Dave (imported) wrote: Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:51 am
Water is brought to California from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and dams, rivers, and aqueducts that flow out of the mountains.
To "cure" the drought the rain has to replenish the snowpack and fill the dams with water.
Also, many farmers in California still use sluice gates and open ditch irrigation. That's wasteful and should be replaced with drip irrigation so it uses less water. Many farmers do their best work with drip irrigation.
Also, where the rivers empty into the Pacific Ocean, the fresh water drives out the salt water and keeps it from getting into the ground water or the water table. Once salt water invades ground water then any form of irrigation poisons the ground with salt.
So there is much work for California to do to survive the drought, regardless of the cause of the drought. A mere 1/4 inch of rain isn't enough.
Pittsburgh gets an average of 36 inches a year and Bartlesville Oklahoma gets an average of 40 inches of rain a year.
There is a reason I rather precisely wrote all that.
California and the American Southwest is in a drought. The southwest has experience droughts before. This isn't even the first drought in my lifetime. Sometime in the 1980's I was in Sand Diego when it was in drought and had to ask for a glass of water at a restaurant. It was served without ice because ice machines wasted water. San Diego survived and thrived that drought.
There were at least two other droughts before this. The Pueblo Indians disappeared during a prolonged drought. That's the desert southwest.
Apparently the Mayans and the Incas did too but they are much farther south in Mexico than in California.
However, this is the fourth or fifth year of drought in California and that is what makes it rougher than the other droughts. It's longer than the earlier droughts.
Other parts of the world are going trough the same thing -- Australia is in drought but has (As a country) worked very hard to manage their water. That's how you get through a drought of any length -- manage water. The Sahara Desert is expanding southward. That is why the countries of middle Africa are having political turmoil. As the Sahara moves southward, the refugees move into new countries to find food and water. That disrupts the local economies and political systems in those countries.
So finding ways to conserve and manage the existing water resources is essential to the solution.
I don't care what the cause is or why the drought is happening. It has happened before and will happen again in the future. The only way to cope with it is to manage current water resources. That's why I chose that set of facts.
I'm an engineer and I think of things as systems and methods to solve problems. It's not ego. It is the way that I think when I see a problem.
Epiphany +
