Some People Can’t See the Good

 

         

Dear Editor,

             The Daily Courier published an article 11-17-2021, “IV Water District makes plea for state help," regarding the problems caused by illegal pot growing operations disguised as hemp farms.  One of the complaints in the article is that some of these farms are buying bulk water from Cave Junction's station.  Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it.

            City bulk water is legal to buy for all uses.  Cave Junction’s bulk rates are $30/1000 gallons.  Ratepayers of Cave Junction pay a top-tier rate of $2.05/100 cubic feet, or $2.74/1000g, for water delivered to their taps by pipelines. 

Everyone who buys bulk water at $30/1000g is paying some of the overhead that city ratepayers are not paying as they cut back on irrigation and other water use to pay high unit rates.  Bulk water users keep ratepayers’ unit and base rates from climbing still higher to pay the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water system, as they keep cutting back on use. 

This is what modern city rate systems do, rationing water by price, with a base rate too low to cover the overhead and high unit rates to discourage use.  But the City thereby depends on high unit rates to cover the overhead, which leaves it always chasing the overhead.  

Businesses can’t survive this way.  But water and sewer plants can; they are natural monopolies.  But they don’t have to; the Council could set base rates to cover all overhead and stop rationing water by rates.

 

Sincerely,

 

Rycke Brown

A pond drains my yard; a willow shades it

 

            We moved to Grants Pass in 1999 and bought a house on Bridge Street in October.  The first winter, our backyard flooded with water.  In the lowest point of our backyard, I dug a small pond to capture the water and pump it out to the street.  I eventually lined it with rubber and then rocks and made a watercourse and fall on the mound of dirt from the pond, lined and covered with rock.  I put a pump in the pond and laid irrigation line to send excess water to the street and added a line to the top of the watercourse, so I could flip switches to change it from pumping out, to recirculating, and back.

          The next spring, I stuck a twisty willow twig in the ground on the other side of the mound.  It grew fast and well, to about fifty feet tall and wide in about ten years.  Its girth is now one hundred eleven inches at three feet.  For a twisty willow, it is very strong and has not lost major branches in snowstorms like some have. 

The shade from that tree covers most of our backyard near the house after one o’clock PM and allows my grandkids to play on a little swing set and swim in an above-ground pool on hot days. It is vital to our use of our backyard.

          Two years ago, I wanted to redo the pond liner and we took the rocks and liner out and reshaped it a bit.  Last winter, it refilled and stayed filled, despite the dry spring.  I decided that twenty years of water in it had compacted the soil sufficiently to leave out the liner and just replace the rocks. 

This summer, the ground within six feet of the pond on the opposite side from the willow stayed moist but still firm underfoot, and our roses within that damp zone were happier than they had ever been.  The willow apparently sucked water only from the soil and the pond on its side.  It had no die-back and dropped far fewer twigs and leaves over this summer.

On the other hand, this magnificent tree has become expensive over the years and especially this year as it sucks as much water as it needs, because of the high and rapidly rising price of city water by the unit. 

This is another reason why we should not conserve water by rationing through high unit rates.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-4-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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

Big tech data centers spark worry over scarce Western water

 

I read a shorter article about this in the Daily Courier. This article is much longer and answers some of my questions. But the writers and the worriers seem to think that the water in the Columbia and other major rivers comes only from rain and snowmelt.

The water in our rivers mainly comes from springs that pours out of cracks in the Earth's crust from the mantle, which is soaked with water. Otherwise, our river would run out in the 100-day droughts we have had in recent years.

The Columbia River is a mighty river indeed. The Rogue River doesn't compare. But the 3.9 million gallon water right that Google bought with their land is nothing next to what the City of Grants Pass pulls out of the Rogue every day. Our plant can produce 20 million gallons of clean water per day. We put much of it back in the river, cleaned to drinking water standards after sewage treatment, and so does Medford and its suburbs.

Associated Press reporters seem to think that water is a scarce and precious resource, when it is the most abundant and automatically recycled resource on Earth, next to air. The water cycle plus modern water and sewage treatment make it really hard to waste water, except by letting it run straight to the sea without being used along the way.

"About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.

"About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures."

And "evaporation is waste," we were told in Landscape Management by a teacher who was selling us on drip systems. It is a common trope among modern water conservationists. But evaporation is not waste; it makes humidity, clouds and rain.

West of the Rockies, our water vapor, from any source, makes clouds and rain in the local area first if there is enough of it. (Water-rationing rates in our cities keep that from happening as much as it used to.) What is left blows uphill and upstream on the prevailing western wind, making rain as it rises, filling creeks and rivers before the remainder goes over the mountains to join vapor from other sources, like irrigation, and make more rain.

Drought is a self-fulfilling prophecy in Oregon, because it is declared every time we don't get enough snowpack to keep our reservoirs full. They fail to take into account the effects of irrigation, evaporation, and the water cycle. Real conservation of fresh water is keeping water from running to the sea so fast.

Beavers did it before man came to North America, building dams and swamps until every rivulet, creek and small river valleys were filled with their dams and swamps. Water tables were high and the continent was full of game. After they were nearly wiped out, man began to do some of what they did with bigger dams and watering farms and cities, storing water in the soil that not only grew plants but kept rivers higher from runoff, above and below ground.

Now our cities are mostly dry ground with only a portion of the residents actually watering their properties, and have started burning because of that dryness, not only within them, but in the countryside around them, because there is less watering vapor to spread out and keep things moist.

Water is the basis of life. That doesn't make it scarce or precious; it makes it vital to living and living well. Brown and yellow is not the new green. It is the ugly color of fire danger and less life, because there is less water in the land, even right down next to the river in the photo with this article.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/big-tech-data-centers-spark-worry-scarce-western-80730977?fbclid=IwAR1z7jbzkg_1dwcoXVIjeDSs1iSdWyo442kq_cDh-_mZvMJkS79pKDC_F3c