Water-rationing has Consequences

 

Tubbs fire, Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, before and after

            The eighties were considered a wet decade.  Water was so cheap to use that we thought of it as free.  It was the height of sprinkler irrigation. 1986 was the first year we heard two nonscientific themes all over the media: burning fossil fuels is causing global warming from too much carbon dioxide; and fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that we must conserve. 

          Change began quickly as some cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, grabbed that idea and ran with it, lowering base rates and charging high unit rates for using water.  The area around those cities and to their east got dryer and hotter.

The first sign of trouble was the fires in the Hollywood hills around Christmas, as katabatic Santa Anna winds, caused by high pressure, cold, and dryness, flowed down out of the Sierra Nevada and blew every spark into brushfires with high-speed wind and high heat at lower elevations.  Seems like nobody connected the almost-yearly fires to the change in water pricing.  It being a Southern California problem, people joked about the winter fire season in Southern California.

Meanwhile, water-rationing rates were spreading across the country and around the world.  Grants Pass started them in the nineties in a small way.  But City Manager David Frasher and the City Council got serious and introduced tiered rates in 2006.  Grants Pass started getting fires from dry weeds and brush, and wildfires got closer to the city as lightning storms turned dry.

Jokes about California’s fire season stopped in 2017 when the Carr fire burned much of Redding in August, and the Tubbs fire burned huge, tight subdivisions in Santa Rosa in October.  In November 2018, the Camp fire burned most of Paradise and killed eighty-five people.  These were all katabatic-wind-driven fires.

In 2019, the West got a brief reprieve from big fires after Congress legalized hemp, which had to be watered.  In 2020, we had a rainy May and June and a cloudy July.  But after water masters made farmers stop using unpermitted water in July, temps rose to well over a hundred degrees in August. 

High heat built up a high-pressure bubble that covered the West coast from Mexico to Canada.  September 8th brought us katabatic winds from highlands under that dome, causing the biggest fire disaster of the last fifty years, as fires started in cities and burned them, all over the western half of our west-coast states.

 

Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-6-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener                  541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com