California taps Australia's expertise in coping with drought
Janet Zimmerman
Press-Enterprise
12/20/2009
California's water experts struggling with drought and other supply crises are looking for coping strategies in Australia, where life has changed amid a 13-year dry spell and rising temperatures.
A 10-person Western delegation recently toured Australian cities to get a handle on how the country has responded to its shortages.
Australia is suffering the driest period in more than a century of record keeping and scientists say it is most likely the result of climate change. The drought and heat have brought deadly fires and agricultural collapse, problems similar to what California has experienced on a lesser scale.
The tour group included Wendy Martin, the state's drought coordinator at the Department of Water Resources, who said she was struck by the effectiveness of conservation measures there. Water use is about 40 gallons per person, per day, including outdoor watering. California's per-capita average is 200 gallons.
"We have a lot of room to improve, that was one of the striking messages," Martin said.
Some of the conservation measures that are common in Australia but still rare in the United States: rainwater tanks that capture water for gardens and toilet flushing; dual-flush toilets; dual house plumbing for recycled water; and water-efficient appliances in virtually every home, she said.
Water use outdoors, which accounts for about half of consumption, is also much more efficient. Residents use low-water native plants instead of grass and permeable pavement that allows water to sink back into the ground, Martin said.
"We're going to have to make some major shifts outside, and in what our yards look like," she said.
Desalination of ocean water is also common in most of Australia's major cities.
But after visiting the plants, environmentalist Terry O'Day became convinced there are other measures that should be taken first because desalinized water is very expensive and the plants have had a high environmental cost, from killing wildlife to damaging ecosystems.
In Carlsbad, construction has begun on the West Coast's first desalination plant. It would be the largest such operation in the Western Hemisphere, converting 50 million gallons a day of sea water to potable water by 2012.
O'Day recommends addressing the easy conservation work that still could be done. Water savings predicted for the Carlsbad plant could be achieved if the city of Los Angeles replaced traditional urinals with waterless versions, he said. Such a retrofit program would cost less than half that of the desalination plant, save energy and create more jobs, he said.
"I'm most interested in making sure we learn the right lessons. It would be easy to walk away and say 'Desal is great, they're doing it all over Australia,' but miss the nuance of it being well thought out, not anything goes," said O'Day, executive director of Environment Now in Santa Monica, a private foundation that funds environmental groups in California and Baja California.
