[quote=XBoxBoy]Anyone know why San Diego isn’t being hit with the watering restrictions that are happening in LA? Does San Diego get its water from somewhere else? Did San Diego make a better deal regarding how much water they would get?[/quote]

I’m surprised that Phaster hasn’t posted the specifics about San Diego….

From 2021: It’s an interesting read.

[quote]

“Despite a Punishing Drought, San Diego Has Water. It Wasn’t Easy. Sustainability measures that the city and county have taken over decades are paying off. But residents still might have to do more.”

….
For much of the past century, San Diego was almost entirely dependent on water that came from elsewhere in the state, or from the Colorado River. Their supplies were effectively controlled by water officials in Los Angeles — a contentious relationship that seeded long-running legal battles.

In 1991, during a punishing drought, San Diego reached a turning point. The Metropolitan Water District, the Los Angeles-based wholesaler that controlled nearly all of San Diego’s water, slashed the county’s supply by 30 percent for a little more than a year. Grass turned brown. Residents put bricks in their toilet tanks to make them flush less water.

And, crucially, the region’s burgeoning biotechnology industry was hammered by water shut-offs that came with little warning.

….In 1996, the San Diego County Water Authority struck a landmark agreement to buy water from farmers in the Imperial Valley, in California’s southeastern corner, that heralded the beginning of the region’s water divorce from Los Angeles.

Over the following two decades, the agency took on a series of significant — and expensive — infrastructure projects aimed at establishing more diverse sources of water, more places to keep it and more ways to move it around the county.

In 2010, the authority lined canals in the Imperial Valley with concrete to prevent water from seeping into the earth, and made a deal to take the water saved by the process — some 26 billion gallons a year. The authority finished raising the San Vicente Dam in 2014, adding more capacity to San Vicente Reservoir in the biggest water storage increase in the county’s history.

Then there was the long, fraught gestation of a seawater desalination plant, the largest in the United States and now the envy of desperate communities up the coast, in spite of environmental concerns. Since 2015, millions of gallons of seawater have flowed into the $1 billion facility in Carlsbad each day, where it is filtered into something that tastes like it came from an Evian bottle, not the Pacific Ocean.

Across the county, restrictions and conservation pushes have led per capita water use to fall by half over the past three decades.

The next major task? Expand the region’s so-called pure water programs, once given the derisive moniker “toilet to tap,” because they purify gray water to make it drinkable. Today, such programs are seen as some of the most promising paths forward, not just in San Diego but across the state. (The system in neighboring Orange County is often cited as a gold standard.)

San Diego has provided a road map for others now scrambling for water, said Toni Atkins, who is the president pro tem of the California Senate and previously served on the San Diego City Council. And she is proud of that.
[/quote]

Also….

San Diego Is Relatively Drought-Proof – and Has Prices to Prove it

Water Authority Confident in Local Water Supply, But Still Urges Conservation Amid Drought

Also. This was interesting…
https://www.sandiego.gov/public-utilities/sustainability/water-supply

And this…

https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/city_of_san_diego_2020_uwmp_final_6_29_2021_send.pdf

And this…
https://www.carlsbaddesal.com/faqs.html

And this

Most of the train money is coming from the federal government.

It still should be cancelled.

From 2009-3/2020 I flew to the bay area about 10 times per year.

Only 1 time since then.

About 90% of court hearings now are video or telephone conference. Bluejeans, zoom. MS Teams, I do them all. State, federal, appellate. All remote.

Intra-city transit is also cheaper, used more, and has larger environmental benefits. Those above ground muni trams in SF were awful, usually packed to the brim with people and barely moving faster than a brisk walk.

[quote=gzz]
Those above ground muni trams in SF were awful, usually packed to the brim with people and barely moving faster than a brisk walk.[/quote]

We rode those once. It was relatively empty when we boarded but as we went through Chinatown that thing was wall to wall people. It would have been impossible to fit a sheet of paper between me and those surrounding me. I couldn’t even see where my wife was on that little tram.

That’s the only time I can honestly say I’ve felt claustrophobia. I can recall the thought going through my head that if I lived in SF there is no way in hell I would ride the tram. I’d rather walk.

It’s not a hard problem to solve, just require $.

It is exactly a hard problem to solve because it is expensive to do so. Water is the foundation of our society, cheap water that is. It must be transported in bulk and is heavy. We consume more of it than our ecology can produce (at least the non-salt version.) Most importantly, people are not smart. Nobody cares as long as the taps still function.
Josh

CA have $100b surplus in just 1 year. Spend that $ to build infrastructure to increase our supplies on stuff that keep society running instead of trying to limit demand.

Woe to him who treats water as a market commodity. He shall reap what he sows. It takes decades to build the kind of infra you’re talking about. It won’t solve the problem. Humans are maximizers. All you are doing by playing the lets-expand-supply-game is heightening the fall. Water is the most fundamental human need. It almost doesn’t exist in Southern California. Market forces will not in any real sense lead us to a better place, or even a place where our society can survive. Think tragedy of the commons.

We will drill, drill, drill until the water runs out; or is too expensive to extract. That will presage a collapse. One where food will get much more expensive and millions around the world will starve. Lets just stop growing almonds and other stupid for profit, for export shit we don’t need and save the water for things we do.

Getting used to doing with less is the only way forward till fusion becomes a reality. Then all bets are off.
Josh