leak-detection squad.
EBMUD now employs 12 people as leak detectors. Bruce Isom is one of them.
'Green Berets of plumbers'
"We're like the Green Berets of plumbers," he said.
To the uninitiated, Isom's trade might seem prosaic and straightforward. It's not.
"Even though it's a science, it's also an art," Hatch said.
"It may take a day, it might take five to find a leak," said leak detector Lucius Lyons.
Isom spent six months, off and on, tracking down a leak in Point Richmond. The quest can be challenging because mains of cement or plastic don't carry sound - unlike those made of copper, cast iron or steel.
"Every day is a new puzzle," Isom said. "But I love problem-solving."
The day starts at 7 a.m. at EBMUD's service yard in West Oakland.
"Most of our calls come from consumers," Hatch said recently as he surveyed the day's assignments. "But a lot of our calls are false alarms. We spend half our time proving we don't have leaks."
Often what seems like a leaking water main can be something else entirely - ranging from over-irrigation by a neighbor to a problem in the sewer system.
"Occasionally you get called out and you see toilet paper there," Jon Greenhalgh said. "It's not the water main."
Pink clue
On this particular Thursday morning, a team of four leak detectors visited East Oakland and Montclair.
At the first stop, leak detector Tony Lopez stared at a large puddle on 41st Avenue.
"We want to make sure it's EBMUD water," he said.
He took a water sample. The strip in the vial turned pink, indicating it contained chloramines and could be EBMUD's responsibility.
"But pink doesn't always mean it's our fault," Isom said.
As the four men checked out the pink liquid, a steady procession of passers-by - residents, merchants, shopping-cart pushers - checked them out.
"We don't give them the whole 101 on leak detection," Isom said. "We just tell them we're looking for a leak. They kind of leave us alone after that. We might get a little argument or complaint about their water bill."
The next stop for the leak detectors was an intersection in the hills of Montclair, where an older logger had discovered a leak.
It took only half an hour to figure out exactly where it was.
"This was lucky," Isom said. "And it would have run for 10, 20, 30 years."
Although winter is normally the busy season because rain produces more leaks, the leak squad is fully occupied these days as well.
"Because of the drought, we're doing a lot more leak detection now," Hatch said. "But I'm not sure we're finding more leaks."#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/30/BA0412F0UD.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea
